Hog Heaven (1997-1998)

Me:
All sounds

The bulk of this project was recorded starting in the last week of 1996, literally the day after I got back from Mike Keneally’s tour, and was primarily recorded in early 1997. At one point, it was a cassette release but in late 1997, I had just gotten my VS880. At the time, I was into editing all my mixed tracks together to make a seamless album, but the first version of Hog Heaven was edited too poorly by a guy who didn’t really hit what I was trying to achieve. Yes, I used to have to pay for that work. When I got the VS, I had a lot more time to work stuff over and get things right, and I went and redid most of the mixes, and was able to massage my crossfades a lot more to my satisfaction. Hog Heaven was a very personal project, falling on the heels of a year of huge change for me, with a lot of failures in life, and much sarcasm. Some things came out as real honest diary entry stuff (I’m too filled with guile to do such a thing now in music), and some, like Hog Heaven the track, is masked in metaphoric imagery of farm animals. I played everything on the entire Hog Heaven CD but for a tiny bit that happened to surface in recordings I borrowed from an earlier period of recording. My studio, such as it was, was a 4 track, some mixer and outboard stuff, a few cassette decks, and a box of earlier tapes which I used for fodder to make drum tracks, effects, and other textures. I had no bass and no drums available during the time, so substituted pitch shifted guitar and keyboards for bass, and scrounged up whatever I could for percussion.

ReCyclED (1996-2000)

Me:
Drums, Vocals, Guitars, Basses, Keyboards, Studio Craft

Also featuring:
Todd Larowe, Rebecca Vaughan, Sarah Conley, Ron Sada, Bill Ray, Danny Donnelly, Mike Thaxton, Brandon Arnieri, Brian Cantrell, Paul Cougill, Matt Zuniga, Tom Griesgraber, Marc Ziegenhagen

These are only about 1/3 of the tracks on a project so named because I was recycling my own stuff (”ED”) that had a humorous streak in it and redoing certain things that were once done a few years before in my silly drums and vocal duo called Rhythmic Catharsis (RC). This was some of the most fun I’ve ever had being creative. Most of the recordings you hear are from 1997-1999 in reality, but some things are from 1996 in their original form, and most are borrowing from lyrical material and humor from the Rhythmic Catharsis days (1992-1993). The VS880 was new at that point, so I was keen on recording all sorts of things that permitted experimentation in recording, so I could learn my way around the machine. Some of the material itself is straight off the 4 track tapes I recorded before the 880 came onto the scene. This project was one that I thought would be a quick wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am of about 6 months, but it took over my life as I ended up calling in all my friends and various pro musicians with whom I worked to play on various things. So there are a lot of cameos from a lot of people. Some songs went down in hours, and some took a year to get right. There are a couple tracks that are in the final list that came from a totally over the top thing I did in 2000 called The Magnificent Meatsticks, which functioned in the same way as Rhythmic Catharsis did before it–a totally irreverent and rude way to blow off steam while pretending to make music. The entire projected running order for ReCyclED was meant to segue from one track to another in an hour-long run of utterly stupid, irreverent, and sometimes hilarious musical jokes. In some ways, this project is still not done; I still have active Pro Tools sessions with all the stuff loaded in and ready to edit into that final form, but its so hard to want to sit and tamper with this stuff anymore. I’ve got this stuff on 4 track tape, VS880, and Pro Tools now. Its absurd.

Receiving (1999-2000)

Me:
Basses, Guitars, Drums, Keyboards, Vocals, Studio Craft

Also featuring:
Todd Larowe

Receiving was my master stroke so far, and I have frankly had a hard time achieving that level of finished work and overall musicality in the stuff since then. For now, it was a year long project which initally was named in the wake of a number of spontaneous and potent little recordings that really got me excited about recording my own more mature sounding stuff, after so long recording both my own silly songs, and a couple of recordings for hire in the year or so before. Artistically, it was a development on the sorts of personal stuff which made up Hog Heaven. I was also intent on actually playing music, and not just making noise like I did on most of Hog Heaven. I played everything on exactly half the songs, and most of the stuff on the others, but there are some key cameos which lifted the project up a notch. Receiving was the first of my own projects to let the constant-segue idea die, in part because each tune did more on its own. There are some tracks that are linked for various reasons, but more of them are let to speak on their own. Given my current preoccupation with suburban failure, you might be surprised to find that the song Suburban Silhouette was actually a last minute addition to the CD, replacing a couple of tracks which were more or less long Robert Fripp soundscapey things. SS was recorded in exactly one week with a dare to myself to get it done or scrap it, because there had already been a couple of tunes that took a year to do right, and I was tired of this project. I never knew my last minute addition was going to redefine my life! Receiving is interesting because the end of the musical period was in September 2000 but the CD was not done for over a year after that, so there are some interesting post-Receiving things that were done before it was ever committed to the final commercial pressing of 500 CDs.

