The daughter just rolls her eyes when she sees me sitting on the porch after a jog, scrolling through the ol Facebook feed, that digital excuse for human engagement that has become so shamefully addictive to us old fucks.

Here we find the mindless chit-chat of people checking in at Coffee Bean or filling up their tanks and showing those amazing photos of the gas prices. What would we do, I ask ya, without this in our lives?

Facebook? Oh, please, she says, as she posts to her own mysterious new app, probably some cryptic messenger service based out of the Baltic that filters your selfie with reptilian features before disintegrating the post to the ether within 10 seconds.
The kids, they like to erase their footsteps.

But not in Fbook land, brother.

No, like a helpful nephew reminding us to take our medication and wipe our ass, Facebook chimes in to show us what we posted, were tagged in, like 4 years ago!
Aside from the fact that we have spent the last 4 goddamn years of our lives watching dog videos and sharing Taco Tuesday memes on the page, it jolts an old memory to new memories we had of memories that had to be digitized from memories on film.
See? Now I have a headache.

But this charming little photo that just popped up again, taken by early So Ca scene reporter Marla Watson, captured a nice little moment in time that caused me to pause for just a moment and reflect.

There we are, that innocent lineup of 1982: Kimm and I, of course, along with Larry Kelley and new drummer Jack DeBaun atop the Blue and White Chevy. It is a glorious suburban afternoon, I’m guessing late June 1982. I remember we were just preparing for our first ever real tour, a Southern jaunt that would take us through Texas, playing with the Big Boys and Husker Du. Getting as far East as sultry New Orleans before doubling back through the middle of the country toward home.

In this pic you can feel the excitement of the four innocent lads, all intentions good and clear, woefully unprepared for the decades of indignities that these first baby steps would bring forth.

But it is something else that caught my eye this time around.
There, among the stenciled cabinets and flats of Banquet beer sits the one trusted piece of equipment that saw us through all of those adventures: The CH3 Ice Chest.

That’s a sturdy piece of gear yo.

Now, ya take your modern affairs, all plastic, injection molded monstrosities lacking any soul. Or those hipster brushed stainless barrels, meant to carry around all the fixin’s for fey mojitos or goddamned Moscow Mules.

Nah mate, the Coleman 1978 Long Boy 54 Qt Model16A was a thing of timeless beauty, a modern marvel of the day.
Here we have an empty vessel, void as a blank pad of paper.
Ready to be filled with the individual artistry of the maniacs it fell before.

Old Green, she was the perfect complement to the Blue and White.
The wizards at GM saw fit to leave a perfect gap between the front seats of the 1/2 ton window van, and in an amazing stroke of cubist Kismet the cooler fit perfectly between those seats.

It was a convenient location for the drinking driver who didn’t want to take his eyes off the road whence reaching for a cold beer. Safety first boys!
It also acted as a handy jump seat up front, adding yet another seat for any New Wave chicks that needed a ride home from the Starwood back to Cerritos.
Seat Belts? Hah, I say.

Yet it is even beyond these punk memories that Big Green mythology exists, for we came together one sparkling night.
As with any good talisman that finally finds the proper hand, Arthur & Excalibur have nothing on the Coleman 54 finding its way to us.

Back in 1978 Cerritos was your typical suburban dream/nightmare, something not even Spielberg could present in its quaint sterility.
The youth culture was divided perhaps into four easy groups, jocks, nerds, stoners and vatos, none of these messy sub genre mutations that now leave us blinking in confusion.

RaveGothEmoSceamcore? Really?

But Kimm and I found a nice way to bring the tribes together: the field party.
Oh, it’s just what it sounds like all right. You find a field, get a keg, tell people where yer at.
Field Party.

You could easily pick one of the dozens of vacant lots that used to define our infant community.
Cleared of the last lowing cattle, another Dutch family paid off and sent packing to Chino.

But before the last of the manure was scraped away and foundations for yet another concrete tilt up poured, here we had a blank canvas for good old American teenage fun.

 

Virginities destroyed, curfews broken, Lowenbrau vomit forced through nostrils: these fine acts and more happened among the dirtclods and dust on a few choice Friday nights under the jealous stars.

We’d spread word of the location at lunchtime Friday, all of our stoner pals already onboard and getting tuned up at Heritage Park across the street already.
And because of our good standing in school (Editor of the Paper, Senior Class President? Oi.), the marching band members and math club crew were encouraged to come as well.

 

By nightfall we were united in the name of obstreperousness and lukewarm beer.

