Echoes

2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Halloween Album

This two-week fall Phish tour is all leading up to Halloween/A.C. run. Rumors abound about Eat A Peach as of tonight, for a day or so it was Rock of Ages, Europe '72, or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (yuck! no way). From the beginning of tour I was feeling Thriller as it's the 30th anniversary since the album was released and Phish played their first show.

After the Sunday night Hampton show the band's sound had me wishing for --

1) Thriller (ultimate dance party)
2) Meddle (they're take on Echoes to end the set more than anything else/Trey' guitar sound during Hampton Tweezer)
3) Kid A. (no fuckin' way)

Still hope it's one of those. Though Thriller doesn't seem right anymore. If I could bet, it's Physical Graffiti all along. Classic rock, double album. They've played The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, so Led Zeppelin is next.

The expectations is so much fun. And you can tell they've been practicing, the sound bleeding into their nightly shows. Two nights away.

Tuesday Night

Went to watch the Colfax Kings at Pan Pacific Park gymnasium. A zippy point guard and a lanky forward. They break out to an early lead, but with 10 minutes left in the first half, they start to tire. The gap is closed at half.  Some baskets and ball control in the second half. Free throw shooting becomes key.
Two players fouled out making it 3-on-5 with over 3:30 to go in the second. It was tense. But they pulled it out. With grit. Final score -- 39-34.
(A strange rule that was disclosed with :12 on the clock. No player can score over 20 pts.)

Canter's to follow-it-up.

Got Head

Kurt Ville's Mix Tape

He put this together while recording/mixing Waking on a Pretty Daze. Dazed listening. 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - No Second Thoughts
Gary Numan - Are 'friends' Electric?
David Byrne - My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks)
Randy Newman - Baltimore
Tim Buckley - Home To Stay
The Byrds - Ballad of Easy Rider
The Byrds - Truckstop Girl
The Flamin Groovies - Whiskey Woman
Rowland Howard and Nikki Sudden – A Quick Thing
Syd Barret - Opel
Pink Floyd - Green Is The Colour
Aphrodite's Child - Take Your Time
Bill Fay - Warwick Town
Big Star - Stroke It Noel
Michael Chapman - You Say
Miles Davis - Here Come De Honey Man
David Bowie - Art Decade
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts
Prince - Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)
Lou Reed - Charley's Girl
Royal Trux - Waterpark
The Rolling Stones - 100 Years Ago
Aphrodite's Child - Valley Of Sadness
Ween - Lullabye

here is a "mix-tape" that i had been sort-of-conceiving for some time before i actually made it. i would say i made it mainly to pump myself up. and then my bandmates, extended bandmates, producer, etc… but also to get all my friends that were involved (at least subliminally) on my wave-length when i needed it most...
by the time the violators and i got back from a 7 week euro/uk tour, sometime in the summer of 2012, it was time to get back into the studio and the bulk of the "wakin" album done. we had already recorded a good chunk of the almost-title-track "wakin on a pretty day" before we left, and a few other songs. (another one called "feel my pain," a stripped-down, ominous folk number, exceptionally meticulous in it's finger-picked arrangement, has since become a favorite of mine for all it’s rawness... hear it soon on the new ep!)
anyway...
i remember the night before driving up to woodstock to start recording again and laughing to myself that it was so important i get the right sequence down on this ultimate vinyl-mix (and cd... and cassette!) when i probably had plenty of fine-tuning needed on my own songs, but hey...
i would jam alot of these mix-tape tunes on the road over n over all the time. from a discman (not kidding) into this miniature battery-powered vox amp that john agnello gave me as a christmas present. usually in hotel rooms in the wee hrs, post-gig...
i remember playing "a quick thing" by rowland howard and nikki sudden in many-a-south-american-hotel-room (over and over) for instance, and getting so deep into it, positively spaced out. cuz that song's as real as it gets, mind you! (ps i love nikki sudden but it's all about the rowland howard here as is per uzsch with mr. howard)
i don't want to dissect all my favorite music for everyone. but i sent this mix to my friends involved in my record for the purpose of loose/good vibes. and then i sent it to some other friends and loved ones. some of whom complimented it, and of course i was flattered cuz i did work hard on it like a total dork, hah... i didn't just throw it together.
i don't wanna say all this stuff influenced my record in any obvious way.
but subliminally? most def.
cuz that's life. always influenced by your surroundings.
some top faves (besides "a quick thing") :
bill fay "warwick town"
the byrds "truckstop girl"
flamin groovies "whiskey woman"
"...and all of the rest."
-kv

October Baseball

Jim Leyland is old school. He smokes Marlboro Reds in the dugout.

