Tag: music

Music from the Responsible Puppet

The Responsible Puppet writes:

Several years ago I wanted to teach my kids the weekly bible verse from
our church’s five year bible memory program so I started making up
songs. One of the pastor heard about it and asked us to sing at the
yearly bible verse kick off. After that, people started asking us to
record.

We started off slow and rough and we have
now produced five CDs. The most recent CD is the entire Sermon On The
Mount (every word, every verse), using several musical styles and the
gifts of nearly fifty musicians and multiple song-writers. It’s good,
main stream, not highly-produced family-friendly music. It includes the
Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and many other favorite passages.

Just to be clear, this is the RP’s deal, not mine.

Just because they are awesome

In general, my rock tastes tend to run more to the barely repressed violence that is Disturbed, but this nondescript little English guy in a red suit with no flashy guitar pyrotechnics or moves like Jagger is a capital-R ROCK STAR in a way that Axl Rose and other overly self-conscious performers could never be. The guitar line is so simple, and yet so awesome when it kicks in. You can see the crowd just waiting for it.

A teachable moment

I was driving to the post office today, listening to the pure essence of awesome that is Rock Sugar, when it occurred to me that a previous attempt to “correct” me served as an ideal example of the frustration regularly experienced by more intelligent individuals forced to deal with the regular attempts of the mid-witted to demonstrate their intellectual “superiority” to all and sundry.

In my experience, those of very average or sub-normal intelligence seldom attempt to correct people. They simply don’t dare. And with the exception of the socially retarded sub-set, those of high intelligence also seldom bother, either because it’s so much more trouble than its worth or because they view one isolated correction as being akin to attempting to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon. But mid-wits love little more than demonstrating that they know more than somebody else, especially in public, and they will readily leap at any opportunity to do so.

Anyhow, some time ago, I mentioned that Shook Me Like a Prayer was one of my favorite Rock Sugar mashups, and that I particularly liked the way it incorporated Hell’s Bells by AC/DC. Someone, I don’t recall who, immediately took the opportunity to jump on that statement, explaining that it wasn’t AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells, but rather, You Shook Me All Night Long that was the song that had been mixed together with Madonna’s Like a Prayer.

That was both true and false… and this is precisely why I hate midwits. First, they seldom have a sufficient grasp of the subjects they address, and second, they tend to inadvertently assume a position that requires the assumption that the person they are correcting is a complete and blithering idiot. I mean, let’s consider the facts that had to be known in this case to the midwit concerned:

(1) The Rock Sugar song is called Shook Me Like a Prayer and Rock Sugar songs are usually named after the two songs most utilized in the mix. Precisely how dumb does someone have to be in order to hear the song and somehow fail to recognize either chorus or the significance of “Shook Me” in the title? 65 IQ? 55? Actually brain-dead?

(2) To quote Wikipedia, “You Shook Me All Night Long is one of AC/DC’s signature songs from their most successful album, Back in Black.” It also has one of the most recognizable introductory guitar lines in rock history.

(3) Its occasional use during defensive stands in NFL games notwithstanding, Hell’s Bells is less well known than You Shook Me All Night Long and anyone who knows the former is almost surely familiar with the latter.

(4) Rock Sugar usually mixes in elements from at least three different songs even if only two of them serve as the primary sources and are referenced in the title. For example, Voices in the Jungle also contains the famous guitar melody from Sweet Child o’ Mine in the second and third choruses.

(5) There are freaking BELLS sounding in the middle of the Rock Sugar song.

Any one of those known facts should have been enough to give the correcting individual pause, but as we saw, they did not. Then add to those five known facts the two unknown ones that the midwit might have known, but couldn’t be reasonably assumed to know:

(6) AC/DC’s Back in Black was the first album I ever bought.

(7) I was a founding member of a band signed to Wax Trax! and TVT Records, and can therefore be expected to pay at least a little more attention to the more subtle elements that go into a song than the average individual.

Now, if you simply listen first to Hell’s Bells from the 22 second to the 40 second mark, then to Shook Me Like a Prayer from the 2 minute 28 second mark to the two minute 44 second mark, it should be completely obvious what I was describing. Despite not being one of the song’s two primary elements, Hell’s Bells is cleverly and seamlessly worked into the mix, which is precisely the aspect of the song I was praising.

The basic problem this example reveals isn’t that the midwit has no idea what he’s talking about, but that he has a partial understanding he erroneously assumes is a complete one. For those who find themselves tempted to be constantly correcting others, it might be worth keeping this example in mind to encourage a moment’s hesitation and contemplation before you leap in and embarrass yourself by attempting to “correct” an understanding that is materially superior to your own. At least on this blog, I have noticed that errors inspired by a combination of trigger words with insufficient reading comprehension appear to be the most common variety.

And on a barely tangential note, I was amused by DL’s email this morning:

I was putzing around in my SNES emulator the other day and loaded up “X-Calibur” or some such at random. Imagine my surprise (and triple-take to make sure I hadn’t misread) to find your past gig providing the music. Not a terrible little game, either. : )

Psykosonik: like the Spanish Inquisition, only louder, faster, and electronic.