One fateful night, we just happened to pick a field that lay next to the railroad tracks.
The party raged on toward midnight, maybe Joe Jackson or our beloved Starz blaring out of a Datsun pickup truck 8 track.
The keg is now tilted and cursed at for the last dregs, drunken cheerleaders are being convinced to go along to the One Ways in Norwalk with some of the Chivas crew.
A group huddled against a trio of boxcars left on the tracks, smoking terrible mersh weed out of beer can pipes. Those faceless rusting monoliths of the Santa Fe line betrayed no clues of the treasures within their bellies.

Then a shout goes out: Hey, the door’s open!

And the next thing you know, everyone is scrambling into the freight train and emerging with brand new Coleman camping gear.

 

Jocks and stoners happily thieving together, walking side by side with Coleman propane lanterns and 54 Quart ice chests though the dust and headlights.
Here a lithe surfer chick helps a chubby Korean gal from band up to the boxcar,  she in turn offering a hand to the Hesher from home room, too wasted to get up on his own.  They each grab a Coleman Two-Burner camping stove then hug in flushed glee.

It became a cheerful night of looting, kids away from any guidance left to make this awful decision against faceless corporate America all on their own. We all became criminals and accomplices that night, and as far as I know, no one was ever caught.
Glorious.

Kimm and I looked at each other, then at the scene with awe.
A moment of reckless abandon and youth unity, I have a sneaky suspicion in turn lead us to start a band.
Have we ever witnessed such a fine night of aim and action since? Doubt it.

Zelig like, the Coleman was in the background of all our shameful moments and victories.
On hungover drives across the blasted Midwestern plains, its content holding nothing but lukewarm water and empty Schaffer cans.
There she is yet again, backstage at Irvine Meadows, stuffed with sparkling clear cubes and bottles of champagne sent in good luck from our Moms.

It became a small piece of home that we could bring along, a welcome target of comfort when we were so far away.

And on return, it would come into the garage and become the symbol of those adventures, centerpiece of yet another night drinking beers and telling the tales of the nights we’d just survived.

You could finish a beer and toss the empty into the dark corner of the garage, then reach for the Coleman yet again.

…you think you come in here with original ideas?
Killing in the name of the Lord?

We’re in the studio day 2, listening to the playback of the basic tracks.

My fingers are grooved and sore.   The cruel contour of steel roundwound guitar strings visible from eight straight hours of laying down the rhythm tracks, then doubling those again.
But it’s a good pain, like the catholic glow of hurt after too many situps.

It’s there, concrete. The drums committed now, even though  Nick now finds fault in a second verse pattern here, a rushed fill there.
Heh.  What was it we were saying about tracking to the grid?

But it all sounds just great to the guitar players in the room , so we move on.  We have the sturdy foundation upon which we shall layer on the melty cheese.

We begin the lonely business of overdubs now, that singular experience of adding your stuff to the song all by yourself.

Isolated from the rest of the fellas by glass and headphone, you become that rogue cosmonaut floating around deep space.
Tethered to Mission Control only by a coiled cord and the static clip of the talkback in your ear.

You are alone with the song now, yet you can feel everyone in the booth concentrating on every movement of your fingers, each crack in your voice.
Ready to stop the track and congratulate you for nailing it, and just as eager to call you a dick for fucking it up yet again. Do you need a moment in there? Shall we stop for dinner?

It’s thrilling, to see these things take shape.

We’ve only been concentrating on the basic track for so long, each downstroke and downbeat, that we only now start to see the song emerge.
Everyone has been keeping their own individual ideas for the songs til this moment.

You get your turn to lay down an idea, then just hope you are not met with a roomful of puzzled looks and the suggestion that, hey, maybe you can go do the taco run right now, hmmm?

Carnitas por favor!

I do a quick scratch vocal over all the tracks so we can set all the marks.
I’m still scribbling out verses up to this point, and stumble over the phrases as I try out the words for the first time.
I scratch out words and mark breathing spots with a magic marker, looking all the world like a grumpy community college teacher grading papers as I sing along to the tracks.
I blow out my voice as I have no clue where to breathe or even what key we’re in, but the proper real estate is now claimed for voice. And now the guitars come in to do their sneaky infestation.

 

Jay and Kimm were  out in the lobby all the day before, going through the songs and scratching out ideas. For this track, they submit totally to its shameless roots in Train Kept a Rollin and Ace of Spades.

Kimm comes in and lays the lead, like, quick.
We all take our places on the couch for another playback, check the new color added to the canvas.
It works.