Pearl Jam Has A New Album... (aka embodying a classic rock Version of Themselves, or Middle Aged Contentedness)

And I still have yet to listen to it. That's the strongest indication of my expectations for Lightning Bolt, and where I think the band is at in their career. (Update: Listening to it on a Monday afternoon in a Savannah coffee shop)

Some have asked if I was the ghost writer of this review of the album. I wish I was. Every point is spot on. On the other hand, they are going on tour without an opening band. An Evening with Pearl Jam. A polished, classic rock-arena rock band that will play all the 'hits' and then some. It's 2013, not 2000. Lightning Bolt not Binaural.

I'm going to one show at the L.A. Sports Arena. The Sunday night show. It'll be fun. No more, no less.

Hail, Hail to Ryan Leas (clearly, a long time passionate fan) for his essay/review. Couldn't have expressed my own sentiments better...

Titles say a lot in Pearl Jam’s discography. Not in the sense that they do with any artist — you know, cluing you into what they’re writing about — but in the sense that the structure of their titles hints at what version of Pearl Jam you’re about to get. For the longest time, they favored short, enigmatic, often single word titles for their albums, sometimes making up their own borrowing them from obscure medical texts (Vitalogy) or bending a familiar form into an abstract summation of the LP in question (Ten, Vs., No Code, Yield). Unless you count the greatest hits collection Rearviewmirror or a smattering of official live releases, the longest album title they’d had thus far wasBackspacer, at a whopping ten letters. That is, until Lightning Bolt, which at fourteen letters is practically a Fiona Apple couplet of a Pearl Jam album name. Not only that, but its words are plain and everyday in a way that none of their album titles have been. There was mystery in No Code and Riot Act. Not so much in Lightning Bolt. It just sounds like any old rock album name, but also a slight one, a record without a defining characteristic or larger resonance. Compared to the opacity of prior releases, it’s a generic name coming off as downright banal.

Though that all might make Lightning Bolt sound like it’s a turning point, it’s more like an end result. The line in the sand was really 2006′s Pearl Jam, the move of self-titling a clear reset button for the band but also so unsettling for fans that they still regularly refer to it as Avocado. That nickname was derived from the self-titled album’s cover, and Pearl Jam’s cover art too has seemed symbolic. Backspacer was plenty slick musically, but maybe the main reason it felt compressed and distant was the cartoons on the cover, as if this set of songs were animated retreads through Pearl Jam’s history, “Amongst the Waves” a less humanized Yield, acoustic ballads like “Just Breathe” and “The End” coloring too cleanly within those lines when this band had written such heart-rending stuff as “Fatal.” I approached Lightning Bolt with similar trepidation. Its cover, its singles’ covers, the video for “Mind Your Manners” — they all had that same cartoon thing going on (given, in a more graphic art style that was not dissimilar from how they’d often rendered tour posters or official bootleg covers in the past). Between the straightforward title and the cover, I went in afraid that it’d be another outing of Pearl Jam performing their vision of “Pearl Jam rocking out again.”

So what kind of Pearl Jam album is Lightning Bolt? To a certain extent, my expectations were accurate. It is very much of a piece with their last two releases, another record where they eschew the art-rock flirtations of ’94-’02 (Vitalogy-Riot Act) and continue to embody a classic rock version of themselves. They’re still more or less interested in sticking to a back-to-basics sound with only the occasional gesture towards experimentation or expanding their sound. The good news is that it works better than it did with either Pearl Jam or Backspacer. WhenLightning Bolt is on, it’s some of their best material in the last ten years, its highlights rivaled only by the very best songs on the self-titled album. One pleasant surprise is that it’s dustier than Backspacer, not to the ramshackle and beleaguered levels of Riot Act, but with music that feels a bit more lived in. Another pleasant but double-edged surprise is its departure from its predecessor in quality. Where Backspacer was an exceedingly consistent experience of mid-level Pearl Jam material, Lightning Bolt whiplashes you between its highs and lows, all that good stuff refused the ability to cohere into a unified whole by a few weak links that wreck the album’s pacing.