A lost opportunity

I think Michael Medved could have gotten a lot further with his Nazi Boy theme if he’d known that I not only believe Laibach to be the world’s finest Slovenian Nazi-Industrial band, but for a brief while had the distinct and immeasurable honor of being label mates with them at Wax Trax!.

So, in honor of a brief conversation with Spacebunny this morning – I have what must be considered the endearing habit of quoting entire verses of Laibach when certain trigger words are mentioned – I present a true magnum opus. You can keep your Taylor Swift and your Beyonce; this is without question the greatest video of all time.

Actually, I really liked a lot of Wax Trax! music that was being released around that time, particularly Sister Machine Gun. It very much amused me that their main remix of Wired was named the Silicon Satan mix.

Brainspider

One of the Dread Ilk, David the Good, has released his third album. Based on the video, he’s got a bit of a mid-90’s trance thing going on; “brainspider” would appear to be an appropriate theme. “Phat Beat Saturday” made me think of Spooky on quaaludes.

In 2002 when I released Space Age, it was a grand experiment. Could I go into the studio for a year… and come out with something that was different… creative… and might even sell a few copies?

Apparently, yes. It sold well enough to break even and got some nice reviews. But back then, I had time to promote, write e-mails, drop off copies at events and venues and all that slavish sales stuff. Unfortunately, I’m much more interested in making the music than I am in selling it – though Space Age continues to sell online. The track “Elvira” is some kind of a hit… despite being ten years old, it gets played regularly on internet radio stations.

Really… why do I do this? It’s not for sales, though I like those. It’s for the joy of creating something and laughing my head off while doing so. It’s for people to pop into their stereos at a party so their friends think they’re insane. And it’s to continue annoying people that don’t like puns and songs about animals, science, grocery stores and pathetic attempts to woo non-existent women.

My second full album, The Infinite, got crashed half-way through by a drop-off in finances and time. I finished it and went broke. And had a baby at the same time. And had to move. The momentum was shattered just as it hit the Internet. No e-mails to listeners… no promotion… no physical copies sitting in coffee shops and dusty record stores. And, on top of that, the record is a downer. It’s about nuclear bombs, the loss of a father, a limbless angel, the emptiness of existence, and the battle between good and evil.

Hey… I like it, but not a lot of other folk seem to.

The new record drops all that. Sure, it mentions anarchy, guns, man-eating women and being trapped on an island… but in a positive, upbeat way that makes one feel good about their prospects and filled with a new faith in arachnohumanity. And, in keeping with Our Modern Era, it’s digital only. No more CDs to print and lose money on.

I hereby present The Brainspider Affair, 20 phat tracks of digital good stuff that’s guaranteed to change your life. Especially if you slip it into the DJ booth at a wedding. One particularly phat track even has its own video on Youtube:

You can pick up the new album at the following locations: CD Baby, Amazon, and iTunes.

Thank you, my friends… enjoy.

The True and Obscure History of Psykosonik, part III

The enthusiastic response to our first collaboration, Sex Me Up, made Paul realize that somehow, we had inadvertently laid what could be the foundation of a pretty good band. The DJ at The Perimeter played the song every Friday and Saturday night at the height of the evening, and within two weeks, people knew the lyrics and were shouting out the climactic phrases. Of course, we didn’t have a name for the band, we didn’t have any other songs, and we didn’t have the ability to play anywhere even if we’d been asked given the fact that it was a two-man band, only one of whom had any significant musical talent. Fortunately, he had enough for the two of us.

Paul was just getting into reading Mondo 2000 at the time and I was a huge fan of William Gibson throughout high school and college, so it was natural that most of our ideas for a band name revolved around the cyberpunk theme, (which, strangely enough, was a neologism coined by the writer with whom I would later collaborate, Bruce Bethke). Most of our ideas came right out of Gibson; I can remember Burning Chrome and Chrome 23 being two of the potential names discussed and rejected. I really liked the name Mona Lisa Overdrive, but it was so obvious and recognizable that we never even considered it.  However, I did scan the cover of the paperback version, which later paid some unexpected dividends.

I think it was Paul who suggested stealing a line from our own song for the band name. In Sex Me Up, just before the guitar solo, by way of introducing it, I said “Go psycho sonic at the count of three.”  Paul liked the idea of using “Psycho Sonic” as a name since it was descriptive of the sound we wanted to create, combining fast dance beats, funky bass lines, rock guitar, and an aggressive attitude. We also thought it was a pretty good description of our partnership, since he brought the Sonic while I more or less provided the Psycho. We didn’t really have a musical model, as we both knew that the band we liked best, Duran Duran, was entirely outmoded, but to the very limited extent that we wanted to imitate anything out there, it was the EMF song Unbelievable. That wasn’t what we wanted to do, exactly, but it served as a useful reference point of sorts.

