Bobby Lightfoot And The Orchestra Of Sweet Regret

Marlaina Miller, Associate Manager, American General Life and Accident

2009-04-28T11:27:00.006-04:00

Marlaina Miller, Associate Manager, American General Life and Accident

Classifieds

2007-10-11T21:57:00.000-04:00

FAILED ARTIST sought by bakery to
sample our new line of brownies. 75K/yr.
and full benefits. Work from home.

MAJOR ENTERTAINMENT CONGLOMERATE
seeks bitter, balding, musically hyper-competent
42-yr. or oldr to compose and produce
scathing indictments of us. Don't bore us, don't
get to the chorus, full orchestra arrangements preferred.
Salary commensurate with disgust.

HYDROPONICS GURU! The fall '07 Willie Nelson
And Friends Tour Needs YOU! Guitar-stringing ab-
ility a plus but will train the right person! 2K a week,
benefits include free RX.

STAFF WRITER POSITION available with Cynical
Motherfucker Magazine. Special knowledge in music
and politics a plus! Unbroken need not apply! Planning
Autumn 5-mag arc "The Genius Of Avril Lavigne". Fax
writing samples (300,000 words plus preferred, with
illustrations) to XXX XXXX.

DOKKEN REFORMING FOR '08 TOUR '80's metal
monsters seek freak energy bassist with hammer-on skills,
to-die-for cheekbones and largeish cock. But not larger than
Don's. Payment rendered in cocaine; hair ex-
tensions mandatory. No neat freaks, no Christians,
Don XXX XXXX between 2 and 5 AM. Leave message after
intro to "Hell's Bells".

STABLE BOY required at Chatterley Meadows Ladies Riding
Academy. Some heavy lifting. Multitasking self-starter with
stick-to-it-iveness. $5.50/hr., no benefits. Cruella XXX XXXX.

2007-07-17T13:48:00.001-04:00

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Ruminations...

2007-06-19T21:57:00.000-04:00

So, who wants to hear a riveting first-hand tale about guns and drugs in th' third world?

Who wants to read about th' creative processes of a deeply experienced artist?

Uh, who wants to read something insanely funny, true and fucked?

Who wants to hear some cool music by an uncompromising contemporary talent with a soul?

Yeah, that's what I thought. Me fuckin' neither! Idol's on tonight, right?

Folks, this blog may not be long for the world. Sorry. It is slowly becoming a little bit of an albatross to me. True, I do it for myself but I can make myself laugh without pouring all this time down a fuckin' hole. I can certainly

keep my pecker up without all th' lost time. Contributing to this culture is a little bit like having sex with sandpaper.

That said, I'm undertaking an intense and engrossing project this summer. I have unlimited access to a great studio space this summer with grand piano, drums, every amp and guitar imaginable, and some great acoustic spaces.

So I've decided to record my defining album- the one I've always wanted to and tried to make again and again. I got pretty close with my last burst of creativity in '05-'06 and the only thing that didn't cut it for me was an over preponderance of synthetic sounds borne of fiscal necessity. I can't stand listening to the digital piano on some of my coolest piano-driven songs and I want to record some songs with real sonic cohesion and real drums and piano and guitars and string sections and everything.

I want to take 15 or so of my best songs of the last 20 years and really pore over them and record spacious, acoustically unhyped, technically unassailable versions of them and just sing the fuck out of them and pick the 11 or 12 twelve best. And if in the process I get a wild hair and start writing then that'll be fair game too.

I want to dig through my catalog and find elements that unite my work and exploit those elements. I also want to identify whatever the consistent elements of crappiness are and remove them. I want the final product to sound really unified without ever lapsing into sameyness and I want it to sound just a little down-home sonically. Like a Michael Penn record or th' sort of tossed-off virtuosity of the White Album but with my sort of baroque neo-soul American Songbook thing. And yeah, some electronics like I dig. Some tone-distressing that serves the music.

But still with all my jiggery-pokery. Because that's what's fun for me. And I want to have good musician colleagues contribute in what I assess to be my areas of weakness. I also want to have some well-deployed string sections and some string quartet things which is expensive but totally doable. The better my arrangements and scores, the cheaper.

And I want to give it a few months. Maybe upgrade my rig a little, if at all possible. This is going to be my most important work, a summation of my output up to now. I'll almost definitely stay away from anything I've released for real with any band or that's been on the radio although "I Could Cry" is one of my top ten. Definitely many songs from my current run. "Station Road" would sound dope with real piano and real Rhodes doing the Eno sections. A live take of "PaulMcCartney" on a real grand piano would be choice. "Monday Wedding" and "Mystery" with nice, real-sounding, shambolic drums and guitar amps in rooms mic'd back.

I want to fall backwards into it like a pond. Backwards into music. Back and to th' left. I want to have a big, amazing, worthwhile achievement under my belt by the fall and maybe that'll fill my sails for wherever the fuck it is I'm supposed to be going in this consarned life. I think it'll help, I really do. I'm really trying to figure it out, I swear. I just love music so much. I'm not good at music because I have clever hands. Far from it. I have to love it so much to make it happen because it can be a huge struggle for me. I'm capable of hearing things and then being tortured by not being able to get them to come off of my fingers and I never give up because I love it so much.

It might be my last chance, man. I'm just starting to realize. I'm just starting to get it. It's sinking in. Everything we do doesn't have to be defining or carry that sort of baggage but it does for an artist. I have a responsibility to figure out how to be content and I feel like a huge part of it is going to involve the closing of a

window in order for some fucking door to open.

But god damn it is it going to be one beautiful closing window. I have the power to control that. I have control over that.

Stuff I Came Up With

2007-06-19T01:57:00.000-04:00

1. Yeah, I came up with "...so not...". "I'm so not looking forward to 1999". I came up with "...so not..." in '98.

2. I also came up with "you go, girl". That one was in '93. I came up with that one day when I was bored and this woman was doing something I forget what but I wanted to express my support and encouragement so I came up with, "you go, girl".

3. Also, "teh". That was me in '01. I was th' first one to misspell "the" as "teh". I was lurching towards my ultimate identifier: "th'"

4. I cannot claim credit for "mother of all...". Saddam Hussein came up with that one before th' first Golf War to describe the battle that awaiting the Americans in Kuwait and Iraq. I love that it's become an American colloquialism. It's like Jews saying, "Juden Raus" or something.

5. I didn't come up with "...from hell". That was Richard Lewis in th' early '90's.

All these other ones are mine, though. YOu all owe me a fuckin' dollar.

From Th' Desk Of Thor Heyerdahl

2007-06-18T19:49:00.000-04:00

Thor Heyerdahl
434 Polenschmoken Vagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
June 16, 2007

Dear Mr. Lightfoot;

What a delightful surprise it was to Google my name this morning and realize that someone had taken a renewed interest in my studies of th' Bog People. I am fascinated with your hypothesis regarding the possibility of Bronze-Age autoerotic asphixiation. Truly this is the work of a great and incisive mind.

In fact, the reason I am writing to you, aside from the desire to congratulate you on your fascinating analysis, is to invite you to join me and my team as I reopen the Case Of Th' Bog People this very autumn. We will be re-opening the excavation sites at Assholenburgh and Cumshottenhammer and I would be honored if you would join us as a consultant.

I anxiously await your response as we venture forth again into th' unknown.

Admiringly, Thor Heyerdahl.

P.S. How on earth could you have known about the ancient pre-solstice celebration of Pigsperm Night? I am indeed humbled. Humbled!

2007-06-18T02:13:00.001-04:00

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Woah There Stupid Motherfucker

2007-06-11T12:58:00.000-04:00

Dude you're there in my fucking stats EVERY DAY. Searchin', searchin' searchin'.

Searchin' for Mahat Magandi.

Dude, you HAVE TO STOP. You've been doin' in for months, months, MONTHS.

Am I crazy? Am I showin' the world I'M a retard? Woah! I could've SWORN th' guy was Mahatma Gandhi but HEY, WHAT TH' FUCK DO I KNOW ANYMORE IN THIS KOOKY WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING'S WHAT PEOPLE SAY IT IS?

Maybe he WAS Mahat Magandhi! What the blithering fuck do I KNOW! Maybe Wikipedia sez that now! Maybe I need to brush up on my history! woah! I know all sorts of history stuff about 'Merican presidents like Douglasmc Arthur and Dwighteis Enhower! And Henrykiss Inger and his advisor Richardnix On! So I feel I have some authority to speakon thissub ject!

Heck, maybe he played euphonium with Georgehar Isson and Paulmc Arntey! Maybe he was devoted to th' principal of nonviol entprotest!

Stop making me endure your torture.

Here's to make sure you receive my missive: MAHAT MAGANDI MAHAT MAGANDHI MAHAT

Street Lights, People

2007-06-10T23:29:00.000-04:00

????????????

Errr.

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Th' Fucking Bog People: New Voices, New Perspectives

2007-06-10T02:20:00.000-04:00

Yeah, right? What's the polesmoking deal with the fucking Bog People? Thor Hayerdahl discovered them in the Peat Feilds of Norway and ever since it's been this whole thing, man. I just happened to remember them because I read something on Ned's blig about being "kerned tighter" and it sounded like maybe something that would be involved in just garrotting someone's sorry, wrinkled, Bronze Age ass.

What the fuck is the story with the Bog People though? Did they call themselves "The Bog People"? Otherwise where did it come from? And don't tell me it wouldn't be the coolest fucking band name since I-just-don't-know-when-all?

So, was it some religious thing that made these people fucking throw each other into swamps and shit? Because, man, I'd have to really be in some sort of trance to strangle someone and throw them in a fucking peat bog like a total a-hole. I mean, I'm not judging or anything, there is sort of a punk element to it.

So, did they have some fucking contest or some crap for who got to jump into th' mud and croak? Did they play mumbledee-peg for who got to get choked and tossed? Was it that bad back then? I've had days when I sort of wished someone would strangle me and throw me in a deep swamp of shit. Today wasn't entirely without moments of faint desire regarding this activity.

Were they Bronze Age Autoerotic Asphixiators? Another not-unlaudable band name if I dare say so myself. That would be funny. "Fuckin' Lasse choked himself jerking off" "Fuck it, throw him in the fucking bog".

Plus, you know, they found all this millet seed in their stomachs. The Bog People. So, the way I see it, these people fucking ate a bunch of raw grain, jacked off, strangled themselves and fell into peat bogs!

Which, while being pretty fucking punk rock, suggests an era of somewhat uninterrupted crappiness.

What would motivate one to behave thus? What the fuck would make you do that? I think one must confront the mystery by wrapping it in a modern paradigm! Definitely! O.K., so let's picture this dude fucking playing Xbox and then eating a large order of McNuggets, jerking off and strangling himself and throwing himself in a fucking swamp. Put in this context it continues to elude easy classification I'd fucking say.

I suppose the possibility also exists that the town all got together and just picked the biggest asshole and did the foul deed with them. I could see how that would make sense because I can easily think of several people in my town that I'd like to force a bag of fucking bird seed down their throat and choke them and throw them in a pit. And maybe, just maybe, if a consensus could be reached that included local law enforcement and such, we could all rid ourselves of a great deal of worry.

And then, in 3000 years, someone could dig them up and laugh at them as hard as we laugh at th' Bog People. I hope it wouldn't be me! I try to get along with folks. Plus I'd never wear a fucking babushka like the Bog Dude in th' picture. If some dude walked around our town that way, well, he just might wind up face-fucking-down in a six-foot-deep mud puddle. Jesus, we don't countenance that sort of fucked up shit here.

The other thing is that these are some ugly motherfuckers to be sure. Look how wrinkled and off-kilter they are. Dude, look at his fucking guy- he looks like the fucking Tin Man. Huh? Right? Jesus, all fucked up like that? His own mom probably rigged the drawing-of-straws so she'd never again have to confront what nature and a right rodgering by Olaf next to the Shitting Place on Pigsperm Night had wrought below her millet-filled guts. Ha ha ha ha. Jeez, he looks like an asshole. He looks like this drummer I knew who shall remain, Frankly, nameless. I bet this fucking guy never got off the hi-hat either. Chhk chhhk chhkk chhkk until the rest of th' band couldn't take it anymore and they carried him to the moonlit solitude of the peat bog and there rid the world of another crap drummer. A drummer who Frankly could never get off th' hi-hat.

Fuckin' Bog People. They're all rotten and dead and fucked up and I'm laughing and drinking delicious espresso because I'm ALIVE, fuckers. God damn it if I don't have something up on some motherfucker, right? Ha! And the odds that I'll be alive tomorrow and eatin' something good for brek and IT WON'T INVOLVE YOUR BORING SHIT GRAINS THAT YOU PAID SO DEARLY FOR. DEAD BOG FUCKERS. LYING ALL DEAD AND PRUNEY IN YOUR HOLES. With your adorable head gear. Dead fuckers. You're all so fucking B.C. You're not where it's at at all, man. Not even Paris Hilton would fuck you.

I mean, there's lots of talk out there about this generation or that generation being the Greatest Generation but let me tell you you mudsuckers aren't even on th' ballot. You're LONG FORGOTTEN, swampies. You're washed up. This is the most that's been written about your bony asses since some bored interns dug you up indifferently in 1962 and commented chucklingly on the wrinkled teeniness of your prehistoric pizzlers over cigarettes which they ashed on your gross, rotten prune nuts.

The fucking Bog People! Rock the bog, Bog Dudes. I don't really hate you. Tell you this, though- you ever track that shit in my clean kitchen I'll give you what for. Bog fucks.

Th' Soulfinger Diaries: Final Installment-- O'Hara's, Manchester CT 5.8.07

2007-06-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

yeah, I've been doing these utterly execreble two-piece gigs here and there with Ace McClintock playing bass and me on th' Red Lady and singing. Oh, they're awful. His competition with me reaches full swing when it's just the two of us and his aping and sputtering and bass solo-ing just completely destroy my spirit, especially when I see the disbelief in the audience's eyes.

Oh, how utterly demeaning. And I'm so off my stride and so completely mortified that I tend to begin sucking too. And minutes become hours, my friends. Seconds tick by like days. Jesus Christ.

Today we had two gigs and it was like seven hours of stage time and my trepidation was boundless. And then he started drinking. Drinking. I got off stage and let him have it all to himself because he was heading into what was sure to be a humdinger of a bass solo. Oh, it sounded so bad. He got the echo going and looped an awful, unpleasant three-second noise bit and started making more noise on top of it. It sounded like Radiohead sort of. But Radiohead would speed it up and distress it and cacophonize it and then it would go into a beautiful, alien beautiful song.

This wasn't going to go into anything beautiful.

I crept over to a corner and tried to make myself small and a woman came up to me and asked me to please go back up and make him stop and play music instead. She asked me why I let him do that and I told her it was his band and he did the booking so it was his prerogative.

"So, why are you doing this?" she asked me. She was a smart-looking woman who was obviously hanging out with her smart professional friends at happy hour and probably just wanting some nice pop songs in the background to drink to.

So why are you doing this?

I didn't know if she'd really understand if I told her it was how I made money. Everyone gets humiliated by the boss every now and then, right? There was something lacking about that answer though, you know? Like I'd decided to be a musician so I could basically have a crappy, humiliating job that just happened to be trying to play decent music for people.

So why are you doing this?

Like there was no consideration beyond esthetics. And the fucking club manager came up to me, fairly pissed off, and asked me to put a stop to it and play some fucking music or get out. Jesus, it was bad. It was really bad for me.

Music is the only thing I have that I don't suck at. I'm not kidding. When I go into Musicland it's a happy place with flowers and it's the one place I can go, man. The one place where I feel I belong, where I can proceed with confidence. Going into Musicland refuels me and gives me the will to live.

And this crazy, drunk, spoiled, evil motherfucker McClintock is turning it into this gross, barren, beshitted lunar landscape of despair and now I have nowhere to go and nothing to do in front of people that makes me feel worthwhile. God, I hate that motherfucking McClintock. What a pig he is. And the way he treats women is disgusting. He's a complete narcissist pig who doesn't respect people's boundaries and embarasses everyone around him with his utter self-centeredness.

So three songs into the second gig I packed up and left.

He was going to do a bass solo.

Just to piss me off. Just to piss me off. What an asshole.

So why are you doing this?

Why indeed.

Webs Rich Bounty

2007-06-08T23:26:00.000-04:00

Satan Cat

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Surrey Housewife Finds Perfect Likeness of Aerobically- Enhanced Sid Vicious Shaved Into Pubic Region

2007-06-07T21:41:00.000-04:00

Dig Kevin Wolf for th' whole story.

Modern Life Is Rubbish.

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My Gut Is That A.J.'s Going To Get It.

2007-06-07T17:01:00.000-04:00

I could be wrong but I have a strong presentiment. It would be very Godfather.

If I'm wrong I can just drive this post out to th' woods and ventilate it.

An Overview Of Th' Candidates: Nazi Party

2007-06-05T22:49:00.000-04:00

Duncan Hunter! Our first feature! Allow me to get this out of the way quickly-

HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAA.

That's fucking Mike Myers, you idiots. It's Mike MYERS. yeahhhhhh, babeeee!

Duncan Hunter! Sounds like something you yell when th' dirty bombs are comin' in.

Which they will be! Duncan'll see to it that even MORE people who think monsters are fighting above the clouds will want to kill us. Fuck, that'll be his fucking platform. Duncan Hunter: The Make The Six Remaining People Who Don't Hate Us Hate Us President. Fucked up, venal, evil, corrupt shit bag. Go fuck yourself. Go start a corporation with th' cash you made selling your infant children to th' charnel house. Pig.

You're last on the list for my next dinner party, pig.

Final analysis: funny in So I Married An Ax Murderer

Good point: when you say his name six times fast it turns into "dumb cunt hummer".

Heyyy- now Giulani could be a swell president. He's almost fucking batty enough. His is one of the few faces to not benefit from dimples. 'Tis a face only a fire extinguisher could love. Ugly, crazy, fucked-up bastard. At least his teeth is white.

Giuliani. Jesus, what the fuck would he do? What would his contribution to the Rape Of Columbia be? Oh, I'd be all a-flutter just to see. Fucking asshole would probably invade Sweden searching for Osama Bin Larsson he's so stupid and misguided and bad. The shit that's going to come out about this fucking guy is going to be some funny stuff. I don't think we've scratched the surface of The Madness Of Rudi.

Oh, yes, please, America- give us Giuliani for President between votin' for the New American Idol and seeing what a bunch of fucking peasants you can be.

I propose a new Amendment to th' Constitution: The Right To Fucking Kill Giuliani.

Final Analysis: At least they got the fire on his face out before it spread to his belly.

Good points: You wouldn't have to put his picture on th' bottom of your shoe. It's already there.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you President Jim Gilmore! Ha ha ha ha! dIS AM FUN!!

Look- he's answering the question, "how many quintillions of American tax dollars will you spend fomenting terrorism in th' Middle East so Corporations can clean up?"

Jim Gilmore! Fucking guy has like twelve TV monitors set up in his lair, each trained on a different prison cell in Guantanamo so he never has to stop masturbating with a filthy loofa. Whoa, technolergy is sweet!

Jim Gilmore. Wow. It's come to this. I'm sure I'd like to raise a son who'd grow up to be like Jim Gilmore. Then I'd know I'd failed on a Grand Scale and could Maybe Be Famous.

Why don't we just get a fucking jump on this shit and have Satan for president? Wait- he's not Presidential because he's not evil enough and fucking corrupt enough and doesn't have green enough fucking teeth like all these fucking stormtrooping brownshirt rodent-devouring- and- fucking right wing Arbeit Macht Frei shit bags. On to the fucking Bastille, my brothers!

Final Analysis: Yeah, Jim's your man. He'll make sure there's a bible in every motel room and free toilet paper for whites.

Good point: Has big enough tits to maybe cop breast cancer.

Gee willickers, Mr. McCain! Are you supposed to do that to your own cattle?

Christ, John. Just...Christ. John, it looks like you were created by th' Vampire Focus Group and they scanned yer face off a fucking ten dollar fucking bill with 3 dpi resolution.

Go, John McCain! I'm sure you're a real Patriot if'n your definition of Patriot is somebody who hires six crystal-methed-out hookers and then spents five sleepless days and nights making sure not a single blackhead remains on a one of 'em.

John McCain might very well spell th' End Of America, my friends. Vote McCain. Oh, he'll roll back those tax breaks. Oh, yes. He'll get us on the path to nat'l healthcare. He'll make sure our children receive quality education. Ha ha ha ha.

Yeah, President McCain will reinstate Habeus Corpus. Hee hee. That's a fun parlor game- pick a right-wing shitbag contender and say the things they'll do for the country. Oh, you'll be rolling.

McCain won't sell our three remaining freeways to fucking Luxembourg so he can have 50 fucking Learjets. God, I hate these fucking shit bags.

Final Analysis: his words have a half-life of 10,000 years, so toxic is he a fella.