The album starts off strong, “Getaway” ranking amongst their very best openers and easily amongst the best latter-day Pearl Jam songs. Like the other best moments on Lightning Bolt, it marries the impulses of post-Riot Act Pearl Jam perfectly. Vedder is singing clearer and more melodically, which allows the band to rock when they want, but to do it in a catchy way. Ultimately, this works to their benefit, a nuanced take that suggests their maturity more so than any attempt to still thrash around. Lead single “Mind Your Manners” is sort of guilty of the latter, being the seemingly now-obligatory Vitalogy call-back they do every now and then. It’s likeable, though I’d rather it didn’t take the place of “Whipping” on a setlist.

For me, the unquestionable high of the album is the run that starts with the title track and concludes with “Swallowed Whole.” Both are moments where Pearl Jam writes a Pearl Jam rock song totally effortlessly. “Lightning Bolt” is an early contender with “Getaway” for album standout, and “Swallowed Whole” is, like “Sad” thirteen years before it, a clear signifier of Vedder’s youthful obsession with R.E.M. With some much murkier production, its jangle-rock would be a direct descendent of Murmur. As “Lightning Bolt” and “Swallowed Whole” are two of the best straight-up Pearl Jam rock songs we’ve gotten in a while, they bookend the only two instances of “weird Pearl Jam” on Lightning Bolt. The emphatic groove of the verses in “Infallible” is built around the most interesting sound on the album (guitarist Stone Gossard told me it was some sort of synthesized percussion noise that was then produced to the point where it sort of sounds like a guitar or organ layered with effects). These verses wrap around it in tight, constricted rhythms, peeling open into one of the best choruses on the album. It’s followed by “Pendulum,” which isn’t quite like anything else in Pearl Jam’s catalog. Its spiritual concerns and exoticism seem reminiscent of No Code, but its textures are more twilit, making it perhaps a slightly clearer-eyed cousin to songs like “Of the Girl,” “Nothing As it Seems,” or even “You Are.” We could use more Pearl Jam songs like it.

As much as there’s all this to love on Lightning Bolt, its lesser moments threaten to scuttle the whole experience. I still can’t decide how I ultimately feel about the already-divisive “Sirens.” There are parts that are gorgeous, especially the band making rare use of guitars in a more atmospheric way they’d do well to revisit. Like many fans, there are also parts of it that make me cringe. It’s later when things really go off the rails, though. Right after “Swallowed Whole” closes out the album’s peak, the band goes into “Let the Records Play,” another in the lineage of Backspacer track “Johnny Guitar”: a more workmanlike rock title promises a more workmanlike rock song. In this case, “Let the Records Play” is exactly like it sounds: a borderline cheesy bar-band blues-rock that’s saved only by a decently catchy chorus. After that things slow way down for a full-band rendition of “Sleeping By Myself,” a song that’d previously been released on Vedder’s solo album Ukelele Songs. It’s not bad, but also feels tangential. Closer “Future Days” is also somewhat superfluous, ending Lightning Bolt way too similarly to how “The End” finished Backspacer. The best moment of the troubled final act of Lightning Bolt is “Yellow Moon,” a gorgeous mash-up of Vedder’s Into the Wild work and a classic mid-tempo Pearl Jam song. It has a much clearer identity than “Future Days,” and it refers back to a strain of Vedder’s songwriting I’d still like to see explored more thoroughly.

After spending a decent amount of time with Lightning Bolt, this is more or less where I stand on it: It’s good, sometimes great. I think I’ll revisit it more than the last two, probably much more. But there’s something in the way — it hasn’t really dug into me, and I haven’t really dug into it in the same way I once did with their music. While there are few problems with the music itself, when putting it in context of having followed Avocado and Backspacer, it can raise concerns about where we might be headed with the band.

