20 April 2020

First Demos

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I was walking on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when it dawned on me that there was at least something good about the song I was working on in my head. This was in the mid-90s, and I’d been out of college for a couple of years. For the first year, I’d occupied myself in four different ways: laborer on a construction site in the Oakland hills, Eurail-style traveler, ski instructor at Club Med in Copper Mountain, CO and beach volleyball player. At that point, I’d played four years of college volleyball, and devoted a lot of time and even more psychic energy to the sport. I might have been a middle-of-the-road AVP pro – I’d already qualified for one tournament in one attempt – but that wasn’t my path. To ensure divergence, I moved to New York City and found a job with test-prep company the Princeton Review. Maybe I’d write some songs as well?

Actually, I’d written some already, and even performed one at an open mic at the Albion in San Francisco in the summer of 1993. But I knew what a good song sounded like, and I wasn’t even close until sometime in 1995, when I got going on one about a pension in Paris. Kent Deverell and I shared a room at the Hotel de Medicis for a month in the late fall of ’93, when we were seeing the world. Did someone recommend it, or was it listed in Let’s Go? I don’t recall, but apparently Jim Morrison also stayed there.

It was that song – eventually called The Hotel de Medicis on the Rue Saint Jacques – that I was ruminating on that day on the Upper East Side; appropriately, I was on the way to tutor someone in French. I don’t have the original lyric sheet, but there’s a recording from my very first demo session:

Upon listening for the first time in a very long time, I’m not 100% embarrassed. For one thing, I wasn’t the stickler for rhymes that I’ve become: the 21st-century me doesn’t approve of “place” and “taste” and “shot” and “Jacques” in the chorus, because THEY DON’T RHYME. Also, I blow a good start in the second half of the second verse by ending with the time of day, which seems like a purely convenient choice. Finally, while I understand where I was going with the Colette and Beat Hotel references, they’re a bit much and so are words like “incessantly,” “disdain,” and “provincial.”

On the other hand, it’s bouncy and melodic in a folky kind of way, and there are some decent lines; on the whole, it sounds like I was having fun. I know I wasn’t having fun at the end of the night that inspired these lines:

Calling from the street
It seemed that I’d misplaced the key
I disgraced the windowsill
And whispered please help me

After a massive bender with members of the U.S. National Men’s Volleyball team, who were in town for a tournament, we lost the key and had to bang on the front door. Then, one of us – I’m not saying who – “disgraced the windowsill,” i.e. vomited out the window of our room because he couldn’t make it to the loo. The link between misplacing the key and disgracing the windowsill might be tenuous, but the images have life and there’s a nice internal rhyme to boot. In conclusion, the song has serious limitations, but I’d argue that there’s evidence I’m on the right track.

Scott Laughlin recently sent me the words to another song from that early period. I came up with the idea for Winding Roads and Blind Curves in Maine, where Scott was “summering” in a coastal cabin and working in a lobster restaurant. During his day shift, I read a page from his journal about a complicated romantic situation, and came up with a verse or two on an afternoon ramble amid large boulders:

My first thought is that it that the musical setting recalls Have You Forgotten, the lead track from Songs For A Blue Guitar by one of my all-time favorite bands, Red House Painters. Could I have already heard that song? Blue Guitar came out after I finished Winding Roads, but I’d seen RHP at McCabe’s and I’m pretty sure Have You Forgotten was one of the encores. My guess is, I was trying for something similar.

The music’s OK, but the song lacks melodic flair, and the lyrics veer between somewhat interesting (I hope you’ll send a copy of that book I’d like to read/If you bring it here yourself we’ll have more trouble than we need) and preposterous. That last verse – which quotes the first line of Ulysses, references Mary Magdalen, and declares a pyrrhic victory – is representative of my worst impulses, which tended to coalesce around bids for literary greatness. Happily, I had the sense to leave out that verse when I recorded the song.

I made these first demo recordings at Sound on Sound with Mike Ragogna, who worked in A&R at Razor & Tie records and had “discovered” me at the Sidewalk Cafe when he happened to catch one of my very early gigs. His idea was simply to get the songs down and maybe interest the label owners. I remember the scene like it was yesterday: walking from the subway to the studio, sitting on a stool, drinking a Coors Light for its mellowing properties, and struggling to understand what constituted a good song or a decent performance. Mike kept asking if there were more songs, and I remember calling a cellist collaborator to read me the lyrics to a new one we’d been working up (Parachute, I think).

Razor & Tie wasn’t interested, which makes sense because they were a reissue label and only starting to get into artist development. I was way too raw! But a few good things came out of that session: first, I sent the songs to the P.O. Box on the back of a Peter Case album and he not only listened but called and left a message on my answering machine. That was the opening salvo in a long game that culminated in his producing my 2016 “comeback album,” Lost Soul. In the short-term, he invited to perform with him in Los Angeles, which might have been the most exciting thing that had happened to me in my life up to that point.

Another thing that happened is that Mike – who is one of the most generous people alive, as evidenced by his unflagging support over twenty-five years – introduced me to his mentor, Tommy West, who produced my first two albums, taught me everything about everything, and told stories about Jim Croce, who’d been his best friend.

Only one of my first batch of songs – Saint Anne – made into onto my first album, Playing God (1999). I didn’t even play any of them on Peter Case’s First Flight, because I’d written a bunch of new ones I liked better. Still, those songs and performances represented an exciting and important first step; at least, they suggested to a few people that I had potential.