Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The whole Madeline story by Spencer Rich
The first time I saw Madeline was at a party at the 666 house--I was entranced.
This was about May of '04. HopeForagoldensummer was playing and Venice Is
Sinking was the band that I came to see, cause I had been eating at the Green
Scene, and got to know Alex, who was still playing keys with them at the time.
Page Campbell was working there, too. The Gerbils and Zumm Zumm also played. The
Gerbils were too drunk to put on a good show and Zumm Zumm is a big fucking
joke--I don't know why anybody gives a fuck about that stupid band. All they do
is put on their instruments and jump around. I don't understand the Nana Grizol
thing, either. People like that Theo guy cause he's cute, or whatever, but I've
never heard anything memorable coming off his guitar or out of his mouth. But
the other acts were all mind-blowing. I ended up buying the Venice Is Sinking
CD, which was still just a demo and the Madeline split CD with the Dead Bird. I
listened to both
incessantly. I had been kinda down because it seemed the old E6 scene was dead
and the Possibilities and the Glands were done and Azure Ray had split town.
So my whole faith in the Athens scene was completely renewed and I went home and
wrote a song about it:"Athens Summer '04." I found out later that Venice Is
Sinking's ""Pulaski Heights" is about that house, as well, which was their
practice space. That was the last song on my 2nd cassette release"Pieces Of
Skull." I managed to give Madeline a copy of the cassette before she left for
Indiana.
During that time, she started dating the drummer she met up there (Matt). The
guy was really nice and pretty decent with brushes for a punk rocker, but the
dude was obviously not at her level of intelligence, by a long shot. Meanwhile,
I was in what might almost be considered a manic state, except that I'm really
not manic-depressive--it's more like depressive-depressive. But anyway, at some
point when I was working at Bluebird, I had this terrible cough one day. One of
my co-workers had been talking about tripping on dextromethorphan, which I had
done a lot in my teens and twenties, but quit for 10 years. Well, I had been
noticing in my adult years the number of products available had considerably
increased, as well as improvements in ingestibility. I got a regular bottle of
cough syrup and got high--I figured, what the hell--I've gotta work and I can't
be coughing all over people's food, and why not do a little extra. If you're
gonna take cough syrup,
right?
So I discovered Robitussin cough gels and Zicam cough mist, which is just
practically liquid DXM. It was a good time to discover such a pure euphoric
high, as I got to know Mercer and Colby from working at the Bluebird and went
out to the Squirrel on a pretty regular basis. Creatively speaking, I was in the
zone, putting down a song a day on 4-track, playing every instrument. I was
writing a lot about Athens life, in general. The doofus hippie, Dave Mundy
("Freelove") fired me from Bluebird and I ended up screenprinting with Frank
McDonnell, which was a serious thrill, cause he's the most amazing guitar player
in Athens--I'm still really sad that Producto has decided to be a duo.
I was basically living this life of being high 3 or 4 times a week, seeing the
most amazing shows of my life. It was heaven, except the job was a drag. Other
than Frank and Steve West, who plays with...shit....brainfart--old school Athens
punk band....ummm. Well, I'll think of it later. The rest of the guys were
complete lunkheads--your basic DUDES, or whatever. Not bad guys, but certainly
not people you'd wanna rely on for any music polls. So, we'd listen to the
crappy classic rock station 'til the eagles made us wanna smash things.
Sometimes we'd listen to 100.7, but it didn't come in great. Sometimes we'd hear
Steve's ipod, because he was the floor manager and had pretty good taste.
Occasionally we had to stay up all night printing shirts if there was a bowl
game and I'd get high and have no problems, when everybody else was falling
apart. But it was hard work and they promoted me to Shipping and Receiving,
which is a good euphemism for receiving an
enema. Man, the guy that ran that place was so ridiculous--I have no idea how
he's managed to stay in business. It made Office Space seem like a drama, it was
so comical. It could've been so simple--"Bill we need the shirts for this job on
this day." Somehow his confusion wound up making me look like I made a mistake.