A certain version of Pearl Jam ended with Riot Act. Since their third record, 1994′s Vitalogy, the band had continuously eschewed their mainstream success in favor of leaning more deliberately alternative, messing with their sound, and, speaking objectively about my favorites albums of theirs, simply making music that sounded uglier. I’m in a certain (but vocal) pseudo-minority of the fanbase that finds Yield, the middle of this process, to be a hidden masterpiece. I’m in a considerably smaller part of the fanbase that loves Riot Act. Sure, that album is all dulled burnt orange hues and wearied midnight wanderings, but even as many fans bemoaned the grayscale of Vedder’s delivery on it (pretty rightfully, though I’d argue it works for many of those songs) ironically it felt like the last moment Pearl Jam really gave us something. Each successive record has felt like some attempt at course correction, or a facsimile of what Pearl Jam imagined people expected them to be. Even when that approach works — as it does on most of Lightning Bolt — it still feels somehow removed from the band we’ve known and loved. They sounded best when they were striving and not always succeeding, their art-rock detours always more interesting than their middle-age rewrites of “Spin the Black Circle.”

The reason I bring this up is because, combined with Backspacer, Lightning Bolt suggests we’re in the midst of a previously unseen version of the band: happy Pearl Jam. As far as these last three straightforward albums go,Avocado still had an anger about it, much of it informed by frustrations with the Bush administration and the ongoing war in Iraq. Its engagement was vital even if its music was at times stale. By the time Backspacer rolled around, though, the band could find hope outside of themselves as well as closer to home. It was the early, fleetingly halcyon days of the Obama administration; many of them were married and having kids. Pearl Jam entered the scene enraged in a specifically youthful way, an approach that appropriately fizzled out and gave way to a mid-career era of questioning and, eventually, somberness. They eventually grew out of that, too. Not only on a personal life level, but as a band — they’re reportedly functioning better than ever, more comfortable with how they work and with each other.

You don’t ever want to begrudge an artist some bit of solace when they’ve found it. We’re just at a point where it’s hard to know — for fans or for the band themselves — what we should expect out of Pearl Jam. This is an artist whose entire being was derived from discomfort in one form or another. Even as the band spent the ’90s going through twists and turns trying to define what sort of band they’d be in the commercial landscape, that searching was the artistic focus. They had grown up out of their early angst, but were still far from being at peace, and I’d argue this era in the band’s life produced their best work. There are many moments on Lightning Bolt that refer to mortality, but the stakes don’t seem like they’re there anymore, even when in reality they’re there quite a bit more as the band members close in on 50. Look, of course we want the band to be in a happy place in their lives. They’ve given us fans more than enough, and they’ve more than earned that for themselves. What’s disconcerting is that even as strong as much of Lightning Bolt is, it’s starting to sound like Pearl Jam on autopilot. All the guitars are still reliably distorted, but its with the crunch of slightly overcooked pizza crust, no longer the abrasiveness of sledgehammers hitting glass upon asphalt. The struggle in Pearl Jam’s music has been mollified.

The end result is an album that sounds brighter than those blurry mid-era Pearl Jam albums, and that can be seen as an improvement in some ways, I suppose. But its lightness can also translate to weightlessness, and Pearl Jam’s never really been an artist that has exploited weightlessness. Quite the opposite, really. Like all their titles before, Lightning Bolt tells you something about the music therein, though it now blatantly announces where others alluded — this album is about punchiness when it rocks, and seeks immediacy in its ballads, even if that means they wind up sounding like the mellow acoustic material any rock band could crank out. That’s fine. Pearl Jam have achieved what they set out to do here, and they’ve got a solid album on their hands. It’s just that I can’t help but still long for the days when the notion of Pearl Jam writing about mortality meant that the music would sound searching, too. Maybe a little messy. I still long for the days when Pearl Jam summed up their albums with a single cipher, but imbued them with the gravity of thousands more.

Gravity

During the ride I was 'wowed.' Then it ended. And let's not forget the 3-D tears.

Enough Said

"You know what you should have done...you just didn't do it." Nicole H. is more sympathetic and humble to modern men, then she is to her female protagonists. (From a story standpoint, Catherine Keener needed one more scene. The movie was a bit loose.)

And James Gandolfini's final three movies -- Killing Them Softly, Not Fade Away, and Enough Said. He has the finest moments in all three. He was Tony Soprano. Then returned to being an actor. I miss him now more after seeing these three films.

