100 SONG MARCH

This fragment is the first recording of Ronnie and me playing together. We had just begun playing guitar a couple months before so our timing sucked, but I like the way it sounds like some kind of forgotten recording from the days of the Delta Blues, a couple of drunk sharecroppers learning to strum.I include it because it is the only remaining baby picture of Lucid Nation and you can see how deeply the blues had us under its spell. I said “my bad’ when I made a mistake so even though I didn’t want to sing at all I was the first vocalist for Cat Cult! The band is mine! Mine I tell you! My unconscious was all set to go go go but it would take riot grrrl to kick open the door. Listen to the song: Click Here

This is Ronnie’s first and by far most primitive experiment with multi-track recording and effects.At first, it seems by fox Ronnie means foxy like the rock stars of yore he mentions but really this title is lifted from the I Ching. Ronnie’s a big Lee Scratch Perry fan as mentioned and I think you can hear a bit of that in this mix. He plays the big solo near the end; I do the meandering bluesy slide licks the rest of the song.There are two kinds of rock and roll: entertainment and enlightenment. Sometimes an artist is both. Any real rock fan is wondering, along with me, what happened to rock as enlightenment? The electric troubadour poets who crystallized and galvanized generations, we haven’t had a real one of those in a long ass time.In this song I think Ronnie captures one reason for that. He sings about Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Jim Morrison, three of the most devoted rock as enlightenment poets. Their deaths resonate with an isolation and resentment that would make any sensitive artist think twice about following the trail they blazed.I’m sure Kurt Cobain would have had a verse in this song but he was still alive when it was written. Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for Ronnie’s lyrics about patience overcoming violence at a time when AC/DC and Muddy Waters were all I would listen to.“Backed into a corner of mirrorsYou got only yourself to blameChange is original sinWhen you play the sacrifice gameSometimes you find it even in your familyLike being at the mercy of Nazi charity“Baby, ain’t no need for suicide or murderthere’s always a way across if you walk a little furtheryou gotta walk a little furtheryou will find ways across.”You’ll notice that Ronnie at the time had a bad case of baby-itis. Almost every song gets at least one “baby”. It reminds me of a story I was told about the guy who sang for horrible hit band Foreigner. He had “hey-itis”. He had to sing “hey” at least twice in every song, and sometimes he’d add a “hey” after every line. Finally the producer said one more “hey” and you’re fired. That was the cure. Ronnie required nothing so drastic. Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like:I have an ancestor who was a chief on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Because of the fate of so many of his family at the hands of the Nazis, Ronnie has strong feelings about the genocides suffered by Native Americans and slaves.Check out Ronnie’s way with lyrics:“Devil headed people came over on a boatThey had a disease that made ‘em want to chokeThe life out of everything beautiful, wild and free,Inside those pilgrim eyes were highways of concrete.”“Don’t it make you wish poor Bob had possession over Judgment Day” is a nod to his obsession at the time with all things Robert Johnson.But what I want to know is how did a first generation American immigrant kid become such a total redneck (as proven by this drawly bluesy rasp of a vocal that sounds like it was lifted off a 78)? Listen to the song: Click Here

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like:“You come knockin at my bedroom doorlike some kind of guilty conspiratorlke a spy in the nightlike an angel on the slylike the southern sunin the morning skytalk to me all night about your boyfriendfollow me home into my bedTell me all and everything you’ve seenYou’re first love and last dreamTell me your secrets with a kissUse the talk of fingertips.”I think those are lyrics are beautiful but I would never sing anything so blatantly romantic, and neither would Bon Scott or Ronnie van Zandt, so I’m okay about it. Listen to the song: Click Here

That glitch at the beginning shows how close we came to recording over this song!Way too silly and romantic for Tamra to ever sing, but cute, in a Marc Bolan with a dash of silly Lennon kinda way.I love the bluesy interplay of our guitars. I guess our instincts were good because we had no clue and a lot to learn! We were convinced we could not be good because we had not been playing long enough. Columbia Records’ interest in us was like some kind of strange cosmic joke. Instead of ambitiously exploiting it, we were waiting for the punch line. Listen to the song: Click Here

Ronnie’s rhythm guitar part later became the Lucid Nation song L.A. River that Keith Richards called marvelous. I played a sweet bass line on that, but I like this song just as much.They say L.A. is a cityIn a nightmare that never sleepsShow me a town where pityOutweighs the law of the streetThe twentieth century,Baby, it’s historyTime can’t turn backTo how things used to beDo I sound a little paranoid?I had a nightmare for breakfast today.I saw a hundred million peoplePretending it’s yesterday.It’s like Woodstock never happenedIt’s like Ike never diedIt’s like Elvis never shook itIt’s like Nixon never lied.That song is over ten years old but it makes even more sense today. I may have to do a version of it with Lucid Nation I like it so much. Listen to the song: Click Here

