Other things
A STONED CONVERSATION (2001)
this is precisely what the title says it is: a substance-enhanced tête-à-tête between tyson and i that took place shortly after we had recorded GOOD LUCK IN THE NEXT LIFE .
gord had organized our first (and, as it turned out, second-last) show at the windsor sportsman’s club, and i had left the details to him because he made it sound like he knew what he was doing, but when the day of the show arrived it became clear that he hadn’t really done any organizing at all. in fact, he hadn’t even bothered to ask anyone if we would be able to play. i watched a guy who looked like artie from the sopranos (i assumed he was the bartender) argue with gord’s mother while we set up. gord had told me that we would be able to use the stage and the house band’s equipment, and we would be good to play for two hours, but instead we had to set up on the floor in front of the stage. good thing i brought most of the equipment i had in the music room at the time for us to use, just in case. we got through three songs, including our re-working of the theme song for king of the hill (which we had warped into something like elevator smooth jazz), and then my dad came over to tell me something. “you guys sound great,” he said. “and you have to stop. some people at the bar are complaining.” i started laughing, while gord and tyson looked like they had just been kicked in the balls. so much for two hours; we had been playing for ten minutes at the most, and we were finished already. gord seemed to think that a shriek i let out in the middle of “voyeur” must have pissed off some of the old guys at the bar, but i don’t think it helped that he didn’t bother to take any steps to put an actual show together. i mean, if no one knows that a band is supposed to play, and then they’re suddenly confronted with three weird teenage guys in their watering hole playing a song that starts off with the words, “i want you to die / i want you to die so painfully”, what do you expect to happen? apparently there was a guy around our age in the audience who liked our music and was interested in having us play at his upcoming birthday party in michigan, but i never heard anything more about it. that would have been an interesting experience—playing for people our own age, who might have actually been into our music. alas, it wasn’t something we ever got to do.
gord decided to defect and stick around the place that had rejected us for the night since his family was there, while tyson and i headed back to my house. i played “absolutely perfect” in the car and tyson sang along. he suggested we pick up some booze because “that’s what frustrated artists do”, so my dad stopped at the liquor store and procured us a mickey each of wiser’s and my old friend crown royal. back at the house, tyson poured each of us a shot in the kitchen before mixing crown and ginger ale, and it was then that he revealed to me his contempt for the piano. “i hate the sound of piano,” he said while sitting down on the couch for a minute. “unless it’s really melodic; then i can stand it. but usually i just hate it.” i guess it was a good thing then that i wasn’t playing much piano at the time, focusing most of my attention on the guitar and, occasionally, hitting the drums. while he reassembled my drum kit in the music room and i put the other stuff back together, we continued to talk music, and i played him a few songs i had written that would ultimately end up on solo albums. we went on to record a few of the demented joke songs that ended up on the mr. sinister cd.
by the time we had finished having our musical laughing fit, the crown royal had been exhausted. strangely, when tyson went into the kitchen to grab the wiser’s, it was nowhere to be found. after a few minutes of searching for it in vain, my dad appeared at the top of the stairs like a parental spirit, informing me that he felt we’d had enough to drink. “we’re not even close to being drunk,” i said, confused. at best we had a halfway decent buzz going, hence the desire to have another drink. “that’s good,” he said, and that was the end of the discussion. tyson and i were not pleased; we had been cut off just when we were starting to have a good time after the disaster that had been our first show outside of high school had threatened to ruin the day. tyson saw a light at the end of the tunnel, though. “my dealer lives not even a block away from my house,” he said. “i’ll be back in about ten minutes.” he returned with some mary joanna, saving the day, and we celebrated the first of it on the porch while i tried to articulate how when i was stoned (which was still a pretty new experience for me), i often felt a bit like i was in a fascinating, unpredictable movie. something about that state made everything seem expansive and vaguely cinematic, like i was simultaneously in the moment and slightly removed from it, as if my brain were a camera picking up subtleties i normally wouldn’t even notice. when we went back inside, tyson suggested that i hit the record button and preserve our conversation for posterity, wherever it went. so we each grabbed a microphone and got comfortable, and then i started recording. in a little more than an hour we touched on fate, the band, our future, possibly living together, and many other things. our band was probably given more attention than anything else, with tyson’s “we make no sense together and yet we make perfect sense together” theory getting an extensive workout. “why am i here?” he began. “i’m at your house, in a band with you and gord, and we have all these songs. why? i don’t believe in god. i don’t know if there’s some higher power…” and on it went. why had we met on that fateful day when i had been kicking the big purple ball around in the park with gord? would we have ever become friends if it hadn’t been punctured by a tree and we hadn’t come back to the park exactly when we did? i told him a bit about the roots of papa ghostface, we discussed our disparate musical tastes and how we managed to sound nothing at all like any of the music we listened to, and just when it looked like a conclusion was about to be drawn, tyson would lead the conversation in a completely different direction and derail my train of thought. he was really good at doing that.
when we were just about finished, tyson decided he wanted a snack, and it was then that we discovered the wiser’s—hidden behind a box of crackers in a kitchen cupboard. we had a good laugh over that. we talked some more out on the porch before tyson took off. “this has been…” he started, trying to find the right words. “i don’t know if i wanna say it’s been the best night of my life, but it’s been a good night.” i went back inside and recorded a weird message about the people i loved in case i happened to die of amusement in my sleep or something. it seemed profound at the time, but then a lot of things seem profound when you’re under the influence. the next day i found the wiser’s had magically moved to the inside of the dishwasher.
someday i’ll mix this and dump it on a cd. it’s not something anyone else would ever want to listen to, but it’s kind of fun to let our voices take me back to a time when anything seemed possible and, as unhappy as i was, there was something exciting about being alive anyway. it was a feeling in the air…
A COLLECTION OF LOVE SONGS (2002)
a useless compilation put together to get an idea of what our setlist for the clifton grant show would sound like. the original papa ghostface version of time again is also thrown in, which makes things even more confusing.
STONER BLUES (2002)
an attempt to collect some of the highlights from the pre-SUBLIMINAL BILE, lineup-shifting days. it’s probably better just to dig into the individual cds, as hit-and-miss as some of them are, because one disc isn’t enough to take in all the best bits. at least my liner notes are kind of fun.
LIVE ON VHS (2002)
it’s guys with dicks! live! on video! all nine minutes of it. something about lies makes it worthwhile. we had somethin’ going on, at least for a little while.
there are also the first issues of SUBLIMINAL BILE and GOOD LUCK, with slightly off-kilter panning. i think the remixed versions sound a lot better.
