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Entry date: 6-23-2024 – Nebraska? You’re Sassy – Letters to My Friends

Dear Friends,

 

I wonder how many times Nebraska has been referred to as “Sassy?”

 

Probably not many because my first excursion into Nebraska has been noticeably devoid of sassiness. People have been very nice, though.


It’s also very flat here.


*****


Yesterday was nice. Our day was long because of two great visits. One in Colorado Springs with my buddy Mike and the other in Aurora with Cousins Bear and Jen.


Colorado is a lovely state and I like it a lot. It was so great to be back in the Springs. We saw the old neighborhood I used to hang out in when I visited Granny and Papa and it was awesome to be there. A little overwhelming, too, as I think about it.


I miss my grandfather so much.



***** 


Off to Illinois!



*****

 

 

Friendship is a wonderful thing.

 

In the early 90s, I was lucky to meet my friend, Alex, after he married my friend, Christina. Alex is from England, so the odds of us having the friendship that we’ve enjoyed for over 30 years now would have been pretty long if he hadn’t have met Christina. When he came to Arizona for the first time, it was kind of a no brainer for us to get together. We have a lot of similar tastes in music and my girlfriend at the time was Christina’s best friend.

 

We definitely hit it off and I went into a lot of detail with this in the blog from 3/17/22, so I apologize, Steve, if this is a repeat for you. I think you’re the only one who has been reading the blog consistently since then. I also apologize to anyone else who has been following along for that long, as well.

 

I guess it was just a natural thing to do for us to make a little band. We both like Big Black and we figured we could do something with a drum machine much easier than finding a human to do the job. We were also never a proper band. We made music when we could because he was traveling a lot in those days because of Fudge Tunnel.

 

Mainly, though, we just wanted to have fun.

 

This should be obvious because of the name. We didn’t take anything seriously with this project except that it was really fun for us to do. I think we enjoyed hanging out so much and the process of creating the songs was relatively easy for us, too. We were really going for low hanging fruit here.

 

It was a lucky thing that Dave Ryley, Alex’s bandmate, had BGR Records and decided he wanted to put out our Son of Crackpipe stuff. Sadly, I think we ended up kind of bankrupting the label because we really wanted to have vinyl records of both the 10” EP and the 12” LP. Nobody bought a lot of vinyl in those days and it ended up biting us on the ass.

 

We were going to do a two-week string of shows in the UK and Germany in 1995, but the label couldn’t afford to have us do it after the records didn’t sell. As it was, we only played live once and that was in 1995, I believe, too. The show was at El Rancho De Los Muertos which was a warehouse in South Phoenix close to where the baseball stadium is today.

 

We wrote about ten songs. 7 of them are on the LP and three are on the EP. The EP features “Mary Poppins” which was our song that was built around the idea of having a cover that showed Julie Andrews with her top off. My friend, Jeff, was pretty good at doing photoshop early on and he took Andrews’ head from a still from Mary Poppins and put it on her body from a still from SOB where she took her top off. 

 

The B side of that one has a song that we did to use up the rest of the tape. I read a book review from the New York Times for one track called “Out of Control” and the other was a noisy thing called “Blinded.” It’s strange to see them on sale for $50 or more on Discogs. When I do see one for relatively cheap, I often buy it so I can give it away from time to time.

 

I’m pretty proud of this one, to be honest. We set out to make a Lo-Fi record and we did just that. People seem to like it, too.

 

Now the LP, on the other hand, was not as well received. We made the CD all one track because we were dicks. Dave seemed to like being part of fucking with people, too, but I’m sure in retrospect, we would have all been a little nice to the listener.

 

The liner notes are pretty funny, I guess, but we were definitely fucking around quite a bit and thought we were way funnier than we probably were. It does tickle me now, though.

 

I listened to the record for the first time in a long, long time recently and was not horrified by it at all. I fondly remember making it, too. Dave gave us a small budget and we got it done out at Blue Sky for cheap. Using a drum machine was easy, at least for me, as Alex did all the programming. I was not very good at it or patient with it.

 

There are some fun little nuggets on there, too. “Rapidinha” is a fast one so we used the Portuguese word for “Rabbit Fucking” as the title. “Pogo’s House” is about John Wayne Gacy.

 

“Enema Johnson” is a tribute to EJ from Hillbilly Devilspeak because he described a band we were watching as a “Dancing in the sand” kind of band. We turned that into a lyric:

 

“Dancing in the sand/waving my flag/Isn’t life grand?”

 

We also added a part where we changed “Isn’t life grand’ to “Do you like bread?” Listening to it reminded me that we were just having fun. That’s what music should be, I think.

 

There is some gallows humor on the record, too, with “Rescue Ranger Amputee.” I’m guessing we would get cancelled for more than just having Julie Andrews’ boobies out now, but who cares. You have to really look for this record as it does not seem to be on the internet anywhere. That’s almost a point of pride for me.

 

“Truth Serum” is a cool song, though, and “What Now” is like 19 minutes of us wanking on our guitars without using a single sample. I played the whole thing and so did Alex. We had nothing to prove, I suppose, except that we could do it.

 

Life was not what I would call easy back then, but we certainly had fun.

 

*****

 

See you tomorrow.



Abe.

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