Blathering on (again)

I seem to have given some of you the impression that I have toiled and toiled, doing Daywork my whole life, and have given it up only yesterday for the life of the pen. In the interest of honesty, I feel compelled to rectify these impressions.

I have worked mostly from home for the past three years. I am sometimes lured from my domicile by a nearby company, where I once ran the department in which I now occasionally serve. I didn't work out as the manager. I fought a lot with my superiors, and when I got tired of fighting, I became lax in fulfilling my obligations.

That is all water under the bridge.

GoodThomas suggested that I point out that I have never worked. This is also not true, and he better have been kidding when he said that.

As for the writing, I made a promise to myself last July to give this a legitimate shot. I hadn't written in paragraphs much for more than a decade before that. My promise took the form of a five-year plan, in which the goal for the first year was simply to write and write and not worry about publishing or anything else.

I felt I needed at least a year to to remember how to make words rub against one another in such a way as to cause meaning to spill forth.

I'm sure when my year is up, I shall feel I could really use another year to remember these things. I'm pretty sure I'll always be working on that particular problem.

I was considered a "natural" writer when I was in school, and somewhere in there, my teachers failed to impart to me any of the discipline I am now trying to create for myself. This is not the fault of the teachers, at whom I sneered and scoffed as much as I could get away with. I hardly ever completed the assignments they set in front of me. Where the fault lies with them, it is only that they did not fail me more often. The rest is all on me. I am well aware that I robbed myself of a pretty good education.

So now I set assignments for myself. I've been at least mediocre with my follow-through. I completed a novel in November as a participant in NaNoWriMo. Before that, I had no way of knowing if I could write about something and sustain even my own interest in a single set of characters and ideas for that many pages, for that long a time. While I am not exactly enamored with the output from that exercise, I do think that I learned a lot. Not the least of which is that I can, indeed, write a novel-length piece, however turgid and excruciating.

Completing the Daywork has me thinking about all of this all over again. Now is my time to write, to put my money where my mouth is, as it were. Or my something where my something else is.

I've been trying to reawaken my more playful mind, and am giving myself a week to decompress before I start expecting any sort of real output on the novel.

But, listen: I wrote a short story today. It is bad, but it is a first draft. First drafts do not need to sparkle. I hadn't really intended to do even this much, but I'm happy I did.

In my adult life, I have been an actor, a musician, a graphic artist and many other things. I was even an accountant. I have expressed myself creativity since I can remember.

I finally stopped acting about seven years ago, because my band had become infinitely more interesting to me. I stopped being in a band because it had started to feel like Dayworking. Writing is my Last Big Dream, and the only one I have never really followed. It is also the one in which I can most easily see where I am succeeding and where I am failing. Each art I have discarded (I don't think I've really discarded any of them forever) has been in pursuit of the more challenging option at the time.

There is nothing more challenging, to my mind, than grabbing a stranger and making him or her feel things with nothing more than the alphabet. To take someone on a ride with such meager tools is an accomplishment indeed, and I salute all of the writers who have taken me on such journeys. This list will undoubtedly include some of you Blogreaders, those of you with blogs, anyway. I had thought blogs were a bit silly right up to (and a little past) the point where I started one myself as a writing exercise. Thank you for proving me wrong.

See how quickly I lose the point? I came here to tell you that I was only a Dayworker for about three months this time, and all my crowing about being unshackled and free may as well be the sound of the wind blowing. My present circumstances and freedom to write are merely the product of circumstance and luck, whose unwitting pawn I shall ever be.

Slow dance on MySpace

In a panic with nothing to talk about tonight (again), I decided to change all four songs on my MySpace page. Dig it. Check them out.

It felt weirdly painful to delete a couple of them, even though I don't listen to my own page, or even my own songs much. And if I did, I still have them on my hard drive.

The first track is not showing up in my profile at the time of this post. Hope it'll be up by morning, as it also won't let me delete and start over for some reason. It just says "processing" in angry, judging red letters, like it thinks I've done something wrong.

