FLIP FLOP

Jocularity!

Listen for: Speaking in tongues, 1:37.

I HATE YOU

I totally spit the bit on this one.

I mean, Mike and Larry brang the noise, but I just didn't bring the funk.

I'm thinking in particular of the moment at 0:48 when I resort to counting to four. Twice.

Listen for: OK, the “Ready, leeettt's go!” part at 0:11 sounded promising. And the Johnny Rotten homage at 1:56 is kinda cute...

HAPPENS ALL THE TIME

And then it was the day after that.

We got together again, and this time with intent. We wanted to make more songs.

We headed over to Mike's house, but soon realized that he was locked out (which became lyrical fodder for the walking blues of track 1). So we recorded instead at my house.

Listen for: the inexcusable run of irredeemably off-key singing that starts at 0:53. If I could change anything about any of these recordings, I would wipe both passes at “Glad you're not around.” The “Couldn't find a key, and then it hit me” part at 1:14 is pretty punktacular, though...

LET IT LIE

Mike's mother would be home soon, and we could see from the small window on the cassette that there was not much room left on side A for recording. So we'd do one more.

And a manic one it was. It starts off propulsive and then falls off a precipice-- you can hear it twisting in midair, with only a slight updraft of shambles to keep it from hitting the ground.

Then at 1:45, there's a parachute. The whole thing gies and haws in the wind a little, and damn if it doesn't land with force to buckle but not break our knees.

Listen for: my most heartfelt yelp of satisfaction at the very end...

WAR IS KING

This one starts out with Mike trying out his Invisible Sun chords. And promptly getting annoyed with me because I wasn't singing.

That's what his little whistle at 0:15 means: “Dude, this is tasty shit, OK? Make some noise.”

But it was taking me a little time to figure out where to go with this one. So by the time I did start singing, I was kind of pissed myself.

Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right...

Listen for: Larry's martial beat at 0:37. You goddam appropriate bastard, you.

GIANT HAND

This one starts out with Larry dragging a pencil across the wooden slats of Mike's louvered window shade. Then Mike joins in with a riff from Turning Japanese, done 16 RPM style. And we're off to the races...

Listen for: the “bridge” at 1:02, where with a couple of head gestures we somehow lock together for a mean tempo shift. Also, that “Hurts, man” at 2:12 is insou-sou-souciant...

WHAT AM I TO DO?

A few months ago I was rummaging through a box of old mixtapes, and I came across a beaten TDK shell I'd recognize anywhere. The label was partially torn off one side, leaving behind a thin white layer of paper. The label on the other side was intact, grayed and browned with age, with one word written in caps: SLEAZE.

This was the master tape of the songs that Mike, Larry, and I had recorded.

I handed it off to my friend DJ Birdhouse for digitizing.

So here is track 1, side 1. You'll hear that it starts during the outro to The Magnificent Seven, which is not a statement or anything. We just pushed “record” and went, paying no mind to the condition of the tape...

Listen for: the scream at the 2:30 mark. Dang.

WATCH THE TAPES

From a boombox perched on the pebbly black roof of a '73 Maverick we played our songs.

A group of about a dozen kids, a couple of years younger than us, gathered to listen.

“You guys are rock stars!”

No. No, we were not.

We were three bored teenagers killing a couple of early summer afternoons making noise.

And when I say “noise” I am not being immodest.

Mike had been practicing guitar in secret, stealing his little brother's acoustic and trying to recreate the new wave hits of the day.

Larry did not appear to have any ambitions that involved drumming, but he was game to grab a couple of pencils, and sit in front of some empty cassette cases and overturned trash baskets.

I was the most verbally inclined of the three of us, so there was a good chance that I'd find something to say when it came time to sing.

So we sat and improvised, recording four songs one afternoon, and another eight the very next day.

The results were often horrendous. Rhythm, pitch, meter-- we violated just about any organizing principle of music you might care to name.

And yet, there were these rare moments when our streams met, and carried us along for five or seven seconds of something resembling magic. You would not need to listen very hard to hear us smiling.

We were rock stars...

RIP PURR

Bye-bye Smoltz. Hope you're slinking around somewhere with Lemke, chasing invisible mice...

SHOOTS COLORS ALL AROUND

I paid £1.95 for my In Rainbows.

The way I understand the global economy, that comes out to about 6 bajillion American dollars.

This better be good, Radiohead...

SWEET HASSLE

Excellent inadvertent Lou Reed quote of the day, courtesy of Lana, who was setting up the chessboard for a game:

"I wanna be black."

IT'S LIKE THAT

Classified ad of the day, from the Washington Post:

"Tape deck - $50. Old school, single cassette-deck, plays all my old Run DMC tapes OK, though."

50 bucks? That sounds like a $5,000 item if I ever heard one...

SMOKEN

"Look at this!" I said, my voice registering equal measures of excitement and disappointment.

"The May-cones," my wife read, as I dragged my finger along the text in the Post.

"Mekons! Mekons! I missed the Mekons, and they were 10 or 15 minutes away from my house. Son of a monkey!"

As much as she loves me, it was pretty clear that Taeko didn't much care. So I called her into the playroom after dinner, and put on Flitcraft.

"Here, listen. Mekons. See, it's important for you to know that this stuff can make me cry it's so damn brilliant."

She sat on the floor with one leg stretched behind her and cocked an ear. "Sounds like The Pogues."

Um, well, yeah. If you want to get all technical and shit...

CREDENCE

Dude, John Fogerty is way pissed...

HADES

You know, 10 years on and I still haven't really forgiven Radiohead for ending Let Down with such a horrid Stygian thud.

And by Stygian here I mean "sounding like goddam fucking Styx"...

CENTERFIELD

I spent the late afternoon on Sunday playing baseball with Sebastian, realms away from the men who toil at it for a living.

We played with a tennis ball, a Nerf football, and even took a couple of disequilibrating whacks at a speckled Ben and Jerry's frisbee.

It was a pretty perfect farewell to summer...