Tag: music

Paul Sebastien and I hit it off immediately after meeting at The Underground. We were both aloof, interested in music, in the habit of wearing designer clothes, and considered ourselves to be more cultured than most of our Midwestern friends and acquaintances. And to be fair, we probably were, as we were more likely to go to the Guthrie, the Ordway, or the Orchestra than we were to attend a rock concert, see a live band, or go bowling. (To this day, I cannot picture Paul on a bowling alley, much less wearing bowling shoes. He’d rather die.) He wanted to be a pop star and I wanted to be a hit game designer. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we became inseparable, but along with my high school friend, The Perfect Aryan Male, the three of us regularly made the round of the Minneapolis bars and night clubs on weekends together.

Since Paul had an apartment that was centrally located in Minneapolis just across the river from downtown, our usual habit was to meet at his place, where he had a room devoted to a recording studio, complete with a full-size mixing board and multi-track tape recorder. I would usually get there about an hour before TPAM, since I liked to listen to his latest musical projects and in keeping with his attention to musical detail, Paul was an indecisive perfectionist who always took what seemed like forever to get ready. In a mildly ironic twist of fate, Paul was living with Kristen, the blonde waitress who had been so sympathetic to Noboys at The Upper Level. She and I got along well, so I would often hang out and chat with her as Paul fiddled with his suits, his ties, and his hair. Once TPAM arrived and Paul had finally decided that he looked presentable, the three or four of us would pile into my Porsche – Paul was ALWAYS in the front passenger side – and we’d head across the river.

Smilehouse had fallen apart, so Paul was working in a somewhat desultory manner on what passed for his solo career. He spent rather a lot of money to record a single at Paisley Park that was produced by Bobby Z of Prince and the Revolution, an eminently forgettable song that was as boring and lifeless as it was technically proficient highly processed pop. I can still vividly remember it being introduced for the first time at Glam Slam; Paul was standing proudly in the DJ booth, holding a beer as he surveyed the dance floor while his song was played in public the first time. The crowd’s reaction wasn’t negative, but merely indifferent, and the song didn’t make even the smallest dent on the local club scene, let alone radio.

Paul then decided he needed to play live shows in order to garner more interest in his music, but being the complete perfectionist that he was, he didn’t actually want to play anything live. This was a point of constant debate between us over the years, as he felt that audiences wanted to hear perfectly “performed” music whereas I felt that whatever flaws were likely to occur during a show made the performance aspects more interesting. And besides, the whole musical miming thing just struck me as ridiculous, especially after the whole Milli Vanilli thing. Paul’s counterargument was that everything looks ridiculous when it goes wrong, so the lesson is to be careful and get it right, not just give up on it.

Paul’s distaste for live performances posed a problem, however, because no serious musician wants to stand on stage pretending to play music pre-recorded by someone else. But being a virtuoso, Paul simply didn’t have confidence in any musician who wasn’t at his level. So, knowing that I had a modicum of piano given my three years of childhood lessons, he asked me if I would be his “keyboard” player and do the backing vocals. I was quite happy to help him out, and he recruited a young friend of his brother Nick named Mike to serve as his “drummer” and a mutual friend of ours from the club scene, Dejay, to serve as a multipurpose rapper/dancer/backing vocalist. There was no pretense of this being a real band, it was billed as “Paul Sebastian” and we were all perfectly aware that we were only helping him out until he was able to put together a real band. I don’t think we ever did so much as a single serious rehearsal, in fact, on further reflection, I’m sure we didn’t or else Dejay never would have seen the stage.

Paul Sebastian and “band” circa 1990

We only performed three times that I remember. The first time was at a University of Minnesota fraternity party, the second was at The Perimeter, and the third was at The Living Room. (Interestingly enough, Spacebunny was also at that fraternity party, although we didn’t meet and she didn’t remember us or the Jane’s Addiction cover band that followed.) Dejay turned out to be a complete disaster, as he couldn’t rap and his dancing would have been considered vulgar at a male strip club. It didn’t suit Paul’s style in the least. Even so, the little shows were received very well, mostly because we looked like a proper band and Paul’s DAT recordings were borderline professional. We weren’t just doing the full Milli Vanilli either; Paul’s lead vocal and guitar were both live, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, Mike’s ability to play his electronic drums in perfect time with the sequenced ones was rather unusual. Unfortunately, Dejay’s total inability to rap tended to support Paul’s point about the wisdom of pre-recorded performances.