Yes, that is me snickering. This song is a lament for musicians lost when one night stands became pregnancies unplanned. It would make a great condom commercial.On a more serious note I think the cruelty of women who saddle men with unwanted children, often for gain, can be a crime like rape: they forever change someone’s life against their will when they force a man to be a father. Of course, he was too stupid to take precautions so maybe nature elected him for the honor of parenthood.Insert joke about how there wouldn’t be a human race if women stopped trapping men with children.Tamra, you are slandering the very force of civilization, the bit and reins most trustworthy can only be fitted against the wild animal’s will. Men, like horses, must be broken. Besides, it is the oldest profession. Listen to the song: Click Here

As timely as today’s headlines! Things have only gotten worse since this song was written. “How do you deal with hopelessness?How do you deal with helplessness?How do you deal with crisisWhen it’s world wideAnd there’s nowhere to hide.”I’m not sure how we accomplished this weird mélange of Woody Guthrie and AC/DC, no one could have planned it, it reads like it shouldn’t work, and yet somehow it does. Listen to the song: Click Here

Now we are moving back through time to the very cassette tape that got Columbia Records interested in Cat Cult. These recordings were made inside an apartment living room, the two of us playing cheap guitars through practice combos, on a hand held cassette recorder. Talk about no overdubs or effects!I wrote the music, Ronnie wrote the lyrics and he plays lead. It reappears on the Cat Cult Columbia multitrack demo as Boulevard in my Backyard with different lyrics and a much boppier feel only partly due to all the extra instrumentation. The music reappears again as the song Angry Pelicans on Lucid Nation’s “The Stillness of Over” CD with new lyrics and vocal by Debbie Haliday, and Ronnie on bass.Hollywood Boulevard used to be mostly junkies and hookers, in a way it still is, they’ve just been pushed onto the side streets. On the boulevard itself you see mostly tourists these days. Since Disney started spending big bucks there the area is becoming gentrified. Some of it’s cool, like having the Knitting Factory there. The movie theaters are glitzy. The famous Capitol Records building, meant to look like a stack of vinyl discs, is being turned into condos, and I have to admit if I was looking for a condo I’d really have to consider the building so many legendary bands recorded in.The neighbors loved that part near the end of this track where we cranked up a sound effects record air raid siren. Listen to the song: Click Here

This was Ronnie’s recording swansong with Cat Cult. The something struggling to be born he’s howling about is probably Lucid Nation!Man he finds a weird groove in here, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and I’m happy to say it owes a lot to my brooding bass line.Riot grrrl found us on the rebound from Columbia, and every word in every zine could not have made more sense. Ronnie and I were about to become very different people as riot grrrl forced us to see ourselves and the world for real. Listen to the song: Click Here

Conrad Santa Vicca was best known as Divine’s dresser. When he was diagnosed with AIDS he decided to fulfill his dream of becoming a painter. His work was extraordinary, as the art world quickly recognized.Ronnie and I met Conrad at a Holly Woodlawn party in a Silverlake backyard. The three of us talked about life and death under a huge old pepper tree. The stars were bright and the summer night was warm. We knew Conrad was dying. His healthy looking tan was the result of drugs they were giving him. When he lit up a joint and offered to pass it to us I didn’t hesitate. My older brother was gay and I knew you couldn’t get AIDS from a passed cigarette. I also knew what it would mean to Conrad at that point in his life to have a smart ass white girl share a smoke with him without a flinch. Ronnie threw me a horrified look but, slump shouldered and secretly pissed off, he took a puff, too. Conrad appreciated what we had done and the conversation we had then about his race with time to create all the art pouring into his mind was a life changer for us. Conrad worked as many hours as he could every day to bring as many paintings to life as he could while there was still time. That was a guru moment for us. Parts of that conversation are in the lyrics of this song.When faced with the descent into a painful death Conrad took his own life.When we heard it Ronnie wrote this. A Powa is a Tibetan meditation or prayer that’s supposed to reacquaint the confused soul of the recently disentangled with the infinite consciousness and compassion that is our true home.“He walks into the bright Collision of every candy bar Kisses and favorite TV shows Sunshine on electric signs Everything he wants to know.”Some of the other lyrics reappeared in the Lucid Nation song L.A. River. Listen to the song: Click Here

