#winter1993

Stoner Wintertime Essay 17 June 2019 The essay for the song before this, the "Fireplace Memories Essay," barely dealt with the song. It's hard to be so emotionally bare in a format in which you haven't spent your entire life dicking around. Suffice to say I can sing about my dad but I sure as fuck can't write or talk about him. But THIS essay, why this one may be TOO song specific. Or maybe it will have nothing to do with the song at all. Part of the joy in being creative in a format that you made the fuck up is that you, the royal "you," are free to leap into flights of fancy. How much irrelavent tripe is too much? Tell you what, I'm not sure that relevance itself is relevant. Every once in a while I don't know what to do. But that's a lyric in a song called "Sinkin" to be dropped sometime when it's cold, most likely. "Stoner Wintertime?" The band was having trouble with the time signaure changes so we changed it. I kept the original version I used on the demo and started the record with it because one of the main points made in the larger piece is that the categorization of music is beyond arbitrary bordering on insulting. Everyone on Earth should be angered. Everyone on Earth should also crave truth and freedom. NEITHER of those things are happening. This is a moment in time, essentially, in a quantum amount of ways. In ways that I can percieve it's the wrapping up of the SFProject I undertook because Brian didn't want to do 1993. It's a little weird, right? I love playing with Brian and Wil but it's better for each of them if they aren't in the same band, at least to mine eyes. The major plus up in this bitch is that I've worked withPaul now for for 1 3/4 years. I LOVE the way WINTER 1993 turned out. I'm ecstatic. I ain't going to go into the ins and outs that go into putting together a record. Suffice to say that, as a fella who LOVES writing, I'm blessed (in a way that pays no allegience to the fictional characters known today as "deity') to have pockets of likeminded friends, up for experimentation. At the last SoSHEDity Fringe Players practice ole Pork was talking about the TV show Classic Albums, the one about WHO'S NEXT, and how nobody understood Pete Townsend's concept at all! Laughingly he said that reminded him of me. And of course it does! I can see it but I'm rightly convinced I'm the only one. There are parrallels in pop culture, mainly insanely ambitious and financially nation-sized ones like MVU and GoT. You see? I got the three letter thing down, motherfuckers - SFP! My brain's scattershot right now. My motherfucking sinuses are causing me a great deal of "goddammit." It drains the energy of the human body. All my extra juice is used fighting the inflamation. Healthy living remedies it to a certain extent. I irrigate the fuckers, I take OTC drugs, I run, do yoga, do body resistence. Every once in a while my sinus laughs at me. If I was a dumdum human living a hundred thousand years ago trying to make sense of this I'd ascribe all sorts of idiotic rememdies to something I couldn't understand. That's what people have done through-out the ages. Even as recently as 5,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, or maybe even 700CE or such. Do you see where I'm going? If you do you're a brilliant cynical motherfucker who is out of sorts with todays backwards looking society based on fear and paranoia. And while fear and paranoia do, in fact, "rule" as they say, pleae burst free from the chains of monotheism, thinker, and embrace LAST century!

The cold and ragged beauty of a winter tree Struck Dawn as quite odd as she looked to see A table full of papers but none up to date No chance t 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 mean nothing in the county jail Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail In wintertime The sun don't climb The ice it shines The world's unkind An accident just happened out on National Pike Some lady ran a redlight sliding through the ice Valentines day candy scattered on the street Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet The windows creek 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 - guitars and vocals Paul - bass and production Pork - drums and headphones mix Ian - mastering

Fireplace Memories Essay 10 June 2019 Fireplace Memories Essay 10 June 2019 This here is a straight up song written to my dad. You see, my method of songwriting hues closely to the template laid down by John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows" namely: "turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream." Later on I realized that people of all stripes and sizes use this philosophy in everything. It's what Mike Tyson meant when he said "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." It's what Tom Hank's character meant in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN when he said to a scared soldier "remember your training. You'll be fine." It's a basic root of improvisation's "yes and" tenant as espoused by the UCB trailblazers. Basically it's when one gets in touch with one's subconcious self. Writers talk about it. Athletes talk about it. That makes me wonder if it's specific to "performance." I don't believe I've ever read anything about a scientist claiming that their hands were moved by some unknowable force when they were hammering some hypothesis into a theory. Some people may say that that is what's wrong with science in the first place. How much does deduction and reasoning factor into the subconcious creativity of an aspiring artist? I would hazard to guess, as the fucking US president would day, very muchly. The thing about accessing some sort of non-concious realm is that it's unverifyable by any means of science. But is that true? The study of brains, especially as it pertains to psychedelic drugs, has recently been fascinating. I happen upon article after article of MRI scans of brains under the influence of substances that change perspective. Every one shows areas of the brain pumping away that lay dormant in brains being un-fucked with. In a way everything we learn is tethered to this particular existence. I get a sensation in dreams when I know I gotta wake up. In a semi lucid dream state I reassure myself that I have plenty of time to sleep. Then I ask myself how I know. I say because I'm looking at this clock. Then I say to myself but this clock only exists in this dream state and the state to which we have to wake up is a different one and this clock is meaningless in that world. At this point I usually wake up. But that's the larger point. Lunatics who believe the earth is flat (fucking idiots - thanks Russia!) exist on the same plane as Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Graham Hancock. Ultimately everything we know and learn is just an interpretation of the limited amount of raw materials we are provided in this waking existence. The importance or rightness of any idea is subjagated to the whims of modern society. Take the element of gold. It's a high value item. It would not be a high value item if the human race didn't exist. It is purely through the existence of homo sapiens that the basic element of gold is more valuable than salt - or nitrogen, if we keep it elemental. Likewise the retort when I claim the ultimate meaninglessness of the human race. But without us there would be no conciousness. I reply "why?" Surely something created by a lump of carbon that acts as cancer to it's environment could not be the entire reason for everything that came before it. Or could it? It doesn't matter. We're describing the same color using defferent terminology. From what I've seen by existentialist writing they try to hammer away at this diamond wall of impenetrability. I suppose that the bottom line is that there is no question unworthy of being asked. There is no answer that is substantially blasphemous. It's irritating and exhilerating, much like the writing of these essays is turning out to be. I used to have this problem in college. My hands can't keep up with my brain. I assume that's why I gravitated to playing the guitar. It's more efficient when relaying ideas. Let it wash over you, music. Sometimes it burrows into your soul.

