Car Crash Eyes is an old song.  I remember writing it in music school–the process being a bit of an affront to most of what I had been working on.  I booked time at Mike Dixon’s home studio the following spring.  That was in Bloomington, IN.  And really it was just an old house.  The “control room” was up stairs and the session room was the living room of the main floor.  Wiring for microphones had been dropped through the electrical lines in the ceiling, and the microphone sat completely isolated in the empty living room.  We only used one.  There was a natural reverb to the room.  It was square with no carpet.

I stumbled across that recording a couple of days ago.  I can remember the song sounding fresh to me–the emotions were still significant in a visceral sort of way.  Now it is something else.  Maybe a little deeper, maybe a little more prolonged.  But the song is an entity, separate from me or any particular recording.  Because I ended up taking that song to studios all over the place.  There are five or six serious recordings of Car Crash Eyes.  But if the song is done justice, it is in a live room.  These days, anyway.  The recording of Car Crash on Brave the Walk is a live recording.  It was one of the first pieces we did, probably because we knew how to approach it.  Almost all of the album is built on live recordings.  That is how albums are made.  The other option does not create an album, it creates a collage.   A performance is a performance.  Period.

So I think of Car Crash Eyes each spring.  Once the temperature outside reaches a moderate warmth (albeit, usually a temporary situation) I start to remember how it felt to write the song and then to perform it.  It was one of the first times I knew what a song should be.  It’s far from perfect, thankfully.  That’s why it lives on in performance and why, in many ways, it is bigger than my efforts to pin it down.

This letter was attached to my newspaper this morning:

March 23, 2009

Good Morning,

My name is Jane Doe.  I am your newspaper carrier.  I deliver Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Investors Business Daily, Financial Times, Barons and Automotive News.  It saddens me to tell you at the end of March I will not be delivering any of the financial papers any more.  There will be a new carrier bringing those papers to you.  Just to let you know, I am staying for the 3 days delivery.  It was a hard decision to make because what is going on with the Detroit News.  I am losing a lot, 4 days and all my financial papers.  That is half of my check plus some.  But I have to keep this job because the economy is so bad.  There are not many jobs out there any more.  I’ll just have to get an extra route to make up some of my big loss.  I thought I would put this letter out to let you guys know what is going on, as a lot of my customers are asking.

Last day of delivery for me is:

Automotive News and Advertising Age 03-23-09

USA Today 03-27-09

Investors Business Daily & Financial Times 03-28-09

Wall Street Journal & Baron’s 03-28-09

New York Times 03-28-09

It has been my pleasure to deliver your newspaper.  I try to give you excellent service and early service and put your papers outside your doors.  if anyone has any questions, please feel free to give me a call.

Thank you for allowing me to deliver your newspapers to you.  I truly enjoyed it.

Sincerely,

Jane Doe

0000 Blank

Blank, MI, 00000

000-000-0000

I had to put this on the page because it is a testament to a number of issues.  These are desperate times.  Hopefully Jane will be OK.  She seems willing to do what she needs to do in order to get by.  But what does that mean?  Because empathy and compassion are not exactly low hanging fruit at the moment.  So I bring this up because it exists in direct conflict with those who so confidently proclaim that a person out of work is lazy.  Or incompetent.  Or that their industry is defunct.  Because this treatment exists in direct conflict with the thought that if you work hard you will do well.  These are lies.  The terrible fact is that there are very few certainties in the world.  Stability is an illusion.  An industry can become history rather fast.  And there are real people on the ends of those capillaries.  People that eat, live, and work.  Individuals who, if you could just see them laugh, are alarmingly in keeping with everyone else.

So come on, really.  Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer.  It doesn’t work that way.   Funny, though, is that it sure seems like everyone can be a lawyer.  But that is a different piece.  The point here is that the changes we are facing are very serious.  Most of us will see some difficult times.  Or maybe we already have.  That said, the difficulties are liable to increase.

Compassion can help assuage the pain inflicted by ignorance.  Relative ignorance is natural.  We’re all in that boat together.  A little more compassion can’t hurt.

“Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.

Shards of the shattered vase will rise

and reassemble on the table

Plastic raincoats will refold

into their flat envelopes.  The egg,

bald yoke and its transparent halo,

slide back in the thin, calcium shell.

Curses will pour back into mouths,

letters un-write themselves, words

siphoned up into the pen.  My gray hair

will darken and become the feathers

of a black swan.  Bullets will snap

back into their chambers, the powder

tamped tight in the brass casings.  Borders

will disappear from maps.  Rust

revert to oxygen and time.  The fire

return to the log, the log to the tree,

the white root curled up

in the un-split seed.  Birdsong will fly

into the lark’s lungs, answers

become questions again.

When you return, sweaters will unravel

and wool grow on the sheep.

Rock will go home to mountain, gold

to vein.  Wine crushed into the grape,

oil pressed into the olive.  Silk reeled in

to the spider’s belly.  Night moths

tucked close into cocoons, ink drained

from the indigo tattoo.  Diamonds

will be returned to coal, coal

to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light

to stars sucked back and back

into one timeless point, the way it was

before the world was born,

that fresh, that whole, nothing

broken, nothing torn apart.”