The Magnificent Meatsticks (2000)

Me:
Guitar, Drums, Vocals, Keyboards, Noises, Studio Craft

Also Featuring:
Mike Thaxton, Brandon Arnieri

The Magmeat, as I call it, was this deliberately terrible thing to happen to music in 2000. I was finishing up the last few things I wanted to do with the CD, and was tired of paying attention to all sorts of petty details like timing, pitch, decent recording, and dare I say, premonition! A couple of buddies around that time were assembling around Hog Heaven Studio for beers and burritos, and the fun of jamming. But Mike wasn’t a drummer, Brandon wasn’t a bass player, and I wasn’t a guitarist! But we didn’t let that stop us. There was no way in hell that Mike, who had barely ever toyed on drums before was ever going to hold things together, and I was too horrible a guitar player at the time to do much more than wank off with noises. So we laid down some groundrules: we’d all be handicapped to the greatest degree possible, and would do all our stuff straight to stereo recordings. If anything else was to be done, it would be in one take, and would involve editing the stereo file to turn it into a new form of garbage. We recorded most weeks that summer and I probably have about 15 CDs from that period, each recorded more or less on a given weekend, but crammed full of whatever I decided to keep in a seemingly random act of editing. Some bits got turned into things like these, but these are the exceptions. Most of what we did used as much noise and chaos as we could muster, but sometimes something terrible happened and we almost broke out into actual music. As a way to let my hair down, the Magmeat was just great fun, and the totally unpretentious shit we generated sometimes is far more appealing to me than the stuff I spent a year on!

The funny thing about the Magmeat was that it was just at that time when I was starting to mess with computers, the web, and graphic twiddling. This is just when mp3.com started out and got to be the coolest thing ever. So we would do this shit, and put the stuff up the next day and tell all our buddies about it, some of whom pretended to like it. But the clincher came when I sent the San Diego Reader a note telling them to have Richard Meltzer listen to this one tune that he might dig. A couple weeks later, he wrote us up in the Reader and he too pretended to like us, which, if you know about Meltzer, he gave up pretending to like anything under the rock music umbrella back in 1971 or so.

Hog Heaven Holiday Theme Music (2000)

Me:
Keyboards, Bass, Guitar, Drums and Percussion

Some dude named Ruben from Malta:
Maltese Goatskin Bagpipe

In the fall of 2000, I still had access to a number of keyboards which I would borrow from local music savant Bob Tedde who had a store house of gear, both vintage and new. For a few weeks in December and around then, I had his Nord lead, Hammond XB2, and some other junk, in addition to my Rhodes. There was a lot of keyboard stuff that came from that period, obviously, and this was something that I did in about a week or so before Christmas, finished in time to fashion into a present for most of my family, and specifically for my 4 year old niece, whom I had just met a few weeks before (family is a mess for me, and her mom/my “sister” has decided to act most un-sisterlike). Something about this little kid sparked me to do this 15 minute chunk of music in a week after I had felt spent doing Receiving, and after the utterly anarchic stuff from the Magnificent Meatsticks, and a failed attempt at a first band which echoed strains of King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Holed up in the studio again on my own, I was alone with a bunch of keyboards and borrowed percussion and this utterly popped out of me a few minutes at a time. For about a week, I just about forgot ambitions to emulate Bitches Brew, Birds of Fire, and Red, and made this childlike little thing. It is a continuous file here, but on the CD I gave out, it is a 9 track affair with titles that are evocative of the season–solstice, fireside, tradition, festive, and family imagery. Each track has its own sort of color, and was done more or less in the order you hear, except the first several tracks actually recorded were put after the last ones recorded so that my failing inspiration happens midway through and not at the end, thus saving my best work for the end! I think everyone in my family missed the point entirely, said “that’s nice, pass that DVD player package over there” and got drunk for Christmas. Usually, I pull this out and put it up on the web site here in November and let people steal it for themselves. But now you can have it in JUNE! The funny story for this project was when I was working on the one section with the bagpipe, I had no idea that there would be such a thing there. But Kelli (not my wife at that point, but college bound girl living in Oakland at the time), came by with this guy in her car who, once finding out I was doing this thing, volunteered that he had a goat skinned bagpipe in the car. His pipes were in A major, and my piece was in F# minor… wow, it was a relative key! So I told him I was going to have this thing evoke holiday and winter season imagery, and maybe he could add something along those lines from whence he came… He did, then left a while later and I never saw the dude again.

