New 90-second song the wife and I wrote and recorded called “Dick and the Debbies”. It’s like a theme show for the Archies, if the Archies did speedballs and had lots of unsafe sex with strangers in bathroom stalls.
It’s for the upcoming Podiobook, The Plump Buffet.
Download MP3 here.
Me: bass and vocal.
Wife: vocal.
London May: Drums.
Officer Hutsskew: Guitar.
Guitar and drums recorded over the Internet.
My wife, the singer!:
HERE’S A SHORT MP3 of a rough mix of a song me and the wife wrote and recorded last night, called “I Love My Little Bitches.” We wrote the lyrics together, I played bass guitar and drum loops, I produced, and “Marky The Sod” played guitar over the Internet. (NOTE: BETTER VERSION WITH NEW VOCALS WAS UPLOADED TO REPLACE OLD VERSION ON FEB 2. IF YOU DOWNLOADED BEFORE THIS, RE-DOWNLOAD AND HEAR HOW MUCH THIS SONG HAS IMPROVED.)
Song is from our upcoming Podiobook radio play, “The Plump Buffet”. In the story, the song is sung by a hot dominatrix cougar with a whip named “Mother”. (Picture Texas Terri, if you’ve seen her perform.)
Mother’s band is “Mother and the Fuckers”.
The guitar player, bass player and drummer are tough leather fags. The bar they’re playing in is called “The Slime Light”. (Picture the SF Eagle, with more drugs and even more sleeze.)
Mother is whipping her “Little Bitches” (femmy mice in slips and pumps) in the audience when you hear the whips.
I’m pretty impressed with DJ’s singing on this. It’s the first singing she’s ever had recorded.
It’s funny, two days ago, GeekDad from Wired Magazine mistakenly called DJ a “singer” on the Internet,
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/01/ipod-plus-delca.html
DJ laughed when she read it. But by today, she is one.
MWD
(book cover image at top by F. Wertham)
I love ‘em These really get under my skin. Dark, funny, low tech, great.
You’ll have funny nightmares.
Watch in this order:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FgMiSb_Qms
DIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecRbZ5uixEg
SCARED
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmpsxDsKDJI
LESSON
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1UnZT-yseM
DAD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5FZQgglULg
BRAINWASH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBlGnIMZfN4
ROCK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFFU8Jd5qlc
JAZZ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a40LcxVvAX4
DRUMSOLO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53TcR2owe8
TALKSHOW
Boss Sonova asked me:
Remember a Bomb show at the I-Beam w/Hilsinger on pedal steel, wearing a pope’s gold gown (and perhaps a miter?)
I replied:I don’t remember.
“If you remember a Bomb show, you weren’t there.” lol……..
Cory Doctorow Blogged on BoingBoing about Debra Jean Dean’s reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Yay! Spread the love.
13-minute high-quality MP3. Engineered by Michael W. Dean. Covered by Creative Commons.
A very cool guy named Torodd Eriksen from a town called Kirkenes (in Norway, on the Russian border) asked me to come tour the region with DIY or DIE and do Q&A and filmmaking seminars. He wrote me:
And after Kirkenes and Norway - you do the same thing in Russia. Russian societies are so hungry for artistic and political impulses. Generally speaking Russia is a safe country, but still it is one of the most unsafe countries for journalists. For that reason alone the skills and tools of citizen-journalism and documentation is very important in Russia……..
Beautiful sunny downtown Kirkenes:
I replied:
Three years ago I would have jumped to do this, and probably would have tried to meet a pretty girl there, get married, and stay.
However, now I’m married here, really happy, and feel I don’t want to travel in an unstable region where journalists get kidnapped. I basically believe I would be considered a “journalist” by some people, because I write for this well-known media company O’Reilly, for the O’Reilly Digital Media site:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3220
How about this. Why don’t you tour this region in my stead, show DIY or DIE, keep the money, and you can bring a laptop and I’ll do a Skype Webcam question-and-answer period at each show? You can hook me up to the video projector, you’ll take questions from the audience, translate to English, ask me, I’ll answer, and you can translate back.
Much respect,
MWD
My friend George Earth’s very cool cell-phone video series, Theater of Decay, number one. Shot with cardboard cutouts. Amazing. HERE.
Brian Childers’ page from the Blue Ridge School yearbook.
Bass player Willie.
Beef People before I met them….playing at Blue Ridge School. (Guy on right is first guitarist, Rob Buckingham. He got kicked out of school for having a girl in his room, and I took his place in the band on guitar. They wrote a song about it, “Kicked Out”. I sang on it on the record.)
Thanks, Jack!
Back when I was in college with Skip Lunch, in Jamestown, NY, Skip moved to Omaha, Nebraska (!) to “make it big in punk rock (!). He went to live with some women who ran a zine called BEEF, and played in a band with them. Band was called BEEF. HERE is a kick-ass 80s punk rock song by Skip with him on guitar and singing, called “Smell The Shit”. Check it out.
When Skip got back from Omaha, returned to the town he swore never to see again, I interviewed him on my college radio show on station WTJU. I said, excited, “So? How was it, man?” He replied, “Well, Michael….I slept on the floor a lot. Can I say ‘lesbian’ on the air?”
————
Here, in Skip’s own words, is the story:
The recording was done in a bedroom on an 8-track Tascam cassette recorder. (I thought surly Skip meant “Tascam 4-track”. I’ve never heard of an 8-track cassette recorder. He said, “Nope. 8-track. About 3 grand in 1982.”
Skip continues: I had a vision. Made 6 songs for a demo. Sent them to bars across the country and every night at 5:30 PM I’d break into _______’s dad’s business and use the office “Watts line” (old-school business phone line) to call all over the country. Then we travelled to the last gig in Portland …where the van died.
Here’s the thing: I approached the whole thing like an instant gestalt. I got a daily planner and went to work while I was on welfare in Jamestown sleeping on the couch in a 17-yr-old runaway rich kids house. From the moment I committed, it all JUST HAPPENED , like an EST forum or a “Create Your Dream” seminar or something. I mean, I formed the band at that moment for that purpose and then just MADE IT HAPPEN.
Oddly there was no pressure or stress, just inspiration and free phone calls!!! (I remember breaking and entering, very spiritual!) The point is, it was all done from conception to finale in 3 MONTHS!!! Completely positive energy just rocking the whole time, like MAGIC. I’m sure some of the members fell from the perfect grace along the way, but not much.. We rocked Portland along with bands like POND.
And actually the most intense thing was this…before the eureka moment , I asked myself “What do I want to do with my life?” “Dunno” I said to myself “Well if you can’t make a long-range plan, choose a short-term one, and by putting ENERGY into that, the future will reveal itself.”