Dinner!

 

 

 

…..been known to burn a bridge and we shared a lethal wit,
They called us Scott and Zelda, but we didn’t give a shit

 

So we finally come to tracking day, the sounds are set, guitars tuned yet again.
I find a comfortable Anvil case to sit on with clear sightlines to drums and booth, my office for the next 10 hours.

It’s just Nick and me in the room, a new experience for us: tracking the basics without the bass.

Anthony has to, of all things, show up at the day job-pfffft.  Whatever.
We shall lay down the magic, me and Nicky, and let him add the bottom end whenever they let him off the deep fryer station.

It’s an exciting time, those few surreal moments before count off.  You just know the first take is gonna suck, but the tape is rolling nonetheless.  Gotta hedge the bets that this will be one of those rare one take wonders, that mythological beast that is never witnessed in person.
Chances are, we will grind this song again and again. Racing toward a finish without dropping a stick or forgetting a bridge.

Why do we put ourselves through this torture, trying to document a precious slice of time as the definitive edition?   A rare bug caught in amber, to be dissected by future scientists, its DNA inspected for clues of the day of death.

We put on the headphones and nod at each other now, each of us bobbing our heads up and down to the visceral tempo that we’ve conjured for the track.

Just before downbeat, Jim hits the talkback, an air controller trying one last time to divert disaster.

“So no click track on this, ya sure now?”

Heh.
Well, we really didn’t think of that did we?  In all these weeks of preparation, songwriting and pre production, we never really discussed if we would record to the metronome or not.

To commit the song to grid, it is really a courtesy to your future self.

In this day of copy and paste, how convenient it is to commit your music to binary code, and manipulate the 1’s and 0’s on the Mac monitor.

A sucky verse? Delete it.

Flat note? Nudge it.

Of course back in those days of actual tape, we would all hold our breaths as the engineer would cut and splice tape with actual razor blades and sticky stuff!  Somehow it was fitting, this physical act of separation and wedding, the results tested with manual rolls back and forth against the tape head.
An ancient art we like to romanticize, oh, like public telephones or smoking on airplanes,  things better left to the past.

But what is rock and roll, if not a breathing thing, allowed to stumble and race?  Like a dog straining against master’s leash, a good song bumps right against its countoff clock, and usually breaks free.
A wild run through the neighborhood, the threat of rolled up newspaper beating be damned!

 

 

Me and Nick look at each other and shrug, then shake our heads.
Nah man, let’s just play the goddamned thing!

We watch Jim and Jay talk it over in the control booth for a minute, a distant pantomime of grown up conversation.  Whenever a conversation conducts in the booth without courtesy of the Talky button, it becomes a silent movie: Did he just say sucks?

Finally Jay leans over the board and hits the button:
Producer will allow it.  Proceed.

 

Breaking Through: From Rock to Opera, the Basic Technique of Voice
Her ad listed her credentials: Her past with a NY Opera Company, and boasted past students:  Axl Rose, Exene…… Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers!    Yikes.  Let me in on this.

And so one fine afternoon I discovered my legs walking up 2 flights of stairs to her studio off a particularly grimy section of Santa Monica Boulevard.

This was one of those old workshoppy buildings, all beige stucco turned 20 shades darker by the years of cigar smoke, probably some training mill for the studio contract gals of the 1940’s.
Give the starlet a shot with the acting and voice before she inevitably ended up behind the counter at Philippe’s or turning tricks off Fountain.
You walked those plastered hallways and heard the ancient clack of tap shoes, operatic trills, and, god help us all, the overwrought emoting of method acting.

As heartbreaking as the resigned whimper of a furry creature caught ankle deep in a toothsome trap, these are the desperate sounds of showbusiness.

I had the overwhelming urge to run, back to the street and into the darkened safety of The Firefly.

Oh, I had no illusion that I could suddenly be taught to sing.  The sad truth is that you can only do so much with what your ancestors bequeathed upon you in length of throat and capacity of lungs.  But as we started to ……expand our musical repertoire (sellout) it became clear that my voice was the weak link in the band.  And if I could not learn to sing any better, than by God I would at least learn how to sing badly night after night on tour!

Gloria opened the door and sized me up.  She must’ve been pushing 80 by this time, but still held that stylish aura of a woman who had grown up in the classy days of overcoats and pearls.

