dressing to undress

andrew moved to welland, we were whittled down to a three-piece (me on guitar, gord on bass and tyson on drums), and something really clicked. it didn’t hurt that i was in the middle of a tumultuous long-distance “relationship” that appeared to have just ended, and working as a telemarketer, both at the same time. i had only been doing the job for a few weeks at this point, and it was my first job out of high school, so it was still sort of exciting in a weird way. those two things informed the music to such an extent that my working title for this album was “sex & telemarketing”. fortunately, good taste prevailed and i came up with something more appropriate. the title SUBLIMINAL BILE is basically a response to/acknowledgement of some things tyson had said. we had a lot of long conversations about all kinds of things at the time, sort of a getting-to-know-one-another-more-intimately process of philosophizing and throwing ideas around while we were becoming closer friends and more of a real band, and many of the conversations took place out on my side porch while he was smoking a cigarette. when i mentioned that this was some of the most intense music i had ever made tyson was puzzled, because for him our music was relaxing. i guess next to the music he was making with fetal pulp and a.d.h.d. it would be a bit like floating on a serene ocean. but for me there wasn’t anything relaxing about it most of the time. i had to explain to him that it was emotional intensity i was talking about; what i was singing about and where it was coming from. so the title refers to the fact that while the songs may be unpleasant and autobiographical for me, it doesn’t necessarily mean that other people will pick up on any of that. i wasn’t in a great place emotionally at the time, and i decided to stop role-playing and start singing about what i was really feeling and thinking. i started using the guitar and the voice more as a means of expressing my feelings instead of attempting to produce pleasing or interesting sounds. at the end of voyeur in particular, i just took out all of my anger on the guitar without any thought given to what i was actually playing. i felt a little like i was possessed.

half of the songs were originally intended for a solo cd of mine that didn’t happen, even though most of them were just sketches that i hadn’t finished yet (voyeur and nicotine & beer only had about one verse apiece). as soon as i realized how well we were playing off of one another, i stopped thinking about recording any of this stuff on my own and just hit the record button and improvised the songs into a state of completion with the gord and tyson. until you lose had originally been written as an acoustic ballad but was soon transformed into something a good deal more aggressive, which was a much more accurate reflection of where my head was at. the words hadn’t meant anything when i wrote them, but now i found i could inject them with genuine feeling. and while the three of us hadn’t played together at all in more than two months, it was almost as if we had been unconsciously wood shedding the whole time. we had never been anywhere near this tight before. maybe breaking things down to the basic guitar/bass/drums setup forced us to realize our true potential as a band. tyson’s drumming became a lot more creative and unpredictable, and gord’s bass playing was all over the place, at once providing the low end and throwing in unexpected melodic jabs. for my part, i probably played guitar better than i ever had before, and the singing was some of my most committed vocal work in a long time. none of us could really believe this stuff was coming out of us. after we finished playing dance on my brain, tyson had a look about him like he had just emerged from a near-death experience. “that just blew away everything pink floyd ever did,” he said. “i think we just became better musicians while we were playing that.” later he would insist that, while the experience itself had been great, he couldn’t listen to the song on cd because it was “boring” at almost twenty minutes long. it was the beginning of the endearing tyson weirdness we all came to love. still, the morning after the first session (from whence half of the songs came), i ran into tyson at the bus stop on my way to work (and his way to school) and we both agreed that the previous evening had produced some of the best music either one of us had ever been a part of. suddenly he was interested in getting together a lot more frequently and started to think of our unit as more than just a fun side-project.

i eschewed the “no overdubs” credo i had been maintaining through all of the GWD cds for the first time when i overdubbed vocal harmonies for the “chorus” of voyeur. i didn’t intend to keep them, but once tyson heard what i had done he was adamant that the harmonies stay. he took it upon himself to talk me into adding harmonies to a few more songs, though i wasn’t sure they were a good idea at the end of ring around me because i thought they might take away from the nastiness of what i was saying. on charlatan shuffle i really wasn’t feeling it at all, so i gave the microphone to tyson and he overdubbed a bit of falsetto wailing himself.

