It’s All Such Bullshit

Another Yesterday, by Larry Lines

This is another one that I think is the hit single on the record. I played the drums on this one too. I think this one was co-written by Larry and his friend Mark Pringle a long long time ago. Maybe just Mark. We never could find Mark to make him join BMI and give him the credit in case we made money. Never made any money to date though so whatever.

I just noticed the line “as a dream I cannot live a life I cannot dream” - that’s awesome. That’s just awesome.

Now I’m listening to the guitar solo section. Very nice. I like that we put a new bassline in there for the solo section, run through some kind of weird amp or setting. The funny thing is I don’t remember much about doing this song. I remember it sounds really neato and I think it’s a single, but I can’t remember what we did with that bass, for example. It’s like there’s just this day where we knocked this song out and didn’t think about it and moved on or something. How utterly strange.

The Girl’s Alright, by Larry Lines

This song’s interesting. Larry said it was basically about him and any number of his friends and friends’ kids. It reminds me of the characters from the moive “Go” (Katie Holmes’s breakout flick - GOD she was pretty in that movie). Of all the songs, this one talks about something about Larry which I really respect a lot. He has plenty of history of adolescent craziness, from drugs to gangs, the whole bit. But he’s turned out amazing and solid, and because of all that history and how he’s turned out, he’s able to stay calm in the face of almost anything. This song “the girl’s alright” is really what he would say if someone were to be worried about their teenager. And he would mean it and he would be right. He really has that energy of “things are going to be ok”. And that is not only rare but really helpful as all get out.

This song’s interesting to me musically too. I like how it gets more complex each go around. But I don’t like that it feels way too long. It’s like it was too long, but we didn’t change enough of the root foundation to keep it interesting to me. But when I thought about cutting it, there was no bit of the story in the lyrics that could be cut out without ruining it. So the story is the right length, the music is too long. In my opinion. Nevertheless there’s some really fun stuff in here.

First of all, right away when Larry starts singing, there’s this “brawr braw ra rar ra” thing - that’s actually me singing through a Leslie amp. A Leslie is this thing with a rotating speaker, which makes it have this crazy wavering quality. We also ran Larry’s clean guitar through that in the chorus. I think we also ran the bass through it. There’s a synth track in there that I played. Then in the second verse, there’s ANOTHER synth in there that I played and faded it in. Then we play with the vocals making them like a telephone. Then the third verse we add in an extra distorted guitar. These are all different melodies so we’re creating so much counterpoint. We just kept writing new melodies. Then we go into this bridge and there’s a synth-horn line with yet another melody! And I sing through the Leslie again. Then another bridging/chorus piece with yet another melody and another synth groove and a different distorted guitar!! Oh and I’m hearing an extra vocal!

I’m not sure why we did so much. It’s almost like this was our last chance to record anything and we threw every trick we could think of at it. I really enjoy listening to all the different timbres and ideas. There’s a lot to discover, and listening to it now, I hardly remember doing any of this. It’s also a decent mix which always amazes me.

So yeah, that’s “The Girl’s Alright”, and yeah man, she really is.

Cat In The Desert, by Larry Lines

I think this was the 1st or 2nd track we did for this record. It was either this first, She Owns Me second, or vice-versa.

Between this and Right On Time and Another Yesterday (which were later in the process), you can see how we sort of evolved and came into our stride as producers. Those other songs definitely have a different feel, partly because of the live drums. But to me that’s cool because that gives us some variety on the record.

I played all these synth tracks on this and did some MIDI sequencing and drum programming. I did the synth solo in the bridge, and Larry played a guitar solo and they kinda play off each other, and I remember that being a happy accident.

I remember this image of standing in front of this keyboard that belonged to Rock Romano, having it on a keyboard stand in the control room, and Larry and Tamara sitting there in the guest chairs. I’m not entirely sure it was Tamara, or if anyone else was really there besides Larry. The thing I remember liking about doing this record is the sense of community around it. There was more community around the recording of this than of Cult Of Nice even. In case you hadn’t gleaned, we did this record almost immedietly after doing Cult Of Nice, in fact I think they maybe even overlapped a lot. So the “team” around it was basically the same team. There was me of course, and Larry, and Tamara, and Justine (Larry’s wife), and some other people. There was Rebecca, and old old friend of Larry’s and Tamara’s who I’ve mentioned before, and Kara, who was a friend of Rebecca’s, and occassionally this old friend of Larry’s from Boston (I think) called Sebastian. Oh and Darrel (I wonder how to spell his name), who was the most ingenious worker of metal and maker of metal furniture and also of construction in general, really anything to do with building, mechanics, physical shapes, things and stuffs. He was older than all of us. He used to work for AJ Foyt or something crazy and had invented some shit that basically revolutionized auto racing without ever really being credited for it, and then drummed out of the business by his wife (who was EX wife by the time I met him). At least that’s the story as best I know it.

