Mark and Steve, spring 1991

I’ve done some remote collaboration over recent years with mixed results. I’ll record a song and send it to a drummer or guitarist I used to play with, and sometimes the person will be all jazzed about it and record a part right away, or sometimes the process will drag on for months, or the part I get back isn’t usable, etc. I’ve gotten plenty of good parts out my old MayTricks bandmate Steve Petrinko, but had not stood in the same room with the guy, much less recorded, for something like seven years, since I stopped having to travel regularly to Michigan to see my wife’s relatives (who have all since moved, died, etc.).

We finally arranged a trip for Steve to come drive up by himself last August for a weekend, and it so happened that my wife and kids were traveling without me and I was even between pets at the time, so we dedicated most of our time to collaborating on some new material, which went really effortlessly and egolessly. My computer had just died two days before the visit, so I had a new one built which I picked up right as Steve arrived, meaning that our effort was delayed by things like trying to figure out how to hook up my monitor to the new video card that didn’t have the right inputs, get a new recording program and the drivers for my new audio interface all up to speed. We didn’t even have effects installed at the time of recording, and I consequently didn’t get around to finishing the mixes on these until now.

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Listen to “I Believe.”

This tune owes much in its conception to the old Steve Martin bit “What I Believe,” but I used that rough format to express, back in 2002 when I wrote the bulk of this (calling it “Stalking George Burns”), something about my actual, momentary beliefs (when I’m at worst); or distilling belief down to what appears true only at that moment, i.e. the phenomenological surface of things; or playing with irony.

For the record, here are the lyrics:

Lord, I believe in subtlety and in stating things with strict exactitude and attention to the nuance of how dumb I feel. For instance, don’t say “ouch;” say, “I perceive a tension in my left chest – there. And its proximate cause was when you ripped the hair out, leaving me lopsided and mildly less bushy and spiritually gushy, [and] I’m not sure why you did it though I could list three hundred reasons. Here goes: Number One…”

No! I believe in subtlety. I believe in sounding off at nothing when it really didn’t matter what exactly got me going in the first place. I believe in a few basic truths… None of which I could possibly do justice to now.

Lord, I believe.

Lord, I believe in long hard work… As long as it’s obsessive and completely self-invented and unwelcome. …Like stalking George Burns or writing songs.
I believe in bullshit – if bullshit is funny, which it is!

I believe if you hate enough and vent enough then everyone you meet will just adore you. I believe if I’m loud enough and I’m hoarse enough and I’m foul enough then I will win!

I recall the original version being considerably more wandering and pointless than this, and my wife was not impressed when I played it for her. My band at the time obviously wasn’t going to do the song, so it just sat there until 2010 when this song-a-week (at the time) music blog inspired me to finish it, lay down the guitar/vocal (in one take, on one track, with no click, meaning that the tempo is all over the place) and a bunch of cool background harmonies, and get my old Mark Lint and the Fake drummer Dave Hamilton to record a drum part at his place. …But then that effort slowed down considerably, so that recording sat there until just this month, when I decided to finish it for our existence of God episode. I added a quick bass part, a little acoustic guitar sparkle in the last chorus, and then spent some time with my newfound MIDI abilities to find a decent church organ patch, and here’s the result, which makes me happy.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Listen to “Mother’s Day” and “Poppo!”.

Two very different but equally unfit-for-regular-public-consumption songs here.

I wrote “Mother’s Day” in September 2007 to send to my mom. She’d been diagnosed with an especially nasty kind of cancer the previous summer, and I’d spent time with her during her surgery and treatment. I was just depressed, and recorded this pretty quickly and sent it to her via the Web. She cried. When I went out to spend time with my father this last May before her funeral, I made some attempt at relearning the song to record a “real” version, but couldn’t easily figure out the chords again. It would have felt weird to play this in any form at the memorial service anyway.

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Listen to “Rembrance.”

When reading Schleiermacher, I was reminded of my friend Steve Petrinko, who was my main cohort in my college band The MayTricks (previously covered in a number of music blog posts). Working in close proximity like that at that time of life (we were also apartment-mates for a couple of years) meant lots of philosophy discussions, and being young and opinionated, we clashed on a number of things, one of which was religion. He’s Russian Orthodox, which like Judaism focuses a bit more on practice and tradition than on believing weird things, but like all Christians he does ultimately get behind articles of faith, and he argued that the appeal of faith was emotional, not intellectual.