Anyhoo, the new songs are:

Girl 7, Song 3: This song was untitled, and then it had several titles which never felt quite right before it was named somewhat tongue-in-cheek after the notion that since all our songs were supposedly about breakups and women, I should consider employing a numbering scheme to keep things simple. So this rather serious song got a jokey title, which seems to suit it fairly well for reasons passing understanding.

This was the first song I wrote with Craig, in the late summer of 2000. I remember being nervous and a little awkward presenting ideas to him, and I fled the house and hid on his front porch smoking cigarettes and watching the rain while I wrote the lyric in my notebook.

It was also one of the first times I wrote a song during an event rather than waiting to get some perspective. I knew she was breaking up with me, our Girl 7, that very night, and I raced to her apartment with a cassette tape in my hand in the futile hope that the song we had written would change everything. Hence all of the questions. She said she thought it was beautiful, and then she said farewell. It seems pretty obvious in hindsight that I knew this was going to be the outcome, since it is clearly an ending song. Maybe I should have written something more like "Let's Stay Together."

Time to Leave: The first song I wrote by myself, sitting on my bed with my acoustic bass in the late spring of 2001. I showed it first to Craig and then the band with a sort of "this sucks but here it is" attitude that they fortunately ignored. This song was saved from purgatory twice: first by Craig's guitar, which seemed to transform my awkward noodling into an actual song; second by Kerry, who kept expressing how much he liked it until he had somehow talked the song into inclusion on our 2001 demo, from which this recording (and "Girl 7, Song 3")was taken.

When we got the song into the studio, we tried a few weird things with it. I recall recording an entire take via telephone. The backing harmonies over the last verse never fail to astound me. I simply cannot believe that's me (and Craig, and one or two more of me).

This is why: Another song sketched out on the acoustic bass, although this time in my living room. I wanted something cacophonous underneath the melody, and Craig did not disappoint with this version, a demo recorded to serve as a guide when we were making what would have been our second album.

The lyric tells of an afternoon spent with the same woman as "Girl 7, Song 3" (who got entirely too many songs) looking out the open doorway of her studio apartment at the skyline of Chicago. Sometimes not having anything to say is a beautiful thing. This was one of those times.

Bed: Written on my baritone guitar, and intended for what I imagined would be a solo album. This was the only track recorded for that project, however, and I never even recorded the main lyric for some reason. This track would probably be pretty dreary if not for Craig's piano, especially at the end. I'm pretty sure I played everything else, so blame me for when the backward drum doesn't hit right. Turns out backward drums are harder than I thought. Still, I like how this song feels: dreamy and almost wistful. I think now that it would seem bizarre with the lyric in place, which was yet another depressing set from what seems like it must have been a pretty tough time for me.

The lyric was:

I'm not getting up to catch the sun
My everything
Has fallen into disrepair
And I would like to find the tools to get things done

Not just from this pounding in my head
I'll take aspirin
I'll take acetaminophen
And I'd be better if I just went back to bed

The red light is on...

In honor of the Police reuniting*, I have posted a version of "Roxanne" to my MySpace page. This was recorded by Green Craig and myself in his old boxcar apartment on a day when we clearly didn't have a whole lot to do. When we recorded stuff there, we often had to wait until nobody was doing laundry in the building, and we always had to disconnect his toilet. It just made too much noise.

We were playing around with something else and Craig said we could turn it into "Roxanne" by changing one note. We changed the note, and had a little bit of fun until we realized that neither of us knew all of the lyrics.

We sat much nearer to each other than was customary for these types of apartment demos, so that we could both see the sheet of lyrics we had downloaded. My crappiness with a bass is more evident than normal on this one, and Craig mercifully faded out before my larger blunders could begin. He added some vinyl scratches when he mixed it down.