Darrel built (with me as assistant!) the incredible aluminum speaker stands/rack mount units that I had in the Houston studios and the Oakland studio. It was incredible to watch him do stuff like that.

Anyway these and maybe even the occasional other person were always around. They’d be in Rock’s studio listening to us track or mix, and they’d come to me and Tamara’s house/my little studio to listen to tracks and give us feedback.

Sebastian had years before created a label around a certain techno artist on the East Coast, and through sheer being unafraid and just pretending he was three different people and not knowing he couldn’t do it, he made the thing a huge success. Then two things happened: 1) they snorted all the profits and 2) they put this artist on stage in front of 3000 people for his first performance, and it turned out the artist had lied: he had no performance experience and he froze. It was ridiculous, apparently.

We wanted Sebastian to help blow Third Option up like that, but in the end, nothing much happened. That was one of the times I learned (again) how you can’t really retain a person of that calibur without any money or promise of it. Maybe if we’d caught him in his drug-addled days when he was doing that other artist, but by then, he had turned it all around, had a high paying real job, kids, etc.

Anyway Larry’s record was really fun to do not only because of the great collaborative energy me and Larry had, but because of that community around it. Also, I was doing somebody other than myself a service, and that was really neat.

Ok! New subject!! I’ll talk about somebody else’s record! But I recorded this one!

Larry Lines “Numen”. Larry Lines! Of Larry Lines fame! LarryLinesBlog!

We did this mostly at Rock Romano’s Red Shack. We did a few things at my place, like a few little vocal lines and maybe a guitar or two.

Right On Time, by Larry Lines is the first track.

Larry played guitars and did all the singing on this track. He played bass and I played the drums and the piano interlude. Yes that’s me playing the live drumkit! How you like me now??? We wanted live drums, we had a drumkit and mics and such. But no drummer. So we said “ok Trumm you better go figure it out”. So I did! And we laughed and laughed! It’s not really the best drum performance on Earth, but we thought it usable.

I think Right On Time is a great song and could really be a hit single kind of thing. It’s just a solid thing. And I love the reverb and sound of the whole thing when he says “there’s a dead man at the wheel”. And the distorted guitar is nice nice nice. That’s a classic peavy amp mic’d up with a Neumann U47 - we really had some neato keen tools.

Another cool thing we did in this one is I made a sort of warrw warrw guitar effect on the accoustic guitar by manually tweaking an EQ knob in time while we mixed down. We mixed this stuff on the same mixer I mixed Cult Of Nice on, which meant it was all manual - no digital automation or being able to recall stuff later.

But yeah, right on time. It’s so up beat and positive, really. Very pop stuff. This whole record is so poppy but then also subversive. Larry’s good at writing that way. You end up nodding your head to something that’s actually saying you’re a head nodding moron.

Monkey Rhymes, by Third Option

Quick song. I could barely get the link and the lyrics and the buy button pasted by the time it was over!

Yes this is the money rhymes one I talked of before that was so berated by some cat on Broadjam.com - here it is in all it’s glory!

i don’t know but i been told
that you want me to fold
i don’t know but i been told
that you want monkey to fold

anymore.

You Can Never Stop Us

Oh wow I almost forgot about this one. The thing that I like about this one, actually, is how there’s this group of dudes (multiple version of me of course) saying “you can never stop us” real fast and for most of the time, it just sounds like rhythm instruments, but then at times I notice “oh yeah those are dudes saying you can never stop us!” That’s neat

There’s really a mixed message in this piece of poem. It’s interesting, because I do that a lot, but I think that makes a more accurate representation of “truth”. “Truth” isn’t this black and white thing where you can take one position. I’ve always said (not always - but a long time) that “truth is a mobius” - meaning that if you take a “position” on something, and follow the train of logic long enough, you’ll find yourself saying the opposite of what you started saying. I think this is part of the fundamental nature of things, where reality is paradoxical - and we do find that most of the greatest truths ARE very paradoxical. Committment-Non-Attachment is one of the major ones.

When it comes to this poem, there isn’t really a paradox as much as a double-edged sword. I was ranting about the wonderfulness of monkeys (monkeys still of course being a very thinly veiled metaphor for humanity) and I say how we dance on the corpse of impossibleness and it seems that this is good news to me, and I like it, and I want it. And then I say how we will adapt, and that still seems to be good news, but then in the next line I say “too dry, monkey? casinos with water fountains every 30 feet” and at that point it no longer seems like good news. Now I’m saying this is ridiculous, we’re not accepting, in effect, we’re NOT adapting, we’re forcing the environment to adapt, we’re trying to put water where this is not water.

And that does sort of emphasize again the mobius nature of truth and reality. We start out with adapting, take it too far, and come out not adapting. Doing the very opposite. And well, I guess I just become another person pointing out that there can be too much of a good thing, that anything taken too far is too much.

