SocietyFringePodcast's podcast

Wake up Monday morning and I look around

I felt bad this morning and my hair fell to the ground

She came by on Wednesday with a wedding ring

I ducked out on Thursday, baby, and hocked my wedding ring

It's hard

So I went out to Seattle to try to find a band

But nobody did want me they wouldn't let me lend a hand

So I cruised on down to LA and got a new tattoo

But nobody knew Chuck Berry songs or "Blue Suede Shoes"

It's hard

So I went on down to Athens but I played too hard

Flew to the Twin Cities but they wouldn't let me in the yard

So I hitch hiked back to Baltimore and I shot myself

Now I'm paralyzed but I have found myself

It's hard

Dave - guitars and vocals

Paul - bass, engineering, mixing

Wil - engineering, drums

Ian - mastering

WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019

When I was a kid I voraciously tore through biographies of the Beatles instead of text books. Even then I had little faith in being educated by people whom I thought were stupid. That's a Bootstrap Theory type of thing caused by reading too many damn John Lennon interviews. Humility would hit hard later. 

One thing both Lennon and Paul McCartney would talk about was that, being songwriters, they wanted to write songs for occasions that had a chance to become standards. That's why they wrote their Christmas songs, "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" for John and "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" for Paul. Both of them songs cut to the essence of them fellas for real. You wonder what each might have added to the other's but that's a recipe for a lifetime of WTF.

In College Park I was writing a rock opera with my buddy Joel Baily. We were in a band called Love and Hate. We changed our name to Forgotten Sons when that crap hair band Love/Hate started getting played on MTV. Joel and I wrote together all the time. We made a point of it. We wanted to be rock stars. As far as we were concerned we already WERE rock stars so we wrote us a song for the occasion of the winter solstice. 

Dig - this is pretty much the song we wrote. It stuck with me all these years. If a song sticks with me for decades I eventually record it, or try to anyway. This was around the time of "Do They Know It's Christmas" - all that pre-internet troglodytal ignorance of the cultures that aren't derived from the Anglo-Saxons. I honestly didn't know that the entire world wasn't celebrating Santa and Jesus on December 25th. Holy fucking shit how the fuck did we exist? I think a big deal was when the Cold War ended and then China started reengaging with the world. Collectively the human race began remembering that there were other parts of the globe besides where one is born, lives, and dies.  Around the time of the 9/11 terror attacks (which happens to be my fucking birthday) I added the stuff about"embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me." You know, channelling my inner peacenik. You can add American Christians to that list as well. In general that's a spiteful and mean segment of my beloved Americans. That sentence right there hints at my own unrealized bigotry. It's a constant battle.

Chances are you've already heard this song. I release it every year in December on whatever social media site is available. I'm very proud of it.

Recording wise we did the sleigh bells and the tuned water glasses but my favorite part is at the end when the acoustic guitar doubles the mandolin riff. These things happen during recording. The way I have always operated, or tried to, is that you roll the tape and see what happens during overdubs. That's the funnest part - the spontaneity. 

I was anxious to hear how Paul melded together the everything plus the kitchen sink approach I enjoy during recording and fuck if he didn't impress the living shit out of me with this mix. That's something I learned from Brian - trust the guy mixing. HE'S the one spending all the time sorting through vague ideas and sculpting a whole.

So I hope you like this one. The arbitrariness of the release is maybe my favorite thing about this song at present. 

Quickly - I purposely avoided any talk of the origins of what for all intents and purposes is an ancient celebration based on the movements of the stars. "Ancient" means, judging by the latest discoveries in anthropology, 100,000-200,000 years old. That deficiency of knowledge outside of one's own lineage is the sticking point that unscrupulous leaders use to aquire and sustain power. It's a useful tool. I have grown profoundly dissappointed in the reaction of the free peoples of the Earth to the vast networks of interwebs. I had mostly assumed that people were generally thoughtful and reasonable where as, if this past decade is taken as a sample of the reaction of civilization to new technologies that are inherently complicated to understand and yet superlatively easy to use, most people are easily swayed and governed by predjudice and place.  I'm still astounded that the great experiment of the fouding fathers has survived this long because, clearly, as I sit here  on 16 April 2019, the idea is better than the species to which it was gifted in hopes of a better world. 

Have a great Christmas this spring!