Good point: will die really soon. Then Vice President Damien could see out th' term.

Huckabee! Oh, I definitely do NOT heart Huckabee. Why? Well, I'll tell you: he's what flies out of the mouths of tobacco chewers, that there's why. They did a whole feature about it on the "News".

They'll swear him in and he'll be like where's the fuckin' Button? Where's the Button? You know how that one sick pube used to get cats and disembowel them? Bill Frist, yeah. Him.

Huckabee followed around behind him playing games with and devouring th' cat entrails when Frist was done wrapping them about his nethers and cackling.

Cackling, people.

Final Analysis: He'd be a really good president except on full moons.

Good point: jowly people look funny when they lie.

Milt Romney! Android Mormon Squirrel Hunting Abomination President!

He got his name "Mitt" because his many wives like to strap on and wear him like a glove! Airtight, baby!

Oh, things'll be spiffy in Mitt's America. Sure they will. American Idol will change format and the winner will be the kid who can throw the most brown babies up in th' air and catch them on a bayonet.

We'll annex th' Sudetenland and then it'll be on to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Nice. That fucking human stain Pat Dollard'll be his own personal Leni Reifenstahl! Triumph of Th' Will II- This Time It's Personal.

Final Analysis: Maybe Kevorkian got out of th' slammer at an opportune time. Hey Jack, Mitt's terminal! Help him, help him.

Good point: Multiple First Lady Cat Fights in th' "media".

Ron Paul! Yes! Although his sis Ru would be even more presidential.

Can you imagine this hideous lump of ochre putrescence (yeah, I love me the Poe- they hadn't outlawed it yet when I was in school) as President?

'Course, I remember saying that about Dribbles.

Ron Paul is harmlessly hateful in a Reagan sort of way where he chuckles around and scratches his ass and all of a sudden you're paying 70% in taxes so his granddaughters can skate on an icerink made of frozen Liberian infants. And you feel a weird compulsion to thank him. That's a Republican for you!

They're like vacuum cleaner salesmen but the vacuums they sell only suck up Goodness.

Final Analysis: hey, what the fuck! If you want a president who only has one pair of underwear Ron's yer fella!

Good points: has tattoo of an ass on his ass.

Sam Brownback! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Final analysis: Hhhhhaaaaa ha ha ha ha.

*cough* *gurble gurble*

This is the only fucking pissdrinking Republican whose teeth are fucking yellower than that sick piece of rancid offal with th' Makaka thing. George. Seriously, google these guys pictures sometime. You'd think with all the cash they suck into their gross mandibles from th' Puppy Fur Coat industry they could afford a fucking whitening.

Look at his face. What is he thinking?? Here's my guess: "I'm going to give this photographer chick a Journey Mix Tape and beg, beg, beg her to tap me w/ the catalytic converter from a '95 Mustang."

Heck, drink enough blood and you get what you get.

Final analysis: Six parts shit, four parts shit.

Tancredo! Jesus! Fuck!
Who in their right fucking mind would ever, ever vote for this fucking evil cum stain?????

Woah! 'Mericans! That's who! Because 'Mericans think oranges are laid by big orange hens and Jesus has enough spare time to make sure his swarthy likeness makes it onto plenty of toast! Yes indeed!

And you and I gets to live amongst them and fight, fight, fight for the right to not have our children ground into hamburger that believes in walkin' on water and Santa!

Wait- Santa's O.K. until age 23.

Anyway, this fucking guy doesn't deserve to sweep the streets, much less run for president, but then, who of these repulsive, evil, conniving, corrupt fuckfaces really does????

Final Analysis: Somebody tell Mark D. Chapman that this guy is Lennon reborn. Please.

Good point: if he is Lennon reborn maybe th' Beatles can open for The Police this summer. That'd be a show 'n' a half! They'd all get up at th' end and do "One" by u2. There'd be like 40 thousand fucking cell phones waving.

Wait, that's not a good point at all, is it?

Woah! Little Tommy Thompson! Tommy likes musical theatre, long walks on the beach with young boys and teabaggin' to the oldies!

And, problematically, lying about it.

Christ, if he'd only just come clean. Then we could have our first gay president, never mind the fact that he'd still fucking kneecap anyone who makes less'n 1 mil. a year and doesn't think Baby Jeezus made th' universe out of fucking jujubees picked off th' bottom of theatre seats.

Final analysis: repulsive shit bag who can't be honest with himself even when he's tonguing adolescent male Burmese.

Good point: he wouldn't touch Angela Merkel at th' G8.

Can't We All Just Not Get Along?

2007-06-03T15:16:00.001-04:00

Man ever since I clocked that fuckin' twit to within an inch of his life in '00 for letting his pitbull get a hold of Sal Th' Feist I've sworn off violence of any sort. It can possibly be cool when you're 18 and it's about some sort of justice but it just isn't something th' well-adjusted over-30 dude does. Plus, the universe works against you for 30 seconds and you'll find yourself with a legal fucking nightmare. That's what happens in the real world. Along with all the other lame crap like me not being th' singer for Maroon5 and not having tube microphones and a Bosendurmfer piano. Fuckers are like 15 feet long, man. That is a fucking SUV of an instrument right there. You could play fucking Medicine Square Garden without amplification with that shit. Tori Anus did it in '75.

So I had a rub w/ a trucker th' other day and I called him "Mr. Snippy Pants" and that ended it pretty fast. "Is the heat getting to you, Mr. Snippy Pants?"

When was th' last time you hauled off on someone for calling you "Mr. Snippy Pants"?

And that is my counsel to you this day.

Dear Jeexis

2007-06-02T02:22:00.001-04:00

Deart BAby Jeekers I have a solemn vow to make at this ungodly hour when I tread th' boards with fear and no small amount of dread.

Dear Jeeves I swear that if you will do one small thing for me I will renounce my heathen ways and stop listening for God's voice in th' rustling leaves and the cadences and counterpoints in my mind.

If you will grant me one small boon I will instead repair myself to your father's house of th' Baptist Church of Granby ("Sunday- It's Mind Over Matress!" sp.!) and fall to my knees and never more spleak of evolution or be tempted by th' weeds of the forest. I will kneel in th' house of worship and swear off all manner of pleasures and comforts and wear one of those fuckin' things on my leg (a surplice or suplice or some shit -ed.) and whip myself with ropes soaked in glue and trailed thru broken glass.

No more will I shout of get ready 'cause here I come or we're all sensitive people or shotgun, shot it for me run now but instead sing of you and of your wonders.

I say this that I may sleep this night and dream of things other than the usual horrors that haunt my repose. I pray that I may dream instead of cherubs and seraphs and the sun shining through th' fine hairs on Kirstin Dunst's inner thighs.

Yea, grant me but one thing. And I will be your servant and messenger and won't think bad thoughts and want to drive into SUVs with yeller ribbons.

b
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My Shredding Generation Smokes Your Gayass Generations.

2007-05-30T22:14:00.000-04:00

APPROPRIATING CRAZY NEGRO RHYTHMS TO WHITE POP MUSIC

Woah! I have to puke on your shoe!

I hope this record's over before I come down or I'll realize how PUTRID it is!

Short, sharp, shocked: Talented, brilliant and ADORABLE.

Eeee-yo, motherfucker.

Limp Bizkit! YOUR suck generation's fault, kids!

Deal with it!

DRUGS

Boomers: LSD: nO HAppY CAmpERS.

My Assrocking Generation: Ooooh! Look at the CRYSTALS. Look at the lattice-like PERFECTION. So natural, so useful.

My last name is...?

This stupid generation: Crystal Meth. Wow, that looks like so much fun. Let's go to Woodstock '09 and shoot 30 people like that COOL guy.

OR maybe we can just stay home and go on MySpace and EAT OUR OWN FUCKING SKIN OFF.

WARS

Nice going, ASSHOLES. How do you sleep?

I'm fucking GLAD we spent your social security on smart fuckin' bombs.

Quick, painless.

Maybe th' politest war EVAH!

Three cheers for MY generation. Not trying to cause a big sensation!

IRAQ: Year Four.

This here is one Piece Of Shit War, my friends.

Congratufuckinglations, little Moral-Values Rovesuckers.

Fuck you for this. I'll never fucking forgive you for this or for MySpace.

SEX SYMBOLS:

Jane Fonda, you guys?

Didn't she fight for th' NVA see above???

I mean, if TRAITORS get you going I guess that's your prerog, man.

Steamy, brilliant, vulnerable.

Empowered.

Bush like the BLACK FOREST. Like it SHOULD BE. None of this weird modern landing strip crap.

Pale, milky skin, a bush like a Bantu priestess and yes, that most holy of female holy grails- no tattoos. Sex with a Strat*.

*yeah I know it's a tele

Hey, thanx for Paris, Gen Y. Oh, she's a treat. A treat. The hottest, foulest, sickest little moneygrubbing trollop to ever strangle dogs for sexual release. Oh, to be th' pea under her 23 mattresses. Be still my congealing fucking heart.

Little fucking parasites. Little robot consumers. Thanks for Paris. LOL! KMFDM! IMHO!

U R assholes.

dot com.

Why don't you kids run out and buy something.

Because that's WHAT YOU'RE GOOD AT.

Fucking zombies.

EPOCH-DEFINING ROCK FESTIVALS:

Woodstock!

Clapstock!

Self-Indulgo-stock!

Right?

LOOK AT THOSE DISGUSTING, FILTHY, BORING HIPPIES. WIDDLE-FUCKING WIDDLE, YOU FOUL HIPPIES.

LIVE AID, BABY!

Th' entire continent of Africa was all a-click with the news of heap good food that day!

And Duran Duran looked RAVISHING.

Heyyy! Woodstock '99!

If you don't give me your fucking Ketamine I'll stab you to death with my Anthony fucking Keidis action figure!

Nice GOING, guys.

PRESIDENTS!

Cooling his heels in Hell!

That's a big zero for th' Trickster!

Energy and Environment Visionary, Avatar of Peace, inventor of The Internet. A laying-on of his hands will very likely clean up unsightly excema.

A perfect 10 of presidential, um, ness.

Hole-in-watermelon-fucking, compulsively-lying, quadruple-dealing spoiled-brat little shitbag for whom an entire New Wing will have to be added in Hades. No doubt on a No-Bid contract with some shit bag mob outfit like fucking Bechtel or Shitwater.

Possibly the biggest dirt bag currently drawing breath on Planet Earth. The nexus, the event horizon of this entire shitty world.

NICE GOING, ASSHOLES.

SCARY BLACK REBEL MEN THAT MAKE YOU FEAR FOR YOUR DAUGHTER

Sly? Sly?

Guy fights like a little bitch.

Bob Marley:

Fucking SHREDDED at Live Aid.

Woah! The sweet, cloying smell of teargas follows this sick little murdering turd like a bad fart.

Down with Scoop Doggy Poop!

Down with his generation! Buyin' and killin' more and more every day.

'Nuff said! Lightfoot out!

2007-05-28T02:56:00.001-04:00

Cable Channels For Th' New Millenium

2007-05-25T01:10:00.000-04:00

The Pissing Channel

The Spitting Channel

Th' Underarm Fart Channel

Th' Twelve-Year-Olds Sitting Around And Talking About Superpowers Channel

Nursing Home Cam

The Gunshot Wound Channel

Anuses Of Th' World

Community Organ Sale Bulletin Board (not Baldwin or Hammond)

People Who Can Actually Fuck Themselves Network

Nedded by Taggie Jingo

2007-05-22T16:56:00.000-04:00

1. What's in your pocket?

2. Is the pork ready?

3. Have you ever had to rock to and fro to make your poopie go?

4. Do you like onions?

5. So, how big is it?

6. Budweiser or real beer?

7. What do you feel about your nose?

8. Children: Baked or broiled?

9. Do you like it when I do this?

10. Do you like the sound of chickens?

11. Would Beyonce clip her own toenails?

12. Do you like pork?

13. If the butter is soft, does the bus arrive on time?

14. When do you get up?

15. How did you survive childhood?

16. What do you do before bed?

17. What are your hidden charges?

18. Who's behind you?

19. Why don't people go to the bathroom on TV?

20. What's a soylent green popsicle?

21. What does it taste like?

22. Why doesn't Consumer Reports rate hookers?

23. Does George Bush replace the toilet paper tube?

And now I give you Kleeque and Th' Viscoonte.

Boxa choklitz

2007-05-21T18:31:00.000-04:00

LA Times, June 25 2001:

Three other sets of true distinction, though, provided lessons for all the other acts. In Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell, STP's Scott Weiland and the Cult's Ian Astbury, the bill sported three bona fide rock stars who command attention with both talent and presence.

The reunited Jane's Addiction set was a bit hampered by technical problems and never quite caught fire, but both Farrell (in a shiny, lime-green pimp suit) and body-painted guitarist Dave Navarro can't fail to make an impression. Weiland's stage dynamics and STP's still-growing catalog of strong material both evoke and reinvigorate classic rock values associated with such giants as Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. And Astbury and his Cult showed earnest rock spirit.

Big Sadness

2007-05-20T17:47:00.000-04:00

Yeah, Freedy never does Little Sadness, my friends. But he never blows Big Sadness up like a flabby melancholic marshmallow. He keeps it down to a size that you can chew and swallow and really get into your bloodstream.

I first got into Johnston with his "big" record in '93. The timing was perfect because I was about to dip my toe into Big Sadness and I needed a soundtrack. I got my little place in Pacific Beach and my fifty-story wall to climb and I was enthusiastic and ready to explore th' limits of Big Sadness. I looked far and wide for something to listen to on the journey and everything else was too arch or too spotty.

I would never have dreamed of covering anything from This Perfect World although I always wanted to. I just wasn't roadrashed enough to deliver it yet. The title track always stuck with me because it was done with a string quartet and because the narrative was a shrouded retelling of some sort of Big Sadness in an otherwise normal-scaled life.

I get the impression that we're hearing from a man who ran away from his family or maybe divorced his wife and he's coming back in the throes of a terminal disease to reconnect with a daughter. As for the ex-wife, well, "last time I was here/they found her in the lake..."

On the other hand I get the impression of an old person, maybe someone in an old folk's home on their last legs. Maybe they wouldn't even be capable of narrating this anymore except in their own head. And maybe they've been so marginalized and isolated by age but all they want and feel they deserve is the right to say goodbye but they're so doped up they can't even experience emotions. And sometimes that's th' Biggest of th' Big Sadnesses.

When the lyric sweeps into the final extended bridge it's pretty breathtaking: "Now I've gone around it's far too late/And these pills won't even let me cry/No one knows you even when you're gone/But I still deserve to say goodbye no matter what I've done/No matter what I've done..."

I've been trying to nail a good take of this song for weeks and weeks. There's no reverb to hide behind or overdubs to fix clams. And the song blossoms at the end so it's heartbreaking to nail a nice 4 minutes and then blow the last twenty seconds. When I got this take I got to the very, very end and I was so nerved up that I just did the last refrain a cappella to hedge my bets. It was not a Big Artistic Decision.

And yeah, there is a decent clam on th' Rhodes somewhere in the early two-minute area. Keepin' it real.

Freedy Johnston is a fantastic songwriter.

"This Perfect World"

And here's how I warmed up.

Re: Vocal Audition

2007-05-15T19:18:00.000-04:00

Hi,

I listen to the audition and also your songs on your myspace. May I make a suggestion? Incorporate more of your style and tone of voice that you are singing from your myspace page to our song? In our song, I really like the middle part of the audition where you use the affects machine when you are talking.

Thanks for your audition. Please send us one more audition with the changes.

May I ask, how old are you? Are you willing to work with some to be 21 yr olds?

Bryan

"Lonely 'Round Here"

2007-05-13T22:37:00.000-04:00

Joe Cifarelli and I tracked his epic lonely-barroom minor blues over th' last couple of months. Joe is on all the guitars and I did everything else. Our addition to a classic genre.

Let the circle be unpolesmokin'.

"Lonely 'Round Here" by Joe Cifarelli.

Here's all th' other songs so far.

This I Believe

2007-05-10T16:15:00.000-04:00

Yeah, hum, uh, errr. Yeah.

Sorry, I don't believe in anything anymore. If you think that's hard to hear, think about how hard it is to say, polesmoker. You think I think it's cool to not believe in fucking anything? Man, I'm not fifteen. It's cool to not believe in anything when you're fifteen or even maybe 21.

See, I don't not believe in anything because it's cool. I'm actually not particularly immature, believe it or not. I don't believe in anything because I come from believin' in shit a whole bunch and having it prove to be a lie.

A lot of it is cultural, man. I try to not cast much of an eye to our culture at all, except to ridicule it and masturbate to it. What I want to see is people get places because they possess talent or ability or passion or whatever. Yeah, I know. That provokes laughter, right? That's Not Good, man.

Look at the fucking president, man. Look at anybody rich or famous. They're the worst kind of assholes, right? So, how does one succeed in one of the many, many definitions of success? By being an asshole? I guess. I guess. By sucking th' lifeforce out of others. By stinking shit up so bad that it's a headline. By being born to the right blueblood robber baron scumbag motherfucking piece of shit, right? By parading your neurotic fucked-up-ness in front of cameras. Sweet, man. The american fucking dream, man. Sorry- I can't bring myself to capitalize america anymore.

So, what do I do? Well, there's therapy, right? But here's th' deal with therapy- it can't make me feel one millimeter less disgusted. All it can do is make me O.K. with being disgusted. that's not fucking enough. I'm not stupid enough for that, man.

What was it like for my parents? Did they actually believe in things? My dad was in th' Foreign Service. Did he actually believe there was a point in it or was he just thinkin' it was a topnotch way to score skirt? Huh? Can you believe in a world so fairytale-like that a person of reasonable I.Q. could think there was a point in being a diplomat?

So many questions! I just get scared that my time is running out. See, I could still believe in something. I believe in that I could still believe in something. But time's running out for that. Pretty soon it'll be too late- I'll be too far gone into Nihilon. I'll be too sick of being lied to. You have to not lie to anyone that matters. I'm fucking dead serious. Just don't. Have enough balls to stand on your own fucking merits and be prepared to not be liked.

How do people get up in the morning? How do they do it? Jesus Christ it takes me more and more time. I open my eyes and I start th' litany- something worthwhile will happen today. I'll make someone momentarily happy today. I'll get kissed really good today. I'll meet someone who actually has something to impart to me today instead of the usual bloodsucking vampires. I'll meet someone smarter than me. I'll meet someone who gives ME a fucking grain of wisdom or a new way to play a Eb dominant 11. Instead of being fucking sucked dry by th' Usual Suspects.

I'll fucking learn something today.

Love? You believe in love? Do You Believe In A Thing Called Love? Dude, I divide th' women in my past into two categories: those who fucked me on purpose and those who fucked me by mistake. That's about how it breaks down, man. And it comes to me so late in th' game that it would have behooved everyone if I'd just cared a little less. If I'd just taken my fucking pleasure and moved the fuck on. Because that's what They wanted. They didn't want all my protestations of undying fucking bullshit.

Women are pragmatic, man. It is very, very much in one's interest to treat them with the proper pragmatism. They're not romantic creatures, my friend. They want worms and a nest for their chicks, my friend. Anything you think they want or that they say they want is, in some confusing, Lady Macbethish way, in service of nests and worms, baby. Do NOT make the mistake of thinking otherwise.

Music? Yeah, I still believe in music. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere. I know for a fact that music is what has kept me sane which is actually sort of a punishment but there it is. In the course of my life, whenever I've thought I was about to die my thoughts have been of music. I feel like I've only scratched the surface of music, you know?

Thing is, man- music is like cooking. It needs an audience or it falls in th' woods and doesn't make a sound. Every time I create something worthwhile and throw it online and eight people really dig it it kills me inside a little. So, I'm supposed to promote myself and my music which is the biggest fucking joke of all. We're getting back into a thread of a 'graph or four ago.

People don't want good, accomplished, passionate, thought-provoking music. They want easy music that goes down like Kool kool koolaide. Dude, I've been in th' business of it with people throwing fucking bread around and greasin' palms and I know how that shit works. I've been reivewed in enough big rags that I know they're reviewing you because you're buying a fucking full-page ad, man. At the end of the day it's the fucker with the biggest ego and the biggest hard-on about tellin' everybody about how fucking great they are that gets somewhere.

And I just can't get it up for that. I don't respect people enough, really. I guess that's it. Or most of th' people I meet of a Friday night. There's a bunch of cyberfolks I respect a whole lot, that's true. But you guys are like a zillionth of a percent, you know? People on the whole aren't any wiser about what they put in their ears as they are about what they shove in their fucking pieholes which is pretty toxic and air-filled.