Well, it did. In Portland at the end of the tour, I met a Jamestown friend from the early 10,000 Maniacs there and he was in acupuncture school. (I now do acupuncture) *bing0! Whole thing was the point in my life actually and inspirational too!
–Skip
P/S My guitar on that recording was later stolen from me from the building where I made my free phone calls. Karma rocks!
I had Debra Jean read the Constitution of the United States. I produced and engineered (and used our wonderful new piece of rack mount creamy goodness.)
Her reading of it is available as a high-quality MP3 download here.
Anyway, Cory Doctorow blogged it on Boing Boing, here, and we’ve gotten about a billion zillion downloads of it today.
Posted by Cory Doctorow:
Debra Jean Dean has done a wonderful, expertly engineered reading of the US Constitution, one of the most inspiring documents ever penned. The reading is released under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, We The People…!)
Debra Jean Dean reads the US Constitution:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/constitution/index.htm
Free Creative Commons audio book.
United States Constitution (with all amendments), read by Debra Jean Dean, engineered by Michael W. Dean
Audio file covered by Creative Commons, feel free to share and link.
“The best recording with the best voice of any free, non-DRM audiobook of
the US Constitution, anywhere.”
Get Episode 0062 of Clone The Homeless. (You must be 18 or over to listen to this episode!)
Mon, 14 Jan 2008
77 min.
HOW TO DIRECT ACTORS (part 1 of 3)
There’s no right or wrong way to direct, it’s a matter of choice and intuition. But in the first installment of this three-part series, MWD and wife have a tape recorder running in the room as they direct voiceover actress Estrus Godspeed in playing a number of sexy characters for an upcoming cat cartoon Podiobook of “Plump Buffet”.
(taglines:
“50 women aren’t 50 times the fun, they’re 50 times the hassle. And one of them always feels like killing you.”
and
“The Plump Buffet is “Fritz the Cat” meets “Showdown at Waco”.)
There’s some damn good stuff to absorb here, people.
Fire up your pod, sit back and enjoy being a fly on the wall (or a kitty in the corner) as this husband and wife enjoy telling some cute girl what to do, all night long, baby.
(Ignore the slight background noise, I forgot to turn the H2 settings to high, so had to boost a lot. The stuff we recorded directly to the computer sounds GREAT, as you’ll see when the actual Podoibook comes out. But this is a perfectly listenable document for learning.)
Review is here. From the River Cities Reader newspaper. (Paper serves Quad Cities, which is Davenport, Iowa, Moline, Illinois, Rock Island, Illinois and Bettendorf, Iowa).
excerpt:
…518-page tome sharing lessons from his hard-knock years touring with his band Bomb and the 12 records he’s created. Taking this further than his documentary film D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, his new book $30 Music School is just that – an all-inclusive exposé and explanation of the music business for the up-and-coming artist who wants to pull his own strings.
Ya gotta love it when a book that came out four years ago is still getting favorable reviews. Buy the book on Amazon.
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7raIAJTxeqA
I actually stepped away from my computer last night long enough to see this on TV, and was pretty much the best sounding thing that’s ever come out of those little three-inch speakers. It was the best musical performance I’ve EVER seen on television, and that’s saying a lot. I practically had my jaw dropped.
Made me warm and fuzzy that I actually know this guy. We’re not hella close, but I’ve been to his house, and jammed with him.
It’s nice to see Chuck getting the attention he’s deserved for decades.
In 18 months when every AlternaJock in America is sporting a “You Could Make A Doubter Out Of Jesus” T-shirt, I’ll be the first to proudly stand up and say “I knew him when.”
His wife Stephanie looks and sounds great, Chuck’s band is tight, and Paul Shaffer on glockenspiel tubular bells is so wrong that it’s right. Shaffer was perfect, but also made me laugh so hard I accidentally spit soda on my carpet. He looks like a mad scientist.
Was nice to have the house band augmenting the guest artist rather than just jamming over them, as they sometimes do. Nice hand claps, too.
—-
Mutual admiration society update:
I just noticed that on Chuck Prophet’s MySpace page he has a LONG list of heros. At the very end of the list it says:
Michael W. “I remember when sex was safe and music was dangerous….” Dean
Jim Goad is my favorite writer. Hands down. I’ve only read one book by him, The Redneck Manifesto (Full title - The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats, and I’ve read a few posts on his blog, but I love the guy.
There aren’t many books I’d consider reviewing ten years after they came out, and this one tops that very short list. I’ve read The Redneck Manifesto four times, and am reading it a fifth time now. I’ve bought about a dozen copies on Amazon (used, sorry Jim…like most of your readers, I can’t afford retail for luxury items), one at a time, and sent them to friends. I think this book is the most no-nonsense explanation of the history of the western world ever produced. (And it’s heavily annotated, if you wanna check the sources. I did. They checked out.) The Redneck Manifesto should be required reading in college, if not high school and grade school. (Though I’m sure that would lead to lawsuits.)
Many people consider The Redneck Manifesto to be a dangerous book…Racist even. I maintain that it is not racist at all (if anything, it’s anti-racist), but it is indeed dangerous, as are most less-than-popular truths.
There are a few basic premises of the book. First, that poor white people are the ONLY racial/ethnic/social group that it’s still OK to make fun of. That if you were a person in charge of a TV or movie studio, or the editor of a paper, and you treated Jews, blacks, lesbians, Mexicans, Asians or anyone else the way they treat rednecks on TV and in movies, you’d lose your job. Many examples are given, but one of my favorites is that newspapers (including the New York Times) often spell out southern white speech phonetically in interviews and articles to show the accent. If you did that with Ebonics, you’d be fired, and probably sued.
Goad goes on to give a pretty compelling argument of why white guilt for slavery is a crock. At least poor white guilt. Says that the descendants of plantation slave owners are far more likely to drive BMWs than pickup trucks. And maintains that white indentured servants suffered as much, often more, and in greater numbers, than black slaves. (Indentured servants were not owned, and were whipped harder, sort of the way people beat the shit out of rental cars, but not cars they themselves own.)
This is stuff that’s basically true, but makes people want to kill you when you say it out loud. Which is a sort of racism on it’s own. It’s OK for any group to bemoan their past, except poor whites.
He states that white people are blamed for everything, but as a poor white man, as is with a poor man of any color, he has no control over the policies of his government, the media, or his ancestors.
He writes that questioning economic policies he has no control over is often looked at as racist, even when it’s not. He says that the questioning world banking (a concept so fucked and complex that many it takes an advanced degree to even begin to understand it) is not anti-semitic, it’s just anti-getting ripped off. He says that suggesting welfare reform is not racist, it’s just about money. He states: “I don’t want to pay for anyone’s baby, no matter what the color.”