gord told me that redound changed the way he played bass, and it was easily the best guitar playing i had ever done up to that point. i’m not sure where it came from, because we were all just improvising as usual and i wasn’t working from any preconceived melodic ideas, but even gord and tyson were in awe, miming with their thumbs and saying, “how do you play that with your thumb?” i was surprised myself, since i thought they were both still far better guitarists than i was, and i certainly never expected to become the only guitarist in a band. vicodin was another song where tyson went nuts at the end and proclaimed it to be the best song we had ever recorded, though again he changed his mind pretty quickly. personally, it’s still one of my favourites. i somehow manage to work my telemarketing spiel into the song (in somewhat mutilated form), along with talk of the girl i’m messed up about, dissecting an email she had sent me, and a whole bunch of other twisted shit. i once explained the meaning of the “ketchup/catch up” line to tyson (while it doesn’t appear to mean anything, it’s actually referring to about three different things at once), and he looked sort of frightened that there were so many ideas behind such a small, seemingly throwaway line. what’s funny is that tyson wanted to record a ballad to end the album, while i wanted to explore an evil arpeggio i had on the guitar instead. i can’t imagine what would have happened if i had yielded and tried to come up with something tender instead. i love the screams and random noise that gord and tyson contribute throughout the song, and there are some uncanny moments of rhythm section telepathy between the two of them. one of my very favourite bits is the “argument” between gord and i, with him screaming into a kazoo and me acting out the part of a typical womanizing guy trying fruitlessly to have a conversation while he plays the role of the woman.

nicotine & beer was one song i wasn’t so sure about. i wanted to keep it for a solo cd because it seemed a bit too upbeat to fit in with the rest of the songs here. once i played part of it for gord and tyson, though, they wouldn’t let it back in the bag, and a band favourite was born. it’s probably the closest thing to a radio-friendly song on the cd, the talk of sex and vomiting notwithstanding. i’m not sure why, but i seemed to sing a lot about sex when i was pissed off back in those days. odd that in times of distress i would sing so much about something i knew nothing about.

the sound on this album, and on the subsequent GWD cds, is a pretty serious shift from anything i had done before. on most of the songs i slathered my voice in slap-echo and left myself somewhat buried in the mix, like another instrument. some of the inspiration came from john lennon, particularly from “plastic ono band”, which is still one of my favourite albums. i loved that vocal sound, and the sound of the album in general. so raw and stripped down, but huge at the same time. i wasn’t much of a producer at the time, though, and i’m still not, so instead of spending a lot of time trying to get a specific drum sound or a specific anything, i just set things up quickly in a way that seemed to make sense with what i had, and off we went. the main reason i mixed my voice so low was because half the time i didn’t really like my voice all that much. the drum sound was a definite improvement over A ROOMFUL OF SEXINESS, with the kick drum mic picking up some of the snap from the snare, and the lone overhead mic aimed at tyson’s crotch. that seemed to be the sweet spot. those two SM57s were all i would use to record drums for the next few years.

i have a lot of memories and stories from the band days (it’s one of those things where i could write a huge book that no one would ever read), but one of the most vivid comes from this album. we were in the middle of recording charlatan shuffle, and it got to the part where the groove gets really deep and i’m singing “shake it loose” and all of that stuff. i looked up at tyson, and he had this huge smile on his face. i looked over at gord, and he had a huge smile on his face. i was smiling too. and i had one of those “wow” moments where it hit me that here i was in a little room between the kitchen and the living room of my house, with two of my best friends, each of us just a few feet away from one another, and we were improvising this music out of nothing and having the time of our lives doing it. and i could tell that we were all thinking and feeling the exact same thing, because i could see it in their eyes. i felt this really strong connection, like i was a part of something bigger than myself, and it was really powerful…sort of spiritual in a way. it couldn’t last long, but it was nice while it did.

TRACKS:

ring around me
until you lose
voyeur
dance on my brain
redound
charlatan shuffle
nicotine & beer
vicodin

STUFF TO LISTEN TO:

Redound