But seriously: Thank you for putting up with my crankiness for all those years, Eric.

This is my second attempt.)

To think we were actually denounced as “sa-tah-nic” for our work in a rock-n-roll band. How cool is that?
————

This was a very traumatic period in my life and has largely been successfully expunged from my memory.
Except Duane. Yeesh. Duane looked like the commune had left him behind and took his spare clothes, in 1973.
———–

Actually, it was “Kelly,” and she was a Methodist. Officially, at least. Apparently, when she was young, the pastor said something in a sermon her parents didn’t like, thereby clearly, unequivocally and permanently excusing her family from all further religious obligations and responsibilities. Or something.
———–

“Rock-n-Roll” and “We’re Still Great” were actually written at one sitting. That sitting was an overnight coffee binge at Denny’s in Lynnwood. Somewhere around the twelfth cup, I decided to start jotting down some ideas for songs. Amazingly, the words started pouring forth and, after a few more of Denny’s world-famous “Mug o’ Sludge,” I had finished both songs. I hurriedly gathered up my treasures, hopped on my bike, and started my five-mile trip home. It was 4:30.

Within a few blocks I started…seeing things. I couldn’t figure out what any of these hallucinations were, because my mind was racing from the songs to the hallucinations to the songs to the white line on the road and how some of the crevices are more thoroughly coated with this sparkly paint to the hallucinations to the dead squirrel! to the songs and so on for what seemed like a day and a half.

Once I got home, I crawled into bed and begged God for sweet, merciful death. I was constantly aware that heaving was just a wrong twitch away, and I lay in a never-ending state between dreamland and a restless, pained state of semi-consciousness.

I never revised the lyrics after that, surely a touch of PTSD setting in. What you hear are the first, very rough, drafts.

Jason and I agreed to do a lot of our preparatory work separately. You know, like the Beatles? Also like the Beatles was the reason: we hated each other’s guts. We were still best friends and all that, but our respective “abrasivities” were really, well, abrasing each other. It didn’t help that our girls didn’t understand. (Although, today, my feet are also shuffling uncomfortably.) Regardless, it was a difficult time, and I think it sometimes showed in the music. You know, like Zeppelin’s “Presence?” For now, we could only prepare for the Gibson Sessions.

Two months later, it was time to record. I was really struggling at this time, perhaps fatigued, uninspired. Jason called to tell me he was on his way to pick me up. “I’m ready! See you in ten minutes!” I hung up the phone, plugged in my guitar, took a deep breath, and pulled out the wrinkled, java-stained artifacts of a night long past.

“It is time,” I thought. “The time is now. Now is the time to reach inside, to reach outside. Reach. Reach for that spark, that ever-elusive spark of artistic creativity. Now is the time to ask the question…”

“What the hell am I going to play for these pieces of crap?”

Ten minutes later Jason knocked on the door and I showed him the two songs, fully arranged and mapped out, including the way-cool piano riff in “R-n-R.” As my wife, an accomplished pianist and teacher, describes it, it is “definitely a theoretically acceptable embellishment.”

Ironically, those two songs took just a couple hours to pretty much complete. You know, it’s great how time makes it possible to get things off your chest. Things you know that, years ago, would have spawned irreparable acrimony had it come to light at the time, but now are actually pretty damn funny. Aren’t they, Jason?

Jason?

Basically all it was – was a guy yelling: “HURRY HURRY HURRY! The show is starting in a few minutes! C’mon in! There’s fresh popcorn in the lobby. HURRY HURRY HURRY!” On the flip side was the same except maybe it went a tad bit longer and maybe there was another “hurry” thrown in for good measure – I actually do not know.

My assumption was that some movie theatre with an external speaker system would crank this up 5 minutes before the show to try and draw customers in. Having bought and played it, I gave it to Jason to use.

It’s the closest I ever came to actually singing on one of these albums.

If fifi had continued with all the band members intact…I think that the natural progression would have been something like that. Okay, not really, not anything like that. At all.

And as for that blue bath robe, Jason also wore it to work one day – toting around a teddy bear to boot. Which is really nothing, when you consider that one time he wore a bikini and some flippers! He did keeping things interesting!