Goad contends that racial prejudice has its current and historical basis in rich whites wanting to keep poor whites and poor blacks divided and fighting…That if poor blacks and poor whites realized that race wars are all bullshit and banded together, they would be a majority, and could take over the world, possibly in a very bloody manner for the rich whites.
Goad points out that rich whites find it easy to be politically correctly racially sensitive because they live in mostly-white gated communities. They don’t have to deal with black rage because it can’t reach them. And that rednecks and white working stiffs have always lived in neighborhoods that are far more racially integrated than the rich whites who poo poo the rednecks for noticing that race exists. Says that while there are no more segregated water fountains, people still are, and always will be, segregated along the color GREEN.
Goad says again and again, in funny and eloquent ways, what I feel is a very important simple truth: It’s not about race, it’s about class.
I love this part:
For all the showboat sympathy that the white middle and upper classes display toward black suffering, they don’t spend much time living or working alongside their downtrodden jungle bruddas. The redneck truck driver and the black gas-pumper share more life experiences than either guy shares with the corduroy-jacketed college professor or perfume-stinking society matron whose tear ducts gush with self-serving weepiness over abstract notions of injustice.
and:
Both Martin Luther King and Malcom X were shot to the ground at a time when they seemed to be transcending narrow white/black divisions and phrasing the battle in class terms.
Goad talks about how there aren’t many great working-class writers because the working class is too damn busy working to write.
I love this, because I lived it. It was harder than eating nails to launch my professional writing career while holding a day job. I had to work hard 60 hours a week in the evenings and weekends while still working 40 hours a week for over a decade. My dad couldn’t just write a check to send me to an expensive journalism school.
(My siblings went to good colleges, but parents took out second and third mortgages to send them, and kids took out loans.
(My parents were farmers until the year I was born. My family looked middle class, but were struggling.)
True to his name, Goad (which is his real name), loves to goad the reader. Some of it has a bit of a “a Modest Proposal” feel, especially the title of chapter ten: “Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals”, which is actually one of my favorite chapters, even though I don’t favor the enslavement of anyone. And don’t think Goad does either.
I love Goad because he’s got a lot to say, but just wants to be left alone. I can dig it. He and I are both widely read people who both probably have a better day when our phones don’t ring. Goad complains about society because he doesn’t comfortably fit in to what it expects of him. One of my favorite lines in the book nails this well:
Interracial dating doesn’t bother me, but the very concept of dating does.
The Redneck Manifesto is all stunningly great. It’s amazing writing about amazing thoughts, and I highly recommend you buy the book today….Especially if you’re rich…buy ten copies, new, and hand them out at the country club.
So…..I have been lusting this piece of studio gear for some time:
I have a lust for rack-mount gear. Every time I see some in a documentary about scientists in their lab, in a sci-fi movie, or any time I’ve been in an actual high-end recording studio, I’ve had to excuse myself to masturbate.
A few months back I bought my first piece, a Furman power conditioner. It helps remove noise from the power in my home studio, but isn’t a signal processor. I still wanted some stuff to sweeten up the sound.
Enter the SM Pro Audio TB202 two-channel rack mount tube preamp / compressor /EQ with phantom power. I finally decided to buy one the other day (they’re only 225 bucks). But EVERY online retailer was back-ordered a month or more. Guess Santa delivered too many and has to have his elves make more. So I went on Craiglist and found one used for $125. We drove up to Santa Barbara (an hour each way), tried it out, and bought it.
When I got it home, it sounded good, but was a little crunchy on my mixer whenever we talked loud. So I ordered a new Tungsol 12AX7 tube for it, only 20 bucks with shipping. That made it sound GREAT!
First, the tube in it was old, but the guy swears he only used the unit on Sundays to record a little old lady in Pasadena at church. I have to wonder though, if that’s true, why is all the red paint worn off the front plate? That usually only happens from finger oils, from touching gear daily for a long time.)
(The guy didn’t seem particularly greasy to me. In fact, he was well groomed, and was a very polite young man.)
But the tube included by the factory is a generic Chinese 12AX7 tube. The Tungsol is a superior name-brand tube, manufactured in Russia.
When I opened the TB202 up, I was surprised to find it only has one tube in it. I think it’s interesting the manual says “hand tested 12AX7 tubes used” and it only has one tube. For two separate channels.
It looks like there’s a space on the circuit board for a second tube, but no socket for it.
I wrote the company and found out that the 12AX7 (the most common tube still being manufactured today) is a STEREO tube, with two-channel capability in one unit. The unit is made with only one tube. And both channels work fine.
Damn cool.
So, I recorded a test without the unit, and then with it. It makes a good difference, warms the voice, makes me sound more like the “voice of god”….creamier, and the compressor function clips the peaks without sounding unnatural. For only $145 bucks outlay (along with a $150 Alesis USB8 mixer/digital converter, and a $225 Rode NT1-A microphone), I have the capacity to do stuff at home that sounds like a high-end radio station. (Well, with all that gear, and my modest amount of voice and engineering talent.)
MP3 TEST IS HERE, with both before and after, back to back. (File is eight megs, 320 k 16-bit stereo MP3). You’ll really hear the difference with headphones, but it’s there on speakers too.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS: ***Use the XLR cables (not 1/4 inch cables) in and out. Will eliminate noticeable noise. Run your mic (or mics) directly into the unit, and then run the unit’s out into your mixer or digital converter. ***If you’re plugging it into a mixer, turn off the phantom power on the mixer, it might fry the TB202. The TB202 has switchable phantom power, so that will power any mics plugged directly into it that need them. ***Turn DOWN the input on your mixer. The TB202 has a pretty powerful preamp in it. ***Don’t use too much compression, it will sound unnatural. Start at about 1/3 total, and experiment. I put the attack and release boost buttons on (pushed in). ***Plug the unit in, turn it on and let it run for 10-30 minutes before recording. The tube has to warm up.
ANYWAY, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the SM Pro Audio TB202. Order it now, get it new, when they start shipping in a month…then you’ll have the warranty, and also, it will look spiffy.
This unit is so cool, it will extend your lifespan.
–Michael W. Dean
My buddy Chuck Prophet (check out his tunes here) will be playing on “Late Night With David Letterman” this Wednesday (tomorrow, Jan 9). Check it out. The guy is great…an amazing, if under-appreciated, singer/songwriter/storyteller. Love him. Proud of him.
Chuck writes on his blog:
We’ve partied at the mansion with Hef. We’ve lounged poolside in Palm Springs, we’ve paddled out into surf above your heads in Hawaii, now we’re off to big apple to meet the man behind the man behind the man. Don’t mind the maggots! Tune in January 9th for the CBS Late Show with David Letterman w/ musical guests CP and the MX.