Post Receiving (2000-)

Me:
Guitars, Fretted and Fretless Basses, Drums, Percussion, Rhodes Piano, Keyboards, Studio Craft

Also Featuring:
Paul Horn Mueller, Dom Piscopo, Whit Harrington, Jason Dean, Brandon Arnieri, Todd Larowe, Ryan McDonald

This is a period which obviously hasn’t ended per se, but I wanted to separate it from the stuff that Glenn and I have been doing because the Cheekymonkeyfunker stuff is largely a new range of ideas for me.

Since the CD was mastered and sitting on my desk, I was not about to go and redo it while some of these tracks popped up, each with a certain amount of charm, some sounding better than what ended up on the CD. So they have languished in this weird state for about 4 years now. But that was only some of them; the rest are various tracks, almost all instrumental, as I played with various groupings of musicians from the end of 2000 on through the more recent times. 2001 was a crazy time of change for me, and musically, I had ambitions to top Receiving that never materialized, despite all the changes in gear, recording space, life, and whatever else. The ideas, when they do grace me with their presence, show promise but its been a hell of a time getting people together to realize things in recorded or performance form. The ending phase of recording Receiving was one where I wanted to leave the studio craft in favor of playing again, but this time on bass or guitar. So this post-Receiving period has been a far longer period of reinvention. Only the recordings have not kept pace. I’ve played with a lot of people, made hours and hours of jam recordings (and have thrown it all out as I go), and make some things that stick. So these are the orphans of the bunch, but some are far more appealing as music. Some are just nuts-out experimentation. In this era, I was trying to incorporate more musical influences, initially in weirder forms, but eventually into a rock band format. And sometimes, as you can hear, there are great intimate episodes with me on the keyboards, or a guitar, or whatever. One of the things I always prided myself on is that for the most part, most of my stuff sounds like it has its own thing. I don’t usually do anything for long. In fact, my attempts to form a rock band in the last 5 years has been my longest, dogged attempt to do any certain thing! The stuff Glenn and me are doing is musically close to the stuff I had in mind and have been struggling to get recorded for years, but none of that stuff just described is turning up in our recorded work. Hmph!

Cheekymonkeyfunkers (2005)

Me:
Guitars, Basses, Rhodes Piano, some Drums, Studio Craft

Glenn Farrington:
Drums and Vocals

As mentioned above, the CMF was Glenn Farrington and me, doing things mostly in a jam setting. He was around long enough to see a few things happen, which is more than I can say for some, and is in stark contrast to certain folks who have been around for years longer and haven’t gotten shit done. So even though it hasn’t borne fruit of the sort that I wanted to follow Receiving with, it shows promise and has gone further in some regards than my own efforts in some long time. We’re both refugees from the local music world who just want to make stuff and not pretend we’re good or original. As opposed to my earlier stuff, this is the material I have played the least drums on. None of it comes from earlier demos or jams, so I’ve been able to just go at it on guitar and bass, and even on the Rhodes–the last recording I got of it before I sold it finally in 2005. I think so far, CMF is putting my best bass forward, which I always regarded as the next most comfortable instrument to drums, my first love.

Slaves By Trade: (1994)

Me:
Drums, Lyrics

Also Featuring:
Jim Pupplo and Josh Rogers

Slaves By Trade is a band I played with in mid 1994. As you can hear, they had some Alice In Chains and Soundgarden to them. I chose this song because it was also my own set of lyrics that I handed to Jim, and in our shows at least, this song was well received. We did a 9 song recording in August of that year, just two weeks after I got my new drums for about $4000, then promptly broke up 2 months later. This is the last thing I ever did as a guy who played “drums only.” But after this season of meathead metal, I wanted to get back into doing songs about farm animals and eccentrics. Jim, the guitarist was the one who initially interested me in playing guitar. Last year, I came to find out that a man matching his description died in a Naval Aviation accident in Japan. This news, ironically came to me exactly 10 years after the date when I bought my new drums, and went to a party, and met someone who changed my life for years to come.