As for me, I played a few atmospherics and thought I was singing backup, although I learned after the first show that Paul had somehow forgotten to plug my microphone into the mixing board. I’m sure a more serious musician would have been upset, but I just found it amusing. It was his deal, after all, and I could hardly blame him as he has a really good voice and a low tolerance for mediocrity. My prime directive was “stand back there and look like Nick Rhodes would”… which I understood completely since another thing we had in common was that we were both Duran Duran aficionados.

Dejay was dropped from the band after The Perimeter show, and because there weren’t rooms for the drum kit at The Living Room, Mike was too. Paul and I did a two-man performance at The Living Room that was much better than the two previous shows. However, it was gradually becoming apparent that the 80’s-flavored sound Paul was producing was becoming increasingly outdated in comparison with the music from EMF, Jesus Jones, the Charlatans UK and the Happy Mondays that we were hearing in the clubs.

Now, one of the things that people who don’t create music, and far too many people who do, simply don’t understand is the way in which musicians draw very heavily upon the influence of those who surround them. This is how even those who don’t write or play a note of music, or contribute a single lyric or sound sample, can nevertheless have a profound effect on what is being produced by the musician. It’s not an accident that George Michael’s music sounded very different post-Wham!, since he was no longer being influenced by his friend Andrew Ridgeley; this is one of the reasons why even a seemingly minor departure of a mediocre bassist can dramatically change a band’s sound. This doesn’t mean that the musician isn’t creating all the music himself or doesn’t merit 100 percent of the credit for doing so, only that those personal influences help determine what it is that he is creating. Although Paul vastly preferred keyboards and electronics, and absolutely loathed the heavy guitar of the grunge music that was making its way out of Seattle, he was a competent guitarist, and so I encouraged him to work on something that combined rock guitars with a dance beat. He was initially a little skeptical, but being a pretty open-minded individual, eventually gave it a whirl.

So, one night in the winter of 1990-1991, we met up at The Perimeter and he told me that he had a tape with him that he wanted me to hear. So, we went out to my Audi 5000, my trusty winter car, popped in the tape, and listened to it. It was an instrumental, but had a rocking guitar line over a busy, infectious dance beat, and it was obviously capable of providing the foundation for a really good song. I don’t remember who came up with which part, but we had been joking earlier about how dreadfully dumb the song “I Wanna Sex You Up” was, and between us we came up with the line “sex me sex me sex me up, before you go go”, which struck us as a hilarious combination of Colour Me Badd and Wham! meets EMF or something.

It started as little more than a guitar line and a joke, but it somehow worked. Paul encouraged me to put together some more lyrics on the theme, which I did, and the whole thing culminated about a week later in “Sex Me Up”. We invited a few guys over to hear it, including the DJ at The Perimeter, and after a few beers they all contributed a shouting chorus to the most raucous version of the song. The DJ liked it enough that he immediately put it into his regular rotation at the club. His name was Daniel Lensmeier.

The true and obscure history of Psykosonik, part I

Among the very small number of people still interested in Psykosonik, there is a fair amount of confusion as to what actually happened concerning the band’s beginnings as well as its end. It was an interesting, and I would have to say, generally positive experience even if we never realized our potential, never put too much effort into it, and basically demonstrated how far one could expect to go without seriously trying.

Psykosonik began with a small, personable guy named Gordie, who was determined to be a nightclub impresario. He got his start with a little place in Minneapolis called The Upper Level, in partnership with a rich kid from Minnetonka named John something or other. John was a short, good-looking blond guy who, if he had been taller, could have played the villain in every 80’s movie. He could have defined the term “douchebag”. The featured attraction at The Upper Level was a band called Smilehouse, which in addition to John and Gordie, featured the music, singing, guitar, and keyboard programming of a tall, handsome, diffident musician named Paul Skrowaczewski.

Paul came by his skills naturally, being the son of Stanislau Skrowaczewski, who at the time was the conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. His younger brother Nick was also in Smilehouse, (more about him later), and played the drums. They had a very 80’s sound and were really rather good, although I was always skeptical about whether Gordie and John were actually playing anything on keyboards and bass. I think the Smilehouse name was meant to trade on the Acid House that had been big in the UK around that time, but there was nothing either Acid or House about the music, which was straightforward dance pop written by Paul. Their most popular song was “All Night Party”, an upbeat dance number, but I really liked the more subdued and mysterious “Perfect Stranger”.