It was totally insane. Wow--I'm getting really off topic--anyway, I decided I
needed to liven up the place and I brought in a cassette deck from which i made
a lot of mixes from classic vinyl and local CD's. I had been used to being able
to hear my music at Bluebird.
So I wrote this song that kind of borrowed from "The Gift" by the Velvet
Underground. It was called "Reactions To Madeline." It was the chords of
"Dumpster Dive Mother" with howling Neil Young, Lou Reed, J Mascis, etc. leads
while I read a bunch of things that people generally say when you put a Madeline
song on, positive and negative, stupid and intelligent--the point kind of being
that it's just a lot of nonsense, you should just listen to the music and shut
the fuck up. I thought it was kind of pro-feminist, because a lot of people
think that she's just a pretty face, or a pair of tits and ass. Well, all that's
undeniable--she's really absurdly beautiful, but she's really skilled as a
songwriter and her approach to playing guitar is totally unique. That's what I
THOUGHT I was putting out there. In case anyone should wonder what I was
thinking when i wrote such a song, I wrote "Spencer Rich-ism," which is all
about how I really think about the
beautiful musicians in this town. Anyway, it was pretty common knowledge at the
time that Madeline was living in the Spillage house across from Taco Stand, so
when I finished this cassette project, I dropped one off.
For a year, she wouldn't speak to me and asked that i not go to her shows. I
should probably mention the most offensive line in the song, "Would you gargle
her diarrhea if it meant she'd give you a blow job?" which was something that
one of the lunkheads at New World Graphics asked me. So I was kind of in a
panic--I was really inspired by this person, obviously. Now, of course, in this
day and age there's a lot of fear about obsession, so I kinda see her side of
it, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other gorgeous musicians in this
town. So I sent a few e-mails, but I knew that it was damned if I do, damned if
i don't.
I ended up removing the song from most of the cassette versions that I put out
and substituted this thing i wrote when I was about 19, but there's still a lot
of those cassettes out there. Some other people who have reason to soil my name
have decided to drag up other examples of things I've done that seem "creepy,"
which has made it impossible for me to make any progress musically in this town.
Things got a little better when i was in Flowers Of Evil. But the problem was
that the singer, Trey, had dated the bass player, Mary, who became attracted to
me. I'm not really too terribly self-conscious--I know I'm a pretty weird dude
and it takes a girl with pretty weird taste to date a skinny musician
w/obsessions about young musicians, no reasonable future, etc. etc., and Mary
was really pretty and weird in the right ways. Her hero was Mike Watt, for God's
sake. Well, I was living with Trey. I did absolutely nothing about it UNTIL he
started dating someone
else--and the someone else that he ended up dating was one of the most gorgeous
girls in town (Sierra). You might have seen her at Mama's Boy or Trapeze.
So, we were doing pretty great--we even got to play with Creepy at the 40 Watt.
I had finally broken up with Mary when the job thing got to be too much of a
barrier--it was totally mutual and we ended as friends, but we were still all in
the band. Trey was booking us way too much and we were playing with a lot of
stupid kiddie bands that we had no business playing with and one of these nights
I ended up doing a little too much cough syrup and drinking too much Jaeger and
i totally blew a show--I could barely hold a pair of drumsticks. This was at
Caledonia. The club was pretty unhappy about it--i didn't think it was that big
of a deal--only one song was completely disastrous, but they apparently gave
them a verbal lashing when i had tucked my tail between my legs and got the fuck
home.
We had another gig lined up at Go. We had a practice where everything got laid
out--i was pretty defensive--they wanted me to stop doing robo, but I knew it
was mostly the Jaeger. What I didn't know is that they had arranged to practice
with someone else at Nuci's Space. Because Trey didn't want to give up the Go
bar gig, he didn't tell me that he was kicking me out of the band. He also
decided that it would be a "good time to deal with the elephant in the room." By
that, he meant the nasty rumors going around about me, which were apparently
making it hard to book shows with Witches at the Hangar, Transmet, etc. because
they're part of that Zumm Zumm crowd. Of course, he did all of this via
Facebook, giving him a good excuse to drag all this dirt he had on me in front
of Mary.
