My Secret Career 41: Onion Hits The Big Time

My childhood nickname was Onion. Which is ironic because I absolutely hate onions. But I never minded the nickname. Teammates called for passes in soccer games by shouting, “Onion, I’m open!” Like, it wasn’t one of these nicknames that only pops up occasionally. It was my NAME.

So I thought it fitting that I would release an album under the name “Onion”. 

I lived in New York City by that time and my real career was chugging along. I was doing regular plays, experimental theater, commercials, TV shows, student films, indie films, you name it I did it.

But I was also nursing My Secret Career in private.

The result? The claustrophobic and disturbing Beauty Is Ordinary.

If you’re counting, this is album number four. Shit’s about to change.

My Secret Career 41: The Rhode Island Trilogy

I am winding this project up by highlighting each “album” along the way.

By the time I left Rhode Island for New York City in the fall of 1994, I had recorded three albums worth of original material.

1985-1987 brought Fecund Youth’s modestly titled Hung Like A Bull.

1993 saw The Mahoneys’ deliver the rough and tumble Live From The 20th Century.

Following that was 1994’s Cocksure? by Rhode Island Red.

These sound primitive because they were. But they will tell you what my life was like throughout that whole period.

Peruse at your leisure!

My Secret Career 28: brenwillsull “I, Phone”

This one accidentally became an album.

I don’t even remember when I got my first smart phone. I suppose I could ask the algorithm and it could find a dated image of me from some surveillance footage at a Mac store and find out, but I prefer the haze of my awful memory to pixelated truth.

Whatever day that was, it started a looooong recording process. I would noodle around on my guitar, if a melody clicked I would spew forth improvised words until something concrete locked into place, and then I would record a voice memo of the song as a placeholder.

The idea was always that I would return to these sketches and flesh them out. Finish them. Produce them.

But years went by. The songs started to pile up. I showed no signs of moving towards any official recording.

Finally in 2018 I had had enough. I did an extensive search of my phone and chose the best of the bunch. For every one of the eleven tracks in this album, there are ten that failed to pass muster. A siren interrupts, a note goes awry, someone knocks on the door, someone yells shut up, something ruined many of those voice memos.

But these eleven? These eleven songs are only possible because of two things. I and phone.

So please give a listen to brenwillsull’s 2018 album called I, Phone. Oh, and the “band” name? Since this is in a way the most basic version of me and my music (an acoustic guitar and a voice), I thought I would almost be myself.

First name, Brendan. Two middle names, William and Sullivan, after my father’s first and mother’s maiden name. 

It took a computer in my pocket for a decade for me to make it.

My Secret Career 39: BOMER-B Double Album, Circa 2000

Music will always be about the album. Forever.

Here is that essential album for any band or artist. The double album. The concept album/double album.

I have written about many of these songs individually but they will always be this:

Out of Charactor: Act I: Id City and Act II: Americana Subversive by yours truly,

BOMER-B.

My Secret Career 30: #Disenchanthem (This Machine Kills Fascists)

I recorded this one in my office on Sunset Boulevard while writing on the Starz sitcom “Survivor’s Remorse” in 2016. 

I kept my acoustic at my desk as a release valve. The pressure of putting a television show together is unlike any other I have experienced. Someone once said it is akin to putting ten pounds of shit into an eight pound bag, and that’s about right.

Adding to the stress was the horror of the 2016 election. The entire office walked around dumbstruck after Trump’s victory and trying to be funny was impossible. 

One night I was there very late, working on a pitch I had for an episode. No one else was in the office so I was free to strum and sing at the top of my lungs.

A coworker had said that I looked like a protest singer with my big bushy beard and furrowed brow. If I was such a thing, I should have a protest song, right?

So I put my pitch aside (no one else on the staff thought it was funny so it died a quick death) and furiously wrote and sang the following song. My one and only protest song.

#Disenchanthem, from 2018’s Sun Zed album by, who else, Sun Zed. 

Fuck you, Fascists. If everything goes haywire on Tuesday, you can be sure I will be a proud member of the Resistance.

My Secret Career 38: California Waltz

I have a penchant for writing songs about places that I have lived. First there was “Always Leaving Providence”, then “Good Bye New York”, and finally California Waltz from 2018’s “I, Phone”. Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing about Salt Lake City but perhaps the less said the better.

Imagine you have clawed your way across the vast American Midwest. You drag your caravan over a mountain range and see the Pacific Ocean.

That’s what it feels like to live in Los Angeles. It gets a bad rap as “fake” from people who have never been there. Sure there are fake PEOPLE, but they are a distinct

minority. Most Los Angelenos are hard-working and genuine people. There are phonies everywhere, not just in the film industry.

The world looks to Hollywood for a reason. True storytelling is inclusive and empathetic. So is the heart of the city it sits in. Los Angeles. Sooooo tired of the right-wing attitude towards culture.

California. Here’s a waltz in your honor. Except I’m pretty sure it’s not even a waltz. Just pretend.

My Secret Career 34: Rowena

Occasionally something comes to you that seems like it came from someone/somewhere else.

Driving along one day in LA, I saw a street sign. Rowena.

Literally minutes later I was singing this song into my phone. I got home, dug out the guitar, and presto!

Rowena.

I am linking to two versions of the song.

The first is from brenwillsull’s 2018 album “I, Phone” and is an acoustic live performance captured by my iPhone.

The second from Sun Zed’s 2018 album “Sun Zed” and has drums, bass by Cashel, electric guitars and even (gasp) a little solo! This one works really well cranked thru headphones.

Here is Rowena. And Rowena.

My Secret Career 31: Morning Parties

My father used to wake us all up in the morning with a sailor’s chant. “Rise and shine, Sailors! Pretty little craft in sight!” He took joy in interrupting our sleep with a heave and a ho.

Our family motto is “Terra Marique Potens”, Latin for “Strong On Land And Sea”, a nod to our tradition and power. My Dad scoffed at the notion of the O’Malley family crest, which he saw as a British imposition on a Pagan Irish past. 

But I still love the snarling boar, the striking ship, the sails billowing with sea wind.

Melody’s mother made every day life celebratory. She found humor and fulfillment through the rituals of life that many people take for granted. She was one of those people who effortlessly stay grounded in the present moment and treat it like a  gift.

She was a teacher and students constantly talked about how deeply she affected their lives. A heroine of the highest order, to kids who needed it the most.

I wish they’d gotten to meet. 

They would have gotten a kick out of each other. I used them as a jumping off point for yet another love song. After all, they’re directly responsible for us meeting.

RIP Bill O’Malley 

RIP Wanda Garren

Morning Parties from 2018’s Sun Zed album by Sun Zed

My Secret Career 23: New Mischief “Brainstorm” # 1 With A Bullet

I have been in exactly three bands. Fecund Youth, The Mahoneys and New Mischief. Who were a crew, not a band.

I knew Buzz through Andy. Andy and I had been roommates my first year in New York and had remained an integral part of my life. Somewhere in there he met Buzz. So I met Buzz, too. He held court at a bar near NYU and Washington Square Park. I would meet Andy there close to closing time and then Buzz would lock the doors and we would have the run of the place.