I really do want to fuckin' believe in something. Like a girlie wants a prince on a fucking horse. But it's a hazardous, hazardous pursuit. You lose your motivation, man. The danger of getting older is that you start to know th' outcome. And that makes it dead-fucking-hard to take on the fucking world. I don't want to get old and die fucking angry. That would suck. I want sunshine and tequila and flowers and pussy. Why can't I fucking have that? Why can't I fucking have that? Don't anyone dare try to make me feel bad for wanting that. There's nothing fucking wrong with me for wanting that.

That's what I fucking believe.

Motherfuckin' Wang Chung Tonite

2007-05-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

Jesus, I've been unproductive as shit for a spell here. It's because everything I need to do is so epically biblical that it's tough to dig in. Fuck, I'll get there. I just need a psychic hardon moment and I'll be flying.

when I start doing shit for pure yucks I know I've got a touch o' spring fever and might as well give in to it. Good for the heart. So, you heard my brilliant ad. Then, today I got a email from Universal Audio whose list I'm on. They're a manufacturer of high-end audio stuff, plug-ins and hardware for recording and mastering.

There's a thing where you can submit a song and if the panel of judges likes it they put it on their website and give you a reacharound or something but you HAVE TO SAY THAT YOU USED SOME UA PRODUCT and how you used it. That kind of irked me, I mean, I guess it's O.K. but the way it works is if you want a musician of pedigree to endorse your shit you GIVE THEM SOME FREE crap.

So I submitted a song and told them I used the DVD case of their wonderful mastering suite to clean pot on.

Then I meet this band! Fuckin' A, man. I'm trolling musician classifieds at MySpace to see if, you know, there's any cool string players around here or if anyone wants to do a Tenacious D tribute. And here's CRAZE, man. They're all like 18 and they have this classified that sez "we DARE you to write and sing a lyric to this song". They're looking for a singer, you know? And they want to find their Vedder so I linked to the song and of course it's just brilliant. So I run it off onto my multitrack and I sing THIS LITTLE TREAT to it and off it goes!!!! Oh, you won't want to miss a second of this little four-minute treat. It's almost frighteningly brilliant. I about hacked up a lung listening to this. Could be a high point. Also, I'd like to pay tribute to my influences on this one- Corey Hart, Wang Chung, Men At Work, Jefferson Starship, Neil Diamond, The D (particularly "Explosivo") and of course Sepultura and Metal Church.

I think they'll like it. I'm going to send them the link now at their MySpace and see what happens.

I can't imagine what I did before I had a blog to be lazily amusing on of a night off. Oh, yeah- I hung out with friends. I knew it was some shit like that.

Your Source For Crap

2007-05-09T00:53:00.000-04:00

Musicians have to do fuckin' ads sometimes. Hey, fuck you a guy gets hungry. This one's for a grocery chain in Hartford CT. Please don't tell them about this take. The engineer (me) rolled tape when th' producer (me) was getting a Dove bar and the singer (me) threw this quick version of th' jingle down.

Fuckers didn't like th' bluegrass one. That was the cool one. Sorry, Ned. So they get this.

Some Words Of Encouragement

2007-05-07T23:19:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to mention a fuckin' thing I was thinking about today because it's extremely true and it's good news in these trying fuckin' times.

When I was 22 I figured I was over the hill to be Rock 'N' Roll Choadface Idol. At 26 I laughed at the ridiculous and uselessly undermining thoughts of my younger self, knowing however that by now it was too late for me to be a Defining Voice Of My Generation.

When I was 32 I looked back (in retrospect) and realized what a whingeing puss my younger self had been, knowing however that by now I was beyond the wheelhouse age of being An Established But Ever-Innovating pop chameleon.

Et-fuckin'-cetera.

See what I'm getting at here? I'll try to be a little less knobberific if you will.

Here's m'band fiction's last three studio recordings from th' big label days. Probably early '00. Icily competent stuff, this. This is being done by a group that's pretty assured of its own ascendancy and the material came from the stage where you're scribbling on tour and running through arrangements during soundchecks. The band was a trio and we recorded as live as we could but there's obviously the old Lightfoot touch at work in th' harmonies. We had the tensile thing together by then, the less-is-more going on. That all comes from being tired on stage, by the way. You can't help but want a song you can reach for your beer during.

The drummer, I'll call him Hank Dooley, is just fucking frighteningly precise. He was also fucking precisely an asshole and we could only handle him for so long. Big pussy, this dude. But listen to him play. I would much rather've made more records with him and not spent three months in a van with him.

We ended up calling this "The Rebecca EP". We only got rough mixes but they're pretty epic.

"Love Reaches Out" was written on tour in '98 in Lake Tahoe, CA. "Rebecca Understands Me" was written in a field on a summer day in '99 in Bowling Green KY (as evidenced by the first line, "Sitting in a field in Bowling Green"). The song is a funny sort of meobius strip of a narrative about a man's implausible fantasy of the perfect woman. I had to find a loop to use for the drums during the verses and I didn't have much time and I ended up ripping the intro from a Sarah McLachlan song on Fumbling Towards Ecstacy (I'm far more aquainted with fumbling away from Ecstacy to be honest) and slowing it way down. Thanks Missus.

"Call On Me" was written on tour in New England in Octember '98. This one's supposed to put some dry leaves under yer boots. The high note that I hold at the end for 27 seconds is not in any way fucked with by a computer or anything. And it's doubled. Wa-CHAAA.

This is interesting music. It's kind of leaning into that whole Talentmetal thing a little, that whole Kings X thing with the keyboard-precise harmonies. But I think there's enough new wave to it (the pointillist Police guitars on "Call On Me", the slinky open spaces of "Love Reaches Out") that it doesn't fall in.

Um, oh, yeah- fuck George Bush, that cunt.

Lightfoot Musician Jokes 1: WORSE THAN BASS SOLO

2007-05-07T18:30:00.000-04:00

A guy arrives at a tropical airport. Along with the heat and the sea breezes and the aroma of spice, he hears the incessant pounding of bass guitar. BOOM boom boom boom. BOOM boom boom boom.

He asks the baggage handler, "So, what's up with the bass?"

The sloe-eyed fellow quickly looked left, then right. "The bass, mon, it very important. Nothing must stop the bass."

Puzzled, our traveller hailed a taxi. The rhythm of the native bass was incessant.

He asked the cabbie, "Yo, bro, what up with the bass?"

The cabbie sucked on a spliff the size of a cheroot and gasped, "Oh, mon. We love the bass. If it ever stop, it will be a great catastrophe. Jah has written it."

The visitor disembarked at his luxury hotel. Despite the grand marble and gold surroundings, the throbbing of the bass was even louder. An obsequious bellhop sidled up to assist the guest with his bags. Wanting to get full value for his tip, the visitor brandished a $20 dollar bill and said to the bellboy, "There's another one just like this for you if you can do me a favor."

Quick like a bunny, the double sawbuck was palmed. "What is it you wish, meester? Dope? Girls? Boys?"

"Nothing like that," said the wealthy Americano. I just want to know about the bass."

"Ohhh, senor has noticed the urgent tropical rhythm of the bass. It is very special. Nothing must stop the bass."

Frustrated with curiousity, ur hero caould hold back no longer.

"What happens if the drums stop?"

The bellboy bared his palm, waiting for the other $20. "If the bass stop, it will be terrible.......after the bass stop.....THEN COME TROMBONE SOLO."

Don't Put On Any Polesmoking Airs When You're Down On Rue Morgue Avenue.

2007-05-06T22:35:00.000-04:00

July 4 2000, Los Angeles CA:

God damn it if we didn't get into the fucking Whiskey, man. Bloody red sun of fantastic L.A., man.

Ohhhh, oh, you're going to bitch about me again now. You're going to bitch about me and my fuckin' thing because I talk the way I do and write smooth and dirty and you're going to lean against that wall and call me on stuff because man you're so pragmatic. But I'm not going to pull rank at a party and I'm not going to command th' room when you've got baby pictures to show. See, I'm wanting to be left alone. I'm wanting to be at home. Now I am, anyway.

See how it fucking works? I'm not going to do any of that shit just because my failure was so picturesque or pretty. And so lengthy. And there were so many moments when it seemed like such a fuckin' shoe-in. So many pretty meetings at Capitol and PolyGram and A&M. So many 4 AMs drivin' south on th' Pacific Coast Highway and hitting Dana Point when the sun was soaking th' Sierras and it was so good to be going somewhere for fucking once. You know how that fucking feels.

See, I'm not going to assume that you don't just because you suffer from Pragmatizm. You know the fuck how it feels when sunrise meets motion. I wish I could give you what they scripted me for my Pragmatitis. It feels weird going in but man it's really good and when you start to come on to it you're thinking Dana Point, CA. You're thinking Venice motherfucking Italy, dearie.

April 28 1982, Venice Italy:

They let us off th' ferry from the train station and it's that jetty right on San Marcos. We get a pernod in th' square and Erica is high and goes and lies out in the square until she disappears under a carpet of pigeons. And the bill comes and it's a zillion lire so we just up and leg it. That's usually how I get my best sense of a city when I'm seventeen is getting chased through it.

I catch up with the other students and Monica Brinton and ask her to have tea with me and she does and it's fuckin'-A great but the girl mixes th' lemon and the cream and you know that's not a pretty outcome.

And I never forget the way it looks in her teacup, like jizz in a punchbowl, yeah. And those little strands, swimming around with a weird animus that you can't figure out what th' engine is. I can see them huge, I can see them up in the sky like bigass clouds fixing to open up and rain dna the fuck on your parade. That's what it looks like, yeah you've seen it.

Yeah, that's right, Mssr. Pragmatique. Into every life a little dna must fall and if you don't listen don't come back to me later. And you can't avoid it doing what you're doing, man. It's not going to work. Their are no clear guidelines to who gets fucked and who doesn't but I always walk around feeling like the other exceeeedingly large shoe is goin' ta fix ta comin' down.

And three days later when I'm looking at that knife in La Spezie and trying to get my watch off I'm looking over the dudes's shoulder and his head is blocking out the sun and I can see, yes, off to th' west. I can see 'em moving in. It's like Jesus poured the fucking tea and Zeus pissed in it all over the sky.

That's what it looks like, man. Do I really have to tell you? You've put th' lemon in the cream. It's how you learn. And to even have the chance to stand at a window in the early fall and watch your babies play in th' yard is one in a zillion. There's so many other ways it could have been.

And that's the odds of fuckin' everything. Don't give me any of this 7 to 10 nonsense. The Chance Of Anything is one in a fuckin' zillion. One in a zillion that the dice are dice and not primordial crustaceans on planet De3eihg. One in a zillion that you're driving a car to the casino and not gleurding a truxkll. Follow? One in a zillion that I'm sitting here well you get what I'm gleurding at.

Th' odds aren't important. Only th' outcome is important and there's always an outcome and when you think about it, on a cosmic scale, well, that's pretty generous. Generous.

Fuck it, I'm Just Going To Steal Other People's Posts Fer a Spell 2

2007-05-04T01:22:00.000-04:00

Inocuous Info

In an article about the new regulations limiting military bloggers, we find this little interesting fact:

Fuck it, I'm Just Going To Steal Other People's Posts Fer a Spell

2007-05-03T16:56:00.000-04:00

When It's Done and Over, Lord, A Man Is Jes' A Man

Bar 63, eighth-note 347,942

Through the modern miracle of podcasting, for some months now I've had the pleasure of timeshifting the day's Al Franken Show into my evening drive home. My enjoyment of the show is muted, though. Al's not the most acute interviewer in the world of space and time, and all too often he marshals his guests out of their own particular areas of expertise and solicits agreement with his own hobby-horses. Fair enough; he's not a "pro"; and what he lacks in professionalism he by far makes up for by being, you know, funny.

But Al and I are not destined by the stars to grow old together, I can already foretell.

The problem is musical.

Al's chosen a few snips from the Grateful Dead's catalog as bumpers to play segments in and out, and it's these things that will eventually drive me away.

Habitués of the Jingosphere may have already picked up on the free-floating notion that I bear little affection for the Grateful Dead's self-congratulatory elitist cult, or indeed for Hippieism in general -- having taken the Clash seriously in Bobby Lightfoot's 1979 may have had something to do with it.

I hung with lots of Deadheads in the Seventies -- it was mighty hard to be in a Midwestern college village and avoid 'em -- but after school was over I managed to get Jerry and the Boys into the rear-view mirror while I explored what we all should have been listening to in our formative years instead of that drunken mess "Europe '72": Vintage country, bluegrass, jug-band music, Delta blues, the huge universe of jazz -- in fact, all the musical forms that preceded and influenced the Dead and indeed all of rock music.

So not having availed myself of the Dateful Bread for quite a few years it's a bit of a hardship to be exposed rather relentlessly to a few selected ten-second snips of Jerry Garcia's guitar playing. I have loathed "Terrapin Station" since approximately four seconds into the first time I heard it, and as a particularly bombastic passage from it serves as Al's main bumper, the cause is not helped.

But no, mainly it's the Garcia Thing. With a few notable exceptions, Jerry Garcia was a sloppy, lazy, cliché-ridden mess of a guitar player, who interrupted his boring eighth-note scales only to interject cod-country double-stop bends that were trite when Chet Atkins nicked them from Merle Travis in 1947. Seriously, listen to any Garcia solo and concentrate on the rhythms he's choosing -- ninety percent of the time he's playing nothing but eighth notes:

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nunna-nunna-nunna-nunna
Nee-noo-wee-noo-wee-noo
Ween'tn-doon'tn-ween'tn-wee-noo
Wee-noo-wee-noo-wee-noo-nee-neeeeeee

I can't help but wonder, whenever I hear the passage from "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" that Franken plays, why that particular edit? Couldn't Al hear the dope-sick, thoughtless reliance on pure muscle-memory that invariably produces the hackneyed guitar playing of a flogger who's so phoning it in he may as well live at Ma Bell's? Can you hear me now? Good!

On another bumper -- don't know the song, sorry -- it couldn't be plainer to this weekend warrior (who has actually once or twice Walked the Walk) that the guy doesn't know what key he's in or what chord is coming next. He noodles, hoping against hope that Bob-n-Phil will hit that tonic A they're hinting at. Whew, they do, but it was touch-and-go there for a second.

OK, so maybe Al just hit a bad patch in his selections. A storied guitarist with Rock-and-Roll Patriot cred like Jerry couldn't have been that awful, could he? I decided to download Skull and Roses from iTunes, just to test the proposition. A 1971 live album over which the band had absolute creative control, right? They could have chosen from a huge number of performances, even edited some together -- it's been done, believe me -- to come up with the bestest representation of their musicianship they could, 'kay?

So... The first song ("Bertha"), the first guitar solo on the record, three bars into it...

Jerry Clams It

He doesn't just clam it, he clams it hard. He clams it with a clam that would make a second-year Mel Bay student wince. Clam Casino. Clam Royale. Steamed Clam with sauerkraut.And you hear those eighth notes? He's gonna do those goddamned eighth notes for another 72 bars, man!Now, please. I love Workingman's Dead. Jerry's pedal-steel playing on "The Wheel" is some of the most innovative ever done, and that song is right up there in the Personal Top Hundred. "Dark Star/St. Stephen" Live/Dead yadda yadda. Dawg Music. No question.

But....

Ring-ring...

"Hello?"

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nunna-nunna-nunna-nunna....

copyright 2007 by Bobby Lightfoot

New! One-Letter Record Reviews! Ironic!

2007-04-30T22:24:00.000-04:00

z

t

r

q

o

Slang of The Future

2007-04-30T22:11:00.000-04:00

This conversation takes place in a milk bar on th' moon of Ganymede in 2355!! Yeah, huh?

Joe: Dude, my cheneys are itching.

Hank: Man, you shouldn't have bushed that condoleeza on Ceti Prime. You probably got wolfowitzes from her cunningham.

Joe: I hope not. My girlfriend would go coulter on my hastert.

Hank: Well, until you get it checked out don't even think about foleying my rove.

Bobby Continues To Sing Rufus

2007-04-24T22:58:00.000-04:00

Doing a four-part vocal chorale is one of the richest, hardest, most brain-and throat-pummelling pursuits in musicdom. And I don't mean Rufus' version of throat-pummelling either.

It's a lot like arranging a string quartet but the attention that needs to be paid to phrasing is even tighter. Every breath, every rubato, every quaver needs to be matched as closely to perfect as possible.

The holy grail of every four- or five- part pop chorale is of course The Beach Boy's live 1966 performance of "And Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring". This is completely Music Of Th' Polesmokin' Spheres right here, and while it can never be attained by mere mortals, the lessons exposed in this utterly seamless vocal ballet are harmelodically on par with any Bach cantata. One is also well-advised to acknowledge th' Hi-Lo's and those other guys for their role in pioneering the harmonically dense, jazz-soaked modern four-part a cappella.

I rarely allow myself the luxury of biting into an a cappella piece because while it is a sweet, sweet ride indeed it can be a devourer of time and that is certainly of th' essence. But a musician has to keep their chops up so you can really just sort of look at it as a form of stretching.

I did this version of Rufus' "In A Graveyard " because I haven't been able to take this cd out since I did the version of "Poses" and I started getting all sorts of interesting voice leadings and suspensions when I listened to "Graveyard". As recorded it's a take on that whole stately Whitman/Frost American thing, done solo with piano. The triadic, gospel piano part suggested a series of moving harmonies with cool added tones. I was thinking about the various things Aaron Copeland does with interesting added tones that can sound so martial and then so voluptuous.

I recorded the song by doing a piano/vocal take like the original and started building harmonies around the lead vocal. All the harmonies are improv-based; I didn't do a score. I set up four tracks and designated them falsetto, alto, tenor and bass and zipped through getting the parts I wanted. I returned to it for a couple of nights and a day, punching in all over the place, refining and tuning it, and when I had the arrangement I returned to each part and rerecorded it with a minimum of punching with all inflections, breaths, rubatos, crescendos and trills in place.

I buttressed three short sections with a doubled fifth harmony. When you record any single tone in multipart harmony overtones will begin to emerge; one can hear a "fifth voice" and sometimes the part is so otherworldly that you just have to sing the part along with it on an overdub.

Then I took the piano out of the mix, set up a beautiful, plate-reverb drenched monitor and resang the final lead vocal. I did it this way because by now in the process I'd be so completely, intimately in touch with the phrasing that it would be second-nature and I'd be able to focus on the performance.

No pitch correcting or pitch shifting. What you do is, you sing all good and in tune and stuff like they used to do.

Freedum Idn't Free Proggresive Puusys

2007-04-24T14:10:00.000-04:00

'Sright, Polenschmoken. All you righty fuckoes can step right up and Hand In Your Wrong right here at day 2 of

BOBBY LIGHTFOOT'S GREAT AMERICAN BUSHOUT REGISTERED TM

I've got th' faith in you. You know you want to, and you can do it here without any judgements or recriminations! No one's going to say "I told you so". Try it for A DAY. If you can QUIT FOR A DAY YOU CAN FUCKIN' MAKE IT.

Maybe you can try them new Bush Patchiz TM. Slap one on and it tells you lies while you withdraw painlessly.

And then you can wake the fuck up in time for all of us to pull the plug on the whole down-is-up-right-is-left thing.

Bobby says you can.

America Bless God.

Librels Are Morans Bush Rocks Globel Warning Whoax

2007-04-23T15:46:00.000-04:00

Yeah, you fell for it didn't you. Fucking wanks. So easily drawn in with Good Ol' American Unregulated No Child Left Behind Spellin'. Anyway, check it righties- here's a chance to Do Good Now. It's like a amnesty. It's-----------

BOBBY LIGHTFOOT'S GREAT AMERICAN BUSHOUT REGISTERED TM

2007!!!!

WOAH, HUH? FOR THIS WHOLE WEEK YOU CAN COME TO TH' ORCHESTRA OF SWEET REGRET AND, WITHOUT ANY FEAR OF JUDGEMENT OR RECRIMINATION, RENOUNCE YOUR FAITH FOR ALL-TIME-OLYMPIC-LYING GOLD MEDALIST DRIBBLEYA BUSH!! HUH, YEAH?

Seriously, guys- guy just said that he has more faith tha ever in Gonzalez.

Aren't you fucking DONE yet?

Dude, I KNOW it's hard. I was engaged to this one chick once and she was unspeakable and I felt bound by propriety, you know? I know it's tough. But if it means some sleepless nights and some chewing of lip well it's all worth it in th' long run.

C'mon in! It's BOBBY LIGHTFOOT'S GREAT AMERICAN BUSHOUT!

wOOO HOOOOO TM!

Let's Get Free! That's the slogan for it!

LET'S GET FREE! TM

General Electric

Haliburton

Everready

Th' Baby Jeebiz Game

2007-04-20T18:09:00.000-04:00

Yeah, we haven't played at Bargaining With The Creepster for way too long. Here's what we do: pick worthwhile people who died and offer baby Jeekers an alternative sacrifice. It's th' third stage of bereavement, man: bargaining.

This week I've got thirty-two names and it's going to be a spot of work so let's get on with it. I will put down the name of someone and the proposed switch.

