Dredging the Past for Meaning

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Friends: Wow oh wow, is it ever a busy time! And of course that’s a GOOD thing — it means new music is under construction, because what the hell else would we, a band of musicians, spend time on? Besides drinking, I mean, and going to movies. And, okay, video games sometimes, and reading magazines in the bathtub. But in this case, it’s music-making that we’re chopping away at, and hard! Trust!

Why, this photo was taken just yesterday:

Take it in. Scour the image for clues. Let your anticipation — surely already at a vicious simmer — boil over.

Okay, okay, perhaps that was cruel — a tease too potent. (How will you sleep, wondering what that big wooden guitar is?!) We roiled the waters of your psyche; now we will tranquilize them. How? With an old-ass, overwritten press placement from our early years as a band. Yes, we may be too busy to sit down and hammer out a substantial newsletter for you, but we have plenty of time to copy and paste work we completed long ago.

Below, please find a piece that Chris wrote for New York music magazine The Deli sometime in the 2010s(?). We can’t recall whether it was ever actually printed — surely it’s too stupid and long?? — so this may in fact be an important debut, a real “get” for S.D.I.R.

We’re going to print a few more of these things (old press bits most of you can’t possibly have read) over the next month or two, just to keep our advertisers from rising up in revolt (Exxon in particular gets violently angry when we go two weeks without posting). Let us know if there’s any specific period you’d like to see investigated for potential resurrections. Currently on deck are a couple of Keith Murray interviews from the recent Lobes cycle that deserve a broader readership, and a remarkable NME piece, circa 2008, from which we’ve acquired audio and unpublished photos.

QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT BEFORE YOU SLIP INTO CHRIS’S LANGUID PROSE, INEVITABLY TO LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS RIGHT THERE AT YOUR DESK: Due primarily to the dogged yet polite requests of Sebastian [LAST NAME REDACTED], we’ve created a streaming/downloadable version of Brain Thrust Mastery Deluxe (the double album version), which doesn’t exist on popular services such as Spotify, Tidal, Internet, and Greece. We’re going to send it out this weekend to paying subscribers of this blog, BUT, if you bought a copy of BTM Deluxe on vinyl and don’t pay for S.D.I.R., we’re very happy to give you the stream/download — simply email managementATwearescientists•com with a photo of you holding your album, with at least one warm-blooded pet visible in the frame, and a nice sunset behind you. (Or you can just write, “I promise I have the vinyl — pls send da link.”)

You may also, of course, join the visionary few who kick us a few bucks every month in exchange for very little besides the satisfaction of the Righteous living amongst the Damned:

The following blob of writing appeared in the pages of NYC’s The Deli sometime around 2012. Or maybe 2016? We have no idea. Also, they may not have printed it; who knows. We do not stand by any of the information or attitudes revealed herein.

HOW TO DO IT

As a founding member of We Are Scientists, I'm regularly asked, "How do you do it?", "What's your secret?", "Why is God’s love for you greater than his love for me?", and variations along these lines. No wonder. As I write this, I'm seated in a spanking new Qantas A380 flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, having just completed a successful run of shows in Australia. I have an aisle seat all to myself. In a few minutes, I'll be served a hot meal that will include a complimentary glass of wine or a cocktail, should I be in the mood for it. Later, a snack. Such films as "Gladiator" and "A Beautiful Mind," as well as contemporary favorites like "Sex & The City 2," wait at the ready in the seat-back entertainment unit literally inches from my face. As and when desired, I can visit an on-plane restroom. All of this is happening in the middle of the sky, at around 500 miles per hour.

Air travel is just one of the many perks that come with my job, so it's no wonder everybody wants to trade places with me. I'm not about to give this all up, though, and in any case most of you don't know the bass parts to all of our songs. So I propose a middle ground: I'll teach you everything I know about being a successful music artist – this will allow you to create your own band and take it straight to the top. In exchange, you leave me the hell alone, except to give me compliments or to offer me free things. But you stop asking me to trade places with you – I don't want your job at Panda Express. I was drunk when I said that.

