It’s two songs for the price of one!
Which is free.
So ... yay?
Being in a band means you have to know other people in bands if you want to play a show. But not just any bands, because if you play music that’s a style that clashes with said band, they aren’t going to want to play with you, and you’re also less likely to pique the interest of their audience.
The hope — especially for a fledgling band that may not be that well known — is that people that like the other band will hear your band and think: Eh, this is good enough that I could stand to see them again. At least that was the bar we had set for ourselves.
And listening to all our songs up to this point, you can tell that we cast our genre net a little wide. Again, it’s the influence of the Alt Rock of the time, where a single band can wear several different rock hats. That’s where we took our cue. Because it was more about the song — not being myopic in terms of strict adherence to genre or what kind of songs we could play — than chasing trends, and ultimately, finding and establishing an audience.
We had harder songs so we could play with harder bands. Faster songs so we could play with bands that played fast. Softer songs in the hopes that would get us girls.
Yeah... None of that worked.
Most of the people we knew in bands when we were starting out were other teenagers that went to our school, and they were in punk bands — or ska punk — you can’t forget the kids that were in marching or concert band1, so they already played trumpet or trombone, and they wanted to get in on trying to siphon-off some of the coolness that comes from being in a rock band.
There was also a specter of history looming over most of the bands in our generation — the late 90s/early 2000s Reno scene — 7 Seconds and Zoinks!. They were punk bands that came out of Reno and had happened to achieve some notoriety. So, we all knew it could be done. There were lightly worn tracks out of this town. Faint and easily covered by snow every year. No one would end up finding the trail again however, but we all had faith.
Now, if we were going to play with punk bands, we would need some punk songs, so that’s where this ditty comes in. The only punk music that I ever really listed to and had to draw inspiration from, was Bad Religion and the couple punk songs that Pearl Jam played. So, in my mind, punk music had to be political, or else it was just pop music played on cheap distorted guitars.
But to hear the majority of punk bands in the Reno scene at the time we were existing in it, all you would hear is the Nirvana and Green Day and Blink 182 of it all. Sleeves long enough to accommodate radio and MTV influence. At least the parts of the scene that we could find entry to...
I mentioned before that an early cover we learned to play was “Zero” by the Smashing Pumpkins, and one of the quirks with that song2 is that it requires tuning your guitar differently to get it to sound like the album. Well, like most bands, we had our instruments all tuned in the standard manner, which means if we were to play that song the way The Pumpkins did live, we’d all have to stop down and tune (which unarguably is the best part of any band’s show, right?). And then — if that wasn’t the last song we were going to play for the night — stop the momentum yet again, and tune back up so we could play the rest of our songs.
Now, if we wanted to be real fucking rawk stars about it, we could just have had second guitars that we could switch back-and-forth between3. But that could possibly ride the line between being Cool As Hell and Pretentious As Fuck if we were to switch guitars for just one song. And our egos weren’t big enough for that, yet.
However, I had the idea that I would start writing songs in that tuning, and we would eventually have 2 different sets of songs we could pull from when we played live. Regular tuning and tuned down. And some songs we could essentially have two versions of, just sounding a half step lower and having different lyrics — hence the “Part One” of this song.
I wrote lyrics for a “Part Two,” but we never got around to playing it.
Damn this fucking weather. The Earth’s no longer on our side / We expected for it to take our shit. Now it’s showing us who’s boss.
Torrents of rain. Skin blistering sunshine. Devastating viruses. Earthquakes and floods.
Let’s destroy the air we breathe, and shit in the water that we drink / We are the only living things that matter. The animal and plants can all suck our—
Tonnes of CO2. Nothing’s been taken off the endangered species list. Clear-cut all the forests. Gotta make room.
We procreate and take up space, and leave our children to inherit this mess / The mindless hate. Encompassing greed. Not to mention the people on the street.
Why should we care? We’re not gonna be here. It’s the American Way. The human race.
We need to take what we want before somebody else takes it. It’s our human right to exploit and destroy. It’s our nature to be arrogant and blind.
The shitty vocals were done with a cheap RadioShack mic that I bought a pair of on a credit card while we recording, because we needed more mics to record the drums. My thought was, I was fully intending to return them within the 30 Day return window, and thus would pull-off a total rock ‘n roll scam.
“Evolution” is there in the liner note flavor text for this song, but this was written before Pearl Jam’s “Do The Evolution” came out in 1998. Not that it ultimately means anything. Just noticing.
Now, I mentioned pretension, and having an instrumental interlude track could be seen as such. But this was Kevin and I messing around because we were the only constants in the recording process of this demo.
I had a Crate XLP preamp that had built-in chorus (which you’ll hear more of on the next track), and I had it switched on and was just noodling around. I don’t know if it’s the association that I have with the video for Nirvana’s song “Come As You Are” which features water imagery and a chorus effect, but that warble sound always makes me think of water. And water makes me think of floating down a river. And a river makes me think of flowing. And flowing makes me think of menstruation, because I was a teenage boy.4
Again, our immature sense of humor reared its shamefully shaking head. But this was more or less a throw-away album filler track, akin to the songs everyone skips on Vitalogy. However, we did play this one live once, which is more than you could say for “Stupid Mop!”
As I was talking about before, finding bands that would let us play with them was probably our highest hurdle to clear in those early years. A work-around we employed exactly once though, was essentially opening for ourselves as a different band.
It was known at the time in deep Pearl Jam lore, that Eddie Vedder’s wife at the time had a band named Hovercraft, and that he played drums on one of their albums under the name Jerome 230. At a couple of Pearl Jam’s shows, Hovercraft even opened for them and Eddie played drums while wearing a mask. Hovercraft was an instrumental band whose song were closer to Sonic Youth inspired noise jams than anything strictly in the rock milieu.
I thought to myself: “If you’re just playing noise, how hard could that be?” I then formulated a plan where Kevin and I would enlist a friend of ours — John, who gave us the idea for the name “kibosh” and was Matt’s older brother — to play keyboard (I should probably write it: “play” keyboard.) with us so that we could have an opening band for a show.
We never did try that stunt again... Not because anything bad happened5, but because, again, playing with other bands and trying to get a wider exposure to a larger audience is what our goal should have been.
But all of this did make for something to write about for this song, other than: This song is a menstruation joke...
-bcp
Harry, Kevin, and Matt also happened to be in marching band, but they didn’t play any brass instruments. Harry played saxophone. Kevin, percussion. And Matt was in the pit along with Kevin, playing guitar.
Actually, all the songs on that double album.
Which first, would mean that we would have to have had the money to afford extra gear. We were all playing out of 10” practice amp speakers until our early 20s! And spoiler alert: none of us came from money (like some other musicians out there), so that wasn’t going to happen until we got jobs and had some pre-2000s Recession disposable income.
And if you give a mouse a cookie and on and on...
Yeah, nothing bad happened there (just nobody showed up), even though this place had chicken wire up around the bar area, so that they could have people under 21 — like we were — see bands there. It was slightly intimidating, evoking images of bottles being thrown, the chicken wire.