Thus this song came to mind, one of Steve’s best, and explicitly religious: it’s a Christmas song, about the fact that Jesus came and can’t really have gone away. However, I didn’t get the religious aspect at all until years after this was written.

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Madison Lint in Spring 2003

New readers may not remember my 1/2 year music blog, wherein I forced myself to complete, or digitize, or remix or remaster a song from my past every week. The point of that was to get me to finish up a couple of significant album projects, but given that I was shooting for every week, I quickly fell into a pattern of finishing up things I could deal with more quickly, so my Sinking and the Aftermath album (mostly recorded in 2000) and the Madison Lint album (mostly recorded between 2001-2004) remain further along but still unfinished.

Well, here’s another post of this type, and I hope to resume doing them on a periodic, though not weekly, basis. If these posts seem not sufficiently philosophical or too self-indulgent to you, just ignore them.

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As I hit the big 30 here, let me thank you for your indulgence, to the extent that you’ve actually been reading/listening. I’m marking this round number with another whole album, this time the debut full album by The MayTricks from 1992, cleverly entitled The MayTricks. As this was really the first full-length album I worked on, it definitely has a special place with me, as weird and lo-fi and inconsistent as it is.

This was compiled in late 1992 with recordings recorded over the previous year and a half or so, all after the previous spring 1991 demo. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, here’s the final tune from the 1991 MayTricks demo (which I’ve made a new page for), “Her Skin Is Only Warm.”

The song was written by Steve and was our most bombastic. It was modeled on The Rolling Stones’s “Steel Wheels” album, meaning it has kind of awkward “Rock! Rock!” lyrics, but it was actually describing a particular situation where Steve’s roommate had a thing for some woman. In some of the verses, Steve and I switch off lyric lines, and we harmonize in a somewhat out of tune manner. There was keyboard playing during this song, but the only thing I can detect is the occasional “ping!” sound on the first beat of a few phrases. This was actually the song that, after the fact, made said keyboardist quit the band, as I think he thought it sounded godawful, but we liked it!

A somewhat more technically correct version, still pretty spastic, was completed for the So Chewy album.

Three songs today: cover tunes by The MayTricks from 1992 or so. Specifically, the Police’s “Can’t Stand Losin’ You” (which I sing) and Talking Heads’ “And She Was” and The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” (both of which Steve sings).

These are actual, multi-track studio recordings done with probably as much care as many of our actual album tracks, recorded as part of a demo to impress frats and fratty clubs and other places we should probably not have been playing as a sort of underground, Beatles White album-inspired somewhat psychedelic band. Read the rest of this entry »

Correcting my previous post, apparently this is my first recorded original composition: “The Funny Train.”

While I had always assumed this to be a traditional melody, a quick web search reveals no previous versions, so I hereby claim it. However, I note that “There was a little man, and he had a little can” appeared previously in a prohibition-era song called “No More Booze.”

How does the little man relate to the train? Is he driving the train? No, qua prohibition-era hobo, he is likely getting a free ride, violating not only the law but his own dignity. And what are his possessions? A can. Perhaps he realizes that “man” and “can” rhyme, and possesses the can just for that reason, making himself an art for the ages’ display. The next line gives us a stronger clue: the can was full of worms, which he then puts in a soup. How extreme is man’s degradation, to be forced to subsist on worms! Or is this a life choice? Is he living his life as an art, not only through living a rhyme, but in choosing worms, the replenishers of all life, which by eating corpses and transforming them to arable land themselves symbolize nature’s triumph over death. Is the man, in fact, dining upon his own death? Read the rest of this entry »

At the half way point of this 2010 experiment, I’ve got something very special to post: my first ever intentional recording of a song, which was also my first experience playing with a band that I put together. It’s from spring ’86 and called “Venus on Earth.”

I had some little music composition program on my Apple IIe that let me type in notes and play them back to me, and so I mapped out a bunch of variations of this little progression, only the simplest of which actually made it into the song. The introduction was inspired by some music from the movie “Something Wicked This Way Comes” that I’d seen on cable a few times, plus the cheesy wind and laser noises that were built in sounds on Brian’s Casio CZ-5000 (used to much greater effect in our later effort). The guitarist (Pete Catsaros) had never actually played guitar before doing this with us, and didn’t know how to play any chords; he just played the same riffs I played on bass, though not always at the same time, with the keyboard covering the chords. Then the lyrics… god, the lyrics are bad, and sung with a weird, quirky English inflection that can only be the 80s at work in me. I can’t imagine what inspired them other than thinking that the words themselves just sounded cool apart from any consideration of their meaning: “I have the indication it’s not infatuation. It’s a different situation that’s worthy of your station.” My favorite part is where I go “…for all eternity- he-e-e hee hee.” Just unintentionally f’in funny. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I present the crown jewel of my high school band years: The Spring ’89 version of “Run Away.”