Ross Abdallah Alameddine--------- Alberto Gonzalez

Christopher James Bishop------- Rush Limbaugh

Brian Bluhm--------- Donald Trump

Ryan Clark-------- Exxon CEO Lee Raymond

Austin Cloyd--------- Bill O'Reilly

Jocelyne Coutere-Nowak---------- Barbara Bush

Kevin Granata----------- Simon Cowell

Matthew Gwaltney---------- Paul Wolfowitz

Caitlin Hammaren--------- Katie Couric

Jeremy Herbstritt-------- John McCain

Rachael Elizabeth Hill---------- Anne Coulter

Emily Hilscher----------- Paris Hilton

Jarrett Lane------------ Dennis Hastert

Matthew J. La Porte------------ Dick Cheney

Henry Lee----------------- Ed Bennet, CEO of VH1

Don Ho----------------- Mark Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications

Liviu Librescu------------- that fucking ghoul Kissinger

G.V. Loganathan----------- Pat Dollard

Partahi Lumbantoruan------------ Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News

Lauren McCain----------------- Paris Hilton

Daniel O'Neil---------- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Juan Ramon Ortiz-------------- Silvio Berluscone

Minal Panchal----------- Josh Groban

Daniel Perez Cueva---------- Tony Blair

Erin Peterson------------ Regina Spektor

Mike Pohle------------- Karl Rove

Julia Pryde-------------- Avril Lavigne

Mary Read-------------- US House Representative Jean Schmidt

Reema Samaha----------- Richard fucking Perle

Waleed Shaalan----------- Toby Keith

Leslie Sherman------------ NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker

Maxine Turner------------- OJ Simpson

Nicole White------------ Condoleeza Rice

Whaddya say, Creepus? Come through for fucking once, nailhands.

To Whom It May Concern: I'm Still Not Fucking Scared.

2007-04-19T00:32:00.000-04:00

I'm still not scared of it. You ain't fuckin' got me. I wasn't even scared that time in LA on th' 101 when the white truck blew a tire and came bouncing at me front over back taking out cars right and left. I was like you are NOT fucking getting me motherfucker you are NOT fucking getting me I am not a number in your fuckin' multiple fatality.

Not scared of th' smoking gun coming in th' form of a mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud can just smoke m'pole. Condoleeza Rice, Wolfowitz, Rove? Dribbleya? Ahmadinnerjacket? Iran? That's what you've got to scare us with?

It's like Blair Witch II, you know? You can't believe how unscary it is. You can't believe they went to all the fucking trouble, man.

And this latest one? With Who Flung Dung there at Virginia Tech? And HOW ARE WE GOING TO STOP IT? HOW ARE WE GOING TO STOP THIS SORT OF THING?

When I was a kid we was in th' Foreign Service and when we'd come to the States from Latin America or wherethefuckever it was always like coming inside to the air conditioning. It was all smooth surfaces and Star Wars trading cards and tree-lined boulevards with no beggars and no handless people thrusting their stumps at you. It was all no-corpses-floating-down-the-river. You could always count on th' corpse-floating-down-th'-river count to be negligible.

And now it's all this. But I'm not even remotely scared.

And here's how to Stop This Sort Of Thing: don't make the guy a motherfucking rock star, O.K.?

See, we keep giving them exactly what they want and not fucking doing that is How To Stop This Sort Of Thing. Motherfucking 9/11 was like this on a grand scale. Mourn your fucking dead and move on. Earlier Generations tought us the value and we dassen't listen, dassen't we?

Hey, if it bleeds it leads, man. Is it going to end up in this fucking country where every single minute of everyone's day is evaluated for profitability and if the shareholders aren't happy well that unproductive Comrade has to be soylent fucking greened?

Place makes me fucking sick. Really makes me sick. A lot of dirty little spiders feeding at a fucking turd. Bunch of fucking hags begging for a milkwhipping from th' royal dork. Just stop with the whole Let's Make All The Really Fucked Up Broken People Famous thing. Let's start there! Kooky! : ) : ) LOL!!

You take a dude like Wee Fuckim Yung and you salt the earth that is the footprint he left on the planet. You pour lye and scientifically formulated acid bleach and stuff on his memory. You throw him in a fucking hole and piss on him and cover him with fucking dirt. It's a MySpace Fame Dream Done Up Right, man. That fuckin' guy is going to be one of the 10 Faces Of '07, man. And that's why he did it. Obviously. Because he knew that it was just so fucking important to be the turd with all th' spiders feasting on it for just 21 seconds.

You stop and think, hey didn't like fucking 200 people die in Iraq today? Hmmmm.

Jesus fucking Christ I'm going to have to wake up tomorrow and I'll have to know that this fuckweed psycho will be burning from every TV screen in this fucking prison of a country. This fucked-up shell of a fucking banana republic where you walk amongst the ruins and think about Europe and visas.

It rubs me somewhat wrong, man. A lot of it is that when I was a bounder I wanted to be famous too. Or at least to have a cool career. But I fucking languished in smelly vans and stumbled over bad stages for however many fucking decades only to realize that somewhere the formula had changed and what I really needed to be doing was opening up on crowds of young people and parading my violent psychosis across th' national stage for every one to masturbate and buy products to.

And yeah, that shook the old bloomeroney off the fucking rose right quick.

It's speeding up, man. See how it's all speeding up? It's getting harder to hide. 9/11 brought all the cornfed ignorant peasant pissant fat fascist gobblers up out from under the rocks and into my fucking lap. And the combination of them and this voracious, fucked-up, empty, bottom-feeding pursuit of Fear For Profit just makes me want to drink a pickle jar of LSD. Place gives me fucking hives. Love it or leave it, you say?

Dude, back that shit up with some airfare.

I'm not scared of what you've got, man. Gotta do better, man.

Bobby Sings Rufus

2007-04-17T20:21:00.000-04:00

Yeah, there's our boy genius with the big burns.

Man, it's hard to do a Rufus Wainwright song but I'm not scared. I'm never scared of music. They can't make me be.

"Poses" Dig it. Full-on Red Lady.

The challenge of this song, as with a lot of Rufus stuff, is making the unique perspective of the lyric fly for me. It's not because he's flameriffic but rather because when you're somewhat estrogen-challenged like me lines like "all these poses, such beautiful poses/make any boy feel like picking up roses..." can be hard to deliver. I'm much more of a linebacker than a Rimbaud, unfortunately.

Hell with it. I'll just go a little mumbly when I do the nancying lines live. The music is too good, the room for interpretation is too wide and too generous to ignore. "Poses" is the title track from Wainwright's vinegary, autumnal '02 record that got me hooked on the guy. The song, as with much of his stuff, is about a half-step removed from an opera ballad. The main instrumental rhythm figure, an ostinato I-X-V-X-V in the bass, is a classic opera comp that we've all heard in "Carmen" and "Barber Of Seville".

The detailed orchestra-pit classicism of his chamber-pop arrangement is a bear to encapsulate on a keyboard. This took a solid week of rote before I could even track this rudimentary version. Just achieving the manual independence to get the main two-handed rhythm figure going was seizure-inducing, never mind mastering all the subtle variations of it that move us through the various I's, IV's and V's.

I should have done it on a piano but I don't happen to own one and my samples just never seem to cut it. Tracking it on th' Rhodes pulls it into another sphere and gives it a music-boxy vintageness that appealed to me. I try to never adjust my Rhodes too perfectly. I love the way the harp support buzzes on the B above middle C and how some notes are rounder than others and how some of the low notes pull sharp as the tine stops vibrating from the hammer strike. Damn thing's noisy, too, isn't it? I bet Rufus would dig it, though- he's no stranger to the Black Lady.

Anyway, as I try to build my repertoire as a catholic-lower-c lounge lizard I'm excruciatingly aware of the need to have material that forces a little virtuosity out of my sorry fingers every now and then on some level. I can't hustle crap. I don't have that skill. If I'm not feeling it I can't sell it. Nine times out of ten I find solo performances pretty damn boring. It's asking a lot and I hate to ask too much. I come from a discipline where you assume you have someone's attention for about 5 seconds and if you don't give them something crazy they're going to flip on over to South Park. I don't need a lot of skill and flash but I need to feel a lot of confidence from a performer in order to get with the suspended disbelief.

"Poses" by Rufus Wainwright. Let's kick this fucker over.

Excellent Haiku Week #2: "Transitions" with Robert Lightfoot

2007-04-16T22:36:00.000-04:00

The excellent mid-century screenwriter Robert Sherwood

CIVICS:

There is a reason
Why gun sales establishments
Have only one clerk

SEX:

Sex is what you do
When you relax all of your
Non-fucking muscles

DEATH:

At last you are here
I'm not surprised that you look
Sort of like Don Ho

LIFE:

Look, there is a light
I'm not sure I like this shit
Stop hitting my ass

HAIKUS:

Haikus in English
Are like trying to make a
Boat out of tampons.

Haikus From Th' Road

2007-04-15T23:11:00.000-04:00

Can we not argue
About what you're paying me
It is 4 AM.

I regret to in
Form you that the song you want
Will not be played now.

The patrol cars there
In the parking lot, my friend
Let's load out slowly.

I will tell your wife
If you go in there with her
I do not like lies.

No, we will not play
Anything by Depeche Mode
Put your drugs away.

I have cut my hand
Upon the side of my Rhodes
Quick- apply Patrone.

There is nothing I
Would not give right now to be
Away from this place

The dream of music
A perfect chord struck firmly
The smell of urine.

It is not my fault
That you have drunk so freely
And have made nothing.

I feel just like Sting
When you vomit your dinner
During the chorus

Th' Future of Comedy On The Web

2007-04-13T16:04:00.000-04:00

Look, don't even bother coming to my page any more. I'm dry, man. Can't you tell? I'm just recycling th' same tired '05-ey crap. I'm not even smart enough to commodify my shit into some sort of revenue stream. I'm a moron- I even give away m'music which is the only thing I emit that's worth anything and damn little at that.

Look, I'm going to drop the whole future right into your fuckin' lap. That way you can never say I'm not good for something.

Yeh, there's this guy named Von Douche. He looks sort of like a Euro Ashton Kutcher but he's young, you know? We'll let him roll. He's got this blig called "Hot Chicks With Douchebags" and it's full-on three-point-0.

Man, I'd tell you about it but if th' premise were a book it wouldn't need a fuckin' foreword, got me? Gotta run. I've got s-s-soulfinger.

Komedy Korner

2007-04-09T21:55:00.000-04:00

Woah, getting my tax shit in order for '06. Looks like I had my best year as a broke-ass singer ever. I'm, like, non-famous musician aristocracy- we're talking 23-24 large, baby. When I was in LA my handlers would've paid that much in a month for payola and kickbacks and drug bribes and for the priviledge to play some shitass hole on Sunset in case some asshole A&R staffer from fucking Interscope might come down and wave some shitass paper at us. Those were th' days. Sleeping on floors in Reseda and still thinking it was the thing to do. Watching our manager buy lunch for a bunch of wanker creative directors at the Manhattan Beach Country Club and knowing it was coming out of my pocket later.

'Course I haven't paid my Haliburton kickbacks yet. That'll be ugly. Got a drawer full of 20's, though. Gotta keep a drawer full of 20's. There's enough to pay my protection money in there.

Money, you know? Christ, I hate that shit. Fucking waste of time. I fucking refuse to get a hard on over it like everybody. It's the grind for me, man. Everybody's got some shit that takes their eyes off the fuckin' beautiful blue sky and tits and stuff. Mine's that relentless grind. I'll sit with a song or a mix for 12 fuckin' hours and not think twice about it but when I'm chasing my tail on somebody else's clock and I can't even get myself to feel like they're getting their money's worth I just want to flush myself down th' terlet. And then you have to hear about Connie in Accounting and shit. I can't stand the idea of having a Connie in Accounting in my professional fuckin' life.

And there's no question about it: onstage can get to be a grind but at least I feel like I'm well above th' value for dollar mark. It's a long night when you do this rippin' shit like Soulfinger.

How much money you want? Remember when you didn't have a farthing or a polesmokin' sous and you were still nancying about free as a fucking bird? Take heed! Take heed! There's an element, just an element of sense and truth in there. Don't don't

get all wrapped around a fuckin' axle about it, O.K.? You could slip in th' shower and open your fucking face like a cracked snare head, man. You could stumble in th' living room and get a poker up your fucking ass, man. You could wind up like my drummer buddy Mike Gauya who wound up 'round a tree with his head further on down th' road. You could get th' sudden, irrepressible urge to fly a plane into a building. Believe it or not, you still have to try to be cool, man. Even if it's your own fucking definition. You know when it's wrong or right. I thought that surely by age 42 I wouldn't be hung up on being cool, but that's where it's at for me. I mean, it's easy to be cool now. Just look at what a bunch of pimply scrotes young people are now-n-days. James Deans and Natalie Woods do not appear to currently dominate th' popular psyche. I mean, who's the coolest young person now? Fuckin' whatsername there, from MySpace? The British chick with the karaoke-sounding complaint reggae? Who? That utter drip Russian chick with the horrible songs? Um....what the fuck is her name? I can't just google "utter drip Russian chick with horrible songs", you know? Actually I rekkin I could- look, here's what I got- 26,600 fucking hits.

"Regina Spektor". Jesus, I wish Ronnie and Phil had taken care of that little secret South of th' Border if you know what I mean.

It's like when someone would say they didn't like my music and I'd want to see their record collection because you fucking know it's all Hootie and Matchbox 20. Man, if you think Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch and Vegina Spektor and MySpace McIdol is where it's at please, please, please give me a frightened and disgusted look. Because it's you cocks that I'm trying to revive the word "chode" to describe.

You'll think you've finally fuckin' gotten me and it'll be like a movie when my hand comes up out of the ground and rips the hair of your balls. Shraaaaakkk.

Now, what would you like to hear?

(And, in closing, if I might add that three down on that gliggle search was this link of excellence which NOT ONLY led to a new and fresh form of comedy but introduced another instance of the underutilized "chode" although in this instance it was spelled "choad" (sic)).

Hey Chodes

2007-04-09T15:54:00.000-04:00

Go here. Dig this. It rocks.

This is th' sort of thing that could have happened at fucking CHOATE.

B
B
B
B
B

This Never Would Have Happened At Fucking CHOATE.

2007-04-08T23:26:00.000-04:00

Oh, you can be fuckin' A+ POSITIVE nothing like this would have ever happened when I was at CHOATE. Nothing resembling this could have ever taken place when I was at CHOATE.

Fuckin' CHOATE.

Campaign War Chests Of Th' Lesser-Known Candidates!

2007-04-06T16:33:00.000-04:00

Raised one eight ball of coke and $239.98

Six potatoes, two cups of vodka, one-half cabbage.

Six clitorises.

One rotten bird, two mouse heads, hairball.

53 dollars.

two trillion dollars, eight pints of "man gravy"

Three cell phones, one tongue stud, five thongs.

Six Liv-A-Snax, Four cat turds.

b
b
b
b
b
b
b

Antidotes To Their Various Poisons

2007-04-04T23:29:00.000-04:00

Mix a paste of mineral water and baking soda. Apply directly into the ear canals and allow to dry.

A long, hot shower is administered followed by two hours of reading Das Kapital or Leviathan. At the end of this period the ears are boxed three times with sufficient force to dislodge remaining shit from brain.

Treat for shock; standard antitoxicity procedure for rabid rat attack. If testicles are iced they can be reattached by a surgeon.

Magic circle has been proven effective as a deterrent.

Six years of intensive talk therapy is suggested as a follow-up.

DickCheneyOff is available in most CVS pharmacies.

In a pinch, eighteen Epi-Pen syringes may be applied to th' forehead

Induce vomiting; standard intensive insulin delivered in I.V.

Protracted bedrest in darkened room.

Rectal examination to ascertain presence of polyps.

600 days strict bedrest.

b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b

Behind Th' Music

2007-04-03T20:06:00.001-04:00

Mostly because I wanted to be able to effin' hear it I made this vocal/acoustic guitar/organ mix of "An Easy Winter".

I just want to be able to hear all th' vocals that take a million hours to track and then subsequently disappear in th' mist.

There's a section at the end of the last verse that is nine parts thick. It's cool.

I'm telling you. About one and a half people including me will be really excited about this

Man you GOTTA WATCH OUT

2007-04-03T01:20:00.000-04:00

- If you laugh at "Sex And Th' City"- your junk falls off.

-If you laugh at two TV ads in a week- junk falls off.

-If you tell a girl you're her religion to hit it- junk falls off.

-If you BUY ANY PRODUCT LESS THAN 6 HOURS AFTER SEEING AN AD FOR IT- off.

-If you look forward to your job for a week running and you're not a musician or a gyno- off.

-If you buy a cd by a) Heart, b) Pat Benatar (she's so bluesy now) or c) Lifehouse- off it goes.

DUDE SOMETIMES IF THEY'RE IN A GOOD MOOD THEY'LL ACCEPT A FINGER BUT YOU CAN'T COUNT, COUNT, COUNT ON THAT!!! AND THEY MAKE YOU DEBASE YOURSELF. DON'T BE A FUCKING CHODE!!!!!!

Robert Lightfoot's Poetry Week #3: Me 'n' Ned

2007-04-02T17:39:00.000-04:00

Me 'n' Ned

Ned's more prone to reasoning and ratiocination
Me, I like to brag on frequency of masturbation
He might tell you clever stuff and give you reading tips
Me, I'm glad that I've still got both my childbearing hips

He's got the hair, I've got th' height
We shared th' brains between us
But if I recall from swimmin' holes
He has th' larger penis

Some day I'm sure he'll be th' old folks home's best fuckin' dancer
Reckon I'll go at fifty or so from lung or bladder cancer

He has living proof that all his soldiers are still swimmin'
But I've had weirder sex with far more questionable women

I've met Snoop and Flea and ducked the flying walls in Northridge
But he's on first-name terms with someone talented- A. Partridge

He says shit that gives you hope, I write fucked-up shit on dope
About th' nun that phoned the Pope and healed up all her cartlidge

I've got polyps in my throat, he got stitched up 'hind his scrote
He got surg'ry up his hole, I've got scars about my soul

I love that fuckin' goddamn dude
And I care not who knoweth
And any who takes offence thence
Upon my sac may bloweth

Mel Shacher Mel Schacher Mel Schacher

2007-03-29T23:37:00.000-04:00

Now anybody who does a search on Mel Schacher will get an eyeful of some little naked guy rockin' the bongos with his little button mushroom dork flapping around.

Mel Schacher Mel Schacher mel schacher.

Grand Funk.

New Recording Alert: "An Easy Winter" by Bobby Lightfoot

2007-03-28T23:18:00.000-04:00

Yeah, chaval- that's Helsinki right there.

City of my birth, in fact. Born as the endless night of a Finnish winter descended. The friddget winter of '64-'65. While The Beatles posed in Central Park, man.

I know a thing or two about winter.

I wrote and recorded a version of this song a year ago February. I really dug "An Easy Winter" and wanted to hear it so I demoed it up pretty quick, using a cut 'n' paste of drums from other sessions and guitars through boxes.

I never stopped wanting to hear "An Easy Winter" in Cinemascope and decamped to the studios of gentleman farmer Greg Aldritch in Amherst MA a couple of weeks ago to record basics using lots of real, one-performance drums and some nice, big, ringing Marshall amps. I wrung myself out getting a solid, Moonish drum track and lots of tube-soaked, chubby bass and guitar tracks.

When I brought the rhythm track back to my studio I spent a good week recording the labyrinthine cascade of vocals and separate four-part call and answer passages. The earlier recording of this had been sort of clogged with admittedly pretty harmonies and I really wanted to still incorporate them so I worked long and hard to get everything to fit without getting insanely busy.

I used some interesting processing on the vocals in this mix. I wanted to have the lead vocal really jump out which is a challenge because it's competing with all these doubled three-and four part harmonies. Instead of doubling it all over the place and just filling more space I did a couple of odd things. First, I looped out the lead vocal into reverb and a stereo delay but compressed the send really hard. This results in the reverb and especially the delay "growing out" from the lead vocal on the verses giving an impression of hugeness without gumming up the vocal. It's like a predelayed reverb that fades up.

I also did an old Motown trick of tracking the lead vocal to another track and accentuating the upper midrange and sending this through a frequency-specific compressor so the enunciation, especially of consonants, would be hyped. Then I mixed this back in with the lead vocal. In the chorus I did double track several key phrases so the lead vocal wouldn't collapse against all the supports.

Everything else in the recording and mixing was pretty basic, the nature of the song being what it is. It was an obvious candidate for the energy-over-gadgetry approach.

"An Easy Winter"

cHILDREN'S letTERS TO GOD.

2007-03-28T01:22:00.000-04:00

Woah! It's like Children's Letters To God! Heh!

