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Entry date: 10-6-2024 - I Almost Forgot - Letters to My Friends

Dear Friends,

 

I am concerned that the world has gone mad right now.

Seriously, what is going on?

This has been said by every generation.

And all the others were not wrong.

 

The world goes mad every day.

Look around and watch.

I can’t explain it

Nor can I stop myself from contributing to the madness.

 

It’s human nature.

I’ll cop to that.

And I will cope with it,

But the world has gone mad again.

 

*****

 

I am not an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, but it seems like this is scary stuff happening right now. This seems like more than posturing. I’m watching and I think we all should be paying attention.

 

***** 

 

This one got away from me today. It’s a little late and that’s okay. I’m allowed to be tardy once in a while. Rhondi and I had a really nice evening last night and I forgot to put the finishing touches on this edition.

 

We are going to hang with some friends today, though, who we didn’t get a chance to hang with yesterday as our plans changed quite a bit. We did get a lot of stuff done around the house, which was nice.

 

We shall see what the day entails.

 

*****

 

Getting high on my own supply number nine.

 

It wasn’t long into our time of being a band that The Father Figures (Bobby, Michael, and I) started talking about making a record. We were having fun playing shows and writing songs and it seemed like a natural progression for us. We needed to document what we were doing. We also needed to do something with the money we were making from our shows.

 

It wasn’t a lot of money, mind you, but it was enough that we didn’t need to put much of our own money into the band outside of paying practice room rent. We stacked up a little cash over the first couple of years and went to see my buddy, Byron, at Villain about making a record. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership. 

 

I had made several records with Byron already, but Michael and Bobby needed to be convinced. It didn’t take long and before we knew it, we had recording time booked. We had about 15 or 16 songs at the time. It was also not our first recording as a band.

 

Hold up.

 

We recorded a few songs with Ryan from North Side Kings for a compilation that my buddy Nate was putting out. It was called Personality Disorder, and it featured one of the songs that would also be on our first CD, Lesson No. 1. That was a good experience, but I really wanted to work with Byron and, luckily, Michael and Bobby did, too.

 

Byron, Michael, Bobby, and I got along so well. We had many laughs, and we did great work together. It was a huge growing experience for me as a singer because I had to actually sing a lot of the songs in a way that I wasn’t used to doing in the studio. I got a little frustrated during the tracking for “Fix You,” but it helped me grow as a singer.

 

I’m just going to go song by song on this one.

 

“Caviar” is a riff I came up with on my acoustic guitar. I brought it into the practice room and we fiddled with it a little bit, as we always did, and gave it a few nice little bells and whistles and it was done. I love the energy of this song and the lyrics are kind of just stream of thought stuff that I came up with while we were jamming it. That’s often my favorite way to write lyrics. I like to see what comes out when I’m playing a song live and loud with my bandmates.

 

I’ve always been pretty proud of the line, “The fish will have abortions/no mor caviar for queens.” That’s where the name of the song came from and I’m glad that Bobby and Michael liked that line, too. I also dig the little turnaround we do in the last chorus to make it bigger.

 

“Butterfly” is a Bobby riff. I really love this one and it is one that we played a lot over the course of our 14 years together. The riff itself turns itself inside out during the song and while there are multiple parts, they all flow together really well. The words are specific to a time in my life when I felt like I was trapped by certain relationships I was in, and I chose unwisely. Live and learn and write a song.

 

“Falling Down” is either a Michael or a Bobby riff originally, Michael, I think, but we arranged it together. I came up with the chorus, I think, and wrote the words based on the Michael Douglas film of the same name. Some friends of PMcG made a cool little video of this song, too, that is probably out there somewhere. Here’s a link.

 

“Typical Bible Beating Hypocrites” was originally a Hillbilly Devilspeak song. We never recorded it, but it stuck with me. When the boys and I were first starting to jam, we needed enough songs for a set to celebrate Michael’s 50th birthday, so I dusted this one off. The title really says it all. I think what Bobby and Michael did with their respective parts is pretty darn amazing, too. It is also one of the few instances where there is swearing in a song by The Father Figures. I say ”shit” at one point.

 

“Save It For Later” was a Michael riff that came from those first jams. He had made a demo of it and Bobby and I liked it. I wrote lyrics for it that are about growing up around people who you can’t quite trust. I had an alcoholic uncle who died when I was 11 and some of what I said here is about him, but flashing forward as if he would have lived. It’s also about being around people who have anger issues. I’ve had plenty of experience with that.