Christmas means togetherness and love and joy

Happiness and presents for the girls and boys

Old folk come together and then reminisce

Stand beneath the mistletoe and get a kiss

Love your friends and kin

When Christmas comes again

Shout out to the homeless in America

The starving out in Asia and in Africa

Embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me

The majority of folk through time just weren't free

Go remember them

When Christmas comes again

Make sure that you bring your love at Christmas time

People come and go but love is all the time

People they pass on but their love still exists

So let that love inside your hearts and reminisce

Love brings love, my friend

When Christmas comes again

Dave - guitars, vocals, mandolin, glasses

Paul - bass, engineering, mixing

Wil - drums

Ian -mastering

TIME FOR A CHANGE 1 APRIL 2019

Everything blends together eventually. You can call it entropy, erosion, degredation, there's a millions words through out time trying to explain decay. Maybe that's where we went wrong. Do we need to explain it? Can we just accept it? My fallback position when I get intellectualy lazy is "this is beyond human language." That's an obvious cop out.

I bring this up because I have two distinct memories of where this song was written - WAIT - they are one in the same! My timeline is off.  Phew!  I'm only still as crazy as when I woke up this morning. 

The year was 1988. I had taken a year off from school to ingest large amounts of psychedelic drugs and then returned.  I went to and lived at the University Of Maryland College Park, Cumberland Hall - a co-ed building. The previous year, 1987, was a great year for rock and roll. I spent the summer living and working (ish) in Ocean City, MD. That's also the last time I was arrested. Music-wise,  for the under(ish) ground, the Mats had released PLEASE TO MEET ME. For mainstream bros and hos GnR's APPETITE FOR DESTRCUCTION was making everyone want to try heroin. For the collegiate types U2 had THE JOSHUA TREE and REM had DOCUMENT. The good music bled into '88 and provided a youthful guitar heavy soundtrack to my life. Public Enemy and NWA were about to pop.

I played in a band in Bawmer - Kona, the next in a long line of people who refused to play my fucking songs. So I would go to school during the week and come home on the weekends to play fucking cover songs to drunks. It was a way to keep my chops sharp. I can't stress this enough. It was a constant struggle to get anyone to play my songs. They referred to them as "originals" like they were some odd alien lifeform beyond the mere talents of idiot Marylanders. My reasoning was always "somebody had to write these fucking songs we're covering - they didn't just appear!" But the poeple around me who played gyuitars were always "yeah but they're songwriters. We're just people from Baltimore." Baltimore I love you but sometimes you really suck.  So not having the resources to actually play all these fucking songs I was writing I categorized them in my own little library code - the Davey Decimal System.

That's a lot of backstory. I wrote "Time For a Change" when my best friend Made Hood was moving to Bali to study ethnomusicology. I was also moving on from my freshman year at college. It was a reset moment. Made was NOT someone who discouraged my songwriting. We actually wrote together. Two of our compositions eventually made it - part of them anyway - to THE BIG OPERA. He wrote the "slide on by" chorus in "The Orphan" and we came up with the riff to "How Do You Like That" after smoking around an ounce of weed. 

This song, obviously, works well as an opener. So whenever I needed a first song in an opera I used this'n. It's not plot specific so you can use it anywhere - any setting, any time period. The only detail is "kazoo." It just so happenned that this song found a home in 1993. It was roughly written around this time, me being a young man who didn't know anything yet but was confident enough to try to make poeple learm his songs.

Musically this was recorded at The Shed in rural Bawmer County with Paul Kelley and Wil Berry, aka "Porky." Pork was the first guy EVER who was into playing my songs as the reason for a band. I'm forever grateful. Dig - by this time I was in my mid twenties. In my mind I had lost around a decade trying to convince people that we were worthy to write. It got easier for people coming up after me. There was no stigma to creativity for them. So I wrote this during Kona and a little interim band called Pritty Hary played it and then it sat in the 1993 folder for 20 years. This arrangement is pretty much the same as when it was written and demoed on my little TASCAM 4 track. 

If you remember me you see

Think of the blood pumping through

If I remember you playing your kazoo

Please remember me

If I were you and you were me

Then just what would you see

When feeling kind of rough

Looking pretty gruff

Be remembering

It's time for a change

Look around that person

Find out what is certain

Choose the other curtain

Yeah but it might bring the worst in

Right now I feel like shit and that's it

Right now nobody's here

And then I think of you wondering what you'd do

If you see me too clear

It's tiume for a change

Dave - guitars and vocals

Paul - engineering, mixing, bass

Pork - drums

Ian - mastering

WINTERTIME ACOUSTIC 21 March 2019

During a nice hot Maryland summer a couple of years back I was helping my buddy Paul cut down a bunch of dead pine trees on the property his family has owned since somewhere back in the sepia toned days before people realized other people existed. Big suckers they were,  full of sap and sharp edges that would slice up your shins and calves if you were foolish enough to wear shorts. I was doing the grunt work for Paul and his mom's husband. They cut 'em down and chopped 'em up and I moved the big shit into a dump truck and the small shit into a succession of burn piles. My dad had recently died and Paul asked how I was doing. 

"I'm more relieved than anything else." I said.

"You aren't depressed or anything? I was when my dad died. I didn't know it until later and then it hit me."