Look at the adorable li'l white child and his equally devout dog! Kid's praying for a cell phone! The dog's like a politician with a MBA- he knows that every now and then you gotta walk th' walk if you want a biskit and a warm, corduroy-clad leg to frot upside of. of

Look at that future erupting Federal Building in th' thought bubble above that little kid's face. You can almost read the fuckin' street number. Little terrorist bastard. I say waterboard the little fuck NOW. WATERBOARD HIM. And TAKE OUT HIS FUCKIN' VILLAGE. Maybe it's not too late for the dog to save him.

Jesus told me once that he hates that shit. He can see right through it. All that innocent people dying war stuff. What did he say about it? He had some phrase he kept using. And if I told th' fucking guy once I told him SIX TIMES that I don't like it when he grabs th' back of my head. Because then I can't see God tumblin' his nuts. Did I say that.

Jesus has this fuckin' terrier Max and the fuckin' dog is ALWAYS fucking with shit and it bugs me and once Max knocked Jesus over and it's a good thing I was there because he would have hung himself. Explain THAT shit as a suicide. With Rush spilled all over the place. Fuck! And six busted poppers right on the little dead slave boy's back.

Ah, it's just the price one pays for being the Hoovervac in th' Holy Trinity Sandwich, I suppose.

Yeah. You know, me and Jesus and God went out and smoked a little rock one night and we wound up at this night club where they had one of those hypnotist dudes and we volunteered and the guy hypnotized God to where he thought he was Catherine Zeta Jones and he's all making out with Jesus but you KNOW IT'S A FRONT BECAUSE DUDE IT'S FUCKIN' GOD AND HE'S OMNIPOTENT SO YOU TOTALLY KNOW IT'S JUST AN EXCUSE TO SUCK FACE WITH WHATSISNAME.

It just cracks me up because God's supposed to be this fuckin' hardass and he's like Downlowin' it with this black janitor at th' mall. Sneaking around. Makes me sick.

Anyway, so I'm out driving with God and he's driving his black fuckin' Escalade and we see a deer and he actually swerves to hit it. Like a total cock. Bad timing too because fuckin' Ronald Reagan almost bites his schwerma off. And what's worse is God grabs his machine pistol from th' glovebox and he squeezes off rounds into the deer's legs and shit before he finishes it. He's a complete sadist. And Reagan's laughing his head off. Sometimes I can't believe I hang out with these guys. God's always doing shit like making people drive forks into their eyes and tongue-kiss their children just to fuck with them. You'd think he would've gotten sick of it after however many billions of years but he's such a fuckin' little JAP. And when Ron and Jesus are around it's like this total oneupsmanship thing. Bunch of heartless little JAPs running around some lousy mall in Encino with mouthfuls of Raisinets and braces and cum. Gum. Gum.

Public Service Announcement

2007-03-25T22:44:00.000-04:00

Hey to th' dude who hit me with a Google search on "bloody stool lump in testicle"- it's doctor time, man. We all know how we like to search our symptoms. It's human nature. I mean, I'm one of those idiots who never got his wisdom teeth out so I'm always doing searches for "swollen lymph node" and "fucked up gland" and shit.

but homes anything involving nutlumps and blood is probably worth looking into.

I'm guessing since you came and read my blog for a half hour there's probably still time left for you. Shit was funny, right? Bitter, bitter laughter is th' best medicine.

All th' rest of you Mel Schacher freaks can smoke pole.

Bobby Lightfoot's Dick Cheney Death Watch 3.22.07

2007-03-22T17:47:00.000-04:00

Well, well, well! So how goes it with Mr. Sucking-The-Marrow-From-Little-Children's-Bones this here week? Well, I know for sure that Shit Head made another visit to his evil Doktor regarding the pustulence in his necrotic shitleg.

There seems to be, I am afraid to report, no major developments therefrom as far as a nice dirt nap for Mr. S.T.M.F.L.C.B.

Since I personally am never farther away than one Fox News crawl to just borrowing my neighbor's scoped .22 and just driving down there and offing this evil cocksucking piece of shit we will give him a Condition Orange today.

Let's hope his leg rots off and that he eats it and dies soon. I don't neccesarily want his slime on my hands.

Furthermore, let us all collectively pray that Mrs. Edward's cancer metastasizes right out of her undeserving bones and settles right in his fucking nutsack and makes a beeline for his brain.

Where it fucking belongs.

Prayer works! Let's call it a Faith-Based Initiative!

Here we see the courageous and selfless Mrs. Edwards shooting cancer vibes out of her finger in the direction of the White House. Huzzah!

One Of My Greatest Struggles

2007-03-22T16:00:00.000-04:00

Republican Shit Head Of The Day Inhofe
Despite my greatest efforts to be a reasoned and insightful guy I am daily pushed further down the path towards the simple belief that conservatives are by and large bad people and liberals are generally better.

It just seems like poor conservatives are stupid and rich ones are patently unable to do anything but lie and make other people's lives worse to their own enrichment.

The lot of them seem to exist for not much reason that I can ascertain. In 1999 I'd just avoid detailed conversations with them. In this day and age I have to remind myself that everything exists in degrees and to come across a more classic variety of conservative is an almost nostalgic experience. These guys I could hang with. Certainly not to th' polling place but far enough to break bread, you know?

What we've suffered from in this country since 2001 is sort of a cult of non-personality. I mean, our leaders seem like such a cabal of pudgy, bland, beset-with-the-complaints-of-late-old-age corporateers that it's almost impossible to conceive that they're as flat-out evil and repugnant and stupid as they are.

I'm really tired of watching them destroy families and get people killed by the hundreds of thousands. Also, I'm tired of being considered a coward because I have a problem with sending the cherished children of complete strangers off to die for nothing. Would giving that the thumbs-up constitute bravery? Explain.

Also, explain why we should be suspicious about a regime that would consider using tax revenues for providing social benefits to poor Americans and not be suspicious of a regime that considers it a higher good to use the public moneys to kill brown folk by the hundreds of thousands. I'm fucking waiting. The hypocrisy and evil fuckin' rebounds on itself until it's like you're playing raquetball with a big steel pellet in a 4X4 rubber room.

I'm looking forward to the next several months. At best it will do for modern conservatism and neoconservatism and the implied credo of Money-Over-Everything what the collapse of the Soviet Union did for communism. Maybe it'll just be something we had to go through for the greater good.

And let's remember- LET'S REMEMBER WITH GREAT PREJUDICE that this whole shitwave rolled in on a tide of "Moral Valyooz".

It's one of my greatest struggles. And it comes at a time of great upheaval and crisis for me. And I sort of don't fucking appreciate that. This is th' time when I'm supposed to be getting my ducks in a row for th' back forty and instead I'm struttin' and screechin' from one booze-soaked juke joint to another because the THOUGHT OF PARTICIPATING IN THE WHOLE THING makes me want to eat some delicious glass. I can't picture being th' fuck in it, man. I know, I KNOW I'll pay but maybe there's a way without being IN IT. IN IT.

another excellent poetry tribute: e.e. cummings (By Robert Lightfoot)

2007-03-20T21:13:00.000-04:00

pleasedon'ttellyourparents
and don't show them the shiny

silver dollars

Bobby Lightfoot's Socratic Method of Fuckin' Reasoning Week: Tuesday

2007-03-19T15:44:00.000-04:00

Let us consider that you are a person who, in our free and open society, makes the legal and reasonable choice to keep their feces in a large jar under their bed. Let us henceforth surmise that in times of stress you find relaxation and release in removing said feces from the jar and rubbing it upon your face and about your person.

Let us for an instant consider that while rubbing the feces that you have removed from the jar upon your face and person you are seized with a sudden desire to stand on a stool and back up against a large bronze hook on the wall, kick the stool out and hang yourself rectally from the hook.

Strictly, strictly for the purposes of this academic exercise let us for a moment consider that while you hang rectally from the bronze (in this instance) hook covered in feces everyone else in the room decides to play Stratego.

A William Carlos Williams Tribute By Robert Lightfoot

2007-03-19T15:10:00.000-04:00

I am sorry that I ate the pudding and blamed it on the child
I am sorry that I taught the little dog to attack the cat with a silent command
I'm sorry that I watched "Faces Of Death" with the baby
I am sorry that I masturbated on the kitchen counter and forgot to clean it up
And I'm sorry I wiped my crank on the curtains
In the foyer

Bobby Lightfoot's Socratic Method of Fuckin' Reasoning Week: Monday

2007-03-19T14:48:00.000-04:00

Let's consider for a moment that you are a rich, wrinkled fuck. Let's consider that you have amassed a wealth beyond wealth, a wealth that could fund the building of a fucking planet. Let's consider for the briefest of instants that you totter hither and yon turning your sick fuckin' dollar fifty into a dollar fifty two at a rate of a million times a second.

Let's consider for a moment that you smoke pole. Nay, let us further conjecture that you are to smoking pole what Russell was to mathematics, what JSB was to music. And, if I might be allowed the development and conclusion of my conceit, let us further consider that you smoke pole by the fucking supertanker load. You are like a one man fuckin' pole export boom. Fortunes rise and fall based on the fecundity of your daily bouts of smoking pole; lands and cities flourish or are abandoned and levelled and left to th' sere 'n' churning desert windzzz.

Let us, in conclusion, consider that your polesmoking futures are bought and sold and reported on th' Pole Industrial fuckin' Average. The only thing you do more than smoke pole in biblical proportions is turn your sick dollar fifty into a dollar fifty two at a rate of a million times a second!

Would there not be an implicit assumption that it would be appropriate to refer to you as a sick, polesmoking billionaire? To perhaps utter the phrase "human liver stain polesmoking evil rich sick old bag of shit" if ever called upon to briefly encapsulate who you are?

Would it not be apt to briefly consider this?

Republican Politician Name Generators

2007-03-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

Yeah, there's a couple three different ones. First one is simple- for the first name just use some slang word for "penis" (I hesitate, unlike many amongst us, to refer to it as the "male penis". I'm not being payed by th' word here).

Anyway! That's a mouthful! Heh!

Last name: Just add a branch of military service and a nonsense syllable! It's easier'n fuck!

-Dick Armyblerch

-Cock Marinefloont

-Prick Navyblunt

-Prong Forceburton

Try it! Trade 'em with you friends! Scare your mom!

Here's System Number Two, fumapolios:

For th' first name you just come up with a garment and for th' last name you use a computer part:

-Mitt Rom(ney)

-Sock Motherboard

-Brief Networkcard

-Glove RAMmery. Glove Rammery- guy's all OVER deregumalation.

-Pants Hardrive.

Finally, my dears we have the "first name- gross little slimy animal, second name physical malady" approach. Check 'er:

-Leech Exzema

-Worm Sciatica

-Shrimp Klostomie

Woah! That's mildly amusing. See, I haven't lost my edge. I've just gone back to music for a while. Anybody wants to pay me for writing offensive shit I'm all over it.

'Til then, let's see if you can come up with SOME MORE!

Woah! Th' Lost Prophecies Of Nostradamus #1!

2007-03-13T22:14:00.000-04:00

Two hundred times ten from the Birth of the Son Of Man
From the West will come The Idiot Son
But he will actually come from the East
And just act like he came from th' West.

From a mother who looks like the label
Of The Oats Of Quaker
With a beautiful mind
Shall The Idiot Son issue
In th' West. I mean East.

Rich beyond riches from the Black Blood Of The Moor
And afflicted in the mouth and mind
The Idiot Son raineth wrath down upon the four corners of the earth
Until grape and grain shall at length
Cause him to topple
In the shower.

Bobby Lightfoot's Dick Cheney Death Watch 3.6.07

2007-03-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

Oh, my friends! Th' Dick Cheney Death Watch hits an Orange Alert today as a chunk of cheezeburger macaroni th' size of a pomegranite is located in the stinking, green, necrotic flesh of his gross, wrinkled thigh.

A great day for freedom-loving people everywhere!

Onward to Red, Red, Red!!!

Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

2007-03-06T22:10:00.000-05:00

AAAAASSHOLE!!!

Ha ha ha ha ha.

"Th' arc of the moral universe is long but it leans towards justice"

-MLK (The "th'" is actually mine, don't you know). Oh, I'm giddy on this great day. In spite of many, many personal setbacks.

Take a long look at the limburger caste of this fuck's arrogant, hateful face.

Ah, tonight I dance. Tonight I am Madame Defarge with a bouncing, veiny and triumphant boner. I polevault into the future and I DON'T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

Let us, in the moonlight, roll out th' Dough Of Tomorrow with The Rolling Pin Priapus Of Victory. Scooter has gone 4 for 5. Scooter has gone 4 for 5!

Oh, that's what we get for being a big CHODE. Let it be a lesson. Fraternite! Agilite! Frotagenite!

Onwards to th' Bastille! Through the window with a knife in your mouth for you! Evremonde must die this night!

And this, this for myself: what kind of a man waxes Dickensian and finds use for th' word "chode" in one short post??

Oh, I'm a giddy berolling-pinned Defarge tonight! Feel young again!! This Is Tomorrow calling, polesmokers. Who's going to pick up??????????????? You gonna pick up?

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2007-03-06T17:07:00.000-05:00

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Searches That Brought People Here 3.5.07

2007-03-05T19:30:00.000-05:00

1. "Biography Of Mahat Magandi" (sic)

2. "Born To Motherfucking Run Or Not"

3. "Yo Lesbain"

4. "fucking mature motherly ladies" (hubba hubba)

5. "the reason Jellyfish broke up" (at least this one makes sense- my music is even more meta than theirs and even less people listen to it).

6. "dog grunts when I hug her" (hot!)

7. "Tito Corleone"- hey Tony! wassup! See how I always compliment your playing?

And of course my two perennial favorites: "Anus Of A Sea Urchin" and "Mel Schacher".

A Couple Of Little Things To Get You Through Another Polesmoking Monday.

2007-03-05T01:54:00.000-05:00

1. The odds are really, really good that you'll wake up one morning to the breaking news of Dick Cheney's demise.

2. There are still people out there that plug in guitars and with a minimum of fuss blaze out shit like this:

"Bad Boy"

being a honking, adrenalized version of the Larry Williams classic performed by Lightfoot in '05- Dave Barrett, Bobby Lightfoot, Henry Slater.

See? You can fucking make it.

Ripass Fuckin' Stink

2007-02-26T23:53:00.001-05:00

Yeh, know I posted this a couple of months back but I just cued it up a time or two and it blew the ol' hair back pretty good.

This is th' project I've been doing with Joe Cifarelli, "Gypsies Watching TV"(??), where he brings in songs, I produce 'em and sing 'em, and he does bitchass guitar overdubs.

We've been working on a couple of new ones, a slow-burner minor blues called "Lonely 'Round Here" and a "Miserlou"-ish rocker called "Arabella". Meanwhile he's been putting them on garbageband where they are doing a brisk business and winning all th' awards.

"Delta Blues" just rips my shit and I hope it does yours as well or else I look th' tosser. It's just really smelly and earthy and I sing the ripass shit out of it and Joe scribbles motherfuckin' magic on it. The acid slide-over-the-pickups stunt guitar shit is actually me, believe it or not, but he's doing all the Mayall on it. Speaking of believe-it-or-not, I actually played this drum track too which shocks me with its decentness.

Time will tell on the Johnson samples. I integrated them in a way that they could be pulled without hurting the song if they end up being too gross.

Don't read th' retarded reviews.

No Need To Talk It Out, We Know What It's All About

2007-02-26T01:03:00.000-05:00

Yeah, Paul Williams wrote this along with Roger Nichols back in 1971 but it was th' Carpenter siblings who launched it into the stratosphere of Eternal Pop Greatness.

And it is I who croaketh it herewith through the phlegm of a nasty but gradually abating February illness. I could have waited a few days but it's not like th' song is called "Rainy Days And Thursdays", you know?

Get out your Brady Bunch lunchboxes and have another bowl of Quisp- it's time for

"Rainy Days And Mondays"

The Lead Bicycle

2007-02-23T16:12:00.000-05:00

Noooo, my friends. I'm not talking about the lead bicycle, th' one out in front. This is the bicycle that's made of lead. This is The Lead Bicycle.

I coined this term in about '99 or thereabouts when I was in my early '30's and starting to end-run my ugly lunge for rock success. God must that have been ugly. It's always ugly. I'm glad I had the sense to realize it was going to become unsightly.

You have no idea how many ex-colleagues of mine are still out there. Jesus Christ. Still trying to get that girl to go to the prom with them, you know?

It's not like it's 1979 or even 1985 or even 1992. Nowadays celebrities are fuckin' assholes! Jesus, I don't know if it's a drag or a relief, you know? Dude, mass entertainment is the enemy now. Look around. Mass entertainment is the fucking Wermacht of th' Oughts, man.

Anyway, The Lead Bicycle is the pursuit that you take on with the best intentions and a lot of energy and positive thoughts. And it's sort of shiny and you start pushing it up th' hill and there's nothing to it. Maybe it's a dream. Maybe it's a love.

And then a person or people start showing up and they start going up the hill with you. And one or two of 'em even give The Lead Bicycle a li'l push, you know? Not much of one, but enough so that you know they want to be with The Lead Bicycle when it gets to the summit. They want to be a part of it.

But somewhere up the hill that fucker starts getting heavy, man. And no one really leans in and really helps you out with it. I mean, they want to see the thing go up the hill but it's your Lead Bicycle, you know?

And every time you let go of The Lead Bicycle it starts rolling backwards immediately. It doesn't have the capacity to move an inch on its own, man. And it gets heavier and heavier and it starts to hurt, you know? And you start to slip backwards and lose ground. You push and push and then you even feel something give in your chest and then your back's fucked up to where it's hard to even sit comfortably. Save something. It's not the last hill, man.

Let go of The Lead Bicycle, man. I'm telling you. There's nothing wrong with pushing a bicycle up a hill, man. When people take turns and the bicycle isn't made of lead? And it'll coast a little? Hey, bicycles don't get to the fucking top on their own.

Let go of your Lead Bicycle. I think it even wants you to, man. Think of how good it'll feel to watch that fuckin' little polesmoker smash to bits at the bottom. Sweet. Wake up from it like it's a dream. Tell yourself: I'm going to read a good book under a tree. I'm going to swim at night in a pond with her this summer. And our tongues will dance and then she'll take me in her hand and oh I'll be like a fucking steel beam and then I'll be inside, inside, inside and that is one easy, easy bicycle to push.

Don't hurt yourself, man. Make it easy. Make it easy on yourself.

"Matinee"- Song O' The Day at Garbageband.

2007-02-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

Let's all hold hands .

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U2 And Injustice

2007-02-21T16:47:00.000-05:00

Uneasy bedfellows!

In this photo Bono of U2 prepares to bite off the foot of fuckin' Somoza!

Larry Mullen Jr. sucks th' leukemia out of his 5,oooth orphan.

Adam Clayton accepts th' Nobel Bass Prize in '05!

Adam donated his liver to a poor Ethiopian child. AND LIVED. How do you reckon???

Why's Th' Edge always wear a hat? SO YOU CAN'T SEE THE COMMUNICATION DEVICE THAT LEADS STRAIGHT TO BABY JESUS!!!!

Th' Soulfinger Diaries, or, Clearly The Veil I'm Using In My Thinly-Veiled Contempt For Humanity Needs To Be Upgraded To A Slightly Thicker Veil

2007-02-20T16:49:00.000-05:00

2.25.07:

Insane Drunk Female In Front Row: BLEAAAGGGHGHH BLEAHGGGG

Bobby Lightfoot: Did you forget your anti-psychotic medication?

Audience: Ha ha ha.

IDFIFR: FLEEEUUUUURRRRD! BLLEEEAEOORORRROBUBBBUBBUB

BL: Is that white van with th' flashing lights in the parking lot for you?

Audience: Haaa haa haaa ha.

IDFIFR: Fuuuuckkkkk yyyyyooeeeeewwwww

BL: I don't come to your job and slobber and scream at you while you make license plates.

Audience: HAA HAA HA.

IDFIFR: III'MMMM GOONNNGGA KICK YERRR ASSSHHHHHHHOTOFOFHKLJGH FSDKJH

BL: Yeah, I don't come to your job and cackle and blow snot on you while you taste-test urine.

Audience: OOOOhhhhhhh.....

2.24.07:

Wacky Chick That's Been Giving Me The Hairy Eyeball Over Her Date's Shoulder All Night: So, are you married?

Bobby Lightfoot: Yes, I actually have three wives and they're all here tonight.

WCTBGMTHEOHDSAL: Don't you think I still have a nice body?

BL: I can't really compare because I didn't know you when you were 78.

WC: Do you love Christ?

BL: I think she's a filthy rat fucker.

2.23.07:

Jazz Aristocracy (on trombone): BLLLLL BLLL BLLAASAAAPPP

Ace McClintock (on upright bass): BLLLLOOOONT. BLOOBBOOOBBOOO

Bobby Lightfoot: Bleagh. How unspeakable.