—–
I referenced Chuck in $30 Music School (page 37), a result of the one ill-fated time we tried to write together (we are both kinda alpha cats, and ended up arguing):
You can also write with one other person, but I have some advice for that. Chuck Prophet told me this one: If you’re writing a song with another guitarist, only use one guitar and pass it back and forth. Otherwise, if you each have a guitar in your hands, you just end up playing blues jams and don’t get any work done.
http://www.politicalcompass.org
This is really good for a “take a test on the Internet” test. I usually hate those, but these questions were really deep, and I really had to think about some of them a bit.
It’s very much along the lines of the thesis of my post on Notes from a curmudgeon / book idea.
Take the test and post your results and comments below.
My results for the Political Compass test were:
Debra Jean’s was:
(which basically means we’re both left economically and libertarian socially. But she believes a tiny bit more strongly than I do that “people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” and I believe a tiny bit more strongly than her that “many people are idiots and need to be herded strongly away from impinging on the rights of others”.
Test opens with descriptor:
Welcome to The Political Compass
There’s abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher ?
On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It’s not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can’t explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as ‘right-wingers’, yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook. ….
Download free MP3s of Brian Childers‘ band, Crawlpappy.
Get the whole disc on Amazon, for less than a buck.
This is the house I grew up in, from birth to age 17. My bedroom was the two front left windows on the second floor. (photo makes great computer wallpaper, by the way.)
It’s in Westfield, New York. Westfield is on Lake Erie, between Buffalo, NY and Erie PA. Westfield is the home of Welche’s grape juice and Mogan David wine (and “Mad Dog”….MD 20-20, elixir of bums, which is made by Mogan David, though they don’t like to admit it. I think it’s the scum that sinks to the bottom of the vats of the good stuff.)
The house was built in the mid-1800s. There is a name and date scratched (probably with a diamond) in one of the windows, date is from 1860s.
It almost looks like a rich person’s mansion, but it only cost 25 grand when my folks bought it (with a long mortgage) in 1960, and we were a family of six. Parents worked 80 hours a week each. Yard was a quarter-acre, and there’s a two-story garage you can’t see in this photo that’s as about half the size of the house.
Maple, oak and pine trees….small town (5000 people), no serious crime, very little other crime, everyone knows everyone. You see the mayor at your church. I’d catch crawdads and hike through the woods. I was a Boy Scout.
When I lived there, I couldn’t wait to get out, I left at 17 to college, flunked out in two years, and left the state before I turned 20 to go be homeless in DC and really live. And now I fantasize about moving back to my little town. Debra Jean has caught that fantasy from me too. We spend time looking online, reading about the town, checking real estate prices & building codes, reading the town’s cute little newspaper, and thinking grand thoughts.
After my mother died in 2001, this house was sold for 110,000 bucks. A similar house at that time would have cost a million bucks in the town where I live now, and about three million in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
DJ and I may retire to that town someday. I saw 16 acres and a decent farm house for sale there for 82,000 bucks.
A great travel book I just finished by Bill Bryson called The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America was the search for the “quintessential American small town.” He never found it. But he didn’t look in my home town. It’s still the 50s in Westfield.
Maybe we’ll just get a summer place there… and live somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line / Bible Belt in winter. Maybe keep our place here in SoCal for winter. (I mean, comeon, did anyone in London or Boston have a picnic in a field last weekend??? We did!) In August it’s 105 F in SoCal, in winter, it’s 65 or 70. In upstate NY, it’s 70 or 75 in August and about five degrees in winter.
It won’t be for many years, and we’ll probably rent a place in that town the first summer, just to make sure it’s what we want to do.
Download episode 0061 of Clone The Homeless
Sun, 30 Dec 2007
Interview about homelessness / and Podcast Expo interviews (2)
Michael W. Dean is interviewed in his home by the Homeless Movie Guy about homelessness. Then we hear chats with podcasting rock stars, (In order): Michael Butler of PodShow, Grammar Girl, Tim Street of French Maid TV, Tee Morris, Tim Bourquin and the Joel Mark Witt (MarylandZoo.TV)
They all expound at length on the past, present and future of portable media.
Entire episode recorded on location at the 2007 New Media Expo in Ontario, California, on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder. (Except Homeless interview with MWD, recorded at MWD’s home on the H2.)
(Small excerpts of these were used in the O’Reilly podcast report I did, but these are the whole, brilliant, uncut chats.)
I was listening to the “Lovesucker” record tonight. I fucking love it. It’s the best-sounding Bomb release, IMHO.
It’s our lowest-selling album ever. It probably sold 500 copies (I never saw any accounting), mostly because the label, the aptly named Wingnut Records, went out of business…But not before the owner, Josh, received mail orders and never filled them. To his credit, he didn’t cash the checks, so it wasn’t stealing, but it was very flaky, and pissed off our fans. But hey…without him, this CD never would have happened, so I can’t be too mad. Also, this record was recorded in 1999 during our three-gig reunion, we never played or toured after that, and touring helps sales. A lot.
I was thinking tonight about the recording processes of our complete discography:
* To Elvis In Hell, Boogadigga LP, (1987)
* Hits of Acid, Boner Records LP & Cass, (1988)
* Happy All The Time EP, Boner Records, LP & Cass (1989)
* Lucy In The Sky With Desi, Boner/Revolver CD & LP, (1990)
* Personal Jesus single (Raid Records, 7″), (1991)
* Hate-Fed Love, Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, LP, (1992)
* Lovesucker, Wingnut Records, CD EP, (1999)
To Elvis In Hell was engineered by Dave Bock. He’s a good engineer, but was less experienced at the time. He had mostly been assistant engineer on other sessions, not the main engineer. The session was sort of an experiment for Dave.
Bomb was new and hadn’t toured much (touring makes bands TIGHT). The studio (Hyde Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco) was one of the best in the world, but we were working late at night, often on short notice when a paying client canceled. And the band members were all drunk and doing speed throughout the recording. Was recorded and mixed in about five nights, spaced out over about a month.
Hits of Acid was recorded too quickly. (All our albums were. A review in UK’s “The Face” magazine said of Lucy In The Sky With Desi: “…given 10,000 pounds and an extra week in the studio, this would have been one of the best records of all time.”) Hits of Acid was recorded on tour. Touring does make bands tight, but that’s best exploited by touring, then resting, THEN recording. And there was speed and too much drink (and some pot, I think) in the studio.
Hits of Acid was engineered by Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys. I kinda felt gypped by that. I’d booked the time with studio owner Don Zientara, who had done great things quickly when engineering my work with Baby Opaque and The Beef People. (He also did Minor Threat and most of the rest of the Dischord stuff.) But when we arrived at Don’s very adequate home basement studio in suburban Arlington, Virginia he said, “My new assistant Eli will be doing your record. I’ll be upstairs hanging out with my wife if you need anything.” The session was sort of an experiment for Eli. He’s a nice guy, and is NOW a good engineer, but he was not nearly as experienced back then. It felt like bait & switch to me. But we were troopers, so we worked, and worked hard. We recorded and mixed in about three long days.