Forming The Band

The first step toward getting to fly on airplanes is to form a band. Sounds more difficult than it is. It is a little known and little understood fact that something like 90% of successful rock bands form at a Guitar Center. Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, U2, Coldplay, and Lily Allen all got their start at Guitar Center when a couple of outgoing musicians who were testing this or that piece of gear fell into a serendipitous jam. Indeed, if you hang out at Guitar Center in any city on any given afternoon, you'll hear half a dozen bands form. You'll be sitting on a marked-down $399 amp with built-in tuner and COSM effects, engulfed in the not-unpleasant cacophony of two dozen assholes fucking around on stringed instruments, when suddenly two, and then three, and then four of those assholes begin roughly to synchronize their playing in both rhythm and key. The other musician-customers, hearing what you hear, begin to taper their own meanderings, the better to witness the burgeoning phenomenon – “the burgeoning," I guess. And just like that, with no forethought or advance notice, twenty lucky sons of guns are listening to the first Seven Mary Three concert.

The lesson is this: if you're a musician looking for a band, budget some time each afternoon for Guitar Center.

Weeding Out Weeds

When you choose your band mates by going to Guitar Center most afternoons and wanking on mandolin until somebody starts wanking in time on djimbe and somebody else starts wanking in key on pedal steel, you run a certain risk. This approach, though responsible for bands ranging from The Killers to The Miles Davis Quartet, has an "implosion" rate of about 5%, which is just a clever bit of legalese meaning that every hundred years or so, a band composed of dudes who met at Guitar Center, jamming, will discover that one among them is not quite right for the job and needs gently to be kicked the fuck out of Smashmouth. This hellish prospect became horrifically real for Guns N Roses, who, a couple of years in, had to deal with the fact that drummer Steven Adler was violently addicted to a cocktail of hard drugs, and that his addiction was taking an awful toll on his musicianship, and that his addiction was to a slightly different cocktail of hard drugs than the rest of Guns N Roses were addicted to, and that this critical difference made it impossible for the band to employ fewer than a dozen drug dealers full-time, around the clock. The word came down from management: Guns N Roses' profile was taking on a vile tarnish in the public eye – the band must limit the number of full-time drug dealers on official payroll to eight. At a moment like this, when the reputation and performance of the band has been threatened, there is little choice: the likeminded band members must crawl out from the opiate swamp where they now dwell like hibernating alligators and mutter or in some way signal that they're fed up with the offending member's irresponsibility, wayward behavior, and callous disregard for the organization's wellbeing. The lawyers take over from there, making sure that the cancerous tumor is extirpated before further sullying occurs. This last bit can become messy. A band like GNR has sufficient financial clout to purchase a smooth exit: $2000 was wired into Adler's account. Later the same day he was kidnapped by two ex-LAPD officers, then lobotomized by a bribed prison doctor. Next he was set up with a job in the commissary of an oil atoll 1,500 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Adler has been selling Camels, Penthouse, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups ever since. He has refused numerous job applications from both Slash and Izzy Stradlin.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals, though completely necessary to becoming a potent live band, can be a major drag. They’re loud, the sound is bad, and you have to hang out with the other people in your band. And there are no groupies. And no mixed drinks.

Not a lot of advice I can give here. You have to rehearse if you’re going to be as big as Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear rehearses five days a week. Then again, they’re all in relationships, aren’t big drinkers, and they all kinda like each other. #notarealband.

Drugs

Use everything you can get your hands on – drugs are the wellspring of creativity, the necessary nutrients in any inventor's mental soil. Anyone who says otherwise is either a religious prig or drowning in vanity, a vanity so lavish that he's unwilling to spend the pedestrian currency of physical health against the possibility of contributing to a rich, millennium-spanning tapestry of intellectual production that will be man's bequeathal to the cosmos aeons after his extinction. Even now, my bloodstream is coursing in toxins. Two ibuprofen taken earlier for back pain, half a glass of marginal red wine served with dinner, plus an antihistamine I introduced into my system half an hour ago to guard against ill effects from the spores this airplane's closed environment is doubtless circulating through my lungs even now. The simple fact is that without these creative lubricants, I'd still be caught in the eddy of choosing a name for this essay ("How To Do It," thanks).

