Without Dicks (2000)
one afternoon late in july, gord and i decided to kick this huge purple inflated ball i had around in willistead park, just for something to do. before too long the ball struck the sharp end of a tree branch and sprang a leak, so we returned to the house and attempted to dress the wound with some scotch tape, before heading back to the park to kick around the mortally injured ball some more. as fate would have it, we ran into tyson and joel, two guys we went to high school with but didn’t know at all. gord and tyson had exchanged cries of “slayer rules!” in the hall a few times, and that was about it. we got to talking, they smoked a joint (i abstained as i usually did back then), and when they asked us what we were up to gord said something about how we had been jamming over at my place. we invited them to come back to the house to hear some of our stuff, i played them “rabbits & leeches” from the freshly-completed PAPER CHEST HAIR album, one thing led to another, and before long a loose jam session was underway. joel sat down at the drums and grabbed my brushes, gord and tyson played guitar (mostly acoustic), and i played bass to anchor the low end. for a while we were just making random noise, but then i hit on a bass line and everyone started following me. this turned into nicotine eyeballs, which tyson ruined a few perfectly fine takes of because he kept urging me to sing and/or record when i was already doing both of those things. in his defense, he was high at the time, but i didn’t appreciate him trying to tell me what to do, especially in light of the fact that i’ve always felt a bit weird about singing in front of people i don’t know. it was a minor setback, and before long i had shed my discomfort and we were in the groove. the final take of nicotine eyeballs turns into a bizarre spoken word piece with me shouting my words into the distant microphones recording tyson’s and gord’s acoustic guitars, and tyson plays some suitably creepy and dissonant things on his guitar. i like joel’s groan at the beginning when i pause for a moment and he thinks we’ve lost yet another take.
one piece is another features a great moment that’s cut short just as it gets going; in the middle of the song, tyson starts playing a riff that would soon end up in a fetal pulp song, and i start spontaneously playing a bass line that shouldn’t work with what he’s playing, but it does. just as i’m about to start singing to the new thing we’ve got going, joel comes in at the wrong time on the drums and throws everything off balance. tyson stops playing the new guitar riff and the song reverts to its previous form. still, i like how we all start laughing at the end of the song, excited about what was happening. disease is the key track, with my slow motion bass line and hazily echoing vocal joined by gord’s electric guitar runs, tyson’s relaxed acoustic picking and joel’s rudimentary drumming. joel wasn’t the greatest drummer around, as tyson enjoyed pointing out later on, but his playing suited the disjointed nature of the music, even when he unintentionally threw things off mid-song (as he does not just in one piece is another, but also in marshmallow shyster and all together, two of the catchiest and most normal-sounding tracks we recorded that day, with tyson playing some nice hawaiian-sounding electric guitar on the latter track). all together features one of my favourite lyrics on the album: “& life is like a sausage with no package / there’s no meat, unless you count that garbage you eat / that garbage that taste so sweet”. every once in a while, you just gotta drop one of the s’s. only wanna get laid is another mostly spoken piece, this time with me taking on the role of a psychotic sexual predator while tyson provides some nice screaming and moaning in the background. it’s kind of funny how, even when i was playing bass, i still provided most of the melodic ideas for us to work with. one of my favourite moments doesn’t involve me at all, though; on only wanna get laid my vocal mic grabs some of joel’s snare hits and, because of the effect i was using on my voice, it creates a really cool sound of distorted drum echoes. near the end i quote the “sunshine of your love” riff on bass and turn it into something kind of demented in this context.
tyson and i played around with the idea of a country/death metal duet, with me singing and him screaming, but sadly we chose not to record it. joel would never play with us again, and he seemed to drop off the face of the earth after this session, popping up at odd places once a year just to remind us that he existed, only to vanish into the ether once more. i never even found out what his last name was. i think tyson told me once or twice and i forgot it about two seconds later, which just goes to show that the guy had a profound impact on my life. but i kid…i always liked joel. he seemed like a good guy. i ran into him at a funeral just recently after not seeing him for at least three years, and he told me his last name when i asked him what it was, only for me to forget it again immediately.
anyway, i had a hard time coming up with a band name and a cd title, eventually settling on guys with dicks and WITHOUT DICKS as kind of a lame joke (other ideas included “fast pope blues”, “the stupid windows” and “juju ramona ball”). i didn’t think we’d ever be playing together again, so it didn’t seem like a big deal either way, but tyson had other ideas. he decided that i was the next frank zappa or something (yeah…i didn’t see it, either) and started walking with me at lunchtime, telling me about what a great song marshmallow shyster was and how i sounded like david bowie. i didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a very strange friendship.
TRACKS:
warmup
nicotine eyeballs (take 1)
nicotine eyeballs (take 2)
nicotine eyeballs (take 3)
one piece is another
disease
marshmallow shyster
all together
only wanna get laid
STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
