revision99

Sometimes I just have to bite my tongue.

Once, a long time ago, when a waitress asked me if everything was OK, I told her “No — look at the mess in Bosnia-Herzegovina! My God, it’s humanitarian disaster!”

No one in the room, including the waitress, thought this was funny. Or they didn’t know what I was talking about — I always have to consider that possibility. The people at my table were embarrassed, for me or the waitress, I wasn’t sure. In any case, the incident taught me to keep my mouth shut when these stupid thoughts occur to me.

So tonight when the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I did not say “True enlightenment? No, I haven’t found that yet. But I will continue my quest, thank you.” I said,”Yeah, I guess so,” or something like that.

Everybody was happy, and the checker grinned and asked “Paper or plastic?”

If you’re an aspiring musician looking for a name for your new band,

…you may need to look no farther than your email inbox. Today I received otherwise useless messages from:

• Elusive Toothpick,
• Campanile Cross and…
• MegaDik

to name but a few.These would all be excellent band names, I think, but I have a question: Do the spammers really think I would send my bank account information to someone named Elusive Toothpick, even if they have approved my loan application?

I’ve been hearing on the radio lately that if I replace five of my regular light bulbs at home with these newfangled curly-cue compact fluorescent bulbs, it will be like taking 400,000 — or is it 40,000? I don’t remember — cars off the roads in California.

Sounds good to me. I’ve put in four of these bulbs in the past month, which (taking the low figure) should equate to 32,000 cars staying home.

Unfortunately it seems the other 8,000 of them are maneuvering around on the roads between my home and my office, usually at the same time I am trying to get from one to the other, and none of them are using their turn signals.

What’s the deal with turn signals? They are on every car I’ve ever owned. They’re mentioned prominently in the California DMV Driver’s Handbook. In fact, if you show up at the DMV to take your driving test in a car with non-working turn signals, you get sent home to fix them. You have to have them, and the handbook is pretty specific about the legal requirement to use them, too. Maybe it’s different in other places, but in my town, in my state, nobody uses them, or they use them wrong.

Of course there are the drivers on the freeway who feel perfectly all right about changing lanes whenever they feel like it, no matter who they might cut off. I rarely go an entire week of commuting without having at least one red-light, heart-in-the-throat, ABS-thumping incident due to some oblivious asshole sliding his crossover SUV in front of me with no warning. They are usually not going as fast as I am, either, which leads to ill will on my part, and when I eventually get to pass them, I look over, but they seem not to realize they have sinned, as they talk on the phone, fix their makeup (this is LA: even the men wear makeup) or tune their Sirius radios.

That’s bad enough, but I can sort of understand this lack of driving courtesy: they are turn signals, you know, and changing lanes isn’t really turning. I have more trouble empathizing with people who are actually turning and who don’t signal. They will turn right in front of you when you are rushing toward them at an intersection. They seem to think that the key is to get their car in your path at any cost, at which point you will have to let them through. Following this line of thought, you can see that signaling would defeat their purpose: If I know you are going to turn, I can speed up and prevent you from doing so. And I would, too, because the main reason I ever get in my car is to obstruct your trip to wherever the f*ck.

Then there are the drivers — and I use the term loosely — who signal only as they enter their turn. To them, the signal means “OK, I am turning now. See me turning?” They are not signaling about something they intend to do very soon, like maybe in a couple of hundred feet. They are signaling about something that is happening right now. Why signal at all? If your turn is going to cause an accident because no one knew it was coming, the only difference will be that your blinker will be blinking when I crash into your car.

Look, it’s just plain thoughtless rudeness. Or maybe it’s willful rudeness, I don’t know. Signaling is something you do mainly for the other guy, and in today’s world, with all your responsibilities and deadlines and preoccupations, who cares about anybody but yourself? The other guy would stick it to you in a heartbeat if it served his purposes, wouldn’t he?

Maybe so. Maybe there’s no cure for this epidemic of boorishness. But I warn all you non-signaling drivers: I have 50 more compact fluorescent bulbs in my garage. If you don’t shape up pronto, you are all going to be riding your bicycles.

It’s the last of my five-day minivacation.

I had a day off work on Independence Day, and I took a couple of vacation days after that, Thursday and Friday, so I got myself a looong weekend. Five days for the price of two. I can’t pass up a bargain like that.

