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He was real lonely
he was this old-timer, he’d come out and
just sit there and talk to me
the whole time I was painting
He said “A shotgun and a flashlight”
(that’s all you need)
(yup. no doubt man!)
He waited for one of the skunks to
pop its head out of the hole
and he shot it.
But he wounded it and it crawled up underneath
and it died under there.
Man, he was stealin’ schnitzels and sausages
and stickin’ ’em up his-
I had this really crappy apartment in Jamestown
(me too)
The heater didn’t work.
So you’d go to the library to stay warm?
Yeah, basically I was hanging out with a lot
of people who were in the same boat as I was.
You didn’t have fleas because it was so cold
I had a heater so the fleas didn’t die
Yeah, there’s an upside and a downside to everything
So I spent a lot of time I the library and
while I was there, I just educated myself.
I used to skip class so I could get an education at the library.
No tips
salt shaker, pepper shaker
ex-sugar shaker waitress
Dirty looks,
empty coffee cups
stained by the lips of lovers
All washed up.
You’re never gonna get the right people in there
because the right people in there
are always going to be the
wrong people.
Because anyone who wants to be in that position
and workss to the point to be president or governor
has somethin’ wrong with ’em.
They’re all sociopaths…
…everywhere.
I’ll be recoding and I’ll talk to myself while mixing
sometimes out loud
And my wife will giggle about it
lovingly giggle about it
like “Oh, he’s talking to himself again.”
Because I’ll…it’s not just mumbling
like (ramurjrjfufrffaufg)
It’s conversations between me the artist
and me the recording engineer
So it’ll be like the same kind of conversations
I would have in a studio when I was the artist
taking to the recording engineer
and / or producer.
But I’ll say out loud to myself,
loud enough that my wife can hear
it from the other room,
and can hear most of what I’m saying,
I’ll say thing things like:
“Maybe we should add a little reverb and EQ on this vocal
but turn down the volume, is that cool?”
And then the artist me will reply back to the engineer me
and say, “Sounds like a plan. Let’s do it.
But let’s try it without the
reverb first just the EQ then turn it down and listen to it.
There’s already a lot of reverb on that other vocal.”
And then the engineer (me) will say “OK, let’s
do that, but if it doesn’t work,
let’s try it my way.”
Actually that’s a myth. But
there’s always one or two people
who really kinda fulfill the myth.
So what did you think of that club
where you saw my band
in the late 80s?
It was so underground, we could not find it.
So what did you think of that club
where you saw my band
in the late 80s?
It was so underground, we could not find it.
One of the simple decisions I made was
he had, in his written text,
his words first,
and Kip’s movie poster words second.
I looked at it and I just immediately
realized, “No, the trailer comes before the movie.”
And I did it and it just made such a huge difference.
And Phil was blown away by it.
He’s like “Man, good move putting Kip’s part
first, that’s so brilliant. Why didn’t
I think of that?
Here’s what I wrote him back.
And this is useful
news you can use.
I think it’s a good
redemption in the third act
to end with here.
So I’m gonna read this
thing that I wrote to Phil.
And I really like what I said.
We’re actually thinking of calling our next record
“We Believe Us.”
I typed it by accident as a typo
and I liked it.
Phil said “Hey, I believe us.”
If you don’t believe yourself
who’s gonna believe you?
So I said, about moving
Kip’s part first, moving the movie trailer
part to the beginning of the song
and then having Phil’s part,
which is kind of “the movie”,
after that.
I said
“Sometimes something that simple
is what makes something perfect.
In music, writing, filmmaking,
any sequential media.
And also with things like
a business or managing
groups of people.
When you do it right,
the result is so powerful it’s like
“Man, that’s so perfect, that’s the only
way it ever could have been like that.”
We watched the guy fall from a
20 foot ladder.
It all started back at community college,
right? English 101 and Radio Broadcasting class.
It was a Sunday. We happened to be hanging out
at the…
He did The Gospel Hour.
He had to go, man.
He saw us there and said “Can you take over for me?”
So we took over for him.
Is that how we got on radio?
Our professor said there’s two bands you can’t play,
The Sex Pistols and Frank Zappa.
So we just got our FCC licenses
and we had to break them in.
So it was the gospel hour, all these
little old ladies were expecting
Mahalia Jackson
and then we blast ’em with some
Zappa.
And I remember there was a big
fervor on campus after that.
And we actually fed it
because I wrote a letter to the editor
as if I was a person who was offended.
So that was kind of our start in radio.
But we would do spoken word stuff
we would do our own stuff
poetry
and I remember you’d bringing in your guitar.
It was more almost just like a hang out.
Kinda like this now.