The Madeline situation goes up and down. One time I was in Flicker and she
thanked me for supporting her music. Apparently something I said in an e-mail
since then freaked her out, because she blocked me from myspace and had Clint
ask me to leave Flicker when i tried to talk to her once.
So, my last cassette dealt a lot with all this crazy shit. Part of me doesn't
like exposing personal stuff in songs, but sometimes that's all that will come
out. I'll try and send you a CD copy of my "Best Of"
and a digital version of the last cassette release, entitled "A Season In Hell."
The Flowers Of Evil changed their name to Night Nurses--I'm guessing that my
song, "Flowers For Friends" might have had something to do with it. I think to
look at this story objectively, it's got the makings of a classic novel. I'm
glad that there's someone I could rattle this all out to. I hope it was
enjoyable. Having re-read over it, I realize that my writing is pretty
terrible--I've had a really shitty week, as you can probably see from all these
Facebook updates, so it's pretty much cough syrup babble, but I think everything
is more or less coherent. Here's some relevant links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/spencerrich
http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/madeline/the_slow_bang/
http://www.myspace.com/nightnurses
This was about May of '04. HopeForagoldensummer was playing and Venice Is
Sinking was the band that I came to see, cause I had been eating at the Green
Scene, and got to know Alex, who was still playing keys with them at the time.
Page Campbell was working there, too. The Gerbils and Zumm Zumm also played. The
Gerbils were too drunk to put on a good show and Zumm Zumm is a big fucking
joke--I don't know why anybody gives a fuck about that stupid band. All they do
is put on their instruments and jump around. I don't understand the Nana Grizol
thing, either. People like that Theo guy cause he's cute, or whatever, but I've
never heard anything memorable coming off his guitar or out of his mouth. But
the other acts were all mind-blowing. I ended up buying the Venice Is Sinking
CD, which was still just a demo and the Madeline split CD with the Dead Bird. I
listened to both
incessantly. I had been kinda down because it seemed the old E6 scene was dead
and the Possibilities and the Glands were done and Azure Ray had split town.
So my whole faith in the Athens scene was completely renewed and I went home and
wrote a song about it:"Athens Summer '04." I found out later that Venice Is
Sinking's ""Pulaski Heights" is about that house, as well, which was their
practice space. That was the last song on my 2nd cassette release"Pieces Of
Skull." I managed to give Madeline a copy of the cassette before she left for
Indiana.
During that time, she started dating the drummer she met up there (Matt). The
guy was really nice and pretty decent with brushes for a punk rocker, but the
dude was obviously not at her level of intelligence, by a long shot. Meanwhile,
I was in what might almost be considered a manic state, except that I'm really
not manic-depressive--it's more like depressive-depressive. But anyway, at some
point when I was working at Bluebird, I had this terrible cough one day. One of
my co-workers had been talking about tripping on dextromethorphan, which I had
done a lot in my teens and twenties, but quit for 10 years. Well, I had been
noticing in my adult years the number of products available had considerably
increased, as well as improvements in ingestibility. I got a regular bottle of
cough syrup and got high--I figured, what the hell--I've gotta work and I can't
be coughing all over people's food, and why not do a little extra. If you're
gonna take cough syrup,
right?
So I discovered Robitussin cough gels and Zicam cough mist, which is just
practically liquid DXM. It was a good time to discover such a pure euphoric
high, as I got to know Mercer and Colby from working at the Bluebird and went
out to the Squirrel on a pretty regular basis. Creatively speaking, I was in the
zone, putting down a song a day on 4-track, playing every instrument. I was
writing a lot about Athens life, in general. The doofus hippie, Dave Mundy
("Freelove") fired me from Bluebird and I ended up screenprinting with Frank
McDonnell, which was a serious thrill, cause he's the most amazing guitar player
in Athens--I'm still really sad that Producto has decided to be a duo.