Empty Glass Essay 5/25/2019 One thing I bought hook, line, and sinker through the nonstop diet of rock and roll literature I ingested through my formative years was the myth that getting fucked up helped the young artist become great. I remember John Lennon saying, in LENNON REMEMBERS, that substances had no effect on his artistic output with a quip along the lines of "I would have written 'I Am the Walrus' if I was on acid or under water." Of course that isn't the Lennon "Walrus" quote that stuck with me. He also said that he wrote "I Am the Walrus" by eating acid one weekend and writing a verse or line, then eating acid the next weekend and writing another verse or line, rinse and repeat until you make it to "goo-goo-ga-joob." I bring this up because I truly believed that chemical dependency was a prerequisite for rock and roll. I was a little stoner kid but, really, BEER! Nothing special about it. We were the type of kids who would play "hey mister" outside of the liquor store and go into the woods and get drunk and tell stories. This happened all the way through my teenage years. I gew up in Baltimore. While Minor Threat and Bad Brains were playing the 9:30 Club me and my guys were in the woods slamming warm Schaffer, smoking pot riddled with seeds and stems in corncobs we would purchase at the Royal Farm on Edmondson Avenue right inside the beltway, daring each other to piss on tombstones, playing drinking games that always had to do with rock and roll trivia, mainly the Beatles. The first song I wrote that I had the guts to play and sing was called "I Hope It's You and Me" and it was intended as my version of "If Only You Were Lonely", the B-side to "I Will Dare" by the Replacements. The hook was the line "I might drink myself to an early grave" so when anyone wanted to hear it they would yell "DRINK MYSELF TO AN EARLY GRAVE!" which is a great prank in and of itself. I continued to write drinking songs for THE REST OF MY FUCKING LIFE! Whenever we do a slow number in C-major even now Brian refers to it as "a drunken swagger." My friends, "Empty Glass"is a song in that grand tradition. It has that garagey mid-atlantic thing going on. Pork says it "sounds like a New Jersey bar band." The mid-atlantic is a strange place. The suburbs are much more urban than to the west, where designers and planners wisely ditched crap that sucks. It's on old and aching suburbia. It's a pre strip mall suburbia. It has main streets, sidewalks, and little stores. It has pizza shops. This ain't the city, but it also isn't the suburbs as they are presently constituated. The houses are close together, the streets are narrow, the corners have what used to be barber shops or liquor stores. One block towards the city and you got the row homes made famous on Baltimore's keynote addition to American pop culter - THE WIRE, and one block the other way and you got mansions. Not MCmansions but real old time structures that slave owners once called home. In the working class sections of these little hamlets a couple blocks off of a road that at one time was a railroad track, you got yourself garages and basements - the petri dish for 70's and 80's little pothead rock and rollers. These houses were big enough that, when the kids grew up, there was a small space that parents ceded to their offspring. This is what Lee Gardner referred to as, in his review of Circle 9's IF IT WAS UP YOUR ASS YOU'D KNOW IT, "rec-room genius." Another writer for an underground metal mag called Circle 9 "stoner friendly rock guys who have probably played their fair share of keggers." I don't know what's wrapped me up in this sepia toned nostalgic reverie. This is the milieau in which 1993 takes place, when these punk ass little fuckfaces have turned into young adults and the cushion of fuck up is gone. This is when people start to get lost to drugs and prison. That's the backdrop. Cocaine and PCP, two of the shittier drugs. But "Empty Glass" itself was my attemp at writing something that would fit in on, if not PLEASED TO MEET ME, then HOOTENANNY. It's got the Stonesy Chuck Berry chugga chuggas and the suspended majors that Paul Westerberg uses so expertly. I even took words directly from Paul Westerberg interviews and made them lyrics. He was and remains the master of devestating couplets, either as insults or come ons or "generational longing" type stuff. Nowadays the lyrics in "Empty Glass" to me have the cadence of a sitcom. Set up - punchline. Exposition, set up - punchline - et cetera. Thinking hard about this song it feels like a nice addition to the canon of boozy little pop songs written by guys and girls who aren't quite urban or suburban but somewhere in between. It's like ole Porky said when the song was coming together in the shed (the more things change!)and previously mentined in this essay. New Jersey Bar Band Rock.

I didn't see you when I went out tonight A word or two means nothing to me that don't sound right I live the life of an empty glass I'm glued onto my barstool before the moment's passed If you call the weather I'll call the time If you say you'll be mine Tonight I'm feeling lucky so what's the word from you If I run out of cash before the night is through If I told you my dream you'd slap me in the face So ditch that creep and I'll meet you later It's gotta be the case If you call my number then I'll set the time If you say you'll be you say you'll be mine If I can wake up to you my life would be complete But I compete on a footing unsure When I call your number You set the time If ever you are ever you are If ever you'll be mine mine all mine You'll be mine