The “Happy All The Time” EP was done in three nights at a small studio (Razor’s Edge in San Francisco….It’s in the house where Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice takes place. The studio is now owned by Fat Mike of NOFX.) Jonathan Burnside engineered “Happy All The Time”. He did a decent job, and Doug Hilsinger actually helped a lot with the producing, which made it better, but the gear was merely adequate, I was on heroin, and again we were in a hurry to beat the clock of our budget.
The “Personal Jesus” single (us covering the Depeche Mode song on one side, and doing the acoustic version of our song “Nineteen” on the flip) was the first recording with both Jay and Doug on guitar, so they were still working that out. We weren’t on drugs, but we were on tour, and it was recorded and mixed by an inexperienced engineer in six freezing hours in a very minimal 8-track studio at an unheated warehouse in Berlin. And Tony and I were arguing about some thing or another the whole day. (We argued a lot in Bomb, but we were professional enough to usually check that shit at the studio door. But not this time.)
(Lucy In The Sky With Desi is simply a best-of CD made from Hits of Acid and “Happy All The Time”.)
Hate-Fed Love, the major label record, was engineered by Bill Laswell, one of the most renowned producers in the world, in his high-end Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn. It’s the disc we spent the most time on (a month), but Laswell didn’t really care (he told me this), and turned it over to his engineers to do much of the producing. Also, we “trusted the process” too much by letting Laswell bring in a “drum doctor” who tuned Tony’s rented drum kit like a normal drummer, which didn’t work. (Tony always tuned his drums really LOW.) And Laswell isolated the guitar amps in big soundproof boxes, which reduced the bleed (I think bleed actually helped Bomb’s other records), reduced the vibe, and eliminated Jay and Doug’s feedback interplay and sustain. (All the feedback guitar on the record was overdubbed later.)
And Laswell was still setting up his studio. Boxes everywhere and stuff laying out all over. The session was sort of an experiment for him and his engineers.
And again, there may have been heroin involved with me and Tony. Not in the studio (at least not me, I don’t know about Tony, but at least one assistant engineer was high). We copped after the sessions, at night, and when you’re mind’s “already out the door”, it’s hard to work. Also, I got mugged copping in Alphabet City, got a knife held to my throat, which kinda made me sing badly the first day.
A month should have been more than enough. Laswell finished the mix by the end of week three, we thought it sucked. Tony and I flew back to San Fran to do drugs and fuck women. Jay and Doug, ever the consummate professionals, stayed in NYC for a week, went into another studio and tried to fix some of Laswell’s dead mix, doing what they could with the hand we’d been dealt.
The “Lovesucker” EP was recorded and mixed in one 24-hour session at Toast studios in San Francisco. (The studio is currently known by its original 1960s name, Coast). Despite it’s smallish size and skid row address (8th and Mission streets), Toast is great. Nice live drum room, comfortable environment, vintage Neumann microphones and a Neve console. Toast is the studio where bands like REM, who have done many multi-platinum records at 1000-dollar-an-hour places, go when they get to that point where they feel like “Let’s get back to our roots for the next record. But not TOO far back…we still want it to sound great.”
This record was engineered by the truly excellent Jason Carmer, who has twiddled the knobs for records by Third Eye Blind, The Donnas, Mark Eitzel and more. (Jason also played guitar in 9353.) Again, Doug helped out on the production. So did Jay.
“Lovesucker” sounds amazing. The four tracks recorded at this session, “Painglorious”, “Die” and “Head in Hands” and “Whore Love Song” sound glorious to my ears. (The three “fill out the length” cuts on the album, “No Color in Utah” “Personal Jesus” and “Nineteen”, were recordings from previous albums. We took all of them directly from the vinyl, on a turntable at Toast.)
Sure, some of the vocals on “Painglorious”, “Die” and “Head in Hands” are mixed a little low for my taste (they’re fine on “Whore Love Song”), but everything else sounds huge, tight as a nun’s cunt, and hot as the Devil’s whore. Playing is inspired, guitars are bright, full and swirling. The drums sound hella live, the bass throbbing, and the vocals are creamy yet hard.
Plus, I was completely sober and the band wasn’t wasted. Well, Tony did get drunk and step outside to cop heroin, but not until AFTER the drums were all tracked. He tried to get really pushy with the mixing, as usual, but something I’ve never seen happen happened. Doug basically said, “Tony, go lie down on the couch and nod out”, and Doug, Jay and Jason did magic with the mix.
Also, we were older, had more experience playing together (and apart), the two guitars were more gelled than ever, and the vibe was nice. I think there was a feeling of “This is the last time we’ll ever do this guys, let’s make it fucking wonderful.”
So, in my humble opinion: “Lovesucker”: BEST-SOUNDING BOMB RECORD, EVER.
Download Bomb’s “Lovesucker” EP free, HERE.
(From The XLog):
The right to use sex toys is getting an activist in Alexander City, Alabama, all hot and bothered.
Loretta Nall, a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, is steamed at Alabama’s Attorney General Troy King over his intent to prosecute adult shop owners for selling sex toys. So she’s taking matters into her own hands by asking touchy Americans to deluge him with sex toys.
Nall has organized a “Sex Toy Drive” and is asking all masturbators to get off their Purple Penetrators and hit King where it hurts, by ramming his mailbox with sex toys in protest.
“King is pushing this thing, but he doesn’t need to be sticking his nose in people’s business,” Nall said. “He’s making Alabamians look like backwater rednecks.”
It seems to be working. The naughty novelties have already starting penetrating King’s office, with ball gags, rectum plugs, and Hello Kitty massagers creating a stir with the stiff conservative.
Nall is practicing what she preaches. “I personally sent him a penetrable pink pig,” she said. “I was thinking of dressing up as a penis to his next appearance, but then people would confuse me for that big dick.”
Love it. Almost makes me wish I lived in Alabama (what am I saying?!) so I’d have a reason to send in a contribution.
In a general, hands-off-me way, I kinda like the idea of government. Good mechanism for providing roads, education, food and pharmaceutical safety, international treaties, things like that. Heck, even a defensive military isn’t a bad thing. But when government comes into my bedroom I get testy.
They can have my sex toys when they pry them from my slippery, dead hands.