I was basically living this life of being high 3 or 4 times a week, seeing the
most amazing shows of my life. It was heaven, except the job was a drag. Other
than Frank and Steve West, who plays with...shit....brainfart--old school Athens
punk band....ummm. Well, I'll think of it later. The rest of the guys were
complete lunkheads--your basic DUDES, or whatever. Not bad guys, but certainly
not people you'd wanna rely on for any music polls. So, we'd listen to the
crappy classic rock station 'til the eagles made us wanna smash things.
Sometimes we'd listen to 100.7, but it didn't come in great. Sometimes we'd hear
Steve's ipod, because he was the floor manager and had pretty good taste.
Occasionally we had to stay up all night printing shirts if there was a bowl
game and I'd get high and have no problems, when everybody else was falling
apart. But it was hard work and they promoted me to Shipping and Receiving,
which is a good euphemism for receiving an
enema. Man, the guy that ran that place was so ridiculous--I have no idea how
he's managed to stay in business. It made Office Space seem like a drama, it was
so comical. It could've been so simple--"Bill we need the shirts for this job on
this day." Somehow his confusion wound up making me look like I made a mistake.
It was totally insane. Wow--I'm getting really off topic--anyway, I decided I
needed to liven up the place and I brought in a cassette deck from which i made
a lot of mixes from classic vinyl and local CD's. I had been used to being able
to hear my music at Bluebird.
So I wrote this song that kind of borrowed from "The Gift" by the Velvet
Underground. It was called "Reactions To Madeline." It was the chords of
"Dumpster Dive Mother" with howling Neil Young, Lou Reed, J Mascis, etc. leads
while I read a bunch of things that people generally say when you put a Madeline
song on, positive and negative, stupid and intelligent--the point kind of being
that it's just a lot of nonsense, you should just listen to the music and shut
the fuck up. I thought it was kind of pro-feminist, because a lot of people
think that she's just a pretty face, or a pair of tits and ass. Well, all that's
undeniable--she's really absurdly beautiful, but she's really skilled as a
songwriter and her approach to playing guitar is totally unique. That's what I
THOUGHT I was putting out there. In case anyone should wonder what I was
thinking when i wrote such a song, I wrote "Spencer Rich-ism," which is all
about how I really think about the
beautiful musicians in this town. Anyway, it was pretty common knowledge at the
time that Madeline was living in the Spillage house across from Taco Stand, so
when I finished this cassette project, I dropped one off.
For a year, she wouldn't speak to me and asked that i not go to her shows. I
should probably mention the most offensive line in the song, "Would you gargle
her diarrhea if it meant she'd give you a blow job?" which was something that
one of the lunkheads at New World Graphics asked me. So I was kind of in a
panic--I was really inspired by this person, obviously. Now, of course, in this
day and age there's a lot of fear about obsession, so I kinda see her side of
it, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other gorgeous musicians in this
town. So I sent a few e-mails, but I knew that it was damned if I do, damned if
i don't.
I ended up removing the song from most of the cassette versions that I put out
and substituted this thing i wrote when I was about 19, but there's still a lot
of those cassettes out there. Some other people who have reason to soil my name
have decided to drag up other examples of things I've done that seem "creepy,"
which has made it impossible for me to make any progress musically in this town.
Things got a little better when i was in Flowers Of Evil. But the problem was
that the singer, Trey, had dated the bass player, Mary, who became attracted to
me. I'm not really too terribly self-conscious--I know I'm a pretty weird dude
and it takes a girl with pretty weird taste to date a skinny musician
w/obsessions about young musicians, no reasonable future, etc. etc., and Mary
was really pretty and weird in the right ways. Her hero was Mike Watt, for God's
sake. Well, I was living with Trey. I did absolutely nothing about it UNTIL he
started dating someone
else--and the someone else that he ended up dating was one of the most gorgeous
girls in town (Sierra). You might have seen her at Mama's Boy or Trapeze.
So, we were doing pretty great--we even got to play with Creepy at the 40 Watt.