 

“K is Dead” is a riff I came up with that has a Nirvana kind of feel to it. Bobby came up with the cool drum intro and we arranged it together. I wrote the lyrics about my grandfather, Tom, and how I felt when he died. He had passed about three years before we wrote this one and it was still pretty fresh in my mind. I felt like I was letting him down, I think, so I wrote this song to help remind me.

 

“Total Fakery” is another one of mine. We called it this because it sounds like a Fugazi-type riff. I remember when we played it at the CD release party and I started it in the wrong key. We opened our set at Punk Rock Bowling with this one and I love it to this day. Super simple lyrics, too, and were just something I sang while we jammed and they stuck.

 

Speaking of the CD release party, that was one of the most gratifying experiences I have ever had on stage. Jugheads was packed and the crowd was overwhelmingly nice to us. If I had a time machine, I would go back and only change one or two things.

 

“No Guarantees” is a Bobby riff that I love. I wish we would have played it more as I love the lyrics I came up with, but we got away from it pretty quickly. I don’t think it ever quite delivered the way I hoped it would and Bobby felt it was too long. I think Michael agreed, but I’m not sure. We just stopped playing it. I love what both of them did with this one and I’m glad it is on that comp I mentioned earlier.

 

“Took the light rail to the library/Want to see where all the books are buried” is a line I am very proud of.

 

“Restless” is a Michael riff that is pretty close to exactly like he drew it up. I don’t think we did any real arranging here as it was pretty fucking great just the way it was. Michael had the title, too, so I wrote words that I thought echoed the feeling of being restless. We dusted it off a few times over the years, but for some reason, we always struggled to play it right.

 

It’s about feeling like you are just sort of untethered to anything real. There is a line that I like, “now I’m dangerous only to myself/and I still matter, but only to myself” that kind of sums up feeling frustrated and restless because things aren’t happening the way you want.

 

“Fix You” is another Michael riff. When we played this one right, which was usually the case, I thought it was such a powerful song. I had to stretch my vocal cords to sing it properly, but I’m glad the boys stuck with me on it. I wanted to give up on it so badly in the studio, but we kept at it. I’m really proud of the bridge on this one, too. We worked hard on getting it right.

 

I was so pissed off when I realized that there was a big Coldplay song that was also called “Fix You.” I don’t think that played any role in why I wrote the lyrics that I wrote. They are kind of vague, but it’s a song about standing by as someone ruins themselves with drugs. Robyn Hitchcock also has a song called “Fix You” but that’s okay because I love Robyn.

 

“She Does Gymnastics” was originally titled “Too Hard” because Michael wrote it and it was too hard to play. We worked really hard on that one in the practice room we had on 11th Street and Van Buren. I can remember feeling really giddy about getting it down. It’s an instrumental so I didn’t have to come up with any words, but I’m not sure I could have written any anyway. It would have been way too hard. 

That’s terrible but I’m leaving it.

 

“Lesson No. 1” is another Michael riff. We all knew pretty quickly it would be the title track once we got it together. We all contributed to the arrangement and, as we got really good at, we came up with the killer bridge/outro together. We were an excellent band when it came to coming together to making each other’s riffs into proper songs.

 

The lyrics to “Lesson No. 1” are about being a young man trying to figure things out and learning a few things along the way. Then it kind of turns into a statement about getting older and feeling like it’s tough to be the one who is supposed to be dispensing the advice. I love that people have come up to me about how the song wraps up and said that it hit them in the feelers.

 

“Fe Fi Fo” is one of mine that kind of came out of nowhere if I remember correctly. I think it could have started as a jam in practice, which was rare for us. Usually that was what we did to complete songs that needed something rather than come up with a whole song in the practice room.

 

It’s a big riff that I always felt like it gave a nod to Dead Kennedys. It’s mainly one riff all the way through just played a little differently here and there, but I love it. We played it a lot over the years. Most of these songs stayed part of our sets except where I noted earlier.

 

Out of the 13 songs, eight of them were played fairly often over the years. That says a lot about how we felt about this record. I’m super proud of it as a first record by what was then a relatively new band. I wish more people had heard it, but that’s another story. We were lazy as hell when it came to promoting ourselves.

Maybe if we had allocated 3% of the effort we put into making the music into self-promotion, we’d be a household word by now.

 

That’s rich. We wouldn’t have spared anything, to be honest. We liked playing music together too much.  

 

*****

 

See you tomorrow.



AI gets it.

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