Booking The First Live Shows

In the studio, time literally is money. What do I mean? Just that for every hour or day that you spend in the studio, your bill will increase – you’ll have to pay more ‘money’ at the end of the recording session.

So don’t jump the gun. Before the money clock starts ticking, iron out all the kinks in your songs in front of a live studio audience, ideally on Dave Letterman’s show, Jay Leno’s show, or Conan Obrien’s show (1993-2009). If for whatever reason you absolutely can’t get onto one of these shows to work on your songs, Jimmy Fallon’s show is an acceptable substitute, but avoid letting members of The Roots guest on your set. The Roots, though a perfectly decent group of musicians, probably won’t be hanging out at the studio where you end up recording. Developing a dependency on The Roots early on is fast becoming a classic beginner’s mistake; every day new bands are finding themselves in the studio days after doing Fallon, wondering who’s going to add miscellaneous exotic percussion during the bridge, or who’s going to reiterate the main vocal melody on a horn during the outro.

Recording

Once the arrangements are locked in and you’ve weeded out any involvement by The Roots, it’s time to lay down some tracks. Here are a couple of tips to help you get the most out of your studio session:

• Keep your smartphone’s Voice Memo app running during every take. The more expensive and complicated a studio set up is, the more likely you are to have problems getting everything to work right – but even if you’re recording on a 4-track tape deck, you’re still almost guaranteed to lose at least one take to technical malfunction during the course of your session. Not if your iPhone is continuously recording! On my band’s latest album, something like 20% of the guitar ended up being taken from iPhone recordings after a hard drive mishap during mixing left us with no alternatives. The reality is that many people prefer the sound of the iPhone tracks, with their marvelous compression! In fact, because several of us were religious about keeping our iPhones recording in the studio, we had several mic positions to choose from, and were able to comp together an excellent stereo signal.

• Don’t be afraid to get freaky during solos. Whether you’re a guitarist, bassist, drummer, or you play one of the many less-crucial instruments, don’t be afraid to let your freak flag flutter and flap during solos! Too many musicians guide their solos down familiar terrain, as though this were their chance to play a Clapton/Van Halen/Valensi solo a little worse than the original. Get freaky! The solo is your chance to freak yourself out, and if you let it pass you by, not only will your reputation as a freak suffer, but so will the track. Remember, when you listen to a song, what are you looking for in a solo? If you’re like most people, you look to the solo to completely freak you out – to change your entire sense of what can and should be done with musical instruments, and to accomplish that in a scary, scary way.

Mixing/Finalizing The Record

Mixing is a scam. It’s the ‘emperor’s clothes’ of music production. We haven’t mixed a single one of our albums, and you’d never know it. “This record sounds mixed,” idiots say when they hear our latest. Oh really? And what exactly does “mixed” sound like?

The Band’s Look

You’ve got the band, the songs, the album – time to nail the look. There are two basic directions you can take with this: daring originality or tasteful adherence to the norms of your scene. The latter is as easy as spending some time with The Deli’s “Where To Shop” section. The former requires an additional bit of creative energy, something above and beyond the actual requirements of music. Think Kiss, Slipknot, Lady Gaga. Here are a couple of rich veins that have yet to be mined:

• Everybody in the band dresses like Indiana Jones, incl. whips.

• The band dresses like a litter of puppies.

CD Release

This is your coming out party, your announcement to the world that you and your band are alive, well, and ready to kick a shit ton of butt. Don’t have this at your apartment. Here’s how it should play out...