If a Record Takes More Than a Week to Make, Somebody's Fucking Up

Steve Albini's call-to-arms letter to Nirvana back in 1993 before the making of In Utero.

Kurt, Dave and Chris:

First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I've had to go through it all. Apology apology.

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal "production" and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.

If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to "sweeten" your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever...) then you're in for a bummer and I want no part of it.

I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existance. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I'll work circles around you. I'll rap your head with a ratchet...

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more "work" does notimply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.

About my methodology and philosophy:

#1: Most contemporary engineers and producers see a record as a "project," and the band as only one element of the project. Further, they consider the recordings to be a controlled layering of specific sounds, each of which is under complete control from the moment the note is conceived through the final six. If the band gets pushed around in the process of making a record, so be it; as long as the "project" meets with the approval of the fellow in control.

My approach is exactly the opposite.

I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band's personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play. I'm quite willing to let my opinions be heard (if I think the band is making beautiful progress or a heaving mistake, I consider it part of my job to tell them) but if the band decides to pursue something, I'll see that it gets done.

I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won't be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.

#2: I do not consider recording and mixing to be unrelated tasks which can be performed by specialists with no continuous involvement. 99 percent of the sound of a record should be established while the basic take is recorded. Your experiences are specific to your records; but in my experience, remixing has never solved any problems that actually existed, only imaginary ones. I do not like remixing other engineer's recordings, and I do not like recording things for somebody else to remix. I have never been satisfied with either version of that methodology. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don't know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

#3: I do not have a fixed gospel of stock sounds and recording techniques that I apply blindly to every band in every situation. You are a different band from any other band and deserve at least the respect of having your own tastes and concerns addressed. For example, I love the sound of a boomy drum kit (say a Gretach or Camco) wide open in a big room, especially with a Bonhammy double-headed bass drum and a really painful snare drum. I also love the puke-inducing low end that comes off an old Fender Bassman or Ampeg guitar amp and the totally blown sound of an SVT with broken-in tubes. I also know that those sounds are inappropriate for some songs, and trying to force them is a waste of time. Predicating the recordings on my tastes is as stupid as designing a car around the upholstery. You guys need to decide and then articulate to me what you want to sound like so we don't come at the record from different directions.

#4: Where we record the record is not as important as how it is recorded. If you have a studio you'd like to use, no hag. Otherwise, I can make suggestions. I have a nice 24-track studio in my house (Fugazi were just there, you can ask them how they rate it), and I'm familiar with most of the studios in the Midwest, the East coast and a dozen or so in the UK.

I would be a little concerned about having you at my house for the duration of the whole recording and mixing process if only because you're celebrities, and I wouldn't want word getting out in the neighborhood and you guys having to put up with a lot of fan-style bullshit; it would be a fine place to mix the record though, and you can't beat the vitties.

If you want to leave the details of studio selection, lodgings, etc. up to me, I'm quite happy to sort all that stuff out. If you guys want to sort it out, just lay down the law.

My first choice for an outside recording studio would be a place called Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It's a great facility with outstanding acoustics and a totally comfy architect's wet dream mansion where the band lives during the recordings. This makes everything more efficient. Since everybody is there, things get done and decisions get made a lot faster than if people are out and about in a city someplace. There's also all the posh shit like a sauna and swimming pool and fireplaces and trout stream and 50 acres and like that. I've made a bunch of records there and I've always enjoyed the place. It's also quite inexpensive, considering how great a facility it is.

The only bummer about Pachyderm is that the owners and manager are not technicians, and they don't have a tech on call. I've worked there enough that I can fix just about anything that can go wrong, short of a serious electronic collapse, but I've got a guy that I work with a lot (Bob Weston) who's real good with electronics (circuit design, trouble shooting and building shit on the spot), so if we choose to do it there, he'll probably come along in my payroll, since he'd be cheap insurance if a power supply blows up or a serious failure occurs in the dead of winter 50 miles from the closest tech. He's a recording engineer also, so he can be doing some of the more mundane stuff (cataloging tapes, packing stuff up, fetching supplies) while we're chopping away at the record proper.

Some day I'm going to talk the Jesus Lizard into going up there and we'll have us a real time. Oh yeah, and it's the same Neve console the AC/DC album Back in Black was recorded and mixed on, so you know its just got to have the rock.

