This time Tyson brought his dad over to join in the fun. Hence the title. What can I say? I’m a creative guy!
We smoked some brown stuff through a Coke can in the park (hint: it rhymes with “rash”), but I didn’t get one decent hit because it was dark as shit and every time I was about to inhale someone would shout something about thinking they saw a cop car drive by, and someone else would grab the Coke can to hide it just in case.
So again everyone was really high except for me, and Tyson was doing that thing where he was encouraging me to sing when I didn’t have a lot of ideas for lyrics, which made for a bit of an awkward atmosphere, at least for me (though that wasn’t Tyson’s fault). I was demoted to bass, this time not so much by choice. Gord and Tyson’s dad played acoustic guitar. Tyson was the jack-of-all-trades for the evening, alternating between percussion, harmonica, kazoo, party whistles, mouth percussion, and additional acoustic guitar.
Female Impotence? and Only Sometimes stand out in the midst of some stuff that isn’t all that inspired. The first of those is a bluesy spoken word piece with a shout-out to a girl we went to high school with. The second is bolstered by some nice beat-boxing from Tyson and a jerky vocal performance from me. It’s probably the best song here, even if starts to get a little psychotic around the halfway mark. It Didn’t Go Anywhere is a decent instrumental that does what its namesake suggests. It isn’t unpleasant to listen to, but it doesn’t do a whole lot of developing in its runtime. At least my weird distorted whisper in the middle of the song is interesting.
The inspiration just wasn’t there for me this time, though everyone else seemed to be having fun. For a few of the songs I couldn’t even find a vocal effect I liked, and on Shitsticks you can hear me rifling through a host of different settings on the Digitech guitar box, trying in vain to find something to get the juices flowing.
The night did at least offer an interesting moment when Tyson told me, “Before we got together, I told my dad, ‘John’s the weirdest guy you’ll ever meet.’ And then you were normal!” He said it with a frustrated smile, like I’d foiled his plans and he was giving me a little good-natured ribbing.
At the time I was fond of making crude drawings on the CD jackets to capture something of the experience. The one I made for this CD (now on the front cover) has to be one of my best: all of us naked, looking like a big oddball family. I think I did a pretty decent job of capturing Tyson’s dad’s essence — though Tyson himself was always kind of tricky to draw because of his hairstyle, and because of my general lack of drawing ability.
TRACKS:
It Didn’t Go Anywhere
Female Impotence?
Shitsticks
Sweaty Home Atlanta
Only Sometimes
The Duck Show
LISTEN:
Dressing to Undress 