JAY-Z’s ASSISTANT: Hey, Jay. There’s some kind of problem. I guess we ain’t gettin in tonight.

JAY-Z: What’s that mean? I’m in this club five nights a week.

JZ’s A: Yeah, there’s some kinda CD release thing. Some band ‘The Adenoids.’ I guess you didn’t RSVP, Jay.

JAY-Z: So I did not. Fuck it; let’s roll to Bungalow.

Getting The “Buzz” In NYC

Turning Jay-Z away from your CD release party because he didn’t RSVP is a great start. Even The Strokes, who are legitimately “rock royalty,” would probably bend the rules for Jay-Z. Another good move is to start a MySpace site. This immediately identifies you as an avant garde sonic terrorist. New York City, of course, loves that kind of thing. Think John Lurie.

Managers

Managers are great – you’ll want to get as many as you can. YOU CAN NOT HAVE TOO MANY MANAGERS. A manager is somebody who goes out there and hustles, gets you deals, endorsements, great gigs, etc. Better to have an army of such people than just one or two. My band is currently represented by 15 managers, none of whom know about each other. The way we work this is, when one manager gets us a gig, for example, we tell all of the other managers that the date of the gig is a “personal day,” and that nothing can be booked then. The manager who booked the gig gets 15%; nobody else gets a dime. The worst thing that can ever come of this is that your band gets conflicting offers from multiple managers. In this case, simply accept the most lucrative offer and tell the lower-bidding managers that they need to step up their game, and that you’ll be taking a “personal day” on the day in question.

The Fans and The Groupies

When it comes to groupies, you can’t be too wary. Although safe sex is cheaper and easier to achieve than ever before, lust-clouded brains continue to make foolish decisions in the heat of the moment, decisions that can sidetrack or even derail a promising career. The fact is that, no matter what your new friend tells you, any time you take off your clothes and get into bed with a stranger and fail to use protection, you can become pregnant. Are you a girl? I have even worse news for you. Your chances of becoming pregnant during unprotected sex are ten times higher than your male counterpart’s.

Here are a couple of myths about sex that personal experience has shown to be very false indeed:

• Myth: You can’t get pregnant after a big spaghetti dinner. Fact: Although a big spaghetti dinner will probably leave all parties too lethargic to become aroused, if you do actually manage to complete the sex act, either or all three of you may become’a pregnant.

• Myth: If a man has two orgasms over a period of several hours, the sperm from the second orgasm will hunt down and kill the first batch of sperm. Fact: Two orgasms do not “cancel each other out.” Although the second mob of sperm will hunt down the first mob, and will fight them to the death, the first orgasm will have contained so many more sperm that, when the dust has settled, a sufficient number will remain to complete the pregnancy rite.

• Myth: You can’t get pregnant having sex with animals. Fact: Yeah you can, as Steven Tyler’s single human parent learned the hard way.

Don’t rely on rumor and old wives’ tales to keep you safe. Take the time to educate yourself about the many scientific precautions available thanks to modern medicine. Unless, like Josh Homme, you want to create an unpaid gang of pick pockets, car thieves, and pre-teen thugs who grudgingly do your bidding.

Dealing With Success

If you follow the above advice, chances are good that you and your band will enjoy success. If you’re at all cognizant of celebrity culture, you know that success is often the very thing that destroys careers. My advice for dealing with the distractions and excesses of success can be boiled down to a very simple rule, one which I follow almost religiously. It’s called The Rule of Two. The Rule of Two says that you never indulge in anything that’s more than twice as big, beautiful, expensive, or elite as what you’d have been able to get your hands on if you weren’t famous. You don’t buy a house that’s more than twice as expensive as the one you used to live in. You don’t do any more than twice as much cocaine in a sitting as you might’ve in the old days. You don’t date people who are more than twice as good-looking as your ex.

Follow The Rule of Two and you’ll be able to enjoy your success, instead of letting it enjoy you. Whatever that means. (I didn’t make up the phrase “letting success enjoy you.”)