I shrugged. I WAS relieved. I was the executor for his estate. I had carted him around to all of his doctors appointments for his COPD which he had although he never smoked. He was a doctor. He had a formality to him that, as I got older, I found endearing.  Due to some arrangement with him and my mom he never paid any child support. So although we lived in a big ol' victorian in Old Catonsville times were tight. He always bought me shit, though, and having divorced parents both buying Christmas presents was, hmm, something that happened.

So cut to a year later and my wife and I have dedicated my dad's old Jeep Grand Cherokee to Baltimore Animal Rehabilitation Center and it hit me. That was the last physical bit of my Dad's shit that was still hanging around.  So I sent ol' Paul a text message along the lines of "dude you were dead on it just hit me today my fucking dad is dead."

Paul's a musician, a bass player, and he's been a dedicated listener to all the wacky shit that Brian and I put out on the Society Fringe Podcast Podcast. Somewhere between Circle 9 and SFP, Circle 9's drummer Wilmer Earl Berry Jr (Pork) had joined Paul's band, Pearly Goats, one of my favorite fucking bands. I had all my operas lined up to record with Brian. He said he needed a break (after only 13 albums in 2 years? Crazy, right?) so I figured I'd record 1993 during the break with Paul and Pork. This being life, things happen and now I'm working on the Brian-Andy SFP concurrently with the Paul-Pork SFP.  It's still one long narrative that takes place over the course of centuries and eventually millenia. The 1993 stuff is rooted in young adult ennui devoid of romantic roadtrips and gunfights in the vast American desert and the Far East. It's a companion piece to Travelogue - happening at the same time, but rooted in realism. The main relationships are the fella, his dad, and his girlfriend. Mainly it's about him and his dad getting on each others' nerves. I didn't realize it until I returned to it when it became clear that it could actually be done. By "done" I mean recorded andreleased.

So, dig, each act is a season in the year of Bawmerhun 1993.  "Acoustic Wintertime" starts it off because musically it foreshadows a song in WINTER and we had changed the arrangement into what eventually became "Stoner Wintertime." It was important that the jarring strum patterns were heard because they get revisited in SPRING in a song actually about jarring strum patterns. I like how it starts with "ready?" and we're off. Paul's on his standup. This is a demo for Pork. I initially wanted to put the version from the original demo I recorded while Circle 9 was working on THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES but this version came up and inserted itself into the equation. In these long narratives I take these kinds of things as signs that this is how the story wants to be told. It's fun to see patterns that you didn't know existed. It's like submerging your ego in pursuit of something "other." 

So here you go. Paul and Pork ain't as into talking about their art as Bri and Andy so I'm going to do essays for the 1993 stuff. It will save a dickton of money, relatively, because this'll just be songs without the hour long spitball session Briy and I tag onto everything. I told him we still had to do some because it's become a clearinghouse for mental shit we go through. Lucky you for getting to hear it.

The bold and ragged beauty of a winter tree

Struck Susan as quite odd as she looked to see

A table full of papers but none up to date

No chance to glimpse beauty when you're running late

-----

A far off police siren pierces through the air

But Billy doesn't notice and he doesn't care

Sirens don't man nothing in the county jail

Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail

-----

In wintertime the sun don't shine

The ice it shines the world's unkind

-----

An accident just happened out on National Pike

Some lady ran a red light sliding through the ice

Valentine's Day candy scattered on the street

Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet

The windows creak and moan as the wind bears down

Whipping through a tree branch lying on the ground

The screen door whistles loudly and the yard is froze

And me I write a song and I can't feel my toes

chorus

Dave - guutar and vocal

Paul - engineering, stand up bass

Ian - mastering

00 "Baby Please Don't Go" Plastic Ono Mothers Of Invention

05  This would be the song playing over the credits at the end of the movie.

10  REAL TIME LISTEN

15  Supine: Face down. Prone: Face up.

20  I don't like one uppers.

25  He's not a mean boy

30  I might, yeah, it's that new fresh feeling.

35  It wouldn't have made sense to anyone that isn't in this room.

40  This is where it slips.\

45  Schedules conflict.

50  I have to be the grounding thing.

55  We had already signed on for SPACESHIPS GUNS AND BOOBIES

Love

Love

Love

Love

Love

Dave - guitars and vocals

Brian - bass, engineering, mixing

Andy - drums and percussion

Ian - mastering

00  The Trogs "A Girl Like You"

05  Yes  been sick all fucking winter.

10  We said it last practice, though.

15  REAL TIME LISTEN

20  The riff was just too cool.

25  I had a thing of chili.

30  It's like the California Nashville.

35  He's a riff monster.

40 Dead guys or dead musicians?

45 It's always so hard to be put on the spot like that.

50  Brian will talk about anything.