#5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I'd better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it's your money, and I insist that you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you'd had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it's worth.

Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I'm going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not affect my enthusiasm for the record.

Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work than I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don't consider that an issue.

That's it.

Please call me to go over any of this if it's unclear.

(Signed)

If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's fucking up. Oi!

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction

To my Joan Didion.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I'm committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.

Highland Park

Paul Brickman, the director of Risky Business, is interviewed. He became a recluse from Hollywood after his debut film at the age of 34.

You filmed in some favored Chicago movie locations, like Lake Shore Drive and the John Hancock Center, but also some suburban spots that seem to have personal significance.

I shot a lot of scenes in Highland Park, so there are a lot of personal spots. The exterior of Joel’s house is three minutes from the house where I grew up. Shelton’s Ravinia Grill, where Joel and his friends talk about their futures, is where I used to hang out after walking home from school in the eighth grade. We’d go there and throw French fries at each other. Part of the car chase sequence with Guido, the killer pimp, goes by the Highland Park Movie Theater where I saw movies as a kid. I remember for the “love on a real train” scene, I was stuck on how to make that work. So John Avnet and I went to an Italian restaurant in Chicago one night that had the worst service I’ve ever had in my life. We were there for about three and a half hours. And we came up with this concept that the train car would come off the tracks and fly over the Chicago skyline. [Laughs] We shot it, but failed to execute it. It came across as pornographic.

Thomas Pynchon Loves Tacos

And Beer. I don' know why I felt the desire to post this. Maybe I like the idea of him eating at a local SoCal taco stand in a red-hunting jacket, more than his actual inaccessible books.

Snake and Jake's Christmas Lounge

Nestled on a shady street uptown. Invisible. I remember that some of the time this place wouldn't even get going 'til after 2am. Go there on a late Sunday night to find other derelicts and dreamers. More like an opium den for drunks.

Nightcap. Bloody Mary. And drifting onto the sidewalk in the morning haze.

William Tyler / Out West (A Tour Diary)

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Cincinnati, listening to the menacing and comfortably familiar electric sitar of Dave Stewart on Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. It’s a little hard to fathom that I was on these same highways a month ago, driving from Nashville to Columbus to begin my three-week cross-country trek. As I type this, my computer auto corrects ” cross” to “crisis “. Nice.

When I returned the rental car this Monday, the odometer read 13000 miles. It had been 5000 when my dad and I rented it. It was a gray Camry, new car smell, satellite radio, proud and clean and anonymous and hardly aware of the intense trans continental journey I was about to subject it to.

The continental divide is the latitudinal point that decides where the rivers’ paths are guided: to the Atlantic or to the Pacific. I would cross this twice on the tour. Fuck man, 8000 miles on a rental? That’s more than most people drive in a year. My carbon footprint is like Godzilla. The only way to neutralize it is to walk everywhere and just eat parsley out of my backyard for the rest of the year.

I spent a year daydreaming about the end of oil, the sprawl of America, the lure of the sleeping seemingly dead places off the interstate and hidden on the ‘blue highways’. Ghost towns of old or towns that were fast becoming ghost towns. James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg and Mike Davis were my mental tour guides and all of them would be horrified at how environmentally unsustainable my trek was. But hey, I’m a working musician. We’re not quite dinosaurs yet but we are still fighting for relevance just as much in this insane world, still having to justify our existence. Those big old town cars that Detroit used to crank out back when we had cheap gas are just like the rock stars of thirty (shit, twenty!) years ago who figured the party would never end and people would still want to pay for “art” forever. Anyway I saw my trip as a cross between Lewis and Clark, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Two Lane Blacktop.

People ask me all the time how I reckon with the magnitude of this country.  I always compare the size and scope and population to our relevant colleagues and peers: China, Russia, India, Brazil…It’s useless to try to compare the USA to anything but those guys. We’ve got too much land and too many people. We are a country of illusions/ delusions. Never gonna run out of land, never gonna run out of sky, never gonna run out of soil, never gonna run out of trees, never gonna run out of people. Ever since World War 2 ended the people here have craved some sort of unifying edifice to keep the linear thinking going: the interstate, the sprawl of fast food chains, billboards, rest-stops.