-DJD
GREAT review of my band BOMB on “Cosmic Hearse”. Excerpt:
…Dean was a modern day Rimbaud, drinking and fucking his way through the bars and bedrooms of the city he loves and hates. Dean’s success is that he can do this without coming off as a pretentious tortured artist. Bomb was real, Bomb was fucked. Bomb had problems and they weren’t afraid to let it be known, in fact, they wore them with pride like a shiner or a hickey….
Love it. I can only hope that art I’m making now, that people are digging today, will still be getting reviewed in eighteen years.
http://www.orlandoweekly.com/music/review.asp?rid=13440
They don’t love it, but they don’t hate it. Interestingly written, though. Article by by Jason Ferguson.
Why I love the Zoom H2 digital recorder (review and info)…..
Someone posted today on the Yahoo Podcasters Board:
What do you all think about the Zoom H2?
I replied:
I absolutely love the Zoom h2.
I also own an iRiver (and the Live Oak mic), but the H2 is MUCH better quality, records for longer (I got a 4 gig card also) and records CD-quality WAV. It’s easy to use, comes with a pop filter and two great handles (a “studio on a stick” lollypop holder, and a “H2D2″ table stand.)
Here’s my review, with links to audio samples:
http://tinyurl.com/29t59o
We own some really nice mics (Rode NT1-A and MXL M3), have a decent mixer and a sound-treated room dedicated to recording, and barely use that stuff to record podcasts anymore. We only use that stuff for paid voiceover work. We use the H2 for almost all of our podcasting, because it requires no setup, is much more spontaneous, and sounds almost as good as recording in our home studio.
We’ve put blankets up behind the bed, to cut reflection so we can lie in bed and podcast without much room reflection.
http://www.stinkfight.com/2007/12/21/h2-bedcast-setup/
and we also go outside and record podcasts “in the field” (usually actually a mall or something, but sometimes an actual field, park, or the woods). The H2 is great for getting a good sound close up, and still picking up ambient sounds nicely, in stereo.
The Zoom H2 will extend your life span. I paid 200 bucks and pre-ordered it to arrive the day it came out. For what it does, I consider what I paid to be a bargain. If you can find one new now for
150 bucks, by all means, GET IT. Make it merry Xmas to yourself.
Here’s the settings I use on the Zoom:
http://tinyurl.com/2tw84z
–MWD
“Clone The Homeless”
Michael W. Dean’s podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music
was dangerous. (Free, and no iPod is needed to listen.)
http://www.clonethehomeless.com
35-second YouTube video of Debra Jean being a human “kitty licking the screen” screensaver.
Download a three-meg e-mailable version:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/temp/KittyLickinGood.wmv
—–
We did this all in about an hour, including practice, three takes, editing, fluffing & folding, and uploading to YouTube. All just good fun on a Saturday night. Why the hell would we go out? We have all the fun we need right here.
Song: “Ode To a Cat” - Song by Michael W. Dean. Guitar and Drums: George Earth. Vocals, bass guitar and organ: Michael W. Dean. Cat: Charlie Squitten Jr. Backup vocals & cat wrangling: Debra Jean Dean. SAX: Bob Bartosik.
NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED (they were just mildly annoyed and would rather have been sleeping.)
At 04:39 AM 12/21/2007, Skip Lunch wrote:
BRIAN: You know what they say,…no junk, no soul. I mean, look at Chevy Chase!
comments?
Michael W. Dean wrote:
Ehhhhh…..hmmmmm…….a lot of junkie artists start to suck when they get clean (Aerosmith comes to mind) or are still good but never as incendiary as when they were young and strung (Iggy comes to mind). But I think it’s more that they get clean around the age people start to suck anyway.
Overall junk sucks the soul, it doesn’t add soul, at least after a while.
That said, there is something to be said for the struggle and desperation of junk life producing conflict, which makes for great stories. Also, when people get clean, they often go into a safer phase of their life, like “Jesus, I should have been dead a million times…I need to start working out, eating right, and write some middle-of-the-road crossover hit singles!”
And if they’re rich they have mortgages on multiple mansions, and have high-dollar lawyers, managers and other handlers, and many people depending on them for a paycheck, so they tend to do ballads and such, or just keep writing the same tired song over and over.
Remember, five years before he died, Jerry Garcia said something like “I hate playing in the Grateful Dead. I’d quit, except the band employs all my friends.” (He finally died in rehab kicking smack and coke.)
I helped my friend Alan FallOfAutumn do a charity video for the Echo Park Film Center. It’s here. Please post a comment.
Alan wrote:
On December 17th and 18th, many of the most popular channels on youtube are taking over prominent pages of youtube to raise money for charity while celebrating nerdiness in an event being called “The Nerdfighter Power Initiative.”
Participants include the two most popular daily channels on youtube, “What the Buck” and “The Philip DeFranco Show,” as well as Charlieissocoollike, DaveDays, Fallofautumndistro, Nalts and others. All told, the participants’ videos have been viewed more than 50 million times, making this project among the farthest-reach among youtube users in the site’s history.
Each video on youtube has a thumbnail–a picture taken from a still frame in the video. During the Nerdfighter Power Initiative, several hundred youtubers–including many of the popular channels on the site–will display identical thumbnails advertising “Nerdfighter Power.” The videos themselves will be largely devoted to the importance of charitable giving. As fans comment on these videos, they will take over the entire front pages of the hallowed “Most Discussed” page on youtube. As John Green of the youtube channel vlogbrothers said, “We hope to blanket these prominent pages of youtube partly because we are so incredibly nerdy, and partly to remind the youtube community of the importance of reaching out to others.”
The Nerdfighter Power Initiative is spearheaded by John and Hank Green, known as the vlogbrothers on youtube. John, an award-winning young-adult novelist, and Hank, an environmental writer, abandoned textual communication for all of 2007 in favor of daily videoblogs. Their project, which has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio, and many other media outlets, spawned a fan community. Those fans call themselves nerdfighters (an obscure reference to an even more obscure arcade game) and during 2007 the nerdfighters have fought tirelessly on behalf of nerds and other disenfranchised communities. Whether this means raising tens of thousands of dollars for microfinance organizations or trying to convince Merriam-Webster to include “nerdfighters” in the dictionary, the nerdfighters have become a community that’s about more than just one videoblog. The events of December 17th and 18th will mark their coming out party. Between those making videos and those commenting to push all the videos onto youtube’s front pages, more than 5,000 nerdfighters are expected to participate in the Nerdfighter Power Initiative.
Viewers of John and Hank’s project have also been asked to submit videos with the same thumbnail and over 400 have already pledged to do so. Nerdfighter Rae Rein said, “I can’t wait to talk about my charity. My sister Sam has Down Syndrome and I’ve always been an activist for kids with special needs. I’ll probably have her make a cameo, and show some of her art.” Amanda Melhuish said, “My charity is definitely Reach Out and Read - I adore the idea of promoting literacy with kids. I’ll be using Harry Potter to convey it all, of course,” referring to a shared obsession among many Nerdfighters. When asked about his charity, Michael Buckley, of YouTube’s most popular entertainment series simply said, “Is Britney a charity?”