–Ellen Bass

I keep reading about artists that scalp their own tickets.  Good old Bob Lefsetz had been digging up that dirt for months now.  Internal scalping is not all that hard to believe, but it is a shame.  And it is directly related to general price gouging.  I remember when a friend took me to see Coldplay a couple years ago.  We had good seats in a shed and the price on the ticket was about $65 dollars.  That was amazing to me.  But a lot of fans are clearly willing to pay high prices for tickets.  That said, people attend fewer shows.  It’s like Coldplay was already some sort of novelty act.  And, in a way, they are.  Because they were one of the last groups to receive the adrenaline-boost career power of the old major labels.  Coldplay got through the door just in time.  Now those big labels are thinned out, senile and impotent.  Everyone knows that.  If you’re a new act and somehow get through to one of those twits, well, prepare yourself for a lot of dry-humping.  It’s just going to piss you off in the end.  The big labels are dying and their offices feel like funeral parlors.  Hooray.  Should we wait at the curb while they turn in their leases?  I might.  Celebration, to some extent, is legit.  But there’s an issue in the aftermath:  concerts have become too expensive and the acts are subsequently pricing themselves out of the most basic relevance.  Now they are special events, a rarity.  That’s all there is to it.  No one can afford to participate regularly.  And a lot of the big artists benefit, but not for long.  Almost everyone else is cut out.  And it’s hard on the venues in the long run.  Because this is not sustainable.  The flames are already licking the walls.

Maybe the big artists don’t even know what’s going on with their ticket sales.  But that seems doubtful.  Anyway it’s really just sad.  I was wandering around the web looking up the Eastown Theatre (an old venue on Van Dyke and Harper in Detroit–I drove by it, too).  The place had closed long before I even started playing guitar.  But it was a legendary room.  My absolute favorite group, Pink Floyd, played a show there in the early 1970s.  It was not properly documented.  So I hit the web to find out more.  It turns out that a lot of great groups went through there.  And the cost of tickets always seemed remarkably low.  The difference in cost between then and now is not even comparable; not even if adjusted for 3 decades variance.  Two or three dollars a night.  The weekend shows at the Eastown were inclusive ventures, inexpensive and on the cutting edge.  Anyone could buy a ticket and have money left over for the night.   Price was a factor then, and price is a factor now.  Continually pillaging the wallets of concert-goers is masochistic.  Like the cult of Jim Jones and his pathetic mini-economy–incapable of even feeding its own people.  So should we all go to Coldplay and drink the purple coolaid?  The music is soothing…maybe that would help.  Otherwise what is it?  A mandatory injection in the beer line?

Touring around established, massive venues may not necessarily be the best thing to do.  I mean, it’s great if you can do it.  The other option is the bar circuit–and that is a true nightmare.  So what happened to a killer show at a Lion’s hall or a sound set up in a park?  Where entry is five dollars, not 50?  When kids can get in without fake IDs?  When the soft beauty of a ballad is not defaced by the stentorian shouting of a group of 20-year drunks?  What happened to the shows that were built around a musical performance?  The good things are still going on, only not as frequently.  And when a touring band plays a bar, it’s hard to get anyone under 21 in the door.  In the end, who is cut out?  Anyone under 21, anyone without $75 dollars to spare, and anyone without easy transportation.  That’s a nasty Venn diagram.  But, as usual, these decisions are left to the Luddite idiots who guard the gates of the industry.

When you’re playing in a band or making a record you think yeah, I want to get my work into the industry and you find yourself pushing against a crowd of people rushing the other way.  They are trying to get out.  Maybe you realize this and maybe you don’t, but most likely you just keep on pushing forwards.  Because we keep hearing that touring is still working out, is still ahead of a collapse.  But really?  And for how long?

I, for one, am turning around.  And I will start here:  Brown Paper Tickets. I’d rather haul the PA system out to a high-school auditorium.  Come drunk, if you want to.  High?  I don’t care.  Didn’t pay at the door?  I don’t care.  I won’t really miss all the miller and budweiser promo plastered on walls and above the urinals.  So you won’t be charged those extraneous fees.  The stage lights won’t do all my work for me.  There won’t be any hepatitis-carts hauling hotdogs around.  No bright pink pseudo-tropical mixers.  The performance will not sound exactly like the record.  And perhaps that will be ok because, if you’re smart, you already stole the record and are in the mood for something a little different.  And (no pun here) for the record, if you stole the record, it’s not stealing because I am going to give it all away for free as soon as I figure out the best way to do so.

One of the greatest urban (and otherwise) exploration sites on the web:   Illicit Ohio All the empty hotels, amusement parks, public buildings.  Every now and then a town.

I have tried e-mailing the site designer before but never got a response.  Sometimes, when I get creative driving around the city, I start to wonder what it would be like to climb through a few empty buildings with a camera.  Sooner or later, I suppose.

It is a strange thing.  Our perception of civilization is such:  We rise, struggle, suffer, struggle, and rehabilitate the old.  Except that is usually not what happens.  Instead we just abandon what most recently failed.  And that’s natural.  But the ghastly shapes of empty buildings have been a little more significant as of late.  I wonder about it.  A lot of people on the street.  A lot more out of work.  Normality is now a goal.

