hola amigos! and sorry for the radio silence. but let’s talk. i want to tell you why i am so very very very very very very very VERY FUCKING EXCITED about this upcoming april 4th show at the knitting factory.
what is this blog about? honesty! hah! no serious, but let’s be totally, completely frank just this once. the old office at the knitting factory is a poop box. we like the bigger rooms. i booked this one because, hey: we just wanna jam! and we love any opportunity to rock with our pal
rebecca hart, she’s the shit, we all know such things. it’s going to be a great, fun night, and we are totally going to rock the house. but on the scale of i’m-getting-crazy-butterflies-over-this-gig: well, maybe not so much.
until.
buried in my spam folder, under my breakfast mountain of penis emails, was this chestnut, a throw-away, a fragment of a glimmer of a whisper of information from the booking agent:
"..there may be one more acoustic act sliding in too--its the guy from early edison who does that 1800okcable song.."
holy.
god.
DAMN!
just to refresh everyone’s memory (AS IF):
when this shit dropped in the early 00’s, as we watched those tossed-up off-key LIU guidos mewl about time warner, we were all like: holy shit! that is the wackest thing we have ever seen on the telly. it was one of those rare and precious television moments that really makes you feel personally disgusting and a failure just for not being the kind of asshole who can say "i don’t have a tv." yeah right! but this spot also had a bonus: it made you feel shitty just for being a musician as well. now that’s songwriting.
in 1988, tom waits sued frito-lay for hiring an impersonator to sing a jingle about doritos. he dropped like
a million crazy word bombs on the stand, but here’s the relevant passage:
"You know, when a guy is singing to me about toilet paper - you may need the money but, I mean, rob a 7-11! Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave."
i gotta say - i’ve always liked to think i’d be just as demanding with my own art, my own songs. (whoa, no promises, chester!) but unlike prickly tom, i don’t judge: hey pal, you go your way and i’ll go mine. so it was easy, once we stopped being revolted by the time warner spot, to start getting obsessed.
actually, we never stopped being revolted. but
additionally we became obsessed. they ran this fucking thing a million times a day, every channel, every time slot. this spot became the overriding context to our passive, pathetic, media-soaked existences, and being the level smarties we were, we sought to analyze and to understand. who? why? how? and how much? and what was up with that tantalizing dick joke in the chorus outro: "all night long, i’ll let you hold the remote control"? was this brazen act of slavish corp-rock shillery secretly meta? a work of manipulative, adolescent genius? was i a little bit jealous? could i have written a song as awesome as "i got cable"? would i? SHOULD i?
but let’s leave that for my therapist. we KNEW these motherfuckers had to be a real, local, rock band. how did we know? because of the poor quality of the film, the totally wack execution, the busted non-union actor extras playing the other parts, etc. the fact that "slipshod work" equals "new york rock band" is a whole other discussion (with copious documentation), let me tell you. but we just knew.
and we were right.
these guys were out there, and they didn’t even seem embarassed! some people even
said nice things about them! wtf?!? was the world coming to an end?
we know now that yes, it was. wake me when it’s over. what’s really fucked is that the band didn’t even negotiate for residuals - a standard clause that would have made them tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars as the spot ran up to 400 times a month for what seemed like at least a year. chalk that one up to naivete and bad management, the perfect compliments to time warner’s awesome SOP of making non-union hack commercials for itself to blast on all 12 million of its stations (including fox reality, which i can tell you is the only channel anyone needs to watch, although i do not own a tv).
"doing the whole thing was compensation enough", lead singer tom told a newsday columnist. "identity-wise, it’s been great for us."
jesus christ, dude. i can’t wait to rock with you on the 4th. whatever crazy shit you’re into is on me.