An introduction to a few of the other participants:
Michael Buckley is the star of youtube’s most-watched entertainment series, the What the Buck Show. He has more subscribers on youtube than CBS and Fox News. Combined.
Philip DeFranco’s daily hilarious news analysis is watched by more than a million people each week.
Alan Lastufka, one of youtube’s newest partners, is widely praised for his collaboration videos, the most popular of which is the “iPwn” commercial, starring MadTV cast member LisaNova.
Charlieissocoollike is one of the most popular youtubers in the United Kingdom–although only 17 years old, Charlie has already been featured on the BBC news and in many newspapers for his goofy antics and serious commitment to helping children in need.
So, I recently posted about my friend Eddy Sky, (a.k.a. Eddy Carranza) the Go-Go dancer for Bomb who died in 1995. I was really missing him, and sad I didn’t have a photo of him dancing.
This week my dad sent me some old photos out of the blue (he doesn’t read StinkFight, he doesn’t read the web. He has trouble navigating e-mail sometimes.) But he sent me these awesome 20-year-old pix he took of Bomb playing in Jamestown, NY. It was in 1987 on our first tour, at a bar called The Rusty Nail.
One of the pix is of Eddy dancing (he’s in the middle, I’m on the left, Jay Crawford is on the right):
Here’s the rest of the pix>>>
Me singing with Bomb. I think I wore a suit that night to impress my dad:
Me and Jay in Bomb (you can sort of see Tony playing drums to my left, and you can sort of see Eddy rolling on the ground between me and Jay):
Me jumping after the show. I look kinda Ska, though I wasn’t thinking that:
And just for further kicks, here’s another photo my dad sent, me in 1980 (left, the incredibly skinny guy) at age 16 in a redneck pool with some friends, Grant Beckman and (I think) his cousin, Billy Beckman:
By Jim Goad, one of my all-time favorite writers.
Jim wrote the amazing 1998 book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats. A lot of people say it’s racist but I contend it’s merely against being racist against whites. The Redneck Manifesto book gets a lot of shit, partially because a lot of white-pride folk dig the book too, but I’ll add my line from my book Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women:
I have heard the defensive constructs about the difference between white power and white pride. But how come people who profess white pride never possess any qualities that instill any in me?
But Jim Goad makes me happy. He’s funny as hell, and right on, and says stuff a lot of people think, but are too politically correct to say.
A few quotes from Jim Goad that I really dig, (and I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the meaning is intact):
“There aren’t a lot of great working-class writers. The working class are too tired from working to write.”
“The problem with armchair coffee shop socialists who yell ‘Workers of the world unite!’ is that most of them have never worked a day in their life.”
“Rich white people invented racism to keep poor blacks and whites from uniting and killing them. A black worker and a white worker sitting next to each other on the assembly line have far more in common than the white worker has with the white owner of the factory.”
(That last one sort of reminds me of a line in the recent Colbert book):
“Upper-middle class is a meaningless term created by the Upperclass to keep the Middle class from joining with the Lower class when the revolution comes.”
And as for Joe Strummer, I still have and wear a Rudimentary Peni t-shirt. It’s my favorite shirt. I wear it mainly because of their song “Rotten to the Core”:
Have you Realised that Rock Stars
Always seem to lie so much?
John Lydon once said he cared
But he never really gave a fuck
Said he’d use the money he made
So that people would have somewhere to go
But now he lives in the USA
and Snorts Coke after the Show.Why is it that Rock Stars
Always seem to lie so much?
Joe Strummer once said he cared,
but he never really gave a fuck
Said he’d use the money he made
To set up a radio station to make the
Airwaves full of something more than Shit
Have you noticed we’re still Waiting?
(E-mail interview I did today with a guy named Pete Crigler.)
Hello Michael,
My name is Pete Crigler and I am working on an essay on the history of Virginia rock music. I have just a few questions I’d like to ask you about Baby Opaque:
What was it like when you first got started and what, if anything, did it do for the particular scene you were a part of?
We started in Todd’s bedroom. We were a great band yet completely ignored. Our first show was at a frat, and they hated us. It didn’t get much better after that.
The inattention received by my groundbreaking band is part of the reason I packed up and moved to California. Things got better for me there. People cared about music that wasn’t 12-bar blues or covers of the top ten. I never wanted to be a live jukebox. I’d rather work at McDonalds.
What was success like and what was it like to break out of the regional area?
The only “success” we had was making great music. We played to an average of 20 people at all 20 or so gigs we did, total. And most of the people at those shows were the friends and girlfriends of the band.
We played a few out-of-town gigs: DC, Richmond and Norfolk, but always playing with hardcore bands. The audiences were bigger, but still scratching their heads. Hardcore punkers, for all their posturing of being alternative, can often be as closed minded as frat boys who want to boogie and drink to roadhouse blues. They’re actually often the same people, with different haircuts.
Was there a lot of unity or rivalry amongst other bands when you started, and is that still around?
No rivalry at all. We were great friends with the Landlords, The Happy Flowers, 98 Colors, Rude Buddha, LCD, and all the other Ch’Ville bands that didn’t pander to the frat crowd. And I played guitar in the hardcore band, The Beef People, after their guitarist got kicked out of their all-boys boarding school for having a girl in his room.
All these bands were very different in style, but united in a “we’re all outcasts” kinda way. We shared equipment, booking contacts, rehearsal space, and more.
Baby Opaque put out one LP and one EP, and pressed a thousand of each. We probably sold less than half that. John Beers still has a big box of the LPs in his basement. You can buy both records online, when you can find them, for either 50 cents or 50 dollars. I’ve seen them go for both on different sites.
This year, when I put all the Baby Opaque stuff online for free at www.babyopaque.com , we got three times as many downloads in the first week as Baby Opaque has sold records in 21 years. And the music continues to get a lot of downloads.
When did you first become interested in music
I loved music since before I could talk. I wanted to be a rock star starting at age five, from seeing The Partridge Family on TV.
Was there much of a scene to support you when you got started?
The alternative scene in Ch’Ville was tiny, and we were all friends.
There was a zine called “Live Squid”. It was pretty nifty. I don’t remember a lot more. I was drunk. You might want to ask John Beers. He didn’t drink, and was a lot more of a fan than me. I had trouble paying attention to things that didn’t involve furthering my personal plans for world domination. Still do.
How did Bomb get started and were you guys comfortable with all the notoriety you were getting.
I was fed up with the lack of support for my music in Baby Opaque, and was also drinking a lot. I tried to kill myself and ended up in Blue Ridge Mental Hospital.