When Andy told me that Buzz had recorded some hip hop tracks, I insisted he come out to Windsor Terrace and visit the basement. Buzz is an imposing person and he seemed like a panther in a kitty cage down there with those low ceilings and tiny spaces.

The whole thing was a brainstorm. Over the course of a couple of months, Buzz would pop over and we would work on the three tracks we initially concocted.

My facility with an electric guitar has never been higher and the sonic textures Timothy was presenting me to play over extracted a level of creativity that I was unaware I possessed. When he played me the drumbeat he had in mind for “Brainstorm”, I knew exactly what to do.

The structure of the song is classic. Instrumental intro with beatbox, Pimp Fu declaration, Bomer-B verse, Buzz verse, Pimp outro, instrumental outro.

I keep talking about the alternate universe, but God Damn King Kong if this motherfucker ain’t a hit.

There aren’t too many rap crews left these days. The solo pursuit has obliterated the sense of unity and support that is integral to crews or bands. I am glad to say I was, for a brief moment, a member of a crew.

Here is Brainstorm by New Mischief from 2000.

My Secret Career 19: One Take One-Off One Time Only "Prosthetic Limbic"

I have many songs in my canon that have been played exactly once. Live to tape. Oftentimes I am balancing a lyric sheet on my knee while I record. I will also ad-lib if the lyrics are not fully formed or the spirit strikes me. In fact, in 2018 I put an entire album of such wonders up on Soundcloud and called it "I, Phone", because that was all the technology involved. 

But the song I'm going to highlight today predates the iPhone and was recorded live-to-tape in Windsor Terrace, Park Slope’s shabby but cooler next door neighbor. If memory serves it was very late at night so I was necessarily hushed. 

To talk about this recording I have to talk about the room it was recorded in. My bedroom. The basement apartment was not legal. The ceiling was so low you could almost touch it without crooking an elbow. The kitchen was sunk a half a foot below the rest of the room, with a sink barely large enough for a plate and a mug. The walls were so flimsy that cardboard would give them a run for their money.

My room was a perfect square built out into the main space. It was an airless cube. An ancient fold-out couch was slammed up against the top of the square and each side of the room was lined with a low shelf. By low I mean shin level. The shelf was more like a step, in that it didn't hang out from the wall but was built into it like a bench. On these shelves sat a TV, stereo system. various sentimental knick-knacks arrayed in a way that was very meaningful to me, and most importantly, the Tascam 424 4-track. Both Timothy and I were filling cassette after cassette with new material. 

I was attempting to process what had happened in my life. I learned a little bit about the brain. I then sat down and wrote "Prosthetic Limbic" onto a sheet of paper which was lying around. There were lots of lyrics hanging around that apartment. I also had lots of free-floating riffs, pieces of music that I was obsessed with but that hadn't found words yet.

I don't remember how I decided to throw these two things together. But I thought it would work. Instead of working on it I hit record on the 4-track, balanced that paper on the little built in shelf, and recorded whatever the hell happened next.

What came out was this. I have never played it again. Someone would have to listen to it, learn it, and teach it to me if I were to try to play it today.

Prosthetic Limbic, from Bomer-B's Act II: Americana Subversive.

My Secret Career 27: Invalid Nymphalidae

Manhattan was crazy for butterflies.

The exhibit arrived at Manhattan’s Natural History Museum with great fanfare and everyone rushed out in droves to go. These days you can trip and fall over a butterfly exhibit making a jaunt to the corner store. But 1999? It was a new phenomenon.

I was no exception and all of a Thursday I found myself sweating inside a museum sized terrarium pushing a stroller as butterflies swarmed around me. As someone who has very little interest in nature, I don’t know why I was shocked to discover that the experience was an unpleasant one for me. Others delighted at the flashing colors and the flitting flight paths. To me it was a giant butterfly coffin that I was trapped inside.

At this particular time in my life, I could only process this experience in one way. And you are about to share it with me. Not for the faint of heart.

Sidebar: Very proud of the guitar work on this. All I knew was I wanted it to sound like a butterfly slowly dying. Not to pat myself on the back but…nailed it.

Please take a listen to Invalid Nymphalidae off of Bomer-B’s 2000 album, “Act II: Americana Subversive”.

My Secret Career 26: Invisible World from Bomer-B’s “Americana Subversive”

Another entry connected to Cousin Liam, aka Dr. Mars, aka Mercury & Mars.

I came late to Guided By Voices. I may be the only GBV fan as obsessed with “Mag Earwig!” as they are with “Bee Thousand”. You don’t need to know anything about that band to enjoy this post but if you are not in the know, GET in the know.

I have seen Guided By Voices twice. The second time was in Los Angeles with The Incredible Ben Barnes, who directed this incredible video (take some time to check his work out, as well as Auditorium), Fire Fire Ocean Liner. But the first time, and the first time I saw them, was when they were touring behind their “Do The Collapse” album. Guided By Voices themselves do not like this album and I disagree.

Cousin Liam and I met up to see the whirling dervish that is Robert Pollard and GBV. They did not disappoint. My neck hurt from headbanging.

I left Liam and made my way back to Brooklyn, buzzed and buzzing. On the subway ride home I wrote a Guided By Voices song.

Here is “Invisible World” from Guided By Voices, er, I mean, Bomer-B, the lead track off of 2000’s “Act II: Americana Subversive”.

My Secret Career 35: The Rats Come Out In The Rain, 1995? 1996?

This one is naaaasty.

My cousin Liam plays lead guitar on this track. I played it to him, he learned it, he recorded one take, and that was that. He is a much better guitar player than I am and he was horrified to learn that I was simply using the take, no edits, no re-takes, as is.

But I love it. It never seemed to fit the music I was making during the ‘90’s. It had more pizzazz. It was dirty, sexy, fun. In that way it was a precursor to the music I began to make with my OTHER cousin musical soulmate, Pimp Fu. So I didn’t fold it into those collections of songs. I hung onto it.

It finally seemed to fit on “Act II: Americana Subversive”, an album without drumbeats but with attitude. This one has loads of it.

Yet another late night subway ride prompted this, as I watched the parade of posers draped all over each other, deliberately sexualizing each other, deliberately avoiding anything else of substance. Rats. All of them.

The Rats Come Out In The Rain. Thanks, cuz. I know you could have played it better but it sounds perfect to me.

My Secret Career 21: God Damn King Kong, Or Pimp Fu Brings The Beat

Legends cross paths. In this case, Pimp Fu and Tommy D.

Timothy R.R. O’Malley arrived in Brooklyn and injected a new sense of fun into my music. My Secret Career stretched back to the ‘80’s and the underground punk scene. Timothy had a secret career as well, with another underground scene. Hip hop and rap. We immediately set out to mix these parallel obsessions. He called himself Pimp Fu.