My one reservation about the name was that I considered Psycho Sonic to be too reminiscent of Sonic Youth, which I always thought was rather a lame name for a band, with shades of “Up With People” or “Hitler Youth”. For some reason, I never thought of Sonic the Hedgehog even though I had a Sega Genesis and the game had recently come out. But I liked the name as well as Paul’s reasoning, so we decided to put the words together and to further distinguish it by spelling it with “k” in the place of the hard “c”. Thus Psykosonik was formed.

We knew we needed more members and more songs, so we set about finding the former and writing the latter that winter. The second song we wrote was a bizarre melange of the cyberpunk motif and my political nihilism; it’s interesting to look back from the distance of 20 years, 10 of them spent writing national political commentary, and see what an unadulterated anarchist I was at the time. I scribbled down some lyrics, Paul laid down a fast beat and bassline over which we recorded some vocals, and I went off to the Bay Area for two weeks in a futile, but ultimately worthwhile attempt to convince companies like Creative Labs, Diamond, and Hercules to abandon their investment into video acceleration in favor of the radical new idea of 3D hardware acceleration.

Upon my return, the first thing I did was to drive to Paul’s condo to hear what he was promising was the finished version of Down to the Ground.  The end result was even better than I had imagined, as he had thrown in a Prince-like guitar solo in at the end and the final product was even more energetic than our first song.  I particularly liked the way the sampled crowd noise abruptly cuts off at the end, making it readily apparent that it isn’t real. We sat and listened to it five or six times in a row, when Paul mused that the two songs were so good, he thought we might be able to get a record deal on the strength of them.

Although a song named Down to the Ground can be found on the first Psykosonik album, it is a very, very different version than the one we originally recorded.  The album version is not a bad song, in fact, I still quite like what we usually called “the lush mix”, but in retrospect, I think it really tends to pale in comparison with raw energy of the original.

And yes, “Feel the blade of ’89” absolutely refers to the French Revolution of 1789.

The one thing we decided we absolutely needed if we were ever going to play live was a drummer; while neither of us minded electronics in the least, we both always thought it was lame when there was no visible percussion, especially for music that was going to be as percussion-heavy as ours was looking to be. Although Paul’s younger brother Nick had been his drummer in Smilehouse, Paul said that he was really impressed with how well Nick’s friend, who was barely out of high school, had managed to blend live drums with the programmed ones when we had played at the frat party. Apparently that is rather difficult to do well.  Since I didn’t know any drummers myself and found Mike to be likeable and extremely easy-going, I had no objections. We invited him to join the band and he accepted.

Thanks to his boosting of our two songs at the nightclubs around town, we’d become friends with the aforementioned nightclub DJ, who was a cameraman at the local ABC news affiliate during the day.  That New Year’s Eve, Paul and I ended up going out in a group that included him and his girlfriend Giselle. Paul noticed that Dan had some pretty serious music equipment at his place, which combined with his finely-tuned dance music sensibilities, sparked a discussion that culminated in an decision to invite him to join the band.  Psykosonik not only had two songs under its belt, it was now complete.

The time capsule

I was catching up with my old bandmates after writing the first two posts about the band’s history, and I learned, to my delight, that Mike not only saved all the old demos, but had even converted the old cassettes to digital as well. The quality is pretty low, but you’re interested in unreleased 21-year old music, you can find a download link to an MP3 of Sex Me Up, the song mentioned in the second part of the True and Obscure History, at Alpha Game along with a Game-related take on it. It was on our three-song demo and was very popular with the crowd at The Perimeter, but didn’t end up making the album since we’d moved too far into techno-rave and too far away from rock during the recording process, so it was never released and I hadn’t heard it since 1994.

I’m particularly excited about Mike’s little trove because there was one song that I didn’t have on tape and thought was lost forever. Fortunately, Mike saved it too, and it’s even more awesome than I remembered. But more about that in the next installment.

The true and obscure history of Psykosonik, part II

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

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.

A sound perspective

I don’t dislike Glee, in fact, I think it is a very clever way to bring back the classic 70’s variety show in an ironic, somewhat less cheesy manner. And it’s less grotesquely stupid than most television I’ve seen in the last ten years. That being said, I find Dave Grohl’s perspective to be more than a little refreshing in this age of celebrity overexposure:

“The Glee guy, what a f—ing jerk. Slash was the first one. He wanted to do Guns ‘n’ Roses and Slash is like, ‘I hate f—ing musicals. It’s worse than Grease.’ Then [Murphy’s] like, ‘Well, of course he’d say that, he’s a washed up ol’ rock star, that’s what they f—ing do.’ And then Kings of Leon say, ‘No, we don’t want to be on your show.’ And then he’s like, ‘Snotty little assholes…’ And it’s just like, Dude, maybe not everyone loves Glee. Me included.”

I very much doubt this Murphy character will ever be inclined to ask to use Psykosonik’s music on the show; let’s face it, even the more famous bands from our genre and era wouldn’t make much sense although I would definitely be intrigued in seeing what sort of epic catastrophe might result from an episode devoted to NIN, Ministry, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. And although I like musicals myself, I don’t think I would want our music featured on that sort of soft pop show either.

Furthermore, there is no excuse for insulting Slash like that. I’m not the biggest GnR fan in the world, but there is no question that the man can play guitar.