Ronnie recorded the sound of the ice cream truck right outside the apartment window to suggest the loss of innocence when you move away from home.He was thinking of a Catholic girl we knew, who because her family would not accept her, had to leave home and church and fend for herself in a world she wasn’t prepared for.Again check out the raw and bizarre, trance inducing mix. More EQ and reverb magic, another tribute to the genius of Lee Perry.I like the old school vibe of this song, but Ronnie said it was corny and declared he’d never write a song on keyboards again. So far he hasn’t but I he’s been playing more keyboards lately so you never know! Listen to the song: Click Here

Debbie said she’s probably crazyBecause all she can think aboutAre the identical refrigeratorsIn every claustrophobic house.”I guess in a way you could say those are Debbie’s first lyrics for Lucid Nation, since Ronnie is repeating something she told him when we all were first becoming friends, just before she began drumming and zine writing.What sounds like an anvil being smacked with a hammer is actually finger cymbals Ronnie used effects on.Lyrics from this song wound up in the Lucid Nation songs Them (American Stonehenge, Public Domain) and Bleed (DNA, Public Domain). Listen to the song: Click Here

Ronnie painstakingly memorized this bit of Celtic open tuned picking that makes up the intro of the earliest version of the Lucid Nation song Trip.As the lyrics in this version make obvious, Andy Wood of Mother Love Bone had recently died. We liked Mother Love Bone.The lead playing in this song shows how quickly Ronnie’s skills developed when he was encouraged by interest from Columbia. But my favorite thing about it is the way he mixed using reverbs and EQs to create a unique mood; again, a benefit perhaps of his being a Lee Scratch Perry fan. Listen to the song: Click Here

Hollywood Boulevard was one of the songs Columbia picked out so Ronnie revamped it into this new song with a completely different loose and funky feel. Check out The Doors-y keyboard part he threw in. I like the lines: “We tore down the jungle to put a street up keep making it wider and longer so we can drive and never stop chicken hawks and stone faced cops tail lights streaming red pizza after midnight see where Caesar bled. “Some walk through like angels Untouched and unafraid Past shopping cart apartments And pavement beds like graves Everybody’s got a mission, a scam or a crusade Some it seems never leave like ghosts that slowly fadeI wrote the lines: “stuck on a fault in here under fire out there”and later used them for the Lucid Nation song Landmark (The Stillness of Over, Public Domain). Listen to the song: Click Here

Ronnie took to multi-track recording like a duck to water. I fell in love with playing bass. The results were a startling leap forward from the hand held cassette demos Columbia liked that you’ll hear later this episode. Ronnie was goth once and you can hear the influence of bands like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and Angels in Aspic in this moody song. The lyrics sound like they were written about today, huh?Insect breath, the sweet smell of soil. That’s actually true! Listen to the song: Click Here

FUBAR is U.S. Army circa WW2 slang for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.“The more things you treat like it the more your life turns to shit.”When Jody heard those lines she wanted to chant them with me. I have to admit it felt surreal to stand there recording with her. We’d played gigs together, Lucid Nation’s second gig was opening for Team Dresch at an art gallery in downtown L.A., but she and Donna, like Kathleen, and Adrienne from Spitboy, were heroes to me. Team Dresch is on top of the list of the best bands I’ve seen live (in a tie with a Sonic Youth sound check I saw at the Hollywood Palladium). I’m stoked that Jody played on FUBAR.FUBAR was recorded on an ancient Soundcraft Series 3 sixteen track mixing board big as a boat. Supposedly it had belonged long ago to Heart, and more recently to Soundgarden. This song and Mung Jung Bushi were the only recordings I got out of the huge thing before it broke down completely. Only one repair guy in all southern California could work on it and he was in demand. So bye bye board.I think I should have done more recording with this line up. I don’t know why I didn’t try to make that happen. Denise was busy with her Venice California metal band Form of, and Jody was playing with Family Outing, but we still could have gotten together once in awhile. Maybe we still will. Listen to the song: Click Here

Late into the night we talked about the future. The audience hasn’t yet learned that the great art of the future will be DIY and hard to find, not corporate and handed to passive consumers everywhere on a silver platter. Remember, average people didn’t know who Beethoven or Van Gogh were during their lifetimes.Here in Hollywood the movie, TV and music corporations, most of which are divisible into five giant octopus corporations, are scared shitless by the changes technology is bringing.What happens when there’s no more forced programming? Instead of having to wait till 8 PM to see the show you want to see (and if you don’t have Tivo and you miss it well you’re screwed) someday soon you’ll search for the show on a search engine just like you search for music files. Instead of a few commercial stations and a couple hundred cable stations we’ll have millions of directories and blogs, and huge databases just waiting to be enjoyed by explorers in pajamas.Make no mistake, great artists of the future will use the most direct means for their self expression. With a good DV cam and Pro-tools and a website as their outlet they will reach millions. Maybe someday some of them will even make millions, too!EPISODE 7 THE ENDNEXT (mini) EPISODE Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation Listen to the song: Click Here