I’ve previously blogged about this song, which is pretty cheesy, but pleasurable, I think. This version owes a lot to the keyboard programming of the last couple of albums by The Cars (my favorite band at the time). The story of The Backdrop, the band that gave rise to this, can be found here. The important point was that with this band, and the maybe four songs we programmed in this way, I had pretty much total control over orchestration, and in this case, this was the third studio recording I’d made of this with my keyboardist Brian Greenfield, and the fifth recording overall. Previous to this (and after all those four other recordings) we had put together a large group to play this at the school variety show, but for this version, I reasserted control, doing all the nine vocal parts myself and all the guitars except for the guitar solo (played by Mike Goldberg, which solo I complained about at the time as being too much like Chuck Berry and having little to do with the song, but which I like just fine now; I may have been responsible for putting it through my phaser pedal, but I’m not sure). The sax is by one of my best friends Sanj Ghogale, playing a part I wrote out for him.

We had a more elaborate drum machine program that we’d used for earlier versions; this version just leaves in the hi-hat and hand claps and a couple of other things. I think the plan was to have a real drummer overdub the rest of it, but we never got around to it, and I think I thought it was fine as is. Now that I’ve added a mess of noise reduction, it actually makes the piercing drum machine hi-hat sound more like a shaker, so I actually like that.

Some of this was actually recorded on the school’s 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, but then it got bounced to Brian’s new cassette 4-track for the last couple of overdubs. This makes it just about the only recording of mine from before ’91 that doesn’t sound absolutely terrible.

When we played this live (for the variety show in spring ’88; I forget whether we revived it for our one of our few other gigs, at the “gym jam” near the end of ’89 where we played covers by U2, Huey Lewis, R.E.M., etc.), there was some conflict in the band between the whole “Mark is the composer and gets to tell everyone exactly what to do” faction and the fact that I had two guitarists playing very simple parts and a drummer who initially was asked to play along with this drum machine part (later in the process, the drum machine was eliminated, but the synths still used a sequencer, so the drummer had to use headphones with a click track on them; very 80′s!). This taught me a more hands-off approach to arranging that I’ve since used with bands, and given that I don’t typically take 2 years arranging a single song now, I don’t have time for that kind of detail work anyway, but I’ve long wanted to get a real mastery of computer music programming now that it’s so much easier (i.e. software I currently possess but haven’t figured out how to use can do it) and do some really complex arranging. It’ll happen some day.

My computer no longer boots and is in the shop, which means I’m on my wife’s MacBook, which means it’s time for more camcorder youtube uploads! Here’s a version of “Love Is the Problem:” http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/0/e0LblloTUnc

We (my band New People) recently played a very big show at Madison’s Brat Fest, on the “Quench Gum” stage, which I honored by inadvertently saying “quench” instead of “clench” during two different songs. The stage was huge, the sound was great, and we brought in a laptop to record the sound right from the board and my camcorder was set up in a great spot also next to the soundboard, away from chatty people.

However, we had not managed to get anyone not on stage to help us make sure that these things were working, so the sound didn’t record at all on the laptop, and the video was poorly framed, with our guitarist and drummer very small in the middle of the screen and me entirely off screen.

So, what I’ve posted is not that, but instead a couple of tunes from a show last August, our final outing with our drummer Julian, who by then had gotten mighty tight. On the whole, this was one of our best played shows, though the newer songs are stronger now that we spent time recording them (some rough mixes should be available for my posting w/in a couple of weeks). The video is pretty good quality, with all three of us actually visible and all the parts audible (though the bass is a bit low, at least where I’m listening to it). It was a great venue, but no alcohol, so our turnout (on a Friday night, no less) was pretty poor, and I’ve not bugged them for another show.

I’ve also posted there a great newer one of Matt Ackerman’s called “Lucky” (http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/qh3dByWYw9E). I’ll likely upload some more tracks from that show over the next few days; so check back to the channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer.

