100 SONG MARCH

This fragment is the first recording of Ronnie and me playing together. We had just begun playing guitar a couple months before so our timing sucked, but I like the way it sounds like some kind of forgotten recording from the days of the Delta Blues, a couple of drunk sharecroppers learning to strum. I include it because it is the only remaining baby picture of Lucid Nation and you can see how deeply the blues had us under its spell. I said “my bad’ when I made a mistake so even though I didn’t want to sing at all I was the first vocalist for Cat Cult! The band is mine! Mine I tell you! My unconscious was all set to go go go but it would take riot grrrl to kick open the door. Listen to the song: Click Here

This is Ronnie’s first and by far most primitive experiment with multi-track recording and effects. At first, it seems by fox Ronnie means foxy like the rock stars of yore he mentions but really this title is lifted from the I Ching. Ronnie’s a big Lee Scratch Perry fan as mentioned and I think you can hear a bit of that in this mix. He plays the big solo near the end; I do the meandering bluesy slide licks the rest of the song. There are two kinds of rock and roll: entertainment and enlightenment. Sometimes an artist is both. Any real rock fan is wondering, along with me, what happened to rock as enlightenment? The electric troubadour poets who crystallized and galvanized generations, we haven’t had a real one of those in a long ass time. In this song I think Ronnie captures one reason for that. He sings about Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Jim Morrison, three of the most devoted rock as enlightenment poets. Their deaths resonate with an isolation and resentment that would make any sensitive artist think twice about following the trail they blazed. I’m sure Kurt Cobain would have had a verse in this song but he was still alive when it was written. Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for Ronnie’s lyrics about patience overcoming violence at a time when AC/DC and Muddy Waters were all I would listen to. “Backed into a corner of mirrors You got only yourself to blame Change is original sin When you play the sacrifice game Sometimes you find it even in your family Like being at the mercy of Nazi charity “Baby, ain’t no need for suicide or murder there’s always a way across if you walk a little further you gotta walk a little further you will find ways across.” You’ll notice that Ronnie at the time had a bad case of baby-itis. Almost every song gets at least one “baby”. It reminds me of a story I was told about the guy who sang for horrible hit band Foreigner. He had “hey-itis”. He had to sing “hey” at least twice in every song, and sometimes he’d add a “hey” after every line. Finally the producer said one more “hey” and you’re fired. That was the cure. Ronnie required nothing so drastic. Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like: I have an ancestor who was a chief on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Because of the fate of so many of his family at the hands of the Nazis, Ronnie has strong feelings about the genocides suffered by Native Americans and slaves. Check out Ronnie’s way with lyrics: “Devil headed people came over on a boat They had a disease that made ‘em want to choke The life out of everything beautiful, wild and free, Inside those pilgrim eyes were highways of concrete.” “Don’t it make you wish poor Bob had possession over Judgment Day” is a nod to his obsession at the time with all things Robert Johnson. But what I want to know is how did a first generation American immigrant kid become such a total redneck (as proven by this drawly bluesy rasp of a vocal that sounds like it was lifted off a 78)? Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like: “You come knockin at my bedroom door like some kind of guilty conspirator lke a spy in the night like an angel on the sly like the southern sun in the morning sky talk to me all night about your boyfriend follow me home into my bed Tell me all and everything you’ve seen You’re first love and last dream Tell me your secrets with a kiss Use the talk of fingertips.” I think those are lyrics are beautiful but I would never sing anything so blatantly romantic, and neither would Bon Scott or Ronnie van Zandt, so I’m okay about it. Listen to the song: Click Here

That glitch at the beginning shows how close we came to recording over this song! Way too silly and romantic for Tamra to ever sing, but cute, in a Marc Bolan with a dash of silly Lennon kinda way. I love the bluesy interplay of our guitars. I guess our instincts were good because we had no clue and a lot to learn! We were convinced we could not be good because we had not been playing long enough. Columbia Records’ interest in us was like some kind of strange cosmic joke. Instead of ambitiously exploiting it, we were waiting for the punch line. Listen to the song: Click Here

Ronnie’s rhythm guitar part later became the Lucid Nation song L.A. River that Keith Richards called marvelous. I played a sweet bass line on that, but I like this song just as much. They say L.A. is a city In a nightmare that never sleeps Show me a town where pity Outweighs the law of the street The twentieth century, Baby, it’s history Time can’t turn back To how things used to be Do I sound a little paranoid? I had a nightmare for breakfast today. I saw a hundred million people Pretending it’s yesterday. It’s like Woodstock never happened It’s like Ike never died It’s like Elvis never shook it It’s like Nixon never lied. That song is over ten years old but it makes even more sense today. I may have to do a version of it with Lucid Nation I like it so much. Listen to the song: Click Here

Yes, that is me snickering. This song is a lament for musicians lost when one night stands became pregnancies unplanned. It would make a great condom commercial. On a more serious note I think the cruelty of women who saddle men with unwanted children, often for gain, can be a crime like rape: they forever change someone’s life against their will when they force a man to be a father. Of course, he was too stupid to take precautions so maybe nature elected him for the honor of parenthood. Insert joke about how there wouldn’t be a human race if women stopped trapping men with children. Tamra, you are slandering the very force of civilization, the bit and reins most trustworthy can only be fitted against the wild animal’s will. Men, like horses, must be broken. Besides, it is the oldest profession. Listen to the song: Click Here

As timely as today’s headlines! Things have only gotten worse since this song was written. “How do you deal with hopelessness? How do you deal with helplessness? How do you deal with crisis When it’s world wide And there’s nowhere to hide.” I’m not sure how we accomplished this weird mélange of Woody Guthrie and AC/DC, no one could have planned it, it reads like it shouldn’t work, and yet somehow it does. Listen to the song: Click Here

Now we are moving back through time to the very cassette tape that got Columbia Records interested in Cat Cult. These recordings were made inside an apartment living room, the two of us playing cheap guitars through practice combos, on a hand held cassette recorder. Talk about no overdubs or effects! I wrote the music, Ronnie wrote the lyrics and he plays lead. It reappears on the Cat Cult Columbia multitrack demo as Boulevard in my Backyard with different lyrics and a much boppier feel only partly due to all the extra instrumentation. The music reappears again as the song Angry Pelicans on Lucid Nation’s “The Stillness of Over” CD with new lyrics and vocal by Debbie Haliday, and Ronnie on bass. Hollywood Boulevard used to be mostly junkies and hookers, in a way it still is, they’ve just been pushed onto the side streets. On the boulevard itself you see mostly tourists these days. Since Disney started spending big bucks there the area is becoming gentrified. Some of it’s cool, like having the Knitting Factory there. The movie theaters are glitzy. The famous Capitol Records building, meant to look like a stack of vinyl discs, is being turned into condos, and I have to admit if I was looking for a condo I’d really have to consider the building so many legendary bands recorded in. The neighbors loved that part near the end of this track where we cranked up a sound effects record air raid siren. Listen to the song: Click Here