All I have done, really, is work on the recording project. Ten songs, covers, unusual choices, I hope. This is so I can put my garage band to work. At this point I no longer know why I want to do this. It’s just what you do. I mean, is it really a “band” if it doesn’t go out and play for people?

My instinct is to pick up the guitar and play it, to hear the notes and the harmonies, to feel the strings under my fingers, the body against my chest, to imagine the possible meanings. (It’s pathetic, really, how hard I try, and how little I produce.) But if you just do it alone, if you never show it, is it real? I don’t know.

Anyway I’ve decided that I have to make this CD, a digital audition, so the owners of bars and nightclubs, and maybe some booking agents, can be assured that the band is competent. They won’t have to bring us in for a real audition (although they still might demand one), so there’s no chance they can make a mistake.

What I have been doing, mostly all by myself in my home studio, is replacing most of the guitars from the original recording session, and all of the vocals. The tracks were recorded in a small room with no isolation between the instruments. Every open microphone became a drum track. Here’s what the floor tom sounds like from 30 feet away, with the mic six inches from the floor and pointed away from the the drum. Or how about that snare, mic’d from three different, apparently random, locations around the room?

This is nobody’s fault, of course. To save money, I set it up as a rehearsal recording. We were supposed to get a live mix of the session. One CD, nothing more, just to get an idea of how we were doing. For fifty bucks more I got the guy to give me the individual tracks, so I could shine it up at home and actually use it for something. Three vocal tracks, two guitar tracks, one bass and thirteen tracks of drums, on ten songs. That was three weeks ago.

Now I’m finished. Well, almost. I have resung all my parts and all the bass player’s parts, and got my brother to redo his parts. I have replaced almost all of the guitar tracks — some of the rhythm guitar tracks my brother played on his ancient Rickenbacker were too good to fuck with — and I have massaged the drums with EQ, echo, noise gates and automated mixing. I even had to move a couple of misplaced snare hits, and replace a couple that, for some reason, weren’t there at all.

It took more than two weeks to do this on the first five songs, and then — on my mini-vacation — just three and a half days to do the other five, which goes to prove what an impediment to progress my crummy job is. Along the way I felt pretty good about the whole thing. I mean, I have no illusions about this band. It’s a garage band. We should play cheap neighborhood dives and Pigma Sty fraternity parties. These kinds of gigs are exactly where I started out. Without changing much of anything, I have become a Classic Rocker.

But while I was working on the CD I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I was thinking about notes, mood, balance, placement, texture — as if it were any band great or small. Technically speaking, I did the best I could with what I had.

But I know no one will listen to a CD of ten cover songs by a garage band, and so the work is not quite finished. Now I have to cut those songs up into bite-sized pieces and string them together into one five-minute segment that will not allow you to turn it off, a demo so compelling that we will never be able to live up to the expectations it engenders. Given the attention span of most of us in this day of fast television cuts and instant gratification, I should try to cut it down to about 60 seconds, but the idea of ten-second songbites offends even me, so I’ll just go with the feel of each song, cut out the fluff and keep it under ten minutes for the whole thing.

Anybody could pay attention for ten minutes, right?

But before I do this…

After tonight this project will be over. Oh, there may be some whining from the band about the way I put it all together, and I’ll either have to spend some time beating back their criticisms, or spend some time making changes to mollify them, but in my mind I’m done. The next phase is what you’d call marketing, and I mean face-to-face retail selling the product, something I have little heart for.

That’s a step toward putting this group on stage. We’ll never make enough money to pay ourselves back for our time, effort and investment so far, but, you know: It’s what you do. I just don’t know why.

The bandstand used to be my refuge, the safe place where I could act any way I wanted, and nobody knew I was really shy, and I could be there at the dances and the parties and the clubs and the concerts in the park with all the people, and no one could question my legitimate reason for being there. Foolish thinking, I suppose, but it made me want to be there. It made me need to perform.

This time around it feels like I’ve gotten on a train without looking at the schedule to see where it was heading, and my stop is coming up, an unknown destination, and I don’t know where it is and I haven’t packed even a toothbrush.

Maybe it’ll stop at Willoughby.

I’m glad President Bush commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby.

Because now Mr. Libby has no legal reason not to answer questions in a Congressional investigation into just who was behind the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson, or in impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney. He can’t take the fifth, because he’s already been convicted and sentenced. Put him under oath. He won’t have the balls to commit perjury again.

(This is all I have time for right now. I hope Blue Girl doesn’t catch me.)