On the subject of malfunctioning vintage gear that makes people go misty eyed, Ronnie drove Mecca Normal to their gig at Spaceland in a broken down silvertop 1966 Pontiac GTO coupe. Because the trunk was rust eaten it filled with exhaust which spilled into the backseat till the passengers were dizzy. But the beautiful heap hauled ass on the freeway when Ronnie demonstrated what it could do. It had the California license plate Artcore.Eight cylinder guilt, it haunts me, that thrill I get from the rev and torque of a big block engine. I love a car that jumps up when you shift it into second. I am an American, damn it, and I like that. I’m so ashamed, but Delorean was inspired when he designed this biosphere killing machine. Listen to the song: Click Here

We talked late into the night about the changes we were seeing. While having nowhere near the illustrious career of a Mecca Normal, Lucid Nation has been around long enough to see the bottom drop out of the music scene (and to bitch a blue streak about it). When we started out riot grrrl was already beginning to decline but was so huge to us it seemed to be only getting started. I was always pissed when I’d hear Kathleen or some other riot grrrl authority warn that the glory days were quickly passing. Boy howdy, were they right!Don’t get me wrong. The scene wasn’t that great. There was lots of high school politics and back stabbing, the bands were mostly shits to each other, half the clubs were run by perverts, and the clubs were usually in parts of town where police laughed at you for being there. But there were plenty of great bands and fans anyway.It’s strange that it wasn’t the Internet and the disinterest of a new generation that wrecked the scene. A rebirth of conservatism inspired fire marshals and councilmen to dig up reasons why kids couldn’t get together. The Internet arrived like the dawn of a new day. We all knew the day the Internet came to town everything before it became the distant past. Mecca Normal continues to trail blaze. DIY video received mass media certification when MTV2 accepted for broadcast Jean’s haunting video for the Mecca Normal song “Attraction.” Listen to the song: Click Here

The other show we played with Mecca Normal was at Soapbox at Koo’s new location, with Family Outing, Jody Bleyle’s band with her brother. It happened to be the night of Morrissey’s comeback tour hitting town so nobody showed up for our show. To Jean it didn’t matter how many people were there. Her message of transformation through self expression was even more powerful in such an intimate setting.Mecca Normal’s show at Spaceland was strange. They performed a brilliant set to a sparse audience that later became enamored with the emotional breakdown of a local star on stage. What must it be like to have given birth to a scene, and then on the other end of it, to be ignored by people who don’t realize who you are or what you did for them? Another sign of the disconnect afflicting the music world at the end of a cycle. Listen to the song: Click Here

For his graphics series Inspired Agitators, David Lester created a poster for the great Sioux chief Red Cloud. Now Ronnie is a Crazy Horse man. He got to talking about how Red Cloud wasn’t that great a guy. David stood up for Red Cloud. Ronnie stood up for Crazy with Courage Horse (the Sioux war chief’s real name). I was waiting for some coups to be counted. It is true that Red Cloud’s great grand niece weaved a beautiful painted quill bracelet for Ronnie while they talked one afternoon when we toured through South Dakota. But we spent the Fourth of July on Bear Butte where Crazy with Courage Horse loved to meditate.As a Cherokee, I yanked out a hunk of hair to leave as a prayer flag on one of the trees way up the butte. Lightning was playing all around over the plains. I think both chiefs were quite magnificent. And I think it’s wonderful that two white boys could get so passionate about them. Listen to the song: Click Here

Beverly Boulevard used to be the favored shortcut for those in the know from where I live in Hollywood to downtown places like The Smell, Silverlake Lounge, Spaceland, Luna Sol, MOCA, and Little Tokyo. It’s still the shortcut late at night. The streets are lined with butcher shops with Carcineria signs. Each one has its own visual flavor depending on where the proprietor came from: Guatamala, Bolivia, Mexico, El Salvador, Burbank.Some have hand painted signs, some are no more than simple black letters but many feature colorful scenes. Late at night they are a hub of activity where working people end their day and nightshifts start theirs: millions of stories to be told. I think Carcineria is Spanish for food that kills but dying never tasted so good. Listen to the song: Click Here