I felt bad enough about posting the previous tune that I spent a bit more time and “polished” up another two old clunkers from the same pile, because mom always told me “If you do something bad, do more of that same thing to make up for it.”

So, first, a very old (1988) demo called “A Little Feeling.” This is a piano tune, which was and is rare for me, inspired, I think, by Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna.” This is not actually a terrible song for my 17 year old self, and it was briefly added to the first-lineup MayTricks set but not revived after we lost our keyboardist, so this is it, unless I’m motivated enough to record a new version some day, complete with the free-form New Age piano solo in the middle and the echoing Pink Floyd-esque guitar I pictured.

Second, “Pakistan-the Complete Works,” a recording made using a walkman from spring 1991, maybe only a month after the MayTricks demo was recorded, when two of our members didn’t show up for rehearsal, so those of us left (me, Steve Petrinko, and our new rhythm guitarist Matt Diaz) all traded instruments (i.e. to ones we didn’t know how to play too well) and improvised three songs, pretending to be a garage band called Pakistan, which shows you my snobby attitude towards “garage bands” (i.e. many of our peers), whereas I saw us as usually playing intelligent, carefully orchestrated pieces. So this is me, with a hoarse voice, apparently, improvising lyrics that are supposed to be funny and sometimes are, though the whole thing is equally juvenile to “Girl.” Steve in turn adopted a persona of a demented individual named Bucko or Bucky, depending on the song.

There are three “songs” on here, but I saw no reason to break them apart, as the whole 14-minute experience is the thing, man: Baby (Don’t Look at Me), Swishy Boy, and Cram. The second, which I played guitar on, actually sort of sounds like a song, whereas the other two (where I played drums) are just chaos. I will admit that this recording is fairly dear to me, and makes me chuckle. And yes, a security guard did come and make us stop (we were playing in a dorm basement practice room, and there were complaints both about the volume and the foul language).

Warning: foul language, juvenile humor, possible misogyny, and terrible sound quality. The song is called “Girl,” and it is from fall, 1989, just a couple months into my college experience, recorded in the excruciatingly awful sounding method of tape-to-tape dubbing, which is what I used from 1987 or so through spring 1991.

This was my first collaboration of any sort with Steve Petrinko, whose MayTricks material has appeared in this blog before. I should say that due to its foulness, Steve has been against this ever seeing the light of day, despite his bitchin’ guitar-solo and “bitch”-saying little sampling keyboard that we used. It was also my first, though very knocked off, co-writing effort, and I find it amusing that even for this piece of drivel, I was egotistic enough that I remember very clearly who wrote which lyric lines and felt the need to point that out whenever I would play this for anyone so that the lyrically inferior parts wouldn’t be attributed to me. I will resist doing so now.

If someone wants to post a comment re. the line between humor and misogyny, be my guest. Later, in 1997 or so, I wrote (purely in my head; no tape was stained by this idea that I recall) an Elvis-ripoff song called “Rape My Life,” which has irritatingly never left my memory. The joke of that song was that it was the opposite of euphemistic, meaning that whereas a euphemism expresses something offensive in less offensive terms that might not even be recognized as offensive by innocent parties, this song was making a bland, unoffensive point (about changing ones life for the better) by using over-the-top, needlessly offensive language. One of the verses went like this: “I want to rape my life, want to do it in the eyes; I want to f*#% that skull ’till it’s paralyzed. I want to rape my life. I want to rape my life. I don’t need a gun, I don’t need a knife, I’m the man, I’m the one, I want to rape my life.” (Procedural point: it’s OK to say “fuck” in a blog post, but not when it’s next to the word “skull.”) My wife pretty much cried (not in a good way) when I sang it at her, even with my explanation of the subtle and complex humor involved, so away it went until now. Lucky fucking you.

Some technical crap: This was digitized from cassette with some processing back in 1994. My work on this just now was applying my bitchin’ noise reduction plugin-in to it after bouncing it (along with a dozen other old recordings, some of which showed digital glitches and things) from my decrepit DAT machine, which I purchased in 1993 and looks like this:

It apparently no longer rewinds, so I need to open the little tapes and spool them back by hand (well, with a little screwdriver, actually). Luckily, most of my master mixes (I used this as the mix destination all the way up through 1998.) have already long since been bounced to PC (the DAT is digital storage, so it’s just a matter of transferring the data, though you still have to actually play the tape while hitting “record” on the PC program), but I still have a small shelf of these tapes. I actually keep the DAT machine in my active stereo setup as a pass-through digital-analog converter for listening back to my computer and sometimes for digitizing cassettes; it’s not strictly necessary, but it’s convenient, and it doesn’t require that the machine be able to rewind.

