dressing to undress

more than half of this was recorded while GWD still existed. tyson’s lack of interest in new material coincided with an incredible outpouring of ideas on my part, and i eventually stopped saving things for the band and waiting for that day once a month when my drummer decided to let me premiere a new song. i began recording sporadically in april, initially only so i could play new ideas and finished songs for gord and tyson, which we would then develop into band vehicles. then i decided to have a little fun with what she wants, overdubbing bass, drums, multiple vocal tracks and a second guitar part. listening to what i had created, i realized that i really didn’t need to keep waiting around for tyson…i’d record the songs i was working on by myself. i didn’t have much reason not to, since it looked like GWD might soon be dead; one day in the middle of april i got a phone call from gord informing me that the members of fetal pulp were being offered a recording contract (based solely on SEED OF HATE, a cd i had recorded for them for next to nothing), and in addition to being tens of thousands of dollars in debt to the record company right off the bat and having most of whatever money they might make going to other people, one of the stipulations of the contract was that none of the guys could be involved in any other band(s). tyson had known about this for a week or two and had never said a word to me. while it was a pretty piss-poor deal, it looked like everyone was going to jump at the chance for a BIG SHINY RECORDING CONTRACT, which meant i would soon be out a band. the record deal ultimately fell through, but by that point my relationship with tyson had already come to an end (and not for the last time). putting everything else aside, it was about time to record another solo album, after a two-year break from the format.

to my surprise, what i ended up with was a more varied and fleshed-out piece of work than anything i had done with the band. heretofore, improvisation had been the means by which my music lived or died. while some songs featured lyrics that were actually written, and sometimes there was even a degree of rehearsing involved, the majority of the music i made—with or without other musicians—was almost always entirely improvised. at this point, i decided to start writing more of the lyrics and giving my songs a bit more structure, instead of just a main theme and a variation. and while the last work i’d done with the band leading up to this had become pretty intense, this album upped the ante considerably. i was in a pretty bad place at the time. the grisly details are best left to an invisible autobiography, but i was hung-over in varying degrees when i recorded the vocals for several of the songs. that really doesn’t have much to do with anything, but i was surprised by the fact that no one could tell, and even more surprised by how few people seemed to pick up on the fact that i literally meant almost all of what i was singing. much of the subject matter was coloured by the fact that there were a lot of girls using me as an emotional chewtoy during a relatively brief period of time. a lot of the songs are about stef, while others refer to about three different girls, but most of the songs are applicable to any or all of them, and in the end they all come back to the fact that i was probably at the lowest point i’ve ever been in my life. throw drugs, half-baked relationships that never make good on what they promise to deliver, a band in the process of splintering, a healthy dose of alcohol and childhood issues coming to a boil, all together in the same pot, and you’ve got yourself one happy johnny!

for such a miserable album, it’s kind of funny how catchy a lot of it is and how many more people it appealed to than the stuff i had done with gord and tyson. the songs adhere to relatively conventional structures to a greater extent than any other solo cd i produced post-GWD. a lot of tracks feature actual choruses that appear more than once (though alcohol on an open wound is debatable, and there’s little rhyming to be found throughout). there are also probably more ugly fuck-ups here than on any other post-band solo cd, most of which occurred while i was seated behind the drums; i’d only been hitting them very occasionally since i’d purchased them in july of 2000 and, while i had improved as a drummer since then, i didn’t do myself any favours by recording most of the drum tracks in one or two passes, without any rehearsal. in a way, i sort of became a real drummer for the first time while i was recording the album, and since i was still in the habit of just putting the songs on cd in the order they were recorded, you can hear my skills improve as the songs fly by. by the time we get to you, then asia, i’ve reached a whole new level of fluidity and dexterity. the singing is some of my worst ever from a technical standpoint, because i really didn’t give a shit (being hung-over a lot of the time didn’t help either). and yet, for a long time, i believed this to be the single greatest thing i had ever done. i’m not sure if i still feel that way today (who the hell peaks at the age of eighteen?), but it has to be somewhere in the top ten at least, and it’s certainly the most emotionally naked set of songs i’ve ever scraped together, providing a nice snapshot of what i was feeling at the time.

it’s also interesting to me how things changed in the absence of gord and tyson. i stopped screaming, which is kind of strange when you consider the fact that i was even more of a mess when i was recording this than i had been when i was trying to rip my vocal cords apart with the band a few months earlier. i curbed a lot of the weirdness that had previously coloured my lyrics (and singing) and mostly stuck to spitting out what i felt. i pretty much stopped playing guitar solos altogether. i allowed myself to overdub more than one guitar part for almost every song, which was something i had never done with the band, preferring to keep things completely live and raw (with the exception of the odd harmony bits, half of which tyson talked me into adding). for some of the songs, i recorded the vocals after some or all of the instrumental tracks had been laid down, whereas in the past i would almost always sing “live”, while playing the guitar or piano. i found myself overdubbing vocal harmonies on a lot of the songs, instead of just a few little bits here and there. i let the piano, which i had been staying away from for quite some time, creep back in for a few songs. i kept most of the songs unusually (by my standards) short, killing them once i felt they’d made their point. it was simultaneously the culmination of what i had been working toward with the band and a complete departure from it, if that even makes any sense. whatever else i go on to do, i have a feeling this will remain my ultimate “break-up album”. even if it doesn’t serve that purpose for anyone else, at least i’ll always have something to reach for when i’m drunk and miserable.