JA: Man, when I used to play with Charles Mingus we used to do this. He called it "Arguing With The Wife"....he'd go blertttt treelerrrrrnt and I'd go bllaappsplaaapp...

BL: I bet even that sounded bad.

Th' Best Of Lightfoot: Master Cartoonist

2007-02-17T13:24:00.000-05:00

Look, man- I got a big run of Soulfinger shows going, O.K.? I don't have time to sit here and putz around with my existential dread and my coffees. My many, many coffees. Man, I have to drive. Drive and sing and play th' Fender Rhodes. Night after cold, lonely, Cuervo Gold-soaked night, baby. Because that's how it is. Vermont, CT, CT, VT, MA.

But man, I can't look at that deep-fried chicken head anymore. You?

Hey- let's revisit my cartoon genius, shall we? It's about time for a greatest hits package. Man, are you in for a polesmokin' treat. It's all the best! All the best of Lightfoot's Recaptioned New Yorker Cartoons! Man did I have some fun back in '05 with this shit. Diggez vous.

This is actually sort of what it's like.

To Know Thyself...

Yeah, you say that now.

Poor bastard's in for it now.

A favorite.

Totally a favorite.

The Best One. I experimented with "it was like getting thrown down a hallway!" but I couldn't make it scan.

I did a series where I showed my brilliant Process by having this one up with three different captions before arriving at this urbane and tasteful final draft.

Literary references!

Everything is relative, this seems to imply.

Yeahhh....kind of coasting here.

Heh.

Um, uh. Yeah.

Does this work? Sure it does. Works real good.

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Who LikE McNiggits?

2007-02-15T17:05:00.001-05:00

Everyones like McNiggits! ff.

I like th' McNiggits almsot as much as FROOT.

Best thing of all, malchickies?

YOu guessed it- FROOT MCNIGGITS.

Here's how to enjoy your McNiggits more deeply:

-dipping sauce choices are varied and wide. Try going 5W 30 during summer months.

-Only eat crucnchy outside. The inner chiquenen flesh is so bad for you and full of corbopornohydrates.

-if you get a head (see illustrations) eat head but don't look in eyes. Don't try arranging hair with th' "comb". See, she's just a expression!

-MCniggits also good with cinammon and salt mixture.

-try rubbing McCNiggit on other people. So many choices!! So much flavor.

-For sexual play there are few snax as erotic as McNiggits! Try the "McNiggit Love Cannon" move with someone you used to love and wish would go away! They will! Promise.

-And remember! Chewing wears out your theeth.

-ALWAYS KEEP THREE OR FOUR MCNIGGITS IN GLOVE COMPoRTMENT IF YOU PULLED OVER THEY MAKE EXCELLENT BRIBERIES. iF officeer says "are you bribbing me" you just say, "no I was hoping you might let me have some dipping sauce or let me rub McNiggit on your sac."

HOw will that look in th' courts? Try proving THAT!

Bobby Lightfooot's McNiggit Recipes:

1. Batterfried McNiggits!!

-cover McNiggits in batter and deep-fry.

2. Toasted McNiggits

-shove niggit in toaster and take 9 Volt battery from all smoke alarms.

4. McNiggits Fondue

fill mouth w/ McNiggits. Jump in vat in melted cheese. AFter 3 min. get out and take McNiggits out and eat. Remember! Never th' inside part!

And watch for seeds.

3. Smoked McNiggits

-always change water first!

1936: "Where Or When" by Rodgers and Hart From Th' Musical "Babes In Arms".

2007-02-13T23:04:00.000-05:00

And thus we begin our exhumation of dog-eared and much-loved standards from the great days of The American Song.

"Where Or When" is just plain mysterious. Harmelodically it takes the usual 1930's tack, even apeing Irving Berlin with its black-key F# major pentatonicism. Lyrically we're on a different train altogether. The impressionistic lyric just barely paints a picture of a moment of profound romanticism, an encounter caught behind a gently swaying gauze of time. When one thinks of its year of creation from a historical perspective, "Where Or When" takes on a laden poignancy that is particularly apparent in the climax of the refrain with its classical contrary motion and gentle Romantic dominant resolution ("...and laughed before, and loved before...").

I think this is a song that should be almost whispered and brought to a forte only on that exact Eb7/G resolve. The narrative is so fantastically intimate and the melody so complete that to understate it is to let it speak. I think one or two lines should be chosen and almost spoken in a sprechtgesang style that recalls the whole Brecht/Weill thing and rubs the European Classicism in just a little.

I think the instrumental thing in the middle should be short and sweet and of near-Baroque precision and cleverness. It should be in Stride style which on the Rhodes piano will translate into a music box vibe.

Also, the last time it hits the "...when..." after the refrain it clearly needs to modulate to a G major on a major 9nth chord and then fall a half-step to the tonic for the finale. Wow, would that kick ass.

This is not to say that I've done a particularly thought-out rendition here. I'm thinking of this stuff as I listen to the first run-through. I'm kind of sorting out the melody and the phrasing and chording minimally (not that that's a bad thing). Some of the rises snuck up on me and it's late so I pulled punches on the high notes rather than wake up the neighborhood. I like the key, though. I wouldn't touch the key. I'd like to have a lot of songs in the set that have this sort of lean-in-to-hear-it quality. It's great when my voice is shot like it is now. Fuck it- my voice is always shot. Shrieking for shekels all the time when I ought to be crooning.

"Where Or When"- a fantastic song from th' mid-30's by Rodgers and Hart.

Next up: some Edith Piaf and my own '30's musical number "For One Another". I'd also like to get my song "Paul McCartney" back under my fingertips but this will be a nightmare since the piano on the original recording was transposed from C to G. Oh, well. If I can't do "Paul McCartney" there's no point to the whole damned enterprise.

So What I'm Doing Now

2007-02-13T01:17:00.000-05:00

Is trying to get my head around the concept of entertaining without a net. With a piano, two hands and one asshole. And that means a lot of sitting and damn playing. And singing.

One searches for what's deep, deep inside the song and tries to mine it when it's the song that's going to carry the thing. Just the song and the performance; the narrative, I guess.

So I'm digging deep, deep into the grooves of the numbers for the thing that comes before worrying about execution: meaning. Meaning and humanity. If it ain't there, man- it goes out the window, doesn't it? Who wants to go digging into a song and find nothing? If that's th' outcome I might as well be Jerstin Termberlake, right?

Don't have much voice right now after some odd days of belting for pennies but let's see what happens when I dust off one of my bits and give it a rip. Rhodes has got a little rattle on B under middle C and I've got a few bad spots in m'range but that's not what matters at this stage. And it better not 'cause this ain't perfection.

But it's live, you know? It's the test, man. I'll throw more of these up as I struggle with them and see how they weather and what they need in order to weather.

Somewhere down th' road a few I might just have me a show.

"Matinee"

Cranberry Sauce

2007-02-12T16:33:00.000-05:00

Dude it's Evil Beatles. YES.

"They're COMPLETELY ANTI-CHRIST. I mean, I am anti-Christ as well, but they're so anti-Christ they shock me which isn't an easy thing."

Derek Taylor, Press Officer for the Beatles

Jesus, Take Th' Wheel

2007-02-11T23:19:00.000-05:00

Heyyyy...bet them Grammys were really great.

Why can't they fly a plane into that shit.

That dreamy Justin Timberlake. He's like a green-eyed Al Green.

What a tedious, talentless, self-important little lottery-winner asshole.

Hope that Fergie takes home some gold! She's so talented.

Why does it have to be so wrong to want to beat the shit out of a woman?

I wish I'd been talented enough to ever get a Grammy nomination. Then I'd feel less awful about taking this next lungful of air.

Yeah- talented at smoking pole. I hope I'm dead and in the ground before this fucking humiliation happens again. I hope I'm rottener than a happy meal bricked into a fucking wall in 1977.

Woah! John Legend and John Mayer and that other chick! It's so good.

I'm going to start driving more so maybe global warming will wipe us out sooner. I promise. It's my Grammy Resolution! What's yours!

Gosh, I love music. Music brings joy to my life. All these talented artists!

I've heard there's an operation where they take out one of your vertebra and they pull your teeth and it lets you GUM YOUR OWN ASSHOLE.

Jayzis take th' wheel! WWoooooo!

She's A Tear That Hangs Inside My Soul Forever

2007-02-09T15:59:00.000-05:00

I walked to my window in the grey gloaming and my eyes were drawn to the rivulets of rain as they meandered slowly downward. Everything lost...everything gone. Anna Nicole.

The inexorable tug of time wearies my every sinew. The days stretch like a million sentences of death and I strain to bear even the very first. Anna Nicole.

I remember a time when we were young and ferocious, Anna Nicole and I, two feral lovers pitted against a hostile world. I try to stem the flow of brutal, stinging memories. The long nights at Joe's Bar in Prague, those endless, paragorical, velvet summer reveries. And I remember even to the day we met, when I offered her my seat on the Red Line in Rue de France, intoxicated by her subtle ballet, her studied little-girl aloofness.

Yes, giants walked in those days. Giants ate the world in great gulps of red and white and green. Swarming human pestilences advanced across the globe in arcing, malevolent clouds and we stood the best we could, all of us. We stood and gave as good as we got and it was a good time and a dangerous time to be alive but we had our love. And I had my Anna Nicole. Many of us have fallen and I raise my goblin, bejeweled and sweating, to all of them, God knows. All of them.

But I, I shall never sleep again. I shall never laugh again. And were I to retrace our steps in my memory, through the tiny streets of Belhorizonte or across the town square in Leipzig where Fiodor took that rain of bullets for us in '54, surely I will weep and never stop. Berlin, London, La Plata, Reykjavik. Palos Verdes. Tegucigalpa. Istanbul. So many places I can never again
see lest the grief of losing Anna Nicole should overcome me and kill me as sure as any slow, fatal consumption.

Buddy Attacks!

2007-02-04T22:10:00.000-05:00

Yeah I had to pick something up at Gary Rome Hyundai in Holyoke a couple of days ago. This is one of those dealerships where they have th' cute mascot dog in all the ads. In this case it's an adorable, feisty li'l terrier named Buddy.

Buddy! He's pretty much famous! I never actually saw him there before and thought that maybe it was all a lie, a fabrication to lure th' unsuspecting lover of feists to test drive some shitebox.

But no- there he was, in the showroom window. Buddy! I'm all like I'm going to meet Buddy! He was looking out the window at me and wagging his famous little tail!

So into the showroom I go with my five quarts of fluid! To meet Buddy! Everybody knows how much I like dogs!

Goddamn if I didn't barely have time to put down my five quarts before that little fuck snarls and shows teeth! And I'm thinking it can't be! Not Buddy! Buddy can't be a prick! And I collect my stuff and start to take my leave when the little cock leaps on me and sinks his fucking teeth into my coat! Snarling! Snarling and generally losing his shit!

And the salespeople all come running and I'm spinning 'round trying to get the little bastard to release his deathgrip and laughing my ass off! And when at length Buddy relinquishes my coat he keeps a not-insignificant part as a souvenir. I couldn't believe it! And of course they're all like are you O.K. please don't sue us and what they don't realize is that I'm Bobby Lightfoot and their cruddy lucre is like so much bloodmoney to me. Fishwrap. Kindling.

What a dick that dog turned out to be. It was awesome.

Things To Do Besides Watching Television

2007-02-03T14:24:00.000-05:00

1. Lie down and have someone pour a large pitcher of liquid shit into your mouth.

2. Develop total dependency on heroin. Then you can have Social Interaction with th' Pusherman and th' pigs.

3. See "1".

4. Go knife some Sihks to protect us from terrorism.

5. Start your own reality show: "Life". Film it with your mind's eye.

6. See "1".

7. Abuse an animal.

8. See if you can fuck yourself. Hey, it could happen!

9. Go drinking and driving.

10. Throw yourself in front of a bus.

11. Filet and pan-fry your frontal lobes.

Speaking Of Renal Function

2007-01-31T19:38:00.000-05:00

The Malarians were opening for The Lyres many, many years ago at Pearl Street Basement in Northampton. Must've been '88.

Fuckin' guitarist got ripped. Ripped. Guy was more pissed than Jeff Connolly was that Halloween at TT The Bears in Cambridge when he was wearing this cat mask and actually drooling he was so fuckin' bombed.

This would have been Danny McCormack. Played a Lyre-shaped Danelectro and did the timed-to-the-drums tremolo thing that was always arresting.

Towards th' end of their set McCormack stumbles over to the side of the stage, whips out his flesh lyre and takes a piss right off the stage.

After the show the fuckhead club manager is of course livid and threatens to withhold the McCormack's pay.

Drummer Johnny Bernardo, later of The Upper Crust, steps up and offers to mop it up if he can have McCormack's pay.

And that, my friends, is just a hint of th' Glamour.

2007-01-30T22:20:00.000-05:00

You guys read that "Rabbit At Rest" by Updike?

There's a scene where Rabbit hooks up with this old lady on a cruise and they go back to his room but they're both so old that they've done everything so many times so they get in the bathtub and piss on each other.

I feel like that about music sometimes.

Let's Measure Pasta

2007-01-29T15:47:00.000-05:00

Serves 1-4

Serves 18

Serves 252

Serves 56,564,343

Serves 878

Serves 343,549,023,567,875

Serves 6,544,390

Serves 1

Serves 567,454,833,368,343,650,301,556,898

Serves .00000004

b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b

DO YOU LIKE FROOT

2007-01-23T17:08:00.000-05:00

Man, I was drivin' th' other day and enjoying seven or eight delicious tangerines! Phuck are those good! And you can eat all you want! Unlike all that other stuff that turns your guts into wretched, bilious slime. Turns you into a little fuckin' gasbag consoomer. Taking up room and breathing valuable air.

And i was thinkin' about how I've had a life of fruit-eating and I was thinking of the many rituals involved. Y'know, everybody eats froots in their own specific way. Those tangemarines? With me? It's- peel 'em off circularly in one piece. Section into halves so you can pull th' white stringy shit outta the middle. Out the window with that biodegrable white crap! Not th' peel, though. It has STPs on it. Then, section by section we pop 'em in and break th' skin with th' lower front teeth. Fuck, fuck, fuck are tangerines GOOD.

And you can eat all you want! What else is there like that?

how do you eat tangerines!

It's so fucking fascinating- it's like orthinology. All th' ways of eating those froots.

Here's how I eat some other froots:

GRAPES:

Grapes are great! I like to string 'em onto a string like a necklace and then I eat them in reverse, if you get m'meaning. woah! And then pop 'em out one by one! Woo-ha. So chilly and loving.

APPLES! Oh, ho ho! How do you eat apples? Man, what I do is cut a hole in th' side and piss into it just a little.

And let it cure. Maybe I'll have it then! Maybe the plug goes back in and it goes back in th' fruitbowl!

Ghandi got NOTHING on that shit. And don't fucking judge me, pelon. Tell me you've never pissed in a apple and ate it. Shit knocks out heartburn like that.

Woah! What's the next bust in th' froot eating pantheom, damas y caballentes?

MANGOES! A-WAP-BAP-A-LOO-BOP, man.

Hey, enjoy the little fuckers. You know? You know? We gave India nukes and Tallulah Bankhead in exchange for 'em. And our future.

Whatcha do with your mangoes? Any tips?

Here's what I do: I put one under each armpit and do a three-mile run. Then I rub them up and down my ass-crack and over my tanned, athletic perineum and THEN ONLY THEN do I section them with a rusty knife and shove them in my piehole. Ohh, they're heathly that way. Sometimes the smaller ones you can actually get a way enough up your nose for a little brining. Li'l of the ol' brining.

TOP that SHIT.

And yes, what is it that we do with the Humble Plantain, good sirs? Do we peel it and halve it and toast it and serve it with th' butter of the Humble Peanut? No, sirs. We do not. Do we place it fallaciouisly perchance at the creamy and cherry-festooned summit of a percipitious ice cream mountain? No, indeed. No, no, no. Not in these quarters, sirrah.

An insidgion is made in th' stem of the banaina and a steel ring passed through, attached to a small string that has been soaked in glue and rolled in crushed glass.

Banaina is then swallowed whole with the string held at th' mouth and allowed to pass through the upper descriptive system. At the juncture of the Colon to the upper archipelago an incision is made in th' mid-abdomen that permits the babana to be drawn through and out of the chesty clavity. Bleeding should be quickly staunced with burning poker or solution of lye and styptic. Removing the babnaina so that only the string remains, this is then moved back and forth using the withdrawn string and the string issuing from the mouth in a flossing motion.

Froots! EVeryone loves froot. D-DO YOU L-L-LIKE F-FROOT.

Man, that's some funny shit. I deserve happiness. Ha ha ha.

The engineer was a cat named Sean and later on he got real gone

2007-01-21T22:46:00.001-05:00

Yeah, everybody's got their story of this one and everyone's got their cut. This is The Malarian's final album the way I heard it. The working title of this is '88 was "Finished In This Town" and while Mal Thursday went on to cut a fuckin' BLISTERING live album with another lineup that came out under that title, this is just th' way I like to remember it.

There's a lot more really, really solid material from these sessions but this right here is the fuckin' heat. I've leaned on our original stuff and a couple of raging covers i.e. th' Turtles' majestic "A Walk In The Sun" and "Do Like Me" by long-lost garage geniuses Nobody's Children.

The stories behind the sessions and the band are myriad and alternately funny, poignant, tragic, sordid and action-packed the way they fucking SHOULD BE. They're also the precious personal memories of a lot of people I'm still close to and who are almost to a man still above ground and kicking ass in various ways.

In other words, I'll leave th' mythologizing for someone else. These are the songs. This is The Malarian's unreleased 1988 epic, Finished In This Town.

Th' password is "froist".

I'm going to spin it once and just sort of reminisce in real-time to the tracks and with any luck a flavor of the sessions, the times and the circumstances will emerge.

1. "Taking Over": curtain rises on an early afternoon in th' spring of 1988. Fort Apache Studios in glamorous Roxbury, Boston, MA. Johnny Tomorrow clears the air with a big-ass power chord and Lime Ricky Keith Moons us into this epic. Wow, some tones going on here. All this stuff was helmed by Sean Slade and Treat Her Right harp player Jim Fitting. We were recording on 16-track analog, 8 tracks at a time. So we could use the tape twice. Yeah.

The bridges on this are insane. Love bassist Slater Awn's blond semi-hollow Fender Coronado. Boy, what a great, funny song this is.

2. "A Taste Of Five": This one is a good introduction to the Malarian love of stories. This story is about a guy in a band getting called up for Vietnam. It was based on a story we'd heard of a band that all got drafted in '66 and at their final gig they all freaked out and pissed on their instruments and stuff.

"A Taste Of Five" is some good-old depression-era slang for "a slap in the face". When I wrote this song (Mal wrote all the verses) I liked the idea of "five". Five fingers on a hand, five members in the band and there's a section in 5/4 at the end. Which is where I make my skilled and breathtaking debut on fake vibes.

These first two songs use the classic Malarian lineup- Mal Thursday up front, me on Farfisa, Johnny Tomorrow on guitar, Slater Awn on bass and Lime Ricky on th' kit. Onstage and in the studio we often assumed "formation B" wherein I played rhythm guitar and Mal played organ. This was usually the case when someone other than Mal was singing the song.

As in the third track- The Turtles '66 classic

3. "A Walk In The Sun": Quite a guitar tapestry here. See, at Apache they'd bought all the stage gear from the "Beatlemania" tour that was leaving the country so they'd ended up with all this great mid sixties gear. On this track I played a Gretsch Country Gentleman through a Vox AC30 and Johnny plays his Fender XII and who knows what-all else.

This certainly is mournful and majestic. Love the twelve-string bridges.

4. "It's A Crime": Slater steps up to the mic with his classic. Oh, I hear me playing a Squier through a Rat in those breaks. Nasty. This song was great live. What a cool singer- his voice always had this sincere teenage thing. Fuck it, we practically were teenagers. Big harmonies, eh? Sean Slade taught us all about stacking and that.

Oh, there's a solo by Johnny in full Zeppelin mode. Raging. More AC30 jangle by the boatload. And farfisa through the Leslie speaker.

5: "Are You Going To Be There (At The Riot)": Like a cut from an evil Sgt. Pepper, this one. We're back in formation A for this one. Wow, this sounds like The Sex Pistols if they'd come out in 1966. This was culled from some B movie or another called "Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)".

This is less a song than a performance event. I remember striping in all these sound effects off John's four track. This is a Johnny Tomorrow number- you can tell by the angular chord changes and the minor-keyed epicness. "Your mom and dad used to own this town/But now they're down in the gutter gettin' kicked around". Ha ha. "Your little sister just shot a cop".

Love those breaks. The sirens.

6. "She's The One": this was my first sort of "Revolver" influenced Malarian song. I figured it was time to modernize and for me this meant copping from the mid instead of the early 60's. Or something.