And now, a bit of back story…

Tommy D., legendary ax-slinger from Fecund Youth, spent a summer working sixteen hour days at a fish camp in Alaska. At break time, the workers would separate into groups. Groups set up according to your drug of choice. The dealers would set up in differnt corners of the massive tin shack warehouse kept at freezing temperature and the workers would stand in line, eating lunch and waiting for their dose.

One line, weed. One line, meth. One line, cocaine. And, wonderfully for my purpose, one line whippets.

The man doling out the nitrous oxide hits was a Paul Bunyan-like figure who towered over his customers in a filthy winter jacket and a glowering attitude. He derided everyone who paid him. Not for their habit, but for the lackluster size of the hits they would take. Grizzled desperate drug addicts would take enormous drags of laughing gas and this giant would belittle their pathetic efforts.

Tommy D. waited all summer long and watched this parade of men get jeered at by the man providing them with their high. Finally he got up the nerve to get in the whippet line, even though that was not his D.O.C.

He shuffled along behind all the other degenerates. He approached the gauntlet. He braced himself. The canister was offered and Tommy D. hit that shit as hard as he could.

There was a pause as the behemoth stared down at him. A silence fell.

Then the greatest line ever was uttered.

A deep, triumphant, formerly caustic voice boomed out from within a bushy beard:

“God Damn King Kong!”

Decades later I stole that phrase and Pimp Fu helped me turn it into the first rap song I would ever write. It’s on Pimp Fu’s “Coffee, Pot” as a Pimp Fu joint but it is also by me, Brendan O’Malley aka Bomer-B and it appears on Out Of Charactor: Act I: Id City. 

Pimp Fu’s beat. An acoustic guitar. An electric guitar. Our separate voices.

Please get in line and take this hit. 

God Damn King Kong.

My Secret Career 29: Sado Hawkins Dance

I wrote many songs underground on New York City public transit.

Someone caught my eye at a dive bar listening to a loud band. I never spoke to her but I can still see her in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t then and can’t now put into words exactly why she disturbed me so much.

But that night on the subway back to Brooklyn, some words did come to me. I repeated them like a mantra and by the time I got home I was able to write them down. Back before cell phones, recall of new ideas was challenging to someone like me who hates carrying a bag. I was forever buying tiny notebooks that would fit into a pocket to avoid a satchel.

The words sat in my notebook like one rotten egg baked into a scrumptious-looking cake.

Months went by. A riff snuck up on me and rattled around. Something about it rang an awful bell and I dug up the memory of that person.

I wish I could say I captured her perfectly. I wish I could say my words captured an external image with force. Instead, when I revisited those words, hastily remembered on a late night subway car, all I captured was me.

Here is Sado Hawkins Dance from Onion’s 1995 “Beauty Is Ordinary”.

My Secret Career 20: The First Song I Ever Wrote On My Own, Or Fecund Youth's "The Big Adventure"

To get to the first song I ever wrote without any outside help, I have to talk about my favorite band. And I’m not talking about Fecund Youth.

Shortly after forming Fecund Youth with Tom and Justin in 1984, I discovered The Replacements. To call them my favorite band doesn't really describe my fascination with and love of that group. They perfectly articulated my worldview. Whatever the Swiftiest Swiftie feels about Taylor Swift, multiply that by gazillion. There was no internet, we didn't have cable, all there was for me was music. And The Replacements were at the top of the pyramid for me and it wasn't even close.

The rest of the punk world seemed so buttoned up, oddly conservative. There were rules. It was rigid. If you didn't wear combat boots, have a spiked mohawk, and have a black leather jacket with safety pins holding it together, you were (gasp) a poser. The fact that I was a soccer player made me very suspect in that hermetically sealed little world. The Replacements obliterated all that.

Sure they played loud distorted fast guitar driven songs. Sure they screamed slogans over fuzzed out low-fi recordings. But they also sang country acoustic songs. They used a drum machine. They played piano ballads. They were never the same band twice.

This refusal to be pinned down by a genre spoke to me. I never wanted my own sound to be homogenous or consistent. Sure I loved The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, etc. Those bands carved out sonic territory that was eclectic but contained. The Replacements? They were all over the place.

So when I got my hands on a tiny keyboard with a built in drum machine, I decided to use it. If Paul Westerberg could use a drum machine, why couldn’t I?

Necessary Sidebar: Living within walking distance of the URI Campus came in quite handy from time to time. One of the traditions of my high school life was walking up to Edwards Auditorium every Friday night to go see a movie being screened in a lecture hall. Three bucks, no popcorn, no concession stand, just a movie and whatever liquor you could sneak in. Tommy D and Rex and I headed out from Linden Drive to see "Pee Wee's Big Adventure". We stopped at a historical cemetery on the way and inhaled a joint. By the time we got to Edwards we were a mess. 

The following is my song lyric diary entry about that night. I turned on the tape recorder, played the pre-recorded bit of music that came with the Casio, and sang "The Big Adventure" over it. Tom was with me and he makes me laugh at one point during the take by hitting me in the face with a blue Nerf ball. 

So Fecund Youth would follow in The Replacements' footsteps in the use of electronics and banned substances. And it sure doesn't sound too punk rock, which is why it absolutely is.

Here is "The Big Adventure" by Fecund Youth. For Tommy D and Rex, who made this song possible.

My Secret Career 33: Rite Of Passage, 1996

New York. Upper West Side. 1996ish.

I wasn’t admitting a lot to myself or anyone else. It took a lot to speak as plainly as I do in this song.

I had been expressing myself like someone transmitting sensitive details across enemy lines. Truth could not be plainly spoken. I twisted my words into impossible knots in order to remain camouflaged.

This was as direct as I was able to be. I avoided reflective surfaces. Every piece of clothing I owned was used in service of a disguise.

The pose was exhausting and exhaustive. The only way to decode the content was to have access to the cryptography program that encrypted the information in the first place.

And even I didn’t have access to that key. This song was a shocking breach of security.

Here is Rite Of Passage off of 1996’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion.

My Secret Career 22: Mr. McGregor

Fables often have strange messages embedded within them. Messages that might not make much sense to a child.

The story of Peter Rabbit always disturbed me. It should have been an heroic tale of a plucky youngster who successfully stole food from a violent psychopath.

Instead, the tale resolves with Peter being punished by his own mother. The undercurrent of guilt and shame is so unmistakeable that it is not even an undercurrent, it is just the river.

Somewhere along the line I developed my own particular brand of body horror. If you engage with my songs it will be unavoidable. It isn’t subtext so I am not revealing anything here, I am simply laying out the underpinnings of this song.

Yet another one-take, sing and play at the same time recording, here is Mr. McGregor from Onion’s 1995 “Beauty Is Ordinary” album. Put to tape on 103rd Street. Mr. McGregor as the moral police.

Also, this one is lighthearted even though it hides a dirty secret. Just like My Secret Career.

My Secret Career 34: Inspired By A Whore

The title of this post is deliberately misleading but also 100% true. 

In 1996, my first big opportunity in New York came when I was cast as Giovanni in John Ford’s still shocking “Tis Pity She’s A Whore”. The production took place in a storefront on Ludlow Street, back when experimental theater had to coexist with crack addicts instead of Starbucks. 