I guess that’s why some wise people say “everything in moderation, even moderation.”

The “lyrics” in question:

allow me to introduce myself
i’m the tallest monkey in the clouds
and you can never stop us
because monkeys know just what to do
where to do it
and how

you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us

Run, by Third Option

Pretty sure I improv’d this whole piece of poem here to tape. I remember a few days later I did an improv based on this - or - wait - it could be - yes I think it is - I think it’s reversed. What really happened was I did an improv with this refrain “run out the door we don’t need no more plastic floors” at a youth/teen slam in Spring, TX which I was hosting. We had a little round of doing improv and they all wanted me to try, and something like this is what I said. I didn’t say monkeys, but I did use that run out the door thing. I remember that I did it much better at the slam, actually. I remember I kind of starting taking off and getting into this socio political shit about 7up bottles and plastic floors and it was really powerful and people were like “WOW! DAMN! AMAZING! HOLY SHIT!” and such.

Yeah, and then this time, I didn’t quite get the same badassness as at the slam, but I got somethin.

That reminds me of this one guy who used to slam around the nation. His name was Abraham and he was from the south somewhere. He had a really sort of huck finn/way spiritual vibe - not straight essay style easy to understand spoken word like they do in slam nowadays, but poetry stuff, but he’d really go off. And he was an amazing improv person. I saw him improv at the Taos Poetry Circus slam and the thing about him was, his improv, the stuff that just came to mind for him, was the same as his written poetry. He just thought and talked like that. I mean I guess he didn’t talk like that if you sat at coffee with him, but when he improv’d it was no less poetic and crafted and beautiful. He could probably improv and you wouldn’t be able to tell. But not like guys who write as if they were talking or writing a prose essay. Like a POET, which was really weird and amazing to watch. He would just launch into this spiritual flight immedietly. I really tried to take him into me and have his thing become a part of my style. He was fuckin amazing. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Anyway here’s what’s on the record as far as poem for “Run”:

run
run
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run
run
out the door
where the tree lined skies begin again
run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run out the door
run out the cage
run out the stage
run off the stage
run off this stage of monkey lies and monkey things
and monkey things we must not do run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we got dirt
we got soil
we got the red wet earth
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
monkeys
belong
in trees
in jungles
in the earth
on the earth
on the red wet earth
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more
plastic floors

Climb, Monkey, Climb, by Third Option

Not sure if I improv’d some of this or not. I think maybe I did. If I didn’t, then I just jotted something down real quick. You can tell by all the repetition that it’s not a long-crafted work of utter care.

I like the notion “this isn’t a monkey’s job all this beating down of apes” - I remember that one. It isn’t really our calling to be all violent and dominating - our calling is to climb and exalt and whatever you wanna say. So yeah, here you go.

this isn’t
this isn’t
this isn’t wasted time
wake up in the morning
and find your tail wrapped around a naked rhyme

monkey in the sky!

Kong, by Third Option

and here we are
at the green leafy apocalypse of it all
fallen down
broken bones

we forgot the last
we beat sense into our own breast and put the smaller monkeys back
we call ourselves king
and kong sits soon to follow

Hmm. Interesting. A lot in here. I’ll just listen.

Monkey See, by Third Option

Hmm. Maybe I should have made other songs called “monkey do” and…oh that’s the whole phrase.

Some of this is improv’d too, but then I guess I wrote it down and then recorded it - or something.

monkey monkey monkey see
monkey do
monkey make money in the back of the zoo
monkey take
monkey make
monkey make money make money monkey
make take money take monkey take
monkey take
monkey don’t like to give
now all the vicious monkeys in the jungle cage the rest in zoos

and now monkey gets all fucked up on qualudes and burnt toast
and all monkey wants to do is fuck some little monkey girls
but monkey girls know better than to fuck with monkey now
’cause monkey look more like an ape these days
all buffed up on horse hormones
lookin like he mighta gone to mad monkey land
“yeah, i’m mad,” monkey says
“I’m really really mad! because they don’t play my song anymore!”
“because they won’t give me what I want anymore”
“because all those things we talked about before ain’t happenin anymore”
“because I NEED my monkey greed, motherfucker”
“and I’mon wrap my tail around any tree limb coca leaf twig bean or branch”
“that takes me outta this fucked up America of broken monkey lives”
“i’m not a monkey, I’m just a brown man with a brown plan”
“and maybe you oughtta remember that the next time you slap my hand”
“yeah, monkey read, monkey think, monkey LEAD”
“monkey rise up and make a revolution”
“how many king kongs are there?”
“only ONE”
“and when he falls,
“all the monkeys and lions and wildebeasts in the jungle are gonna have a little love in”
“til there ain’t no more powder cane monkeys spillin poison in the jungle streets”
“til there ain’t no more woe or wonder or hard monkey choices”
“til the rest of us take charge”
“and NOBODY calls us monkey anymore!!!”