The summer before, in 1987, Big Chilly and I had formed a cover band called NoBoys with his brother Sharp and our friend Horn, which wasn’t particularly serious and was more devoted to figuring out how to program the electronics of the songs we liked than anything. We learned how to play songs by Depeche Mode, New Order, Shriekback, Erasure, and Information Society, whose singer, Kurt Harland, happened to be from the next suburb over. More about him later too. The name was a bit of a joke, standing for North Oaks Boys, which was about as far from “the street” as you could get without going to an East Coast prep school. Had we started it just a little later, after Straight Outta Compton was released, (we were huge PE and NWA fans from the start), I have no doubt we would have called it NoBoyz….

Right before we all went back to college in the summer of 1988, I played a tape to Gordie and we discussed NoBoys playing at The Upper Level. He was excited, because at the time, with the exception of Prince and the various Prince-related bands, all the live bands played rock and roll, not dance music. He came out to my parents’ house where we practiced in the exercise room in the basement, liked the song selections and the fact that all four of us could sing, and hired us for what turned out to be NoBoys second and final live performance. So, we got The Upper Level gig in return for a percentage of the evening take.

This was the picture used in the flyer that Gordie distributed. From left: Big Chilly, Vox, Sharp, Horn.

As would happen later a few blocks away, with Psykosonik, the crowd completely abandoned the floor once the DJ stopped and the stage lights went on, only to return with delight once they heard the electronics kick in and everyone realized we weren’t going to play music that was 20 years out of date. We played for an hour and the set went over well, extremely well. So well, in fact, that John, Gordie’s partner, was furious that the crowd was so much more enthusiastic than it had been lately about Smilehouse. (This was because Smilehouse had been playing there all summer, not because their songs were bad. Also, when it comes to dancing, people tend to prefer covers to original music by unknown bands, live crowds never want to hear anything new even if it is U2 or Springsteen that is introducing it. Although in the latter case, that will seldom stop them from bragging about it later….)

John was so jealous that he not only pulled the plug on us once we’d hit precisely the one hour allotted, (we were just about to kick into our big closing number, a rocked-up version of Malaria by Shriekback(1), he actually had the DJ play “Blue Monday” by New Order, the last song we’d been permitted to finish. This was a mistake, because our programming was very good and thus our version sounded almost precisely the same, (except for the vocals)(3), and he just about lost it when people kept asking him why it was being repeated. The four of us were so indignant about being prevented from finishing our set when it was going so well that we refused to accept the few hundred dollars we were due from Gordie, who was a nice guy and extremely embarrassed by his partner’s behavior. I also met a pretty blonde waitress that evening who was very sympathetic to us, which eventually proved to be of minor significance, as shall be seen later.

But Gordie and I stayed in touch, and the following winter, he invited me to see his new club, an all-ages place called The Underground, near the University of Minnesota campus in Dinkytown. He had the most ridiculous little “VIP” section roped off, with just enough room for about ten people and invited me to come sit with him in there.(2) As it happened, that evening there was already one other “VIP” sitting there smoking a cigarette behind the ropes, a guy that I recognized right away as the lead singer of Smilehouse. Gordie introduced us, and that was how I met Paul Sebastien.

The true and obscure history of Psykosonik part II

(1) Man, we loved that Shriekback song. And everyone went nuts when we played it, Malaria was the one big exception to the rule about live crowds not liking songs they hadn’t heard before. With his big bass voice, Big Chilly just ripped it up, both vocally and on guitar. And how can you not respect a band that not only incorporates the word “parthenogenesis”, but does so in the freaking chorus! If you haven’t heard Shriekback’s Oil and Gold CD, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

(2) I was tremendously amused to see that for the dance floor, Gordie had used the same black-and-white linoleum tile at that he had admired so in my parent’s basement exercise room.

(3) “Blue Monday” was one of the two songs on which I sang lead, because the other three were all talented vocalists who didn’t sound plugged-up and drugged-out enough for New Order. And by talented vocalists, I mean genuinely talented.