just jackalackin' around

Yo, so yeah, I missed a day on the blog, huh? How did everyone survive their respective Mondays? I had band practice. I have another band, called the Falcon that’s playing up at Subterranean on North ave in Chicago this Saturday and Sunday. It’s gonna be a gas. The Sunday performance, especially will be a hoot, as it will feature some real surprises. That’s really neither here nor there though, is it? It’s not plug time, it’s reflection time.
This weekend we played HOB and it was awesome. I had a really great time, even though there were some early evening clerical errors and we went half the show with no backstage room. Whatever, right? That’s when, as the singer of a band, it’s my job to throw a fit, chuck a lamp at a wall and ask loudly if people have forgotten exactly who the fuck I am. So, yeah, I did that and it was great. Then I boned a few groupies, did some lines off Neil’s balls and played a hell of a show. It’s crazy. The adrenaline gets so strong right before a show that the whole thing just whizzes by. It’s almost like it didn’t even happen, or more to the point, that it was happening, but I was just kind of there watching it go down. It’s indescribable, the feeling. It’s kind of like being drunk but more in control and with tunnel vision, but not in a bad way. I dunno. Who am I, a doctor? Thanks to everyone who came out. That shit was fun. Come see my other band this weekend. That’ s gonna be a good time too.
It’s funny, I spent a lot of time looking forward to that show and now it’s over and the crushing realization that I’m a drone at a shitty job has um, well…crushed me I guess. It’s like that in life, right? Like if you’re going to, oh say, Iceland, and you’re all excited for it for months, then all of a sudden, the trip’s over, you’re home and that’s it. Back to shoveling someone else’s shit. It sucks. The lesson here? Never do anything.
So, I got asked a question in an interview recently which was the following: How has becoming a father changed you as a musician? This is an interesting one, right? The fact is, there’s nothing rock and roll about being a parent. It’s quite literally the opposite of rock and roll. Rock and roll is about defying conventions and pissing off or terrifying parents or something like that. I mean, that’s my understanding. So all of a sudden, to be a parent, and have that inform your music, well, guess what? You suck now. It’s true. People go putting their babies on the covers of their records as though that’s got any sort of relevance to anyone but them. That’s just self indulgent, baby picture showing, dad behavior. It doesn’t matter if the kid’s got a beer, or he’s smoking a cigarette or he’s in front of a plate of cut out lines, it’s lame. It’s cutesy, and that’s just not cool. It’s not. People write songs for their kids too, which is almost always a bad idea. Talk about schmaltzy. Fuck! There’s that Will Smith song called “Just the two of us” where he’s rapping about how he’s always gonna make sure his kid brushes his teeth and does his algebra homework, and how he’ll whup his butt if he misbehaves and all that. Lame. What kid wants to hear a rap that their parents could conceivably have written as a morality lesson to them? Also, there’s the great line in that song “Things didn’t work out between me and your mom” which, man, if the kid wasn’t already embarrassed enough by the whole fucking thing, has to be the line that makes him get into gay porn or whatever it is you do to get back at your dork-ass rapping dad for doing one of the most mortifying songs in the history of the world. Yeah, it’s Will Smith, I know. He stinks anyway, but the point is the same.
There are a few good tunes about kids, like “Loving you is easy cuz you’re beautiful” by Minnie Ripperton about her daughter Maya Rudolph who’s now on SNL, or was recently, I don’t know. That’s a good song, but it’s hardly a rocker. I think Eminem gets the prize for the only person I’ve ever heard invoke parenting in a song and not making it sound dorky, but it’s essentially because he totally recapitulates the whole thing so that he and his daughter are essentially the kids ganging up to kill the mom. That’s a nice take, but it’s not really my style. End result? How has becoming a dad changed me as a musician? Oh, fuck. I don’t know, but it can’t be good.
Nah, those are two different things. Being a dad is something I do just you know, because I like this kid, and because if I didn’t, well, parent at him, he’d grow up to be another one of these lame dipshits that I deal with all day at my bar. Being a musician is something else entirely. I don’t want to get into using dumb lines like ‘it’s just in my blood, man’ cuz really, it’s not. I mean, I love it, but I’m not like waking up and playing riffs that came to me in my sleep or anything. That’s for people like Keith Richards to do between hits.
I don’t know what’s going on here. The other day I was talking to someone and I mentioned some crazy story that I had been involved in and I was thinking it would be great to write about here, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the fuck it was. It wasn’t the time I did Karaoke in Athens with the runner up of Greek Idol. It wasn’t the time that I stayed in the squat with the methadone clinic in it in Slovenia that had shit logs pierced with hypodermic needles scattered everywhere, it wasn’t the time I hitchhiked into the Mexican desert with my friend so he could get weed from a farmer or the time I got arrested for urinating in a public square in upstate New York and got placed on suicide watch for some strange reason. It wasn’t the time that I got locked in the stairwell in Canberra and gave myself claustrophobia, or earlier that week in Sydney where me and my friend Chris got kicked out of ten bars in one night. Fuck, man…I can’t remember what it was. It was actually wild, not like these stories, which are essentially tame, but involving wild locales. No, this was one of those stories that, every time I tell it I’m like “woah, I don’t believe that happened.”
It wasn’t when I stayed at the house in Nottingham with the dude who was debilitated with Gulf War Syndrome where you needed to actually swipe a credit card to get the shower to go on…Hmmm, it wasn’t the time where my friend Pete and I got stuck behind the bar of an English pub, pouring drinks and getting loaded while a guy who claimed he had a sterling silver Tiffany’s butt plug up his ass tried to convince us to go to a party with him on Christmas day. Man, whatever. I don’t know. I guess this will go down as just another dull entry.