We always had a rule about not doing covers that were hit songs, but this one was just so much fun to play that we brought it to the band, and we turned it into a very dynamic full-band rendition based largely on the mellow feel of this recording. During the breaks at the end of verses, the drums used to go nuts.

It was chaotic and wonderful, and I wish I had a decent recording of the whole band cracking this song open, lapping up the basic idea and turning it into something new.

Anyway, I really enjoy this tiny, impromptu recording of a classic song, and I hope you will too.

*This really doesn't have nearly as much to do with the reunion as it does with me stumbling across this recording last night and remembering how much I loved making it.

Blatant self-promotion

A very nice comment from Caroline seems to indicate that some of you were unaware of some of my other corners of this big, wonderful web we call the, uh...well, I guess we call it the web. Sometimes I wish I were clever.

To that end, I thought I'd quickly mention my MySpace page, where you can hear me warble a couple of tunes, accompanied by the good folks who used to comprise map of july, which was my band for almost a decade. Fellow blogger Craig appears on all of the tracks, and can be heard calling me a "nervous Nellie" at the beginning of the track from which this blog derives its name. And yes, I'll likely be your "friend" if you are on there too and ask me.

Also of potential interest is my Flickr page, which features some of my photography. The vast majority of the shots were taken in London. Some of them I quite like, and maybe you'll like them as well. Stranger things have happened. And if you like gravestones, well, you're in luck there as well. I took a lot of pictures at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, GA.

The other thing I want to mention is that I'm considering sponsoring a short fiction contest like the one that just wrapped at The Clarity of Night. I didn't find out about it until it was over, but I truly love the idea, and am stealing it. I have no idea what form this contest might take, but the formula will be more or less what he's got going on, as I've already established that I'm not very clever. I'll think up a topic or an image, give y'all a time limit and maximum length, and we'll go from there. There'll be prizes and what-not.

If any of you have any ideas for some general parameters, leave me a note in the comments or send me an email and let me know what they are. The biggest problem I foresee is getting prizes for international submissions, and the mailing or sending of these. I don't want to exclude anyone.

map of july (part 3)

I approached an actor friend who said he was a drummer, to see if he'd be interested in filling out our line-up.

"What're you guys?" he asked in his Boston accent. "Straightforward like the Foo Fighters?"

Jeff came to his first rehearsal with a full drum kit, and a notion of rock bands that came out of "Hammer of the Gods." None of us drank much at the time, but Jeff downed a whole bottle of wine that he found in my fridge to "warm up," while the rest of us exchanged nervous glances.

Jeff was at his best with some of our jazzier songs. He liked to have room to play with things. He tended to get lost in a standard pop song. We noticed quickly that the cool thing he played on the chorus of one song, he might not recall even the next time the chorus came up during that same run through the song.

Jeff tended to bring his girlfriend Kate to rehearsals, and she had some things in common with Nathan. She didn't think twice before offerings suggestions that we change this or that, that I sing this song an octave higher.

She was our photographer for the first set of band pictures. We had vetoed Jeff's suggestion that we all "dress up and hang around in the cemetery" which bordered my apartment, on the grounds that such behavior had nothing to do with the music we made, and ended up taking a series of pictures on old bridges and some fun ones in a scale-model town the local police had built for the teaching of traffic safety. By the end of the day we were exhausted as much by Kate as anything. Even Jeff, who clearly loved her, didn't seem to like her very much.

It was nice to have a drummer, though. It made things feel more real somehow. And Jeff was certainly fun to have around most of the time. And with this core group in place, we set out to play our first legitimate show, an Earth Day 1997 celebration downstate.

We had gotten the gig through an ex of mine (who would later adorn the cover of our first record), who had some connections as a student down there. We were to play for 45 minutes.

I doubt we played well, but it felt great to be on a stage singing the songs we had made, taking our first steps towards something. Marc and I, at least, were already pouring a lot of time into discussions of what we'd do when we got big. We divided potential royalties, weighed the pros and cons of signing to a label. Ian was a little more reluctant in these conversations. He worked in the music industry and had an idea of how difficult it can be to make a living at music.

