Dear Friends,
I’ve been reminded a lot lately about the beauty of friendship. I’m very lucky in that capacity. I have written tens of thousands of words here at Ergonomic Mischief about the people I love and the last couple of days have really reminded me that I am truly grateful for the people who choose to let me be part of their life.
I had a great conversation with Markus last night. It was so good to spend an hour with him just shooting the shit. We’re coming up on forty years of friendship in 2025. How awesome is that?
Then there was Sunday and getting to go to the game with my dad and my brothers from another mother, Michael and Tom. Those guys mean the world to me and getting to share them with my dad now, too, is the best. These may seem like small things from the outside looking in, but to me, it just doesn’t get better.
Walking in the morning with Tom and Q makes me soul feel right. It’s good for the body, the mind, the heart…all of it. These are things that would be so easy to take for granted, but the reality is that many people don’t have these types of connections. They can’t…if they did, the feel and culture of the United States would be way different right now.
Sure, I could be angry, too. I could be pissed at the world and talk shit about everything and everyone. That would be easy. I don’t want to be that guy. I’ll write songs about it, sure, but even that is me from the past. I haven’t written any lyrics for so long know that I don’t know what I want to talk about.
Even the connections I make with my students are rewarding in a way that is hard to articulate. I’m so thankful for how they teach me to be a better teacher. It’s a gift they don’t even realize they give me. Those are often the best kind of gifts, too.
So, I’m feeling thankful today.
I have a cat on my lap as I type this. He’s giving my wrist the occasional head butt, but other than that, he’s not impeding the flow. Oliver is a fine beast.
*****
Alex turned me on to godheadSilo at some point in the mid-90s. We went to see them at Hollywood Alley, and I thought they were so brilliant. The sounds they came up with as a two-piece, bass and drums, were right up my alley and super inspiring.
They were just two kind of nerdy looking guys who brought the rock. I think, if I remember correctly, Alex recorded them on their next record after the one that I really got into back then and am writing about today, Skyward In Triumph. I like that record, too, but I always come back to Skyward In Triumph.
As I type this, I’m not super certain exactly what it is about this record that separates it from their others. Maybe it was the first one that I bought and really dove into or maybe I just like it the best. I have all three of their records, though, in the collection and they are all good.
Skyward In Triumph starts off with “Echo Challenge.” It’s a short song with a lot of echo happening (obviously), but the coolest thing about godheadSilo is that they got a lot of sound out of the bass. You can hear that right away on “Echo Challenge.” There are some great noises that happen on the song that make it really interesting, even though it is a simple song in many ways, too. There are layers happening here that set up the record in a great way.
From that starting point, the record really took off across the next three tracks: “Booby Trap,” “Chuckanut Overdrive,” and “Just Friends.” Especially on “Chuckanut Overdrive,” which I adore, the band is just smokin’. The songs are noisy, compact, and the distortion is perfect. From the vocals to the bass to the drums, godheadSilo was killing it in the mid-90s…and then they were gone.
For years, I thought “Chuckanut Overdrive” was called “Chucknaut Overdrive.” I wanted it to be about an astronaut named ‘Chuck.’ I’m sure I mislabeled it on a few mix tapes I added it to over the years. I liked writing ‘Chucknaut.’
The bass line on “Chuckanut Overdrive” kind of showed me that you could do something that sounded like a heavily distorted guitar and have an underlying bassline that was still heavy as hell. As I listen to it with these ears I have now, I hear how much godheadSilo influenced me in the early days of Hillbilly. I wish we could have played with them.
When Alex and I did Son of Crackpipe, we talked about trying to put together a short tour with them and Doo Rag. All two-piece bands. That would have been epic and both of those bands would have made us earn our keep, for sure.
“Just Friends” sounds like a song that is coming from the perspective of someone who does not want to be ‘just friends.’ The vocals are super distorted, so it’s hard to tell what he’s actually talking about and I’ve never read the lyrics, but the bass line sounds like one of unrequited love.
There is a fifteen-minute song smack dab in the middle of Skyward In Triumph called “Guardians of the Threshold.” It’s one of those mid-90s songs where a band kind of does something because they could, not necessarily because the listener would actually enjoy it. I mean, it sounds cool, but it is long. Really long. Those first five minutes or so are pretty epic, though.
The last four tracks on the CD are about half as long in total as “Guardians of the Threshold.” “Buttress of Solitude” is a great riff. I remember them playing this one live a few of the times I saw them. “French Loan” is pretty great, too. This one actually has a pretty cool melody. I was certainly inspired by it on the song “Rodman Vs. Soul” on the first Hillbilly record.
“Skyward In Triumph” finishes things off and it is sublime. Not that shitty band, sublime, but sublime in the truest definition of the word. It’s hip hop/noise rock. Groovalicious.
“You can’t stop us ‘cause got no brakes…”
If you like the bass, listen to this record.
*****
See you tomorrow.
Not exactly an eagle, AI.
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