Girl Singer (1999)

Me:
Drums, Bass, Synthesizer, Ebow and Electric Guitars, Production

Also Featuring:
Girl Singer, Todd Larowe, Mike “Bad Jesus” McMahon, Mark Moorhead

[Girl Singer] was an odd bird. She talked a lot and maybe even got stuff done, but mostly she talked a lot. Like, too much. She was this girl singer who had something of a gift, but it was mostly her ability to talk too much. She came to me through Mike Keneally, who said she was this dynamite artist and perfect pitch singer who could just pop out a performance so fast it was stupid (it was this project that made me start to question his judgment on what is good and bad music). He supposedly was going to be the producer, guitarist, bassist, and whatever. Supposedly I was going to be the drummer and fader monkey. Well, maybe that was to be the case if she could have a-fucking-fforded him! They were talking up some spec deal and it fell through, so here I was, left with her on my own, and so I called up my newfound guitarist buddy Todd Larowe who was more than happy to step into Keneally’s abandoned shoes. The Keneally Konnection was not totally severed; [Girl Singer] did have this one tune (Toddliness) that got some Keneally Krafting but it was limited to some additional guitar after Todd and I did the heavy lifting, and some hard slash editing that I personally think was shit. Only one song of the bunch got the production I think it deserved and that my abilities at the time were able to give it (Chainlink Fence). Todd and I worked on that like dogs one night and got it quite a bit like an acoustic version she had that she dared us to record with a few ideas. We got the music bed done and she protested. Finally she shut up till I showed her her list of ideas, then showed her how the key and tempo were matched exactly, and the feel was more locked in than the original because we looped 4 bars of drums! Finally she shutup and put down some vocals and it turned out great. Somewhere along the line, we had Bad Jesus join us on fretless bass, so we at least were playing as a band, cutting most of the tracks together.

[Girl Singer] was always talking in someone’s ear when she should have been listening. She annoyed us with exactly that. She all but refused to sing a part more than 3 times, even if the recording was blown out by her unexpected dynamic meanderings. Likewise, she would change lyrics each time she sang it, and combined with the fact that she always managed to blow a section or two, it was hard sometimes to even convince her to sing the song enough so that I could even edit a track together from scraps! The last several songs we did had no particular attempt at production done; she had pissed me off sufficiently with promises of this and that and never came through. The final straw was the week of the Columbine shootings when she decided she was going to be the anthemess of the post-shooting period. So she talked me into doing this song for her, but I said it would be three days of work, no more. So Todd came in and played the piano, some guitar, bass, and I played drums, and she sang. Then Bad Jesus heard the song and wanted to sing on it (we had no time to involve him on bass), so he and I did laboriously detailed background vocals for a section, which come mix time, [Girl Singer] nearly deleted. She was a pushy broad for the amount I got paid. But Todd and Mike and I put in some honest effort, so the songs remain in the canon. Those poor guys however got up on stage with her to do some open mic playing and it was a fucking disaster. For all her micromanaging, she couldn’t count bars worth a shit and couldn’t remember her own songs!

Sometimes there just isn’t enough money in the world to do this shit.

Loaf (1999, 2002)

Me:
Keyboards on 1, Guitar and Keys on 2, Wah Guitar and Small Percussion on 3, Production

Loaf:
Everything Else

Loaf were a band who came here on a few occasions to get some recordings done. The odd thing was that they were a two guitar and keyboard band in each instance, but somehow I ended up on their stuff rather prominently. I’d end up mixing out some of the extra stuff that they put down and didn’t sound too good as a recording, and would poke around at figuring out what maybe worked better. They were a garage band/weekend warrior group who just wanted to have fun anyway, so they usually just went with whatever I did, which usually meant rearranging their whole sound so that everyone didn’t play at once all the time. They got to be a 7 piece band, and when I wanted to challenge myself during times of major studio change over, I’d have them over for some tunes to see if I could get everything at once and make it sound good. The last song is one of those tracks that went down mostly live, but with some stuff added and deleted, and I still regard it as one of my better natural sounding recordings. Rebecca, the lead singer, is a naturally gifted singer who also plays percussion in Loaf, and drums and guitar as a songwriter. She is also a joy to record because unlike [Girl Singer], she …gets it. Rebecca and fellow Loafer Dawne Forderer were my backing singers around this time when I was doing bits of ReCyclED and Receiving. Rebecca is one of the few people I would actually set out to work with if I wanted to do a songwriter sort of gig.

Definition Of Dope (2002)

Me:
Guitars, Mixing

DOD:
Everything Else

This is a one shot deal. Everything was done in a day primarily by my buddy Mike Bedard, drummer extrordinaire. He wrote the track for an MC friend of his, who came in and delivered this fun little ditty in a few takes. Mike played drums and keyboards, and the bass player who was in Jennifer Lopez’s band that year came in and played bass. I put down the two guitars. The mix you hear is actually done about year and a half after the thing was recorded; I had some new Pro Tools plugins to mess with and was gleefully remixing some things.