i’m not sure what to say about individual songs without writing a book… some of the heaviest things i’ve ever done are here (scaring boys, freon) alongside piano ballads (alcohol on an open wound, make it better) and one of my catchiest shots at the ex-family (absolutely manhole blues, which seemed to get them out of my system once and for all). something like… is a bit like a cross between a seminar, a play and old school whorehouse quartet, making for one of the few lighter moments on the album. dopamine has always been one of my favourite tracks on the cd, which is kind of funny because it was just something i improvised after sticking the guitar jesse topliffe kept leaving over at my house in a weird tuning. in a way it might be the most honest thing on the cd. i’m singing about a certain substance and wanting to obliterate myself, and delivering the words to one of those girls, or some other girl who doesn’t exist and never will. i certainly felt it, especially when i howled, “i like the way it destroys me”. even now the end of the song makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because it brings me back to that time and exactly what i was feeling, more than any of those psychotic screaming GWD songs ever do. and it remains home to perhaps the best acoustic guitar sound i’ve ever recorded, which makes no sense at all because i was only using one microphone and it wasn’t a mic that most would reach for first to use on an acoustic guitar. but it was the best i had at the time. i guess there was just something special about betsy II (the name jesse had given this particular guitar). i was sad to see her go when he finally remembered that it was actually his guitar and took it back one day. at least i was able to use her for two songs (the other was raze). the drum sound is one of my favourites as well—a continuation of the two-mic approach used on the final GWD tracks, but somehow it sounds meatier here.

one thing that’s funny about this album, aside from the fact that i would sometimes write a song about one girl and realize while listening back to it that it was more about another, is that i played a lot of the songs for gord and tyson while i was in the process of writing them, and with a few exceptions neither one of them had any interest in turning any of them into GWD songs. they didn’t even raise an eyebrow. but once i played them the finished versions with me playing all the instruments, they suddenly seemed to think the songs were better than anything we had ever done as a band. it was a bit of shock to hear tyson calling me an “awesome drummer” and telling me that there was no way he and gord could have improved upon what i did. “your stuff’s better than our stuff,” he said. you better believe i threw that fookin’ quote on the cd jacket. it was a strange time. it was also an incredibly fertile time creatively, and the next two cds would contain a lot of songs that had been written or started during this period. hell, there were a ton of ideas i never even developed into songs, and i probably still remember half of them. one thing my former drummer didn’t like was how much of a role silence or near-silence played in a few songs (i make myself sick and alcohol on an open wound in particular), but i don’t think the music would be anywhere near as powerful without the pregnant pauses.

scaring boys is a complete overhaul of the mr. sinister track “vomitingbirds” that makes the original sound as lame as it is, though when tyson heard it he seemed kind of wounded. “that song meant something to me,” he said, which i thought was strange since he didn’t have anything to do with its inception and wouldn’t have even played on the first version if i hadn’t brought the music i had already finished writing to his attention. apparently he felt differently about the situation, and years later he would get his revenge through a bizarre act of musical subterfuge in an online interview that drove me to end our fucked up, one-sided friendship once and for all. it’s a long story, like everything else that happened back then. you might think that some of the things i’ve said on some of these album pages about him are unnecessary shit-talking, and maybe you’d be right, but i’ve limited myself to just a few things that were relevant to the music and what was happening at the time, leaving out the worst of it. if he can claim that he was a part of my solo “career” when he never so much as shook a tambourine or contributed in any way to any of the cds i’ve released under my own name, then i can at least speak a tiny kernel of truth about him and call him on his bullshit in a place where pretty much no one will ever read it anyway. i’ve put up with a lot of stupidity from supposed friends over the years, but taking undue credit for work that i did entirely on my own is something i won’t tolerate. back to the album…at the time, old t-dawg felt the lyrics were about him and the whole fetal pulp contract business, and i guess i can understand that with lines like, “i’ll shit on your dreams / i’ll shit on your emotions”, but it really had nothing to do with him at all. i wrote the lyrics on a break from telemarketing hell, and they were my attempt at adopting the mindset of a person who can get you to make them your whole world, and then smile while sticking a knife in your gut and ripping your insides out. the ascending shrieks were added on a whim while i was in an especially livid state over one of the beautifully stupid girls. for some odd reason, whenever i would listen to this track back then i would get an image of myself playing it live on something like the david letterman show, looking kind of evil with my long hair down. i’m not sure why that image popped into my head, but i could almost touch it, it looked so real.

on another note, the acoustic fragment that ends the album is one of the better hidden tracks i’ve put on a cd. i played it for my mates back when the band still existed and they both tried to get me to fashion it into a proper song, but it didn’t feel right extending it or singing on top of it. tyson thought it was “morbid”. gord deemed it “heart-warming”. together, they were…gorson! but seriously. i like my bass-playing here. i hadn’t really touched the four-string beast in a while, but alcohol on an open wound and absolutely manhole blues feature what still feels like some of the better work i’ve done on that instrument. and if you can believe it, i got away with playing the latter track on CJAM once. i thought that was pretty crazy. i hoped my mama and step-papa were listenin’ somewhere and feelin’ the love, but i knew it wasn’t so.

on an amusing side note, someone i knew once used this album as makeout music. kind of difficult to fathom, given the subject matter, but apparently it worked surprisingly well until the home stretch, when “something like…” rolled around, and the female party found herself quite offended and angry. thus ended another johnny west-enhanced (and, in this case, -hindered) sexual experience. i had a few good laughs over that. none of my music has ever struck me as being suitable for that sort of thing. sex, i mean. i certainly wouldn’t reach for my stuff in the throes of passion.

TRACKS:

raze
what she wants
i make myself sick
dopamine
alcohol on an open wound
cottonmouth
scaring boys
dance yourself to sleep
the elastic promise
freon
you, then asia
absolutely manhole blues
make it better
something like…

STUFF TO LISTEN TO:

Cottonmouth

Scaring Boys