The concept of the production was genius, courtesy of Frank Pisco (RIP). Post-nuclear 1959’s dystopia. Society has retreated underground to bomb shelters. A twisted power structure has resulted. That twisted power structure is embodied in the “love affair” at the heart of the story.

Spoiler alert, but this play was written in 1626 so gimme a break.

In the penultimate scene of the play, my character murders his sister, who is pregnant with my baby. I storm her wedding reception holding her heart triumphantly and saying she will never be anyone else’s to wed. We used a pig heart dunked in Caro syrup and I can honestly say it might be the single most disturbing bit of stage craft I have ever witnessed or been a part of. 

The audience lined the wall right next to me on folding chairs and I saw each person recoil as I passed them. They had cringed when I sang a Tony Bennett song (“Let’s Fall In Love”) to my sister, her in lingerie, me in boxer shorts, but the heart was something else altogether. 

My fingers slid inside of the valves in order to keep hold of it. It was horrific for me to DO and I know it was horrific to witness. There was no proscenium arch to give some distance. There was an actual heart, human or not, gripped by a raving lunatic less than a foot from their seats.

The twisted sexual politics of this play are difficult to comprehend even in modern times. I cannot imagine how beyond-the-pale this piece was when it premiered in 1626.

All I know is an edgy group of amateurs shocked everyone who was brave enough to come to the Lower East Side to see a classical play called “Tis Pity She’s A Whore”.

It inspired the following song, a love song, a song of a love that can never, should never be.

From 1997’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion, here is Mint Condition.

My Secret Career 36: The Tourniquet Blues, Summer 1994

I was leaving town. Seems like a decisive move, right? Definitive. Psychological, yes, but geographical to boot.

The end of summer approached and I rehearsed for the show I was playing on my way out onto 95 South. Many of these songs I never performed live in any other context, mostly because they were stranger than the songs I wrote for The Mahoneys, gnarlier, harder to elucidate.

To call any song a “blues” has always seemed sketchy to me, something that signaled meaning in lieu of delivering that meaning effortlessly. I named this one “The Tourniquet Blues” as a nasty wink, and to remind people that blue is the natural color of blood.

Also, musically, technically, formally, this music is categorically NOT blues.

My longings were inchoate, my desires obscure, my dysfunction crippling, my ambition enormous. I was absolutely not ready for prime time. But I knew it was time to jump and I’d just have to learn before I hit the ground.

Which, dammit, I did. But not before I had to sing the blues, baby, sing the tourniquet blues.

The Tourniquet Blues

My Secret Career 37: Fast Whiskey, Or The Mahoneys Let Loose 1993

The Mahoneys had a blast every single time we practiced or played. We all got along, we laughed, the only personal issue in the band was that I had only been playing guitar for about a year and a half and I could barely explain what chords made up the songs I was writing. I was insecure and they were even nice about THAT. Hardly a nasty rock ‘n roll outfit!

One of the first songs I ever wrote was “Whiskey Full Of Sea”, an aggrieved song about some college girl who wasn’t into me. Or, no, she was into me late at night when she missed her fiancé back in her home state and needed someone to walk her home after rehearsal and make out in the hallway of her dorm. Always the hallway.

I wrote this song before I learned to play guitar in earnest. I was a junior, maybe, and occasionally sang with Justin out at his house, but songwriting wasn’t really high on my list. And I wasn’t very high on hers.

But years later once I actually learned to play, the song kept coming back. It stopped being about her and it was just a fun drinking shanty, a lilt, a paean to drinking your troubles away, to drinking in general. And I did quite a bit of drinking just to drink in those days. I miss the attitude, but not the result.

Later, The Mahoneys would take this song and turn it into a kind of elegy. That version opens the “Live From The 20th Century” album and think it really showcases the band.

But we would play the song twice in our set. One way was the standard way. The second? We would just randomly attempt different styles. The song was adaptable. We did AC/DC stomps, reggae drifts, country rambles, whatever floated our boat at that moment.

And this version happened to be caught on tape at one of the two rehearsals we recorded.

In this rendition of the song I make it thru the dorm room door and out of the hallway at last.

Fast Whiskey, from 1994’s “Live From The 20th Century” by The Mahoneys.

My Secret Career 32: The Goddess Of Love And Beauty Lives In Champaign, 1994

“Are you strung out on some face?/Well, I know it ain’t mine” - The Replacements

Truly unrequited love is easier to get over than that murky hybrid that also can exist, where there is always the sense that a tiny struggling ember might catch a breeze and burst into flame.

But more often than not the air stays still, the pulsing red in the ash grows fainter and fainter with each moment and you dread the moment when the cold fully asserts itself.

I was still gathering leaves to throw on the fire when I wrote this song. This is one of the songs I have written that I have absolutely no idea how to play on the guitar. At one point I could pick up a guitar and play this song on command.

Now the ash has long blown away, scattered to everywhere and nowhere all at once. We haven’t been in touch since just after the turn of the century.

Here is The Goddess Of Love And Beauty Lives In Champaign, played live at Theater-By-The-Sea in Matunuck, RI in the late summer of 1994.

My Secret Career 38: It’s Maria’s Heart by The Mahoneys

I knew when I wrote “It’s Maria’s Heart” that it was clearly the best song I’d written to date. I immediately brought it in to rehearsal and One Man Out got to work on it.

But the song was never right. The drummer couldn’t handle it. He was as green behind the kit as I was with a guitar slung across my shoulders. The other two members were great musicians. They tried to buoy us but more often than not the song defeated us.

Then we swapped drummers and became The Mahoneys.

The song took off. Literally. It felt like I was strapped to the head of a rocket. The other three guys were so assured I could just make little stabs at my guitar, adding texture to something that was already full. We would have sounded great if I was just singing and there was only one guitar. The overall effect was devastating. 

If you listen, you will hear us kind of botch the ending. But I don’t even care. It sounds exactly like we intended it to sound. I only wish more people could have heard us in all our glory.

It’s Maria’s Heart, by The Mahoneys, off 1994’s “Live From The 20th Century”. 

In a strange twist of fate, Jeff Bibbo of Granite State grunge/jam legends Groovechild heard an early acoustic version of the song on a cassette I made for my sister, who played it for him in NH where she lived at the time. Nearly thirty years after it was written, Groovechild recorded it and released it right before Jeff passed away. Their version is wildly different from mine, and I am very proud that it stuck in his mind enough to record it. I got to sing it onstage at the concert organized to honor his passing.

Here’s Groovechild’s take on Maria’s Heart.

My Secret Career 18: Turf Farm Kings’ “Plaid Mumbo Tango” 1993? 1992?

This song is a minor miracle. 

We used to routinely play something we creatively titled “The Poetry Game”. Everyone should play it.

Whoever is there at the time writes a title on a scrap of paper. A short phrase, an image, a single word…chef’s choice.

Substances were always involved, either of the liquid or flammable variety. The scraps of paper would be put in a bowl or hat and then one by one you would pull a scrap out.