To apologize for many weeks now of old (i.e. poorly recorded) and (in the case of the “classical pieces”) near unlistenable material, I’ve now newly encoded and posted the entirety of my “Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio” album: http://marklint.com/FJTalbum.html.

This is probably my single strongest collection of tunes. The recording quality is decent (i.e. digital 8-track, not 4-track cassette like the MayTricks stuff), and we put A LOT of time into the arrangements and mixing, though I of course didn’t have my current computer magic whereby I can fix things out of tune and/or time, so it’s hardly a professional masterpiece. It was also a transitional time for my voice between its nasally, unsupported origins and its current state of relative strength, meaning that people have criticized my singing on this. Still, it’s a dream compared to the older stuff, and the songs are, again, a bit stronger on the whole than what I’ve produced more recently, I think.

“The Fake Johnson Trio” was a band name I came up with because I wanted it to sound like a jazz or folk thing but with an obviously fake name, and actually using the name “Fake” was the most absurd way of doing that. This was my attempt, unlike the MayTricks, to do marketable “alternative” rock, conceived in 1994 or so when grunge was still alive and well. I would deny or at least subvert my sensitive side to put on a manly, jaded air and use big drums and distorted guitar and all that obvious, cliche stuff. This would undoubtedly make me the big bucks.

Well, it still turned out to be a weird niche band, but I like it, and it’s the culmination of the my first three or four years in Austin building up a tight ensemble, though the recording itself was not completed until said band had safely broken up, meaning that I ended up playing the majority of bass parts myself even though that was not my role in this band and we used a few different drummers, only a couple of which I’d played these songs live with, and I dragged in a fleet of singers to do various backing parts so it wouldn’t just be me singing against myself.

Note: Among the many session musicians on this is one Hal Thorsrud, who now teaches ancient philosophy at Agnes Scott college in Georgia.

Continuing this thread, a multi-movement horn trio: “Ron Visits the Land of Insanity.”

I think these undoubtedly very talented music school players practiced this once together before coming into my class to try to get through this, and I put them through some mighty indignities including trombone parts written much too low and choreographed coughing. I see I’m going for a Gothic soundtrack kind of thing; I recall my TA telling me afterward, “If you have strings play chord clusters like that, they’ll sound like magic, but horns doing that just sounds like horns playing chord clusters.”

My guesswork regarding chronology is growing slightly firmer, though without actual printed evidence: This and Week 20′s entry I now think came from Fall 1991, with that project being the mid-term and this the final, but then again it could have been Spring 1992.

Here’s another, earlier music composition class piece of weirdness: “Argument Leading to Death.” I’m thinking now that my week 19 entry was likely from the early spring of 1993, while this one was from late fall of 1992 in the previous semester’s class. I think I decided it would require less effort this time around if for the class performance I just brought in a tape of something I’d put down at home, and this was it.

I’m playing electric bass here, and my roommate Sanj Ghogale (now a doctor in the navy) is playing alto sax. Sanj has been my friend since early high school and played in my high school band The Backdrop, whose small body of work I will eventually post. We recorded this on my 4-track recording, which gave us the advantage of being able to punch in a lot, which means that instead of playing the song all the way through, you just play a phrase (or more) and then stop, then you can punch in and do the next part. This is a totally routine way of doing things in the studio (for parts like backing vocals, anyway; it’s not so easy with, say, drum kit) and really lets you perfect your parts, or even make them up as you’re recording. In this case, I had sheet music written out, so this was merely a matter of us being able to get the recording created without having to practice very much. Still, I guess this is proof that I did start playing bass by reading music in orchestras, and this may have been the last time I ever really had to read a part written out on a staff as a bass player.

Is anyone actually enjoying these pseudo-classical pieces? I’ll admit that while I seem to treasure to the point of fetish even a lot of my old songs that were too crummy to have ever been recorded, I’d totally forgotten about this until I went just now through my tapes, and the same goes for last week’s entry. Listening back to this very loud on headphones, though, I kind of like it.