It's a pop psychedelic rock 'n' roll carpet ride, this one. Man, were we sucking up a lot from the Dukes Of Stratosphear. I really hear it on "She's The One".

Beautiful, beautiful instrumental break on this one. I brought in acoustic guitars under Johnny's gorgeous doubled solo and I played that last bit through the ubiquitous Rat pedal. It was supposed to be done on a Coral electric sitar but I don't think we had the Coral anymore.

7: "Boom Boom": A bar-rocking nugget from the mysts of tyme. I'm familiar with th' John Lee Hooker version but there are lots of versions.

Jim Fitting drapes this in his virtuoso blues harp. Wow. I'm on Farfisa organ. Very inspired run on this. Live, if I'm not mistaken.

8: "You Shoulda Lied": Another romantic ditty from Johnny Tommorow. Quite a guitar orchestra here.

A lot of these songs (maybe all of them) began with a title that sounded convincingly pimply. I actually had one that never made it in called "Fuck You Girl" that was cool. Also another one called "Outta Luck"- "outta luck, outta luck, outta luck, outta luck little girrrrrl..." Ha.

9. "Paranoid": Heyyy...what about a surf instrumental? This was originally called "Hospital Waste". This was back when all that shit was washin' up.

This certainly has some layers. Dig Johnny's clean solo on the bridge. Crazy shit. That's got to be a Telecaster and it sounds like a Dynacomp is involved.

10. "I'm Mean"- Mal steps back up to th' mic with what I believe is a Lime Ricky number. We have Jim fitting again on harp and what's going on is he's commenting on Johnny Tommorow's rhythm and lead guitar over on the left side. This was an overdub for sure. I remember him perfecting the phrasing and hitting it in passes in the control room.

Jesus, the processing on Mal's voice is awesome. I'm surprised we let ourselves be that hi tech.

Yeah, listen to Jim over on the right play with John's parts. That didn't sound right. You know what I mean.

This one is one of my personal favorite discoveries from the vault. I think all I did on this was go duh-duh-DUH-DUH-duh-duh-DUH-DUH through a fuzz box.

11. "Do Like Me": this was always one of John's signature songs. It's a 60's nugget and he delivers it with a sort of girlish lilt that is really kind of menacing. This is a really great vocal, man. I think the 1988-ness of these recordings come through here a lot- the whole guitar gestalt is totally REM. I do a sort of Peter Buck 12-string non-solo in the middle of this.

Wow, another favorite for me. Ridiculous harmonies.

12. "You Know The Game": we step into pop mode for the Slater Awn closer. This is his finest hour in my opinion. This song was so pop but we all loved it and pictured it as a single. I got to have a lot of fun on this on organ and really arranged the hell out of my part. It was the first time I got hip to the whole Leslie thing and worked in some swells and all that "real" organ stuff on my solo. The idea was to make it sort of baroque with two lines going. Since we knew this would be a huge hit I ceded the second half of my solo to the hit-making harp of Jim Fitting.

Man, nice vocal on this. That guy was a great, natural, unstudied singer.

So that's The Malarian's epic unreleased masterpiece, my friends. I don't know if I'm breaking any unspoken copyright thing or if I'll piss anyone of by posting it so grab it while you can. Thank you and good night.

Gotta Take Care Of Th' Red Lady

2007-01-17T00:16:00.000-05:00

Gotta do it, man. Don't let th' Red Lady spend another night in the car, man. Gotta roll her in. In the hand truck. Down th' hill. In the dark. With the ghosts.

Gotta roll th' Red Lady in. Pop the top. Tighten some screws. Check the escapement. Check th' tines and dampers. Chase down a groundloop.

What am I going to listen to? I'll tell you what I'm going to listen to- I'm going to listen to the sound of the winter woods out back that stretch for an acre along the creek, baby. I'm going to listen to the little part of my wizened brain that broadcasts music and see what it has in store for me. Then probably this interesting new band called ROAD and then I'm thinking English Settlement. It's old but it's fine, fine, fine.

I used to take that music broadcast as a sacred gift and I used to make sure it all made it off the end of my fingertips or out of my mouth. Now I just let it roll out and I keep it to myself for the most part.

Gotta take care of th' Red Lady, man. She was there for me this week in Glastonbury and Hartford and East Hampton and all those others. Danielson. Bristol. Gotta tighten the hardware. Check the screws. Matcksticks and Elmer's for loose holes. Maybe we'll spend all night.

And right after that, I'm going to go upstairs and pull Sal's tail and give her a Halfasnack. I call them that instead of making it clear I'm breaking a normal dog cookie in half so I don't call attention to her size. Tiny little runt. Wallhugging little twerp of a dog.

I got that from a guy at a recording studio once who said there was a "Halfacat" in the parking lot and we couldn't figure out what that was until we realized there was actually a half of a cat because of some unspeakable vehicular mangling. He's like yeah- I told you- a Halfacat.

Red Lady's heavy. At least 160 lb's. If the universe was a kind and pliant place I'd split the difference between th' Red Lady and Sal The Feist and everyone would be happier. And I'd have to buy more Halfasnacks.

Thank You Sir May I Have Another

2007-01-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

Hey, that was fun with th' space rock opera. Glad it was enjoyed and appreciated. That's all a record wants, you know? To be listened to. To have its opinion respected. To get to choose th' position every now and then if you know what I mean.

I, and the record, appreciate very much the interest and the many downloads. Tell your friends! Scare your mom!

TJ always opined that this record would be an underground thing.

TJ also opined that sequencing songs by ascending key would have a psychoacoustic effect on the listener. This is the one time I let him have his way with this ridiculous concept. Nickelback's last record was not sequenced in ascending keys. Nor was Abbey Road. Space Rock Opera was. I leave it to the listener to untangle this profoundly complex notion (which is by no means to imply that exquisite attention was not paid to keys and key motion on Side 2 of Abbey Road; the beautifully stately, steady rhythm of switches between A major and C major is characteristically virtuosic -ed.)

Songs have always been my children. Artists know what I mean. When you leave one horking in a incubator it's never good. An unreleased album is a roomful of preemies and it makes a fella sad.

That said, let's do another! What th' fuck! Let th' children breath!

'kay, we're going back to the beginning of Grunge with this collection. Back to the Halcyon (capital mine) days with the Mr. Sherwood album. "Mr. Sherwood" is a rainy day record if there ever was one. At least it is for me. It always takes me back to that beautiful, waterlogged spring of '92. The grey, rainsoaked streets of beloved little old Northampton live in these grooves as does a ridiculous amount of hope and optimism and faith in the human creature and the human creature's earholes. All that is pretty much gone but I can reexperience it briefly in the dense, ambitious, uncompromising songs from this era and the bittersweet cameraderie of the whole thing.

Illustrated with pics of the same instruments used on th' sessions.

"Mr. Sherwood"

The password is "children".

Wow, what a feat this record was. What a triumph of youthful ambition. Let's paint the picture.

I left neopsych punk road dogs The Malarians in '88 and by '90-'91 I had four-tracked up a pretty vast library of solo stuff. It was interesting stuff. I had sort of combined my love of good, guitar-based early '80's rock (Pretenders, XTC, Police, etc.) with ambitious '60's pop into a pretty irresistible stew. When the first Jellyfish album came out I knew I was on the right track.

I had a lot of labels and publishers calling me back on this material. Island, PolyGram, Capitol, Famous Music, Hit And Run, all these guys. This is back when there used to be record labels that you could talk to if you could work up the moxie. What these people all wanted was to see a shitass good live band. People like Joey Gmerek at Hit And Run (Genesis, Peter Gabriel and Cheap Trick's publisher) would say, "hey, if you can do this live I want to sign it".

I was here in Northampton at this point. Made a few trips to LA and NYC with this stuff and banged on some doors. Looked good, man. Looked good. Got a manager in LA to sign me. In early '91 I had the lineup of Mr. Sherwood together. It was going to be my Beatles- a lean, classic two-guitar bass drums thing with everyone singing. See, that was the hook. We'd have these really impressive, "Pet Sounds" quality four-part harmonies going on over this '60's/new wave hybrid that would be pretty fresh. More wiry than Jellyfish, more chrome polished live than XTC. Counterpoint. A cappella bits. Ambition.

I played fretted and fretless bass and sang lead. Nelson Bragg, the guy who plays percussion for Brian Wilson now was on drums and vocals. New buddy Paul Rocha was on rhythm guitars and vocals and Malarian colleague John Lebhar played lead and sang. We picked 15 songs from my catalog, stuff that would translate on stage with a hell of a lot of work, and got to work in Paul's bedroom in his old house on Gothic Street. Nelson used chopsticks on the kit to keep the neighbors at bay.

We worked, worked, worked. Christ, did we work. We worked for the better part of a year. In the meantime I set up showcases for th' labels and gigs to get us oiled. I cancelled them and we worked some more, realizing we could just get PERFECTER. In the bitter winter of '91-'92 we took a break one afternoon and saw "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time on MTV.

We strongly suspected that we were fucked.

We did all our gigs and showcases and sounded pretty fucking impressive. Everyone took a pass. We weren't remotely Nirvanaesque. Timing is everything, baby. '92 was not the year for the whole Slick thing.

In th' spring of '92 I sold enough belongings and borrowed enough money to record live backing tracks at Longview Farms in MA with the awesome Peter Keppler engineering. I really, really wanted this on tape and I had a feeling people would start defecting soon. We did all the backing tracks in one afternoon at Longview- we were tighter than fuck. We had to be- we didn't have a budget that would accomodate overdubbing and mixing in a world-famous 24 -track studio. Nelson especially was a fuckin' riot. Pete had trouble with him because he played sort of quiet on this stuff and it was hard to separate the drums, but I thought he exhibited unusual sensitivity and championed his approach. We didn't end up with a super-muscular drum sound but it has a definite distinctiveness of approach.

I did some sessions for Keppler with a band he was engineering for Sire- Riverside was their name. Young guys from Pennsylvania who did this sort of dreamy protobritpop. Like male Harriet Wheelers with some Cocteau Twins sprinkled in. This was barter for him to engineer us and to do front-of-house for our NYC showcases.

Both John and Paul (ha) had those great TASCAM eight-track machines. I can't remember the model but at the time they were home-studio heaven. They ran 7" reels of 1/4" tape and were basically oversized portastudios that sounded fuckin' awesome. Nice 10-channel mixer on that thing with two auxes and inserts which are always invaluable. Over the next couple of months or so I ran back and forth between their studios and we recorded all our huge-ass harmony vocals live, often doubling or tripling. Then I tracked John and Paul's various guitar solos, overdubbed some tambourine and percussion and finally all my lead vocals. John did awesome pedal steel on "Don't Cry". Paul also overdubbed acoustic and acoustic twelve-string guitar to lovely effect. His 12-string solo on "Blue All Over" lives on for me.

Not one note of keyboard anywhere. We didn't really do Keyboard back then, aside from the Malarian's Voxes and Farfisas. Everyone was tired of that '80's keyboard thing then and no one was pulling out Wurlitzers or Rhodeses yet.

My drummer pal Dave Barrett has an innate hatred of keyboards. I love it. I understand it to a great extent too. Keyboards are always lame live because people insist on standing at those two-tiered syntho things and making plastic sounds that are awful. Dave hates coats too. Fucking hates them.

Paul had quit by now but kindly let me mix the project at his place, which I did in a few marathon sessions in the summer. It really sounded good. Keppler helped me master to DAT and to hi-speed dbx'ed cassette.

The end result was a beautiful, nuanced, virtuosic rock album that captured Mr. Sherwood in all its pointillistic loveliness.

The whole Northampton musical community hated us and our fucking clever record. What a bunch of tossers. The preferred term for insulting the music was that it was "busy". What a stupid fucking adjective for music. Fucking stupid and backward-looking.

It was devastating to listen to the sheer vitriol that was heaped on our lovely effort but it didn't bug me until the band got in on the action. Fuck, was I unimpressed. Nelson was steadfast, I have to say. That's why I love him so much and why I'm so glad he's fuckin' blown us all away with his awesome career. Look him up on myspace. Nelson Bragg. He's probably onstage at the Greek Theater or Glastonbury as we speak.

John, a consummate song guy and engineer, eventually came around to how good this album was. The mix I'm posting is actually his mastering job, done on one of them new-fangled computers a couple of years ago.

I guess I was about 26 when this thing was finished. It was the first of many experiences of taking 2 years of work and putting it in a drawer. It bugged me a lot but I figured it was one of those things. I still had my management deal. I was still moving to LA and doing it while all the Northampton ladies were off to their authentic open mics.

What a fuckin' album this is. Check it. Chockful of youthful ambition, virtuosic arranging, Beach Boys-caliber harmony and more pathos than you can shake I don't know what all at.

Here's the tracks:

1. "Requiem": Written in '89 as I recovered from a pretty serious two-month bout of mono complicated by hepatitis C. Oh, man I was road-rashed. Road-rashed from The Malarian years and exhausted and sick.

This song rips the riff from The Pretender's "Time The Avenger" pretty good, but takes it to a whole new place. "Requiem" is a pretty good indicator of what is to come: it's chock-full of shit, all the harmonies, all the painstaking arrangement, but always, always rock. All guitars all th' time.

2. "Caroline": yeah, I don't know how this one is ageing with me. It's pretty, it's jangly, it's all that Crenshawish kind of stuff. I'd never write a song like this anymore. I don't have enough time left to just write really-good-on-paper guitar pop songs. But hey, it's pretty. I think the last minute or so is pretty much redundant.

That's Nelson stealing the tastiest scrap at the top of the chorus. I couldn't hit that high note dependably back then.

Jangle, jangle, end.

3. "Blue All Over": Now that's more like it. What a hip, tight little pop song. Very fun live. Of course this was copped from XTC's "Blue Overall". Amazing deduction there, sparky. I'm impressed with the construction and arrangement of this after all these years. God, I wouldn't have the energy for this anymore. Just the sheer eight million run throughs required. I do love how each subsequent chorus packs on more sweet gooey candy harmonies.

This contains Paul's earthy acoustic 12-string solo. One is put in mind of someone just stepping closer to the mic. It has that sort of unstudiedness.

Check the "Ticket To Ride" quote on the end. Yeah, this would have sat perfectly next to "Come As You Are" on the WSUX top ten.

4. "Change In The Weather": Yeah, someone loves the Byrds and XTC, huh? Love this- played loud is best. It's totally inspired by "Senses Working Overtime". Listen to the breaks on the chorus. This song has so many twelve-strings.

Yes, some of us were already freaking out about global warming in '92. "Can't you see the autumn leaves come tumbling/A bit too late?/Can't you see the ocean rising in the bay...?"

Masterful harmonies abound. Boy, John gives us a lovely doubled guitar solo at the end. Kind of busy, though, dude.

5. "Children": The soul of the Mr. Sherwood album. Another treehugger song. I still feel this way, man. I just try to use less gas and buy local instead of writing songs about it. See, I don't believe in rock 'n' roll anymore, unfortunately.

"Children" is one of my best, simplest songs of all time. It's far more radio-friendly than just about anything else. It's really flirting with that 80's U2 thing. Remember how huge REM was back then? They were completely ubiquitous. This is certainly an REM chorus. Nelson's beautiful, stumbling drum fills that usher in the choruses are actionably Bill Berry.

Wow, listen to the end coda. Three Chords And Th' Truth, baby. It's hard to listen to the pre-despair me. John's guitar choir at the end is affecting.

6. "Running In Place": More XTC poisoning here. I like the relentlessness of this and how it echoes the lyrical sentiment which is an XTC hallmark. Listen to the cleverly deployed triangle of Nelson Bragg.

This song was an utter bitch for the guitarists- it's carpal tunnel waiting to happen. Listen to how cool the middle eight is. The original arrangement called for the drums to continually break open into back beat and pull back teasingly. I held my ground on this and I like how it worked on the song.

7. "Time Goes By": Paul used to call this "Tim Goes Bi" which continues to amuse me. This song is just so flat-out packed with ideas that you could get a whole album out of it. I'm not necessarily complimenting it. I really love "Time Goes By" but it may be one of the few songs to which I would concede the "busyness" argument.

It's really sort of charming, though. Ridiculously poppy- the chorus is nice, aside from the fact that the lyric "They call it love- I don't know why" is utterly, utterly, laughably meaningless. And it has that "Please Please Me" end. But with a tricky four-part vocal thing that ascends into a reverb wash.

8. "Why Say Anything": This certainly owes a debt to 80's guitar pop with a healthy dose of Beatles and REM. Paul has this one out-of-tune open B string that keeps singing out on the right side in the verses that always raises the hair on the back of my neck. He's still an awesome kisser.

I really rode Nelson to be "Copelandish" on the chorus of this and he didn't disappoint with the whole syncopated-ride thing. Man, he really keeps rising to the top on this affair, doesn't he? Interesting. I like the almost-comical degree of tightness of construction of this recording. Very satisfying to play live, with those bottomless harmonies. Some of the lyrics, I'm afraid, suffer from a George Harrison Rubber Soul-era level of charming banality.

Does this modulate on the last chorus? Woah. I guess not. My pretty-damn-cool original demo of this did and it was explosive. It's fine, it's fine.

9. "Don't Cry": We close this admittedly dense collection of pop Shakerism with the lush, alien, evocative sobber "Don't Cry". Listen to John's pretty pedal steel and the swells into the chorus. The chorus is fully copped from the "if I fell in love with you..." tag at the end of "If I Fell". Dig it. It's pretty unapologetic.

John plays another one of his patented, beautiful doubled guitar solos in here. My demo had backwards guitar and I remember him going for a "backwards" sound.

Well, that's the Mr. Sherwood album from way back in the analog days. Well, analog for us.

What these records make me think of is how long we've operated without the "go into a big studio and pay a lot of money" blueprint. I've made maybe three records like that in my life and I've made a lot of records. I never even really considered it. A lot of us have experiences early on that teach us that big studios and big mixing boards and big monitors don't really help without the time to really let something develop. To go down a few roads with ideas. I'm a total blueprint guy in the studio- I know what I want from the second tape rolls. But even I have to concede that the greatest recordings take on their own life big-time. You can't strangle something with clock-watching. It keeps A from getting to B sometimes.

Today Is My Very Special Day

2007-01-11T00:43:00.000-05:00

For having my chestnut "Like Dying" as Track O' The Day at Garageband.com.

I'd like to thank Th' Academy as well as all my family and friends. Friend.

I'd really like to thank my family.

And I want everyone to know that I feel so close to all of you right now. It's been a long, hard journey to reach this summit. As much as I'd like to just stop and savor th' moment, I have to realize that this is really just teh beginning of th' struggle. The long nights, the cold open road. Diners and stages and that blurry two-lane blacktop in the rain.

I have to go change th' answering machine message now for when David Geffen calls.

Space Rock Opera!

2007-01-08T22:55:00.000-05:00

Here's an album that fiction did in '00.

The password to access the folder is "sparrow". All tracks are in sequence and are downloadable 320 MP3s.

This was the band's swansong when we wrapped it in the summer of 2000. It was one of those records that can break up a band and does.

I was sad but still had it edited, sequenced and mastered and did up a whole package prototype for it just so it would exist for me and the fellows. I never planned to release it. There's nothing sadder than a posthumous release.

It's called Space Rock Opera. It is, in fact, a space rock opera. It's meant to be sort of a Day In The Life of the universe, a series of vignettes about some wack space shit that actually very much have to do with goings-on in our lives here on Earth. That's the conceit of the thing at any rate. It was born from a running interview joke we had where we would always refer to the "space rock opera" we were working on and how brilliant it would be. We were playing at Spinal Tap and it was always great to see fiction's upcoming Space Rock Opera referred to in print by an irony-other-abled rock writer.

TJ, the guitarist, actually left me some coded messages in some of the lyrics that he wrote, which is so conceptual it's beyond brilliant. I didn't start picking up on them until much later. It sounds a little narcissistic but it isn't. The things aren't generally all that flattering. They're classy and oblique, though. I have to credit him for that.

TJ, a self-professed alien abductee and intellectually-inclined Christian, also worked in a lot of neat conceptual stuff about religion under deep and not so deep metaphoric cover. The whole "Sparrow" thing is an interesting little manifesto. It's from some scifi book from back when but he subsequently insisted he'd made it up.

The other thing about Space Rock Opera was that it was recorded at a point when we'd been fired from our label and our manager and our entire sort of machine had packed up and fucked off. We were left with our gear and my old breaking four track Tascam 246.

We began the project as a "fuck you" to any of the powers that seemed to be conspiring to keep us from making records. We used what we had on hand- a nice big P.A., some dynamic mics, and a rambling rehearsal complex in La Mesa CA. We positioned the P.A. speakers in different rooms and sent signals through them at huge volume, micing them from a few feet away or a few rooms away to create a sense of space without any digital jiggery-pokery.