Whatever was on that paper was the title of a poem that you had to write. After an unspecified amount of time, each scrap of paper would be pulled and each person present would have a pile of poems. All unique but sharing titles. Then you take turns reading your poems aloud.

This particular session was out at Justin’s family home. Nestled between a turf farm and the Queen’s River, this homestead is impossibly bucolic and inspirational. Magic oozes from the place.

A good friend Jim came along for a day hang. We altered our perspectives and then started “The Poetry Game”. All but one of those poems are lost to history. One survived.

Justin had written the phrase “Plaid Mumbo Tango” on his scrap of paper. I don’t often believe in telepathy but the proof is in the pudding.

We each read our respective “Plaid Mumbo Tango” stanzas. Normally I would leave to fate whether you listened or not, but since this is such a wonderful example of groupthink I am going to lay out the lyrics…then you can listen to the finished product if you are still on board.

Stanza One (Justin’s poem-Justin on vocals, Justin on electric guitar, drum programming, 4-track mastery)

Plaid mumbo tango/plaid mumbo tango/plaid mumbo tango/And I’m shakin’ my baby

She say “Plaid Mumbo Tango”/She say “Plaid Mumbo Tango”

I had a sip and now I’m feelin’ fine/plaid mumbo tango/she say “Plaid Mumbo Tango”

“When you get up why don’t you drop me a line?”/Plaid mumbo tango/She say “Plaid Mumbo Tango”

I asked “Do you speak-a my lingo?/plaid mumbo tango/She say “Plaid Mumbo Tango”

Stanza Two (Brendan’s poem Pt. 1-me on vocals)

Hoo cha cha ya hoo/Hoo cha cha ya hoo

Here comes that famous man/Here come that only son/Here come that roller coaster/Here come Dress Shoe Gumshoe Private Eye/Hoo cha cha ya hoo

Don’t cross that famous dick/No double-crossin’ slick/If  Dress Shoe Gumshoe is on the track/You better watch your back

Stance Three or Chorus (Jim’s Poem-Brace yourself, this is genius-still me on vocals)

The girl from Ipanema met me in the cabana/She slipped me the film/It was straight from Havana

She slithered out of the leather and ordered a Pina Colada/Her girlfriend joined the table and performed on the Lady Madonna

Smoke I inhaled was racing my heart/A spy code relayed: Iguana/The night heat overwhelmed me/I awoke to Lola Falana

Stanza Four (Brendan’s poem Part Two-me on vocals some more)

Hoo cha cha ya hoo/Hoo cha cha ya hoo

Oh, he could find your short and curly in the comb of that barstool girlie/He’s not just a dick/He’s a walking, talking magic trick/That Dress Shoe Gumshoe really know his trade/Hoo cha cha ya hoo

Here come that dashing man/Here come that prodigal one/Here come that Sherlock Brain/Here come Dress Shoe Gumshoe/Hoo cha cha hoo cha cha ya hoo

If you mess with Dress Shoe Gumshoe/you will wind up in the can/‘coz Dress Shoe Gumshoe always gets his man

In some alternate universe where even my side projects got attention, this song would have had a goofy video and gone into late-night rotation on MTV.

Turf Farm Kings was extra secret, though, and forever lived on, singing against the backdrop of a little patch of green tucked behind a Colonial home and an ancient river.

Only three of us knew about it until today. Welcome to the club.

Here is “Plaid Mumbo Tango” by Turf Farm Kings.

My Secret Career 16: New Killer Of America

The drum track on this song makes no sense. But I made it and love it. 

I tried to follow Pimp Fu’s instructions with the drum machine but no matter how hard I tried the sequence would always start on the two instead of the one. So what I heard when I listened in headphones was NOT what came out when I attempted to transfer it to the 4-track. Imagine a drummer waking up mid song and still starting from the beginning.

After a thousand “fuck yous”, a million “you son of a bitches”, and a billion hands-thrown-up-in-frustration, I just recorded it anyway and tucked it in my growing collection of “almost” tracks. Listening to it made me dizzy.

Then one day a harmonica crossed my path.

Forty five minutes later, this monstrosity existed. Every sound you hear I made. Beware the Sisqo reference that perfectly dates this track.

Please try to enjoy “New Killer Of America” from Bomer-B’s 2000 classic, “Out Of Charactor: Act I: Id City”.

My Secret Career 17: Sadaharu Oh, 1998

1998.

I was apartment sitting. This temporary transplant left me shaken somehow, as if the removal of everything familiar to me had left an actual hole in my life, a week long cliff I had come upon so suddenly I couldn’t avoid falling over the edge.

My other careers were roaring. I was churning out weekly tongue-in-cheek investigative articles about urban legends on this newfangled thing called the internet. I would get off the phone with the head of the New York City sewer system, having asked if albino alligators were really down there, pop out of the ping pong table/bean bag chair office, hit two commercial auditions and two tv/film ones, then write the copy promoting my latest AOL Urban Legends scoop on the subway ride back to the office.

Someone’s cat needed to be fed though so I was going to be living in Manhattan for a brief spell. Alone. I packed my 4-track and my acoustic guitar up and trekked over. 

And the void that opened up in front of me resulted in the following song.

Named after Japanese great Sadaharu Oh who played his whole career with the Yomiuri Giants. Oh hit 868 home runs, still by far the most home runs by any professional baseball player in any league ever.

But over here, all we knew was Babe Ruth. Hank Aaron. Willie Mays. Ted Williams. This guy outdid them all but viewed from a certain perspective it didn’t even count because it wasn’t in the Major Leagues.

The name popped into my head and it seemed the perfect way to describe where I was at in my life. I should have been on top of the world. By any metric I was a success. I should have been resting on my laurels. Instead I was sweating on a white leather couch and wrestling demons that had won a long time ago.

There in that strange apartment, mimicking a life that wasn’t mine, I wrote and recorded this song at three in the New York morning. If you listen all the way to the end, and you might be the first other than me to do so, you will hear a yell from way below, out on the street, a faint intrusive voice that perfectly reflected how far away from myself I had gotten.

This song was about me and a couple of people but I could barely look myself in the mirror because my soul was out roaming empty desolate streets. 

Proud of the song itself but listening to it is like stepping off into the void over and over and over and o-

Sadaharu Oh. 

My Secret Career, Chapter Thirteen: Good Bye New York

I flew to Los Angeles for good (or so I thought) on September 11th, 2003. The ticket was dirt cheap, for obvious reasons. I had no idea what lay in store for me out West but I was determined to mark the occasion. 

So I decided to write a song on that flight. By the time I landed I had the lyrics and melody to "Good Bye New York". It is all I have to say about that day.

It took me six years to record it properly. 

Produced by John Would, drums by Mitch Kink, guitars John Would, bass and piano Jonathan Leahy. 2009 Santa Monica.

To commemorate the release, I played a concert on September 11th of 2009 at The Bootleg Theater as The Congress Of American Musicologists. 

Backed by the incredible Elemenopy, joined by Jen DM of Hi Fashion, Pimp Fu, and Shark of The Wild Colonials. It is a beautiful memory.