We actually had a "band rule" that said we wouldn't do a stadium tour until we had crossed the country at least once playing clubs. The rules were designed as a statement about who we were, as well. We didn't want to be famous so much as we wanted to be good at what we did, and respected for it. It's fair to say that the most any of us hoped for was to make a living doing this.

But the show was fairly well-received. The students seemed to like us. We got our first press as well, the above pic running in the local paper the next day, spelling both my name and the name of the band correctly, which we decided was a good sign.

A friend of mine, with whom I was very close in high school, came up as we were tearing down and asked when I was gonna write a song about him. A few months later I angrily obliged, coming up with "The Ballad of Wolfgang Grimm." The song was written to be a throwaway we could play once at some show he attended, but it remained in the set lists for years.

Within a couple of months, Jeff's inconsistent drumming and his sporadic rehearsal attendance, coupled with some differing views as to what the band should be, led to his dismissal. We had already found a new drummer, Greg, during a time when Jeff was not around, and circumstances ended up so that Greg was present when we let Jeff go.

We were at a screening of the film Jeff and I had completed the previous Spring, held at the Art Institute. I had tried to reach Jeff by phone before the screening, but couldn't, so I had to do the job at what would otherwise have been a purely celebrational experience for us both. The other band members seemed to literally dematerialize as I approached him.

He laughed it off, but I could see that it bothered him. I felt terrible, firing an old friend like that, especially given where we were. It's definitely a low point for me. I thought about the story of John Lennon firing Pete Shotton, his best friend, from the Quarrymen by breaking a washboard over his head. I reconciled myself with the knowledge that, while we were never going to be the Beatles, at least I hadn't fired Jeff violently. Shotton at least got a supermarket out of the deal, though.

But the first time Greg played with us, his very first rehearsal, he brought something I hadn't yet experienced in music. He played solidly, and some little part of me relaxed more than I had been able to previously. The song was going to be there, and I could concentrate on singing. The songs sounded better with Greg, and he helped me to sing better as well. I could trust him.

Even with the Jeff situation as yet unresolved, we offered him the job before he even left my house for the first time.

And with his acceptance the "classic" map of july line-up was formed.

map of july (part 2)

Once we had some original material to play with, it grew increasingly evident that we needed a drummer. By this time we had room for one, as I had cleared most of the rest of my stuff out of the small back room of my tiny apartment. I slept on the couch in the living room. The band had nearly half of my apartment, although this was still a cramped room measuring maybe eight feet square.

Casting my line at work, I got a nibble from a co-worker named Nathan, who agreed to come out and hear the band, maybe play along some, before making up his mind. Nathan was primarily a guitarist, but expressed interest in playing something percussive.

He showed up with his guitar, and we all started to play some of the covers and original songs we had been working on. Nathan was an angry sort of music nerd, the kind of guy who would declare that all punk music was actually country, and attack you personally if you disagreed. It shouldn't have been much of a surprise, then, when he started saying things like: "You guys should never play that song again" (on our version of "Cry, Baby, Cry" by the Beatles) or "Ian should not even be allowed to hold a slide guitar. You guys should take that thing away from him" (on an original song, later recorded for our first album with Ian's slide work intact).

Perhaps more jarring than his comments was his rehearsal method. He'd plug in a long cable and wander around as the song progressed, often leaving the room entirely. I'd catch a glimpse of him standing with his back to me in my living room. Often, when he wandered about like this his playing did, too. I don't have any real recollection of him playing drums or percussion.

He wasn't a bad guitarist. At one rehearsal, I can recall asking Ian if he could play something "Nathanish" over a part of a song. The normally fuzzy and friendly Ian responded with: "Oh, you want me to leave the room and play something only marginally related to what you guys are doing?"