We didn't shy away from "crappy" sounds or off-kilter mixes. We didn't have to anymore. The one thing we had going for us was that we could make exactly the record we wanted to make without interference. The only time constraint was that we had to finish it before we couldn't stand being in the same room together. Creatively we were fine; personally was a different story. Paul Cortois the drummer left when we started vocal overdubs. TJ and I made it until the mixes were done and I just stopped returning his phone calls.

I did the editing and mastering at a studio in San Diego where we had all worked and made sure they'd have access to copies.

Space Rock Opera is cool, weird, ironically claustrophobic. Ironically everything. We joked about actually taking it to the stage and doing an intentionally cheesy stage production with tinfoil space ships on strings flying across the stage and shit. That would have rocked.

Enjoy. It's an exclusive.

Here's a quick minilibretto so you're not completely in the dark:

1. "Citizen Of The Galaxy": With a quick transmission from Planet Xenon we're off with this galloping prog rock narration from a blaster-packing space cowboy who implores us to "keep the plasma dry, for God's sake". I'm talking about national borders and national identities in this song, and how arbitrary, outdated and elastic they are. The last minute of this is pretty insanely blazing. I love the drums and bass on this album. And the guitar. And the mic'ed up japanese windup toys. "...so many worlds arrayed like jewels on jet-black velvet/It's a big old sky..."

2. "Live Today For The Sparrow" Suite: Weird, man. The new Space Messiah arrives, announced by a chorus of Buddhist Monks from the Nebula of Langerhans. He prepares the gathering for The Word, introducing them to "The Sparrow", a galactic deity. Then, in a haze of rocket exhaust, he's gone.

3. "Purple Majesty": The first of TJ's little forays into hidden meanings. Or not-so-hidden-meanings if you have a dirty enough mind to get a little tingle from the title. In short, this is a great, funky little song about fucking in space. Great rhythm track. Yours truly is very proud of this bass performance and the drums are so real and tight. Zibba-dibba-zibba-dibba- zum-sum.

This guy is a bona fide genius crazy guy. He'd be the first to tell you. Fuck it, he'll probably google this shit and read this. Hey, dude- nice fucking album. Look at his picture. This guy has to add a large flourish to every power chord. Even in rehearsal. But listen to what he plays.

TJ was mastering a sort of non-music with his guitar when we did this album. He had this thing where he'd play something really sort of hopeless-sounding and machine-ish and he'd say "that's the kind of thing that my mother would ask me to stop playing". And we tried to let that "non-music" approach influence this stuff. It's pretty spiky. We set up a lot of these drones that stretch with little overdubs and never sort of resolve harmonically. And TJ comes in on top with these hopeless, astringent, galactic sounding lines.

4. "Perfectly Lovely Planets": Another TJ number that didn't make any sense to me at all. But in a good way. I had learned by now that this guy was coming from another galaxy entirely and I sort of sat back for a lot of his input and just did what I was told. I knew it would be weirder than anything I could come up with and that refreshed me. TJ puts his vocal through a really fucked-up robotizer and delivers a chilling story of a race of space females who decimate planets, kill all males and establish themselves. I love the jackbooting imperialism of the chorus and the "Lost In Space" countermelodies he works in at the end.

TJ found a Goth chick in a band in another rehearsal room and got her to record the part of the galactic woman explaining the agenda of the X5-17. Freaky. She was hot.

TJ was always bringing people in from other bands to loop their voices or have them do some random percussion on a track.

5. "The Future's In Space": this was my song about being brave wrapped in an interesting tale about a crazy guy imagining he's spacebound in his Buick Skylark. But is he crazy? "I ease the throttle to overdrive/The G's kick in and I feel alive..."

We did the Space Rock Opera live in its entirety at the Mint Supper Club in Hollywood one summer night in 2000 and this one was the funnest for me to play, along with "Purple Majesty" and "Sugar". It was the only time we did the whole thing live. It went over a storm.

Nice rhythm track on this. Obviously copping "Walking On The Moon". I wanted to get that effect: a rhythm that is super-empty but totally infectious. It's like "space soul". There's a lot of weird distant guitar in this in various states of mangling. Slowed down in places to give a sense of distance and heaviness.

6. "Free From Denial": This one is TJ's letter to me. I'm referred to as "sister B": "Sister B/This mission lately doesn't mean too much to me.../Sister B?I'll telegraph when I get where I'm going..." See, it's a sort of disgusted goodbye. You have to understand- TJ is the kind of person who would do this.

He goes on to say "We've seen each moon three times/Each constellation twice/It seems to me the galaxy is shrinking all the time.../But you don't seem to mind..." which I assume means "I'm moving on to other crazy shit".

This whole song is about becoming disenchanted with a once-crucial mission. Like, say, being in a band. The "free from denial" refrain sort of drives it home. Some very fine guitar here.

7. "Iapetus IV": Ever since Andy Summer's "Mother" I've loved fucked-up songs about men's terror of women. This song couches the whole thing in a galactic ghost story about a guy who has a thing with a female alien ("...she looked at me as if I was a five-course meal/with her blank eyes nictitating/And her six bare breasts like something from a dream...") and is subsequently eaten by her as their space ship barrels into a galactic docking station.

This one was quite a production. It's the "A Day In The Life" of this record. All manner of found sounds were incorporated, sounds from other records, all manner of distorted power tools. I put the sound of a spinning bike wheel through a series of sonic alterations and set up a compressor so the vocal triggered it. That's the sound over on the right that sounds like my voice is being reprocessed for transmission to Nebula XJ-1584355. Ha- I love the lyric "I will never tell them how she came to me/With her pretty blue probiscis and her pheromone sac soft and smooth and cool..."

The ending involved a three-page script that we had to learn and enact. TJ is the docking computer on the right and I'm the pilot over on the left. The pilot mis-hears the docking coordinates and that's when all hell breaks loose.

In a beautiful little moment of completism, the docking computer says, "almighty Sparrow...she's on top of us...", I really love this. It sums up the intent of the whole record- the idea of a masterpiece held together with tin foil and clothes hangers. Space Rock Opera is about that exactly- it's not so much a space rock opera as it is a record about a space rock opera.

Listen to the breaking-up transmissions at the end. They're really disconnected and beautiful like they're coming from another star cluster. We figured that's what you'd hear, you know? You wouldn't hear some huge explosion like fuckin' Star Wars. You'd hear the radio go dead. Bzzt.

And with that, a pretty and otherworldly bass/drum/guitar ensemble ushers in the spacious, stately "Sugar".

8. "Sugar" is my favorite. I love this deeply as a piece of music because it's such a triumph of economy. Here we have the zenith of the "non-music" from the intro to the last note. It's as simple an arrangement as a song can have and still be flat-out majestic. Everyone plays to their strength here- Paul is stentorian and powerful on the kit, I do the playing-about-four- notes- in-the-entire-song-Zen thing that I developed from long years of being a lead-singing bass player. TJ shows off his incredible knack for arranging off-kilter guitar and elevates this whole song. This is TJ's record as far as I'm concerned. I told him when we were working on it that I thought he should just run with it, that I'd take his arranging cues because the stuff he was coming up with was so interesting and original and had such integrity sonically. And it was innovative.

I love the little bass section where the fuzz bass is about eight times too loud for the track.

"Sugar" on the surface is a song about a space drug that takes you "farther than you've ever gone...faster than you've ever been..." The backstory has to do with a mythic civilization that use the drug as a time-retardant that allows them to have million-year orgasms:

The Mercury-Neptune shuttle
Leaves the spaceport on the hour
I'll meet you in that milk bar on Ganymede
I've got an ounce of Plasma Powder

I know you're gonna love it
It's like starlight on your pale and perfect skin
Faster than you've ever gone...farther than you've ever been...

I've heard of a place in the Pleiades
There's more sexes than fish in the sea
And they mate only twice in their thousand-year life
I know it's crazy, but it's real...so real...

And I know you're gonna dig it
It's like oceans waxing blissful in the moon
Faster than you've ever gone...sweeter than you might assume....

Change your life
Change your life
Change your life
Change your life...

Here, in the last refrain of the album, we are at last clued in to the larger intent of Space Rock Opera. The jacket that I designed had a big red planet with that lyric emblazoned across the equator to drive the point home. The whole record was conceived as a blow from the depths of hell, the ultimate fuck-you to the idea of Going Quietly. It was by a factor of 10 the best thing the band ever did and my memories of recording it are rich, hard and bittersweet. We were in this sun-drenched complex in the San Diego desert and it felt like the end of the world out there. And we'd meet every day and work as we lived out the last days of our rock 'n' roll unemployment and the money went away.

And it was cool because we knew it was just for us. It was just for sake of making a really, really original statement. I love how the record manages to be about so many things by virtue of its threadbare, ironic hubris. It really is a finger up Death's ass. Check it out.

Check It

2007-01-07T01:13:00.000-05:00

The biggest problem with losing a dream that has sustained you for 20 years isn't what you might think.

But maybe you already know this. The odds are excellent, however, that I know it more. This is a little problem. Well, it's big to me. Beyond th' national boundary constituted by my skin it ain't shit. If I have a little wisdom to impart, especially to the youthful amongst us, it lies in this area.

I haven't got a clue how to live. Skipped the lessons, baby. Didn't need them. Figured they was all for straight pussies. I got trickdosed with Welbutrin last year and I didn't have a fucking inkling what to do with all that hope. I found it profoundly disquieting and disorienting. I couldn't get off that shit fast enough and reengage in my comfortable, familiar state of profound, elegant, artistically invaluable depression.

Jesus fuckin' Christ, do you know how lucky we are to even be drawing breath? Woah. It's coming to me, man. It's getting through. I just turned 42 and I'm starting to lose a friend here and there, you know? Man, the first girl that wanted to marry me is in the fucking ground. The fucking ground. All alone in the fucking ground. Fuck has that got to be lonely.

Me, I've got all the pieces. I mean, for the following week, you know? Next week has potential. Next month has potential. But I haven't got the faintest whiff of a concept about how to put them all together.

I haven't got my dream anymore and I never will and it makes the thought of living sort of threadbare and cruddy but man the thought of not living is light years fucking worse. I'm not ready to be that lonely, all in the ground and shit. All in the dark with those muffled footsteps above you and you can't move or get to them.

I'm going to go ahead and give in and start learning how to live this year. This week. This day. Whatever it takes. Maybe what it takes is a new, improved dream. I can't do the death trip anymore. I keep doing the death trip and it keeps not coming and taking me. I have this little inner joke about how I think of death every three minutes instead of sex. Every song I write is a different take on letting go and falling into the fucking abyss.

And the reason is that I have died in a way. It's like I'm in a living purgatory because I lack the imagination or the strength of character or just the skills to rock the future. The future's big, man. Not easy- big. And it just keeps coming. And I just keep staying. There's a lot of shit to get on top of, man. I just had a moment in '01 or '02 where I was like yeah, it's never, ever happening and I had some of the coolest parts of my life after that but it's like I can't sink my feet into anything. Nothing's going to come along and magically sweep me into significance or give me purpose. Tragedy is sort of what does that for the common man. It's usually tragedy.

I wrote an insane song cycle for voice, string quartet and piano in 2002 called The Song Of Days. It's a 35-page score, sort of a neoclassical Side 2 of Abbey Road thing that is held together in a series of movements that are each based on a day of the week. Fuck me, it's really cool. It has really rich jazz sections and insane transitions and a miniconcerto for quartet and piano. It has a section where the strings play these endless, Phillip Glassish staccato offset triplets, slipping in and out of different keys while the piano explores this nightmarish theme that sounds like Rhapsody In Blue played by demons.

It has an eastern-modality based section that's really jumpy and celebratory. It has a hopeless love story set to a series of polychordal I-IV movements that alternately mock and celebrate the lyric. And it's all stuck together through a series of transitions that are almost the heart of the thing. And each movement or day of the week echoes through the others. But it still has the dreamy, hallucinatory quality of sort of meandering, of sort of just puking out prettiness or tension as it moves along.

This year I'm going to record The Song Of Days, I'm going to learn how to look forward to things, and I'm going to learn how to live. I like that thing in people, you know? That looking forward to things thing. People are always like yeah we're going fucking sailing next week or yeah we're going to fuckin' Sheboygen for th' Comicon. They aren't like yeah I'm going to smoke dope and try to redefine music in my basement studio for a week without sleeping and then I'm going on the fucking road for three months.

My family was fuckin' awesome. My folks are ambitious, imaginative people who had been cloistered in small-town America for their childhoods and when the reins were in their hands they were just fucking out, you know? Warm wine in Madrid, baby. Th' altiplano of Bolivia. Fuckin' arctic winters. Trips to Moscow. They were in a choir in Chile that toured down to the tip of the fucking world. And until we were a certain age they dragged us to crazy-ass places every weekend. Museums and galleries and castles. They knew how to live. They weren't overwhelmed by their Responsibilities To The Safe And Healthy Upbringing Of Their Children. You know what they did? They chucked us in the back of the car and made sure we had food and a place to sleep and piss. Well, two places.

Genius. Pure fucking genius. An unrivalled triumph of the imagination. An utter victory.

Something to cause a faint smile to flutter across your dying lips. That's what life is, my dears. Life is a thing to comfort you when you die. Dying is going to suck and you're going to want something when a Life Saver won't do the trick. A chuckle. A memory or two of things like tangerine orchards that stretch to the horizon or an old abandoned tunnel of love or seeing Th' Louvre or Montmarte in th' twilight.

Life is a way to stick your finger up Death's ass. I want to be the guy who sticks his finger the furthest up Death's ass. After all this time. If I have to think about death all th' time I want to think about Death with my finger up its ass. Twisting. Hooking around to worry and discomfit th' prostate now and then. The odd ragged fingernail getting stuck in sensitive colon flesh. Oh, don't be such a fucking whinge. It's Death's ass, man.

I'm going to learn how to sit down and organize my life in a way that doesn't just consist of a bunch of dotted lines that point to a circle in red that says SUCCESS. I'm fucking serious, man. It's like I got visited by the Ghost Of Don't Be A Fucking Knob, you know?

After everything I've seen and everywhere I've been. To have walked along the beach at night after a show in Redondo in '92 and to have said yes I'll take a fucking shot. Who gets that, man? Who gets that?

Did maybe just a little rub off on me? A little understanding of the mystery and the majesty? Surely I'm not so bereft of imagination after all I've created from sweat and pencil? Dude, if I can write "The Song Of Days" with a fucking bubbler and a couple candles and a number two, surely, surely, surely I can compose th' beginnings of a new life.

To be such a knob. What a thing that is. Being a disgraceful, cosmic little knob. It ends tonight.

It ends th' fuck tonight.

Cue th' music, motherfucker.

07

2007-01-06T14:24:00.000-05:00

Bear th' fuck with me, man.

I'm just trying to figure out where this thing's going in '07.

I know exactly where I want it to go but I don't know if I've got th' stones.

A lot of people I know are reading this now.

It's getting harder to be honest. That's all I really care about. I'm surrounded by fucking lies every second of every day of my life and that presents me with my "niche". I consider it a public service of the highest order to be truthful, as wretched and horrible as it sometimes is.

If I've put forth even the tiniest, most infinitesimal inkling of giving a dump of how I'm thought of or perceived I've already failed. There are already so many things I wish I could talk about but can't. I think that's fine. I think that's human. Honesty isn't necessarily about snotting out the deepest, darkest chunks of your fucked-up psyche. There is such a thing as too much of it. We've all had a lover like that, man. We've all had a friend like that. It can be cruel and pointless. It can be masturbatory and selfish.

But I don't like the world and I don't like the culture we've elected to live in. Yes, elected. See, if you take responsibility for it that means you have a little power over it. That's why I take responsibility for my part in everything. I'm so beyond disgusted. It doesn't mean I'm negative. It means I'm sane. Yeah, I think it's an awful place. What the fuck happened? We've got it all, man. We've got all that 1984 shit. I think we sell our children out daily. Especially those of us who operate in the cultural sphere. We just can't stop. I think it's just fuckin' wretched. I bet they've all watched fucking Hussein swing on YouTube. That's great. I think the best thing we could do would be a long and protracted campaign of selective assassination. We need a Resistance. We need an Underground. We need a fucking Al Qaeda that's a little more selective. I really think that. And I'm a lover of peace and beauty.

So, see? Where's the line? I think it's right over there. Off I go.

Source Of Humor

2006-12-28T14:03:00.000-05:00

Cleek's gone and pointed the way to larfs and more larfs involving cats and their little ways.

As you can imagine, a lot of these pictures derive their value from twisted anthropomorphism. Photographer is unusually skilled at catching cats in th' midst of those little freak-out things that they do and then run away from in self-digust.

Check it. BOOYAKASHA.

Seriously Compelling Blog Alert

2006-12-27T20:02:00.000-05:00

Yeah, Milo Freeman has posted here and at Ned's place in recent days and as I'm wont to do with a new visitor who doesn't have "hate" or "death" or "Limbaugh" in his tag, and who doesn't wish all manner of pestilence upon me, I was off to see from whence th' polysyllabisms origificated. Obviously a Catch-22 fan.

Turns out Milo's in th' Suck, to borrow from the parlance of an earlier, easier adventure, my peaceloving friends. And he's reminding me a lot of an early, good Hemingway character with his intellect and his well-consideredness and his romance. He's going to change the way you feel about the modern soldier. Maybe even th' modern 20-something. He's also a poet. Let's all give him our business.

Go check him out. He's something else. Keep your head down, Spc. Freeman. We want and need you back when this shit is ironed out. Someday.

The Score: 12.24.06, 3 AM

2006-12-24T16:06:00.000-05:00

Deer: 1

Lightfoot: 2

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All right you want my christmas list here's my christmas list

2006-12-23T01:12:00.000-05:00

WOOAAAHH

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Yeah last minute ipod synergistic gift ideas

2006-12-22T20:38:00.000-05:00

Yeeeahh. Ho ho ho.

I was searching for gifties today amongst th' Missing Linx in aisle two and was amazed and excited by all th' options. Try growin' up in the third world and not walking through this culture in a haze of disgust and shame. Try it, droogsters. Like a bee sting that never stops. Like a Kenny G carol that never stops farting and blatting its hideous keening mating call to th' female of the species. Actually, I take that back. All our kids is growing up in th' third world as we speak.

Here comes excitement, my friends! Right down Santa Claus lane!

Up first we have:

The iPod Ass Attachement:

Heyyy...exciting that! Slides right up the ol' cheddar expressway, don't it? Whole new meaning to th' term "subwoofer". Ha. Get me THREE or you DON'T LOVE ME.

Next up, we have th' certainly no-less hypnotizing

iPod Credit Card

WOOOAAAHHH! Looks like a credit card! Swipes like a credit card! But it's so much motherfuckin' more! It plays SO MUCH BAD MUSIC!

It plays THE MOST BAD MUSIC. THAT MEANS IT'S THE BEST!

no other device yet devised plays MORE BAD MUSIC. Music that sells every manner of appliance and personal hair removal device! You can set it so when you swipe it at the automated teller TM, well, boy oh boy if it doesn't just play you a li'l Regina Spektor number. She's so talented! And she grew up in a Communist Country so her story is one of overcoming TREMENDOUS ODDS to bamboozle you with her mediocrity. Regina Spektor. She's like a fucking sleeping aid. Jesus. And that psycho uncle Phil of hers from Laurelstan.

They're moving like hotcakes in places like China and India but we'll have to wait a while here in the Old Country.

Hey, look! Look at THIS crap. It's the iPod iNfant. Look- mommy's pausing her new Killers cd so's what she can breastfeed.

th' iNfant is great because you can plug it right into your USB port and download all manner of corp'rate advertising for your delectation. The headphones are located on the inner thighs so it looks like you're giving little snuggums a shoulder ride but you're actually listening to that SWINGIN' new "emo" band. Dashboard Vomitorium. Man, they rock. They're my faves. Right after that other Beefheart of th' teen set, The Fray. Bleagh. Only thing good about th' Fray is that the singer is going bald. It makes it easier to deal with the fact that everyone dies someday. And all the backmasking is funny. Like the backmasking. I can't catch it all because it's in Chinese but every nowandthen I can pick out a fucking BRAND NAME.

"Emo". Ha ha ha. They've named a musical style that is so singular to us today because it deals with emotions. Registered TM. Emotions. Wow. That is some seriously groundbreaking, groundbreaking stuff. I had a emotion once- they almost sent me to that gulag, Ohio. It's Not Done, dearhearts.

Emo. Jesus Christ. Fuck you. Yeh goddamn kids today with yer cellphoons and yer blowjobs. And yer ringtones. Woah. Every time someone gets worked up about their fuckin' Butthole Surfers ringtone I just want to fly a plane into the building that is them. I just want 'em to pancake down all o'er lower Manhattaran.

Butt I digrest! There's more!

There's...the...the...iPod Soul!

What do YOU think it is? What do YOU think it is? What do YOU think it is?