Here is “Good Bye New York” by The Congress Of American Musicologists. This one is an anthem. It’s also for my Dad.

Good Bye New York

Soon I will be taking my last train/It's mainly in the evening that it can all seem in vain

When the pain is rainin' canes on ya but you don't have your legs no more

You've got to make your Exit before slippin' out the Backstage door

So floor it, Honey

Unpop that effin' cork

Let's celebrate

Good Bye New York

They may have made mountains of your buildings/They made you walk the bridges home

They made you grieve in tiny boxes/They made you wanna hide your Cadillac chrome

They blackmailed you with severed heads/They made unreasonable demands

Too much tension

Too much torque

Uncelebrate

Good Bye New York

From Grand Army Plaza up to Harlem

Flies a scarred and angry Stork

He cries, "It is Today! They are Forgiven!

Here's a New America Baby, say hello!

Good Bye New York!"

I could close my heart off to Them/Write 'em off or back 'em down

I could hate all of their Brethren/But that's not how we do it in this town

They have to wait 'til Paradise/We exalt our Virgins now

Or were they really after raisins?

Either way I'd have shown them how

This road must fork

Good Bye New York

So floor it, Honey

Unpop that 'effin cork

Let's celebrate!

Good Bye New York!

My Secret Career (Zero): Mission Statement

I have a confession to make. To make it, I have to go back to the beginning. The beginning of my other careers.

I have been a professional actor since 1989 and an amateur much longer. I have worked in children’s theater, college theater, educational theater, musical theater, regional theater, Off-Off-Off Broadway theater, in commercials, and on film and television. 

I’ve also written professionally all along the way, first as a playwright for the children’s theater I acted with, next as a tongue-in-cheek investigative journalist on the fledgling internet, then years as a freelance copywriter, and finally as an actual screenwriter.

Amongst all the paying gigs were countless unpaid gigs that furthered both endeavors.

If I were a baseball player, I could hang my hat on the fact that I made it to the major leagues. Was I Big Papi? Was I Pedro Martinez? Was I Ted Williams? No. But I did what I set out to do and I am very proud of the body of work that I continue to achieve. I am by no means done with those careers.

However, running alongside these other careers is a different career. A secret one. One I always considered to be as integral to who I am, as deep a wish, in fact even deeper. 

Music. 

The fact that I have to announce this to the world instead of it being evident is proof that I haven’t done myself justice in this regard. In some alternate universe, my actions would have been all the explanation needed. The music I have created over the past forty years (!!!) would be widely available for public consumption.

But this just simply isn’t the case. Now, to my credit I did regularly perform live music over the years but it was always very informal, an obvious sideline activity. However music is not my sideline. It is my lifeline, my timeline, my bloodline.

These tracks, with a few notable exceptions, were recorded at home in ramshackle fashion. They are not professional affairs. I think of them as audio diary entries. But crude as they are, they were always intended to be HEARD. So I am humbly asking you to lend me your ear.

I only wish I had done this sooner. I’m tired of keeping this secret. So without further ado, welcome to My Secret Career. 

Music to follow…

My Secret Career 12: Generation Ex-Wife

This is the closest thing to a Stones riff that I will ever write.

Early on in my time in LA, tossed off, but still one of my favorites. Helped by Jon Leary who programmed the drums and played the bass. Mean-spirited but fun, a nasty romp, not a difficult one to decipher.

I guess I needed to vent a bit. Really the title didn’t even refer to my ACTUAL ex-wife.

Here is “Generation Ex-Wife” by High School Hero.

My Secret Career 14: My First ALBUM, Bull Cancer…Meets The Brown Recluse Of Hwy. 54

Rough but ready.

I wrote my first album in 1999. I started it in North Carolina, expanded it in Santa Fe, and finished it in Brooklyn.

Although I had been writing songs at the rate of more than an album per year for almost ten years, I hadn’t actually written a group of songs that were an ALBUM.

But Bull Cancer was different. IS different. If you take the time to listen to this whole album, and I truly hope you do, you will find that it is, in the truest sense of the word. A CONCEPT album.

The order of the songs is specific, they fit like puzzle pieces one after another. The entire thing is a message. When I finished “Go To LA”, I knew that was it, that what had been a growing collection had just gotten an exclamation point. It is sequenced with purpose, written with purpose, and performed with every ounce of my skill and emotion.

I have often considered the idea of re-recording these songs, to flesh them out, to give them the full studio treatment. Involve drums. Keyboards. Amplifiers. And maybe I will some day. But more often than not I listen and I can’t imagine changing a single sound.

Here is Bull Cancer…Meets The Brown Recluse of Hwy. 54. Three cities, twelve songs, one sound.

For Melody Dawn Garren

My Secret Career 13: 70’s Futureman

All of a sudden I am a cartoon character. I have a rap alias. I have abs. 

2000. All kinds of cousin energy associated with this one. As a joke, I decided to grow a mustache before my cousin Mike’s wedding. I would show up to the rehearsal dinner and he would be horrified that his wedding photos would be marred by my crazy facial hair. Then I planned to shave the morning of the wedding! Mission accomplished, joke landed. 

I also had recently bought an infamous short sleeve tight black shirt with bright red flames on the shoulders. When my cousin Josh (aka Spazz Pu, the trumpet player for the Army Jazz Band) saw me with my shirt and mustache, he exclaimed, “Who are you, 70’s Futureman?”

Little did he know what that comment would bring into the world.

Now, it was during this time that Timothy (Pimp Fu, Spazz Pu’s older brother) and I were living together in Brooklyn, hitting the gym every morning at 5 and being maniacal about physical fitness. To this day I have never been in such good shape. We were already in our own hermetically sealed world.

By the time we got back to Brooklyn from the wedding, we had somehow concocted an entire cartoon universe inspired by “70’s Futureman”.

Here is the synopsis:

70’s Futureman is our superhero. His El Camino allows him to time travel. But only one way. Back to the 1970’s. His trusty sidekick Warp Speed-O can run at light speed but has trouble slowing down, so he often overruns his targets.

They protect Id City from Master Mindgame and his henchman Hench. Master Mindgame has invented an Infantizer-Ray which will allow him to turn everyone in Id City into a baby.

70’s Futureman is, of course, his true identity. But like all super heroes he has an alter ego. Lee Minors, billionaire playboy gambling addict Coke-fiend. Warp Speed-O by day is known as Jack Chassis, Lee Minors’ trusted scientific right-hand man.

Throw in Id City Mayor Sid Itty-Bitty, Beelzebubblicious the gorgeous super-heroine who joins 70’s Futureman in his quest to clean up the city, the stalwart Id City Eagle Newspaper which chronicles his exploits, and, well, you get the idea.

Id City became a catch-all for us, the repository of all our burgeoning creativity and energy. In a fever (after lifting weights and downing coffee) we recorded a suite of songs that existed in this made up world.

Alter-ego inside alter-ego inside alter-ego.