There are a couple old hotels on Illicit Ohio and they blend in very well with the sad ruins of the mad men.  And there is a human side to this.  Here is an example of a person frozen in an abandoned building.  The point is that people are connected–even after a building is empty.  That’s why it’s spooky.

There is an old hospital that I have been meaning to look into.  I actually drove by it tonight.  It was built in 1974; intended to serve the surrounding community.  Due to economic duress, mismanagement and a series of problematic and abusive local insurance scams, the hospital closed in 1990.  It has since suffered through a rebranding campaign and temporary usage as a walk in clinic.  Anyway, it’s empty.  And the below ground courtyard is full of water.  I imagine that the rest of it is full of water.  And that it freezes.  I have never been in, but I have seen it enough to know that the boards and bars securing the entrances are new.

So when I look at an empty building, that is what I see.  The years of its legitimate operation are then slowly and systematically mirrored by its illegitimate follow-up.  There is a beauty in that.  But like I said, it’s spooky.

Here’s the daily wierdness:  Centralia Pennsylvania is the place that’s always on fire.  Literally.  The coal mines beneath the town have been smoldering for decades.  Apparently the fires are rather difficult to put out.  The town is mostly deserted.  Next time I am rolling through Pennsylvania, I will make it a point to stop in Centralia.  In 1981, a 12 year old fell through soft ground.  He managed to hang on and was eventually pulled out.  Amazing.

I wrote this song in LA.  I had been in the studio all day and was just sitting on the bed playing guitar.  The TV was scanning through channels and the sound was off.  At some point I picked up on the rhythm of the switching channels and started playing chords.  Sooner or later I was singing what I saw–that’s how the song happened.

Something about the faces, the silent moving mouths.  Then a sudden switch a forest or meadow and then suddenly a wrecked car.  Maybe an ad with a clock ticking away and then a switch to something completely different yet equally meaningless.  That’s the origination of the idea.  I felt trapped that night.  Stuck in a room–a room I had been in a number of times before.  And I was restless that night and went out for a walk.  But it was not a meditative walk.  So when I came back I just played guitar (arpeggios) and passively watched the television while it scanned through channels.  The inane violence and dislocated beauty of the silent television.  The hotel room quarantine.

I took the song to Don the next day.  He was reluctant to do anything new but let me have a take.

The rehearsal space is haunted.  Or rather, the building is haunted.  I remember when we first started moving gear in.  At that time you had to walk through a large, pitch black room to the light switch.  Eventually we put lights up.  Tonight we finally took them down.  We put all the gear back into the road cases and stacked everything up near the door.  So on the way out, there was only one working light.  The rooms (there are 3) have no windows.  It felt strange to experience that darkness again–it reminds me of Mammoth Cave, KY.  I visited Cave City once on a whim.  Twice, actually.  Because I wanted to recreate the random magic of the first trip.

At a certain point on the cave tour, the guide shut the lights out.  Complete darkness.  That’s what it is like in the rehearsal space.  I swear I have felt something brush my shoulder on the way out–and more than a couple times.  But that is the way things go with old buildings.  They are haunted, I think, by occupation and traffic from years ago.  And some of these buildings never see any use to speak of.  So when I walk up the stairs in that old warehouse I always get the feeling that I am disturbing something.

Tonight I am going to start packing up the old rehearsal space.  Frankly, I am ready to get out of there.  I remember when I first moved all the gear in.  That must have been four years ago.  I used to spend a lot of time there writing and recording.  But as soon as sessions started for Brave the Walk, I never really went back.

It’s still a little strange to me–so many songs came out of those rooms.  Time and memories.  We shot videos up there and made demos.  Sometimes we would work through the night.  Some of my brightest and darkest hours were spent in that room; the times right before the song actually happens–the last struggle.  So naturally the songs reflected the location.  Because it mattered where I was.  It’s not like all the songs have to be written on the second floor of an old warehouse in Detroit.  They aren’t.  I wrote Where it Began in a hotel room in LA–yet another obnoxious cliche, I know.  But they reflect the place.

So the old rehearsal space.  A wharehouse in the burned out blight, across the Lodge from New Center.  A lot of time spent there.  A lot of memories and a lot of reflections.  Ghosts, too.  So I am glad to be moving out.  But I will never forget standing a lone in one of the rooms with my guitar plugged in and having nothing to play.  Total sadness when the band cracked up.  Hauling the B3 up a long set of stairs.  Or maybe just sitting on top of someone’s truck in early July, drinking cheap champaing and watching the fireworks in the distance.  Distracting ourselves by talking gear and records.

The rainy season has arrived.  Damp cold and an unchanging sky.  I always forget that this phase sits forever between winter and spring.  But it’s fitting.  This is my first post on the new website.

We are going to see a different life in the next few months.  The brutal winter has kept everyone in doors while the world fell apart.  It’s as if everything were frozen and is now thawing, ready to participate again except without any memories of the last few months.

It’s eerie in the city these days and it’s not getting better any time soon.