Life In The Hive pt 1

Around the time of recording the band's demo in 1991, I was a bit of a mess.  I had effectively dropped out of school so I could 'party' with pals all day (I ultimately got my shit together and graduated), get high on whatever was available to get high on and create music and art.  This was a creative high point for me - I was putting together comics, making psychedelic line drawings that were getting some attention in the community and the band had a rented out practice room (that smelled more than a bit of piss, but was a good place to get drunk and jam all night) and a few shows under our belts.

Anyone who's seen my Youtube or Vimeo page knows I'm no stranger to the ways of The Pink Floyd and those epic, bloated conceptual double albums of the 1960s and 70s.  So my stroke of genius (heh) was of course to write a hardcore punk theme album, with a story that could be told both musically and visually but would not compromise on the down and dirty simple and loose structures of punk and the violent rage and 'moshability' of thrashcore.

The concept was called 'Bees' (as you will see, I had a thing in my head for always titling albums with a four letter word - my har-har inside joke) and the story is as follows:

Our hero has isolated himself in a small apartment type room (the cave) refusing to exit into the outside world, surviving only on food and drink and smoke and whatever he can order by phone and get delivered to his door.  His only entertainment and joy comes from drawing images on his walls with graphite pencil.  From his window all he sees is a large bee hive hanging from a tree limb and a steady stream of bees entering and exiting and doing their mindless thing.  Eventually he becomes paranoid of them and believes society as a whole have become giant thought-controlled bees who have been programmed to capture him and make him into one of their mindless drones.  For some reason the authorities (it is not revealed, but one can assume it is neighbors or family or his landlord or someone) kick in his door and he kills the first person to enter his room.  During the grand finale of the story our hero has been placed in some sort of  facility where he can be contained and perpetually drugged - which he perceives as having been brought into the hive for removal of his free thought.


A lofty concept, with obvious nods to other such concept albums - dealing with madness, isolation, violence and rebellion.  A string of songs were written by 18 year old FM, and were presented to the band with some positive reaction.  The opening track is actually what I considered a rather hard edged yet epic acoustic song which sort of sets the scene and the general feelings of our hero towards those bees out there beyond his window.  Here's the original solo acoustic demo of the track as recorded within hours of writing in 1991:



This song was a huge departure from the Too Baked To Skate punk we were playing previously, and the band (although sympathetic to the project) didn't really see it as something they could get behind.  There does exist a practice tape with a full band version of the track, but it was never formally recorded.

From here, the album was to take an unwavering hardcore stance with what I considered fairly brutal lyrics.  Each song was bridged with a hard spoken word segment that sort of led from one part to the next - a la Henry Rollins or Jello Biafra or Kurt Brecht.  Only one song - titled 'Society' was ever put together as a true hardcore song before the band fizzled out.  Only one recording exists of a band practice in late '91/early '92 where the 'Society' lyrics are completely illegible and the sound quality almost unlistenable.  If I can lay my hands on it, I may post it so you can at least hear what it was to sound like and the truth behind the intent that this was to be a true hardcore punk project.  That song had a level of complexity we had not achieved previously with lots of rhythm changes and catchy mosh riffs and all of us were really proud of it as I recall.  But it was not to be.

The Bees concept would stay with me for a few years and even today (at age 38) I am considering revisiting it.  The next couple of posts, we'll discuss what became of Bees and it's ultimate recorded structure and expansion.

Songwriters Are Douchebags

I had this guitar.  It was a no-name brand 'flying V' style thing that I spray painted flat black then took my box of acrylic paints and made a large multi-colored nuclear explosion up on the big big pointy part there with a red smiley face on it and wrote underneath it "FUCK OFF AND HAVE A NICE DAY" and of course made all the As into little Anarchy symbols.  I was 14.  I had already popped the lock on Mom's liquor cabinet and had scored a few nickel bags of pot from some scary black dudes who hung out all day on their porch.  I had purchased my first Black Flag album and was just learning the evil ways of the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles.  The appeal of punk (as most stuffed shirt revisionist history ass hole rock writers will surely tell you) is that anyone can do it.  Or at least anyone will think they can.  At 14 I thought I could.  So me and my trusty flying V rocked one out.  These are the lyrics to my first song: "Too Baked To Skate"  - written in 1987 at age 14:


It's Saturday afternoon
Had too many bongs
Try to thrash around
But you're too far gone
The road starts to spin
Board begins to shake
Do a 'skull grind'
Because you're fucking baked
You are bleeding now
But you do not care
Time to go home
And put superglue in your hair


Spike your fucking mohawk
Spike it three feet high
Need some money for more weed
Tell your Mom a little lie
"Mom, I need some money
for a school trip.
Yeah, maybe tomorrow
I'll bring home the permission slip."
Your Mom gives you the money
For a nice fat dime
Time to start the whole fucking thing
Another fucking time


This time on a half-pipe
Going 'round and 'round
Do a hand plant 
You're fucking upside down
Your wasted friend comes at you
Rail slide on your head
You should've known you were too baked to skate
Too fucked up to shred
Fucking Nazi punk
Shouldnt've smoked that reefer
Now you're in a wheel chair 
Watching reruns of Leave It To Beaver!


Not exactly world shattering stuff but considering the time and the age of the writer it's fairly edgy I guess.  And really, how many songs have you heard with a Leave It To Beaver reference?  The music was a bouncy thing performed as fast as I could spit out the words somewhat legibly.

Here's how it sounded when recorded by my shitty band in 1991 in my friend's basement by the drummer's Dad who had a primitive recording rig.  We had a lead singer/yeller, but this was always the song where I stepped up to the mic and belted it out.  Here's 18 year old FM at the peak of his angsty testosterone-fueled rage:





I ultimately became the driving force behind this anarchic underage booze fueled Connecticut Hardcore punk garage band called "Chemical Persuasion."  In those days it was pure shocking rebellion.  I used to bring my songs to band practice with lyrics written on a wadded up piece of paper in my back pocket and a rough tune in my head.  Generally the guys would read it through, laugh and then see how many times they could fit the word FUCK into the lyrics without messing up the phrasing too much.  I was now officially a 'songwriter.'

The term 'songwriter' fills my head with images of thin, pale young men in black, skin tight and long-sleeve turtleneck shirts with wisps of stringy beard hair and bad skin with a chain smoking habit and an air of superiority.  Simply put: douchebags.  And I guess in later years I fell into a douchebag songwriter phase.

I have spent the past few days converting a bunch of songs I wrote and sang solo acoustic into my beat up boom box in the early to mid 90s after the band fizzled out and I slipped into married working life.  I've never performed a single one of these songs live or in front of anyone - not even my wife - and only shared them with a few pals (who generally were nice enough to tolerate my shit).  But listening to them almost 20 years later, some of them are quite good and mark a few rather momentous events in my life.  The time has come for me to bring them out of the box.  You're welcome to join me for what will surely be an uncomfortably revealing and potentially embarrassing display over the next few weeks.  For the record, I'm a little freaked but mostly excited.