It must be said that Timothy is responsible for all of this. He had the nerve to rap?!? To dedicate his talent to hip hop?!? A white kid from Maine?!? He created the insane musical backdrop for our imaginary Id City.

From Bomer-B’s 2000’s double album Out Of  Charactor, please enjoy!

1. 70’s Futureman

2. Lee Minors

3. Master Mindgame

Thanks to Bomer-B and Pimp Fu, Id City is forever safe.

My Secret Career 9: QE3

Here again my career and My Secret Career directly intertwine.

I had been acting in readings of “Searching For Certainty” by my cousin Mike O’Malley for several years in the early Aughts. We did it many times in New York City at different venues, at the Williamsburg Theater Festival in The Berkshires, in Cleveland as a workshop, and finally and most impactful for me, as an actual theatrical run in Los Angeles in winter 2003.

It’s a GREAT play. 

My character was a songwriter who is stuck in a rut, pining away for a girl he had a platonic friendship with at the tail end of his college years. He comes to New York City to try and mend fences with her after he learns that she is newly divorced. 

On arriving in LA to begin rehearsals, I headed straight to Mike’s house. He gave me a mix CD (!!!) of songs he thought were applicable to my character’s emotional state. He also challenged me to write a song about the woman my character was in love with: Betsy.

So, like so many other things in my life, the following song is solely thanks to Mike.

Here is “QE3” by High School Hero. 

My Secret Career: Everybody Hateful

All of a sudden it is 2000.

I am living in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn with my cousin Timothy. I had somehow secured a basement apartment with two “bedrooms” and Timothy agreed on a whim to move from Portland, Maine to the Big Apple. The quotation marks around “bedrooms” should give you an indication of the size and luxury of this haven.

This is where an intersection of my real careers with my secret career magically happens. A playwright I worked with gifted me an old drum machine he had no use for anymore. I hadn’t touched the thing. It stared at me from a shelf, intimidating me.

But Timothy was undaunted. He had been programming drum machines since the ‘80s. This was just one he hadn’t seen. He had also recently created an alter-ego. Pimp Fu, aka Poppa Foxtrot.

I would leave the apartment to go into the city for an audition and by the time I returned he would have recorded something insane to show me. I looked forward to each one.

I immediately began incorporating drumbeats into the songs I was composing. The sense of darkness and dread that pervaded my writing to that point evaporated and my music started to be what it had heretofore never been: 

Fun.

Timothy taught me as best he could but the mechanics of the drum machine essentially eluded me. By accident I would create something I liked and then I would pick a riff I’d had and see if it fit. The lyrics now might happen spontaneously instead of as deep, dark personal, finely-crafted revelations.

I had never been experimental in how I recorded. I am not a skilled enough musician to “jam”, so my songs were painstaking affairs that were eked into existence by the skin of my teeth.

Now a song could occur out of the blue.

One such song came to me in a dream. In the dream I was in a band playing a Clash style reggae punk song called “Everybody Hateful”, clearly a ripoff of the actual Clash song “Hateful” from “London Calling”.

Well, I attempted this song. But my months-long relationship with the drum machine meant that I couldn’t really predict what would happen once I started recording.

So what began in my sleep as a Clash-tiche became something entirely different. To this day I have never performed this song again. Someone else would have to teach it to me. The riff of the song has been played exactly two times, each take used in the recording you are about to (hopefully) hear.

Et, voilà. Bomer-B creates the latest dance craze, the “Everybody Hateful”.

And it’s all because of Pimp Fu.

And Steve Rossiter at Axis Sound. I may have Produced this album but Axis Sound Executive Produced it and where I come from, that is the senior credit. It would sound nothing like what you are about to hear without Steve Rossiter. Thank you.

My Secret Career 8a: The 4-Track ‘95, or Onion Plays A Solo

Sidebar: I believe I got the nickname “Onion” from a  kid in elementary school who said my name sounded like “Bread ‘n onion”. It stuck. To the point that in high school soccer games, teammates would call “Onion, I’m open” when they wanted me to pass the ball.

This is the story of the terrifying moment when I first attempted a guitar solo.

I had been gifted the Tascam 424 4-track (see the whole story in My Secret Career 8b) I had barely touched it. It intimidated me.

I have never been a lead guitar player. In The Mahoneys, the other guys would encourage me to rip off a solo during rehearsal but I literally didn’t have the first idea how to do it.

You have to remember, I didn’t spend hours and hours learning to play. I picked up the guitar with the sole idea of writing songs. I would hear a melody in my head and then attempt to accompany myself. I didn’t attempt a scale until I was 27 years old and had been playing full time for five years. 

But the day came when I left a space on a recording where a guitar solo might rest.

Several takes and nervous breakdowns later, I came up with the following. But you’ll have to listen to the whole song to hear my shaky lead debut. It’s a solo approximately three seconds long.

Such A Place, from 1995’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion.

My Secret Career 8b: The TASCAM 424 4-Track, Circa 1995

Fecund Youth is no more. But Justin and I continue to collaborate. After a year at American University, Justin returned to attend URI so we saw each other frequently. Or rather, infrequently, as I was thoroughly ensconced in production after production in the theater department and Justin was heavily involved in his fraternity and actually having to study.

Somewhere in here he made a purchase that was to utterly transform my secret career. He bought a 4-track home recording unit. I know it was a TASCAM, I believe it was the 424. Seemingly out of nowhere he had recorded an album: The Z-Digs “Scared Crows”. It’s incredible.

We cut a few tracks together, here and there, with me singing his songs, but my focus was on acting. I can honestly say that during this period I had no intention of pursuing music. I hadn’t learned to play guitar yet, I wrote poetry but the melody machine that runs 24/7 in my head hadn’t come to life yet.

But then I went to France and the removal of the theater department as my daily routine meant that I had creative energy to spare. And that was that. From that moment on a great deal of my psychic energy was devoted to the excavating and building of songs. For good or ill.

Cut to ‘95. Off to grad school, Justin gave me the TASCAM 424 4-track. The ramifications were immediate and long lasting. 

For one thing, everything I had recorded to that point had either been with a live band, or in someone else’s studio, or even more crude, into a boombox.

Now I could build songs track by track. For several years even this capability intimidated me and mostly I stuck to hitting record and strumming and singing at the same time. But here and there I would attempt to layer in a second guitar, a harmony vocal, a tambourine hit by a pencil…

I was stuck in this phase for seven years. I didn’t have a drum machine so I couldn’t build beats. I was limited. 

What resulted was a claustrophobic sound, the sound of someone trying not to bother his neighbors, the sound of someone hiding. I began to tire of my own process. All I wanted was a band. I had one for a time in NYC  in ‘95 but it fizzled out after one show. I didn’t realize it at the time but I would never have a band again.

I have a hard time listening to this era of my catalog. I was so unhappy. Every song is another way of saying so but hidden in elaborate cyphers, as if I was afraid of revealing myself to even myself. 

I imagine myself as my only fan, listening to the new album and thinking, “How could he know? It seems like it was made just for me.” 

In almost every respect, it was.