She took a look at my hair, the ripped jeans and cowboy boots, and cocked her head with a resigned sigh.  I imagined she had quite enough of the scruffy rockers that filled her waiting room, so far away from the glamor of her youth in New York.  She had once been a promising young star of the Opera world there, a lifetime removed from the desperate ooze of Sunset Strip. Now here she was, trying to teach us desperate hacks how to butcher her beloved art yet again.

She sat down at the piano then , and played the major scale up and down, effortlessly Mee-Mawing along in her crystalline coloratura soprano  voice.   She raised a contoured eyebrow and nodded, and then it was my turn.

Oh, we all know our Do-Re-Mi-etc, don’t we?  Who doesn’t think of Julie Andrews in those Austrian alps, chiming the scales in perfect pitch to her audience of Nazi youth?

But now imagine those very same notes punished, finally the Doh! of High C bleated out, goat-like,  my face reddened by  oxygen deprivation and shame.

She closed the lid of the piano and sat there a moment, pinching at the bridge of her nose.

Then she simply said, no.

 

No, that was not singing, she explained to me.
What are you doing? Do you think you sing from here? pointing at my throat.
Listen, what about babies, you ever hear them cry?  You don’t see them going hoarse, losing their voice, now do you?

And then she got up and went to the closet and came back with a child’s jump rope.
Here, she said, tying the braided strand around my mid section, you feel that?  That’s your diaphragm.

And then she molded my body like a she was dressing a stubborn mannequin.
Knees slightly bent, hips up, support the diaphragm, she pushed her strong hands at different points of my  body.   When satisfied with my posture she said,  now breathe!   I took a deep breath and then she slapped me on the back,

Not there, not the lungs, down here–tugging at the rope.

I took another breath, this time feeling my belly fill with air, the rope straining at my mid section, and held for a moment.

She once again struck the note on the piano, and I let the air up, through my body, found the note in middle distance between us.  For the first time, really, I heard this foreign sound come out of my body, effortlessly clear and easy.

And for that brief moment,  for the first time, I sang.

 

To be continued

 

So yer sittin there at the Gold Brique, watching the heavy glass pitchers of beer sweat, Credence on the Juke Box. Herman’s manning the bar and scolding us as we try to sneak tips on the bar. “That’s your money, young mister! Put away your change, you earned it, didn’t ya?”
Joyce chimes in from the corner stool and agrees with the old coot. They smile at each other, a shared secret long forgotten.

Helen snores softly in the back office, the door cracked open just enough so we can peek in and catch a glimpse of her weathered bra-enormous! –glowing blue in the flicker of a Dodgers game.

Maybe ya just got back from throwing back a tumbler of Jack at the Embassy Lounge next door, and when you look around all you see are people you know. Maybe there’s a steaming basket of broasted chicken cooling on the table in front of you.

Jesus, the chicken’s always too damn hot, man!–and you always wake up on Saturday morning after the Brique with the fine first layer of skin burned off your palate. You say fuck it, dunk one of the potato logs into your pitcher of draft Bud, and take that first bite, juggling the molten goodness between tongue and molar while mouthing-ho-ho-!

As the Box switches songs, (Lodi to Traveling Man, there’s a good one!) there is a sweet pause in the music. In that moment of your life, you hear only the sound of laughing and cussing; it is the sound of your friends talking to each other.

By God, was there nothing better than a Friday night at the Brique??

And yet, nothing made the picture complete as the sound of the ’42 flathead coming off Norwalk, one last rev before shutting her down on the sidewalk right out front of the Brique.
You could easily hold your breath in the short pause it took a man to dismount and walk into the bar pulling off his gloves, for these were the golden nights long before a helmet law.

And there he was –Fat Paul.

Paul Avila, mechanical madman, community jewel, all around bon vivant around town.

After the Brique shut off the sign and Helen threatened to call the goddamn cops on us for the fourth time, you considered yourself a lucky man if you were invited along for after hours at Paul’s. A short jaunt up Norwalk blvd and you found the wonderland of Fat Paul’s house.

Though there might be a disassembled trike transmisson on the kitchen table, and the very real threat of live ammunition in the cupboard, Paul’s house felt as warm and welcoming as Grandmas. Besides, where else could you play with a taser gun at 3 in the morning?

The years roll on, and somehow life becomes more complicated. But you still catch yourself looking down those familiar streets when you’re back in the old neighborhood, somehow hoping the Brique would suddenly be there again, Helen at the door and Fat Paul pulling in the driveway.

Paul passed away just before the Summer turned hazy, but it’s taken this season for all of us to absorb his passing and prepare to say a final farewell. Come join us Sunday at the Blue Dog to say GoodBye to a pal–Cheers!