True Fact: Anywhere in America right now, you can turn on your radio and find Rush Limbaugh or the Eagles playing. I’ve been testing this thesis for almost a year.

I was on a three-week tour that would take me through the two most populated states in the country, California and Texas, and the least populated, Wyoming. Someone in Salt Lake City told me that there were only two escalators in the entire state of Wyoming. That was really comforting to me for some reason.

My tour was beginning two days after Mercury came out of retrograde. I am convinced that before I had awareness of the existence of Mercury in Retrograde, it had no effect on the events in my life. I learned about Mercury in Retrograde in the middle of a similar cross-continental tour five years ago and as soon as we were made aware of it everything started breaking: flat tires, frayed nerves. I don’t agree that ignorance is bliss but it’s a lot less complicated.

You get west of Kansas City and everything begins to open up from the sky to the possibilities of space to the distances between towns. This is the part of the West that people used to just pass through on their way to California or Oregon until the government got savvy in the 1860s and started essentially giving the land away to prospective settlers. Wind, wheat, corn, time to reflect are all in abundance. There is the tyranny of big spaces out here, you can imagine how humbling and terrifying it would have been to the covered wagon rovers but in a car with satellite radio and the promise of gas stations every few miles it is possible to zone out in way that is calm and deliberate.

I’ve tried listening to the news. Too cerebral, never anything uplifting, and being informed on tour is kind of like holding an unlit cigarette in your hand for an 8-hour plane flight. No use. A lot of the oldies stations, too familiar. Getting stuck on the “Deep Tracks” station and lots of country oldies. Listened to a rodeo on scratchy AM radio driving across Nebraska. That was a nice surprise.

My dad on driving through Wyoming: “Now I understand Dick Cheney.”  Does Cheney own both escalators in Wyoming?
Salt Lake City reminds me of the towns you would build in the computer game Sim City, where you could just arbitrarily lump buildings next to each other. It’s clean but ersatz, almost like North Korea on a blind date with Reader’s Digest. It’s tucked into the dip of the mountains with a skyline that cries with beauty. You understand pretty quickly how Brigham Young and company must have been stoked to find this place and basically said, “Fuck it, we aren’t going any further, this place is nice.”

My gig in Salt Lake City coincided with Pioneer Day, essentially the Mormon Fourth of July. It commemorates the day that Brigham Young and his first band of settlers got to the spot the city now inhabits. Not the best night for a solo guitar gig. All was going well even with the sparse crowd but I mistook the fireworks show going off downtown for my amp breaking. Which it did anyway later in the show.

As the sun set over Boise, warming the ground level stare with something almost tragic, I was talking with one of the locals about the ‘anxiety of congestion’. He had grown up on the East coast and the endless stretch of populated places was the main thing he had wanted to get away from when he found his way out west. I could understand this. Out here it’s eight hours between cities and there is something very calming about that. The isolation doesn’t seem that lonely, although playing a show to one person in the crowd that night did. words/ william tyler /

In Utero

It's the 20th anniversary release. Here's an interview with Krist Novolesic and Dave Grohl talking about it.

In the suburbs,  Nirvana Unplugged was the album for a year. Every household on a Friday night. It was played much more than In Utero straight. Nobody ever complained.

Though I would drive down Sheridan Road late listening to "Black."

And now this album isn't so much nostalgia. But a wake-up call. A reminder. 

Can't wait to hear it fresh.

Tuesday Night

U.S.A beats Mexico handily to qualify for the World Cup. Watch the game at Big Wangs. Is it me or has happy hour become kind of gross? Maybe all these places are gross.  Rather than just lowering prices on their 'A' food, I think a lot of these places just bring out 'C' quality plates of what they normally serve. As always my problem in Los Angeles, I just need a neighborhood bar. And a porch.

A Moscow Mule is the victory drink. Towing not included.

Ukulele Songs

I never really paid Eddie Vedder's ukulele album much mind. But I saw that the song "Sleeping By Myself" is gonna be on the new Pearl Jam album. So I'm giving it a Sunday night quiet listen. And I've changed by not changing at all.

Middle-Aged Contentedness

What the fuck. The band I love would've stared down the photographer for suggesting such a staged pose. Stone is the coolest guy in the band.