I had finally broken up with Mary when the job thing got to be too much of a
barrier--it was totally mutual and we ended as friends, but we were still all in
the band. Trey was booking us way too much and we were playing with a lot of
stupid kiddie bands that we had no business playing with and one of these nights
I ended up doing a little too much cough syrup and drinking too much Jaeger and
i totally blew a show--I could barely hold a pair of drumsticks. This was at
Caledonia. The club was pretty unhappy about it--i didn't think it was that big
of a deal--only one song was completely disastrous, but they apparently gave
them a verbal lashing when i had tucked my tail between my legs and got the fuck
home.
We had another gig lined up at Go. We had a practice where everything got laid
out--i was pretty defensive--they wanted me to stop doing robo, but I knew it
was mostly the Jaeger. What I didn't know is that they had arranged to practice
with someone else at Nuci's Space. Because Trey didn't want to give up the Go
bar gig, he didn't tell me that he was kicking me out of the band. He also
decided that it would be a "good time to deal with the elephant in the room." By
that, he meant the nasty rumors going around about me, which were apparently
making it hard to book shows with Witches at the Hangar, Transmet, etc. because
they're part of that Zumm Zumm crowd. Of course, he did all of this via
Facebook, giving him a good excuse to drag all this dirt he had on me in front
of Mary.
The Madeline situation goes up and down. One time I was in Flicker and she
thanked me for supporting her music. Apparently something I said in an e-mail
since then freaked her out, because she blocked me from myspace and had Clint
ask me to leave Flicker when i tried to talk to her once.
So, my last cassette dealt a lot with all this crazy shit. Part of me doesn't
like exposing personal stuff in songs, but sometimes that's all that will come
out. I'll try and send you a CD copy of my "Best Of"
and a digital version of the last cassette release, entitled "A Season In Hell."
The Flowers Of Evil changed their name to Night Nurses--I'm guessing that my
song, "Flowers For Friends" might have had something to do with it. I think to
look at this story objectively, it's got the makings of a classic novel. I'm
glad that there's someone I could rattle this all out to. I hope it was
enjoyable. Having re-read over it, I realize that my writing is pretty
terrible--I've had a really shitty week, as you can probably see from all these
Facebook updates, so it's pretty much cough syrup babble, but I think everything
is more or less coherent. Here's some relevant links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/spencerrich
http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/madeline/the_slow_bang/
http://www.myspace.com/nightnurses
Mambo Nr 5
The music was composed and made popular by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, who's attributed the mambo way back in the 1950s. Check him out.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Mule Fest Party
So, I started my drinking around 530pm at Square One Seafood, new new place on Thomas between the Classic Centre and Good Dirt, at the corner of Handcock. You can see were Bone Shakers, a former gay bar, was leveled to make room for potential condos. The spot mentioned is now the valet parking for Square One. I hate valet parking, so I parked in front of Good Dirt, fuck em.
Square One looks a lot like touristy seafood places I learned to love in Florida. Of course, as a Florida local, I went to the less touristy more townie type places. When you enter the patio of Square One, the entryway is bordered with boat oars and decorative plants. They have a lot of tables and benches, plenty of room to sit down. I really found the aesthetics of the patio very pleasing. So, pleasing, in fact, I didn't want to go indoors.
I see my friend Ken Will Morton wearing seersucker paints, pork pie hat, and 70's porn star sun glasses that made him have bug eyes. Soon, all the bigwigs start showing up, the mayor, Jared Baily, Eric Krasle, Dana Downs, Baby Jessica, Michelle Roche, Jordan Stepp and their various entourages.
Then, they brought out the food, a cornucopia of munchies. I was in heaven. All I could eat buffalo shrimp with phat blue cheese dressing. I was chasing it with gulps of Magic Hat Waco, a seasonal beer. The party was a huge success, The fest had a lot of people as well.
Word,
Johnny Midnight
Friday, August 21, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
New Shocked n Dismayed blog
My name is Johnny Midnight. I am a blogger. I am basically starting this blog because I finally figured out a extremely cool name. This has been an evolution as such. Well, let me get to work to bring this blog to life. The title says it all, what is shocking and what is dismayed?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Subscribe To shocked n dismayed
Posts
All Comments