Not surprisingly, the time soon came to fire Nathan. Ian, Marc and I stayed after rehearsal to talk about it. We debated some, but the die was already cast, and eventually it was decided that I should call him at home and tell him the news.

When he answered the phone, it was clear that I had woken him.

"Nathan, we've been talking," I began. I was thinking about how inauspicious it was to have to fire someone before ever having a stable line-up. I was also thinking about how I was the only band member who was going to have to see Nathan the following morning at work. "It's just not going to work out."

"OK," Nathan replied impatiently. "Anything else?"

That bastard was cold.

The good thing that came out of the Nathan period was our name. We had elected to try out a couple of our songs at an open mike at Fitzgerald's, a folk/rock bar in Berwyn. Ian knew some people there who would listen with appraising ears and give us some feedback.

We decided we needed a name before taking the stage, and from a long list of awful names, we selected map of july, based on my inability to recall the word "calendar" during a conversation, and the fact that Ian, Marc and myself were all born in July. We thought it sounded cool and a little mysterious. A resolution was made to never reveal the origin of the name, as it made us look silly.

We, of course, were sure that they were going to offer us a gig right then and there. They told us instead that we weren't very tight, and to come back when we were. They were almost certainly correct. We had a long way to go as a band.

Map of July (Part 1)

Late November/early December of this year would have been the tenth anniversary of Map of July had it survived. We came a lot closer to celebrating a decade than we would have imagined when we first got together. In honor of this almost anniversary (and some of the people who altered my life forever), I will be doing a series of posts about the history of the band, and some of the memories that stick out for me. The artwork which accompanies these posts are all elements used by Map of July at one time or another, and created either by Marc Ludena or myself, or by both of us when we weren't bickering.

Marc helped me move from Denver back to Chicagoland in September of 1996. In exchange, he asked only that I go with him to see a band he loved called Over the Rhine in October. The day of the show I tried to get out of it, citing a headache, but he wouldn't hear of it. He pretty much forced me to go.

The concert was incredible. Intimate, passionate music performed expertly by a wonderful group of folks on the stage. I snuck over and bought every record they had recorded at that time whilst I was supposed to be out smoking. I didn't want Marc to know how much I had enjoyed the thing I had tried to evade.

Driving home, I said again (it was always in the back of my mind) that it would be great to start a band that could capture some portion of what we had seen that night. He agreed, and I mentioned that I knew a guitar player (Marc was already a bassist) we could call and see where things might go. I, of course, would sing, since I didn't know how to play anything. Marc surprised me by saying this was a great idea.

Marc was one of the only musicians I had known who had heard me sing and thought I sounded good enough to play music with. My friend Ian was another, an old friend from high school with whom I had recently rekindled communication. I called Ian to gauge his interest. He seemed enthusiastic, and came over to my house on a Sunday afternoon to play around and see what we thought. I remember thinking afterward that we had both probably sounded terrible, but I really wanted to be in a band, so I told Marc it had gone swimmingly and told both of them to come the following Sunday.

We goofed around for a month or two. Marc was a really solid bassist, but I had never sung much into a microphone, and Ian came from a folk music background where he had never been required to match anyone's timing but his own. So both of us were pretty self-conscious around Marc at first.

When Marc had to take some time off from rehearsing in January, Ian and I decided to spend that time writing some original music. The first time we tried to write, we wrote a couple of songs, and the next week a couple more, and we discovered that we worked well together. I tended to like his guitar lines and he tended to like my lyrics and melodies, and that became more or less what we did for a month solid: marry his output to mine.

When Marc returned, we had more than a few new songs to play for him, and we were a bit nervous that he would tell us they were crap. After all, he was the first person to hear any of the songs who hadn't written them. I think we were both relieved when he started to play along with some of them, clearly having ideas and liking the songs.

When we started working on our own music, suggesting things to one another and creating something together instead of simply playing someone else's songs, that was the moment we really became a band.