Right after I got out, I got a postcard from Jello Biafra asking me for a copy Baby Opaque’s EP. I’d never written him before, he wrote ME, and I was blown away. I moved to San Francisco as soon as I could sell all my possessions. (I found out later that as a compulsive-obsessive completist record collector, Jello wrote that same postcard to most of the bands that were ever reviewed in Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll magazine.)
Also, I went to see Flipper in DC. We snuck backstage and asked them a lot of glowing questions. One of them finally said “You should get the hell out of here. But your girlfriend can stay.” I was impressed. I wanted to live in California and act like that.
I took a Greyhound bus to Frisko. I’d never been west of the Mississippi river. I took LSD three days in a row on the bus to “prepare” myself. Big mistake. I was a mess by the time I arrived.
I crashed on my one friend’s couch in Berkeley, commuted into the city daily on the subway to work as a bike messenger. I met Jay from Bomb in a bar when I was trying to sell him a Baby Opaque record to get beer money. We started talking, and jammed shortly after. It was magic.
We had something special, and it caught on quickly. Again, we weren’t hardcore but ended up playing a lot of hardcore shows, all over America and Europe, but we were so fucking good and the music was so aggressive that even though it wasn’t punk, punkers got it.
Bomb’s music is up at http://www.hitsofacid.com
What was your experience like with a major label with Bomb, and did it leave you bitter or disappointed?
Lol…the phrasing of the question makes me think you’ve heard me talk about this before. Or maybe you just know a lot of people who’ve been on major labels.
Warner Brothers signed about ten “alternative” bands around the same time they signed us (1990). They singed L7, Babes in Toyland, Flaming Lips, and some others that I, and history, can’t remember. It was typical corporate thinking that has been repeated since Thomas Edison first scratched a wax cylinder in 1877: “We don’t understand it, but the kids like to shimmy to it, so let’s throw it all against the wall and see what sticks.”
Apparently only the Flaming Lips stuck, because they’re the only band of those ten that still has a deal with Bugs Bunny.
Warner Brothers gave us a shitty deal. Our lawyer said it “looked like a 1965 Motown contract”.
We signed it anyway. When we started in 1986, there was no way in the world a band like us could have gotten signed. We didn’t change (other than getting better, putting out three albums - one ourselves, one on Boner Records, and one on Rough Trade – and touring incessantly), the industry changed. Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction went mega-platinum.
A manager from LA named Charley Brown contacted us. He had gotten Jane’s signed, so he had moxie in the biz. We figured “why not?” and signed with him, then with Warner Brothers.
WB put the record out, then promptly ignored us. They didn’t give us ANY tour support, didn’t help book a tour, wouldn’t give us a paltry five grand to make a video (Even when Kevin Kerslake, who’s done some of the biggest selling videos ever, lowered his price to that, because he was a fan). Warner Brothers didn’t even send out promo materials on time when WE booked our own damn tour. The promo packs often showed up the day we got there to play, far too late for the club to do anything with them. We still starved, and surprise surprise, the record tanked. WB dropped us, but didn’t bother to tell us we were dropped. We found out from our lawyer, who read it in a trade paper.
A lot of indie musicians rant endlessly about the problems of major labels without having any experience with them. I have experience. When I rant, you should believe what I say, because I’ve seen all sides of that rusty coin.
What are you up to now, is it the same as it was before?
I’ve kinda reinvented myself as a filmmaker, writer and podcaster. I still love to reach the world, but I like to get paid for it. But I still do a lot of stuff free, like this interview, because I enjoy it, and I’m honored that people ask my thoughts on things.
When I was in Bomb, I was really cocky, and it turned me into my own worst enemy. I can’t put all the blame on circumstance that we didn’t become as well known as the music deserved. I was a selfish shit, and people don’t like to work with those.
I’m still full of myself, but now I realize there’s other people in the world.
That said, a lot of what I do now is ignore the world. I’d say I’m about halfway to my lifetime goal of being famous while being left alone. I dig it.
I now treat people with respect, unless they fuck with me, then I show teeth, and use said teeth if needed. But for the most part I avoid daily contact with the world, and I’m very happy with that.
I’m married, very happily, and have made a “nest” for myself and my wife. We live in the sticks, an hour outside Los Angeles. Our house is comfy, quiet, secluded, and filled with cats, joy, and all the toys I need to get my thoughts out into the world, on a daily basis, forever.
I still play music, but only in my home. Usually as background or mood music for my films and other people’s films. I don’t tour, but when I do sit down to make some music, it’s often heard by more people than all my lifelong album sales combined.
I work at home, and the wife still has a day job. I have a five-year plan to get her to be able to retire and work at home, so we can just make love constantly, make art, laugh and pet the cats full time. She and I do voiceover, in our home studio. We love it, and have gotten some paid work doing that. She’s great at it. Our voiceover sites are here: http://www.michaeldeanvoice.com and http://www.debrajeandean.com
Six years ago I quit drinking, and drugging. That shit was getting in my way. It worked for a few decades, but I couldn’t sustain it, and it was getting worse.
My dear friend Brian Childers died of liver failure last month. I was in The Beef People and Bomb with him. We had similar drinking habits for a long time. I miss that guy, really hard.
Do you still keep in touch with your bandmates from Baby Opaque and Bomb and what are they up to?
I don’t talk to the drummer from Bomb. Last time we talked, a few years ago, he was a shit to me for no reason. I don’t need to take calls from drunks in the middle of the night who insult me just because they’re unhappy with the life they’ve created for themselves.
Jay and Doug from Bomb are menschs. I love those guys. They’re in Frisko, I’m in LA, but we chat on the phone and by e-mail often.
I had a lot of issues back in the day with Bomb’s manager, Charley Brown, but we’ve resolved them and chat on the phone often. I like him a lot. I even named one of my cats “Charley” after him.
I recently got in touch with Todd from Baby Opaque. Haven’t spoken in a while. He did come see “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist” http://www.diyordie.org when I showed it in a bar in Minneapolis when I toured with the film. Todd seemed happy and healthy. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails lately, but he’s a busy family guy.
Michael Bérubé from Baby Opaque has done quite well for himself, he’s a tenured English professor at Penn State. I love that guy and dig his mind. About once a month, we exchange about ten long, funny, smart e-mails each back and forth in the space of a day. He’s a genius.
I still talk to John Beers from the Landlords and Happy Flowers, He always sends me a Christmas card too. Sweet.
I’m really good friends with Charlie Kramer from the Landlords and Happy Flowers. We e-mail constantly and talk on the phone when we can. He’s now a government economist.
Rock on Pete. Thanks for asking, and I’m honored to answer.
Michael W. Dean