Here is “Beauty is Ordinary by Onion”.

My Secret Career 7: Farewell Rhode Island, From Theatre-By-The-Sea, Summer 1994

There are times in your life when you suddenly find yourself thrown in with a new group of people. Even though it is a new dynamic it immediately asserts itself. Rituals are born. It’s like watching a cable bridge get built in hi-speed photography. First there was nothing. Then, a bridge.

My 1994 summer had a bridge like that. I don’t remember how we were flung together, Tanya, Mike, Terri and I, but it happened.

We gathered in an apartment on Main Street. It was not the hustle and bustle of today’s Main Street, Wakefield. There was no ice cream place, no theater, no restaurants to speak of. It was a graveyard at night.

This meant that I could play my acoustic guitar and sing at the top of my lungs. I was grieving many things that summer: my band was gone, my acting job was gone, my Providence life was over, and all my old wounds seemed to rear their ugly heads at once. 

I had torn my life down and swore I was going to New York City. But I wasn’t there yet. I necessarily had to regress, move back in with my parents, go back to work at the group homes, go back, go back, go back.

The only positive about going back was discovering new friendships with people I went to high school with. And they humored me in my need to share my music. They served as an audience when I guess I needed one. In fact, they were the entire crowd at the last musical performance I would give in Rhode Island. Even to this day.

And, fittingly enough, it was at Theatre-By-The-Sea.

A family friend had taken over the adjacent restaurant at TBTS. I knew I was going to New York and I wanted to capture the acoustic sound I was in the middle of cultivating. I needed a recording that would serve as an audition tape, a demo that I could use to get acoustic gigs once I got settled in the city. She agreed to let me use the cabaret room to record myself.

One afternoon, we all trooped over to Matunuck. In my memory it is only Linda the chef, Tanya, Mike, Terri and I who are there. I powered up the PA, set up Justin’s Tascam 4-track, and played a show. For four people. 

The tape ran out on the last song. I didn’t even bother to bring a second tape. So if you listen (and you will probably be the fifth person ever to do so) you will hear “Your Favorite Song” get cut off mid verse.

I’ve done many shows since, each important to me in their own way. But that day was monumental for me. My friends showed up for me. They listened. They cheered me on. 

I’ve never had fans so I don’t know what that’s like. Sometimes friends are enough.

So, without further ado, please let me share with you my final appearance on a Rhode Island stage. It serves as the back half of an album by my moniker at the time: “Rhode Island Red: Cocksure?”.

The album comprises the tracks I recorded solo at Danger Studios, the tracks I recorded for “True West”, and this, a concert at a place I’d been going to since I was a kid. A place where I had my first Equity acting gig. A place I had been a waiter.

I’d been singing to my new friends all summer. Then they held up the cables and built me a bridge out of town.

My Secret Career 6: The True West EP, Winter ‘94

My time in Providence only lasted two calendar years. It felt like a lifetime.

Sidebar # 1: Rent. I shared a huge three bedroom apartment with two guys and we paid $450 a month. NOT EACH. $150 a month. It is the last time in my life that I wasn’t worried about where next month’s rent was coming from. I made my rent in a week at the children’s theater. This is how life should be for everybody.

The children’s theater was an incredible experience. Most days we did two shows, either morning and afternoon at the same school, or morning and afternoon at different schools. That’s approximately 720 shows in two years. A crucible of growth for an actor…those kids will let you know if they aren’t entertained. 

In and around this, I was rehearsing with The Mahoneys, doing staged readings at Brown, RIC, URI and Alias Stage, auditioning for anything and everything, and writing songs at a furious rate.

Then in the winter of ‘93, I was asked to be in “True West”. The director had heard my songs and wanted to use them in the pre-show to set the mood. She wanted to feature “Lean Hard Ghost”, “Passed Lamenting’s Past”, and “Dilemma”.

But rough live band recordings wouldn’t really fit the atmosphere so I reached out to an old college friend. Her husband was a guitar virtuoso and had a home studio. I went over there one free Saturday and we laid these three songs down.

He used a drum machine, played bass and lead guitar, and I played rhythm and sang. My old friend did backing vocals on “Passed Lamenting’s Passed”. 

Sidebar # 2: The Mahoneys refused to say the title “Passed Lamenting’s Past” when deciding what song to play next. They referred to it as “P.L.P.”, which is why it is labeled as such on “The Mahoneys: Live From The 20th Century”. That always made me laugh, them denouncing my pretention. God, we had a lot of fun in that basement.

A week passed. “True West” was about to open. We loaded the three finished tracks (the ones you will hopefully click on and listen to later) into the sound deck, teched the show, and that’s how my three songs played before an American theater classic.

It was odd to be backstage preparing to be someone else and hear my own voice floating out over the theater. I had to shape my pre-show prep to include that odd intrusion. Again I fantasized about an actual release of music, pressing vinyl in a rush to coincide with the opening of the play.

In an imaginary world where I had representation and management, this would have been a publicist’s dream! Actor writes songs inspired by Sam Shepard’s masterwork! Buy your copy in the lobby!

But alas, this aspect of my career was to remain secret, even with the songs blaring out over an unsuspecting crowd. 

The security and ease of my monthly bottom line had started to feel like a trap. A life almost entirely made up of rehearsal, performance and songwriting, but my ambition was curdling all of that sweet cream. 

Like Lee in “True West”, I longed for something bigger. Longed for achievement and recognition. Longed to jump into the slipstream of money that trailed behind mainstream American success.

I wanted to hit the big time.

Here are “Lean Hard Ghost”, “Passed Lamenting’s Past”, and “Dilemma”. Imagine you are in a darkened theater in the winter of ‘93/‘94 waiting to see “True West”!

Sidebar # 3: Whenever I do a play, I invariably wind up writing a song or two inspired by the experience. In this case, it immediately turned into The Mahoneys one epic song, “Angst, Or The Ballad Of Cricket Hicks”. It tells the tale of a drifter who comes back from the desert an avenging angel, looking for all those who done him wrong.

Within a couple months of “True West” closing, I had moved out of my Providence apartment, given my notice at Looking Glass, done my final children’s show of the school year, and moved back in with my parents for the summer.

I needed that $150 a month to get ready to move to New York City. The Big Apple might have been due but I was headed true west.

My Secret Career 5: Always Leaving Providence, or Brendan Goes Into A Recording Studio For The First Time

1993.

I somehow live in Providence. I am somehow in a band. I have somehow willed myself into being a semi-decent guitar player. But there is one song of mine that The Mahoneys just CANNOT get a handle on.

“Always Leaving Providence” would ultimately elude us as a band. It would also ultimately be the spur that led me to make the leap and move to New York City. I wrote it after one too many local artist had claimed that they planned to make that leap. But they’d lived in Providence forever, when did they think they were getting out?

The song gnawed at me. Every time I played it I felt implicated. The people in the song claim they have big plans but never go after them. Was this going to be me? Talking a big game but backing zero up?

The song gnawed at the band as well. Every week we tried to get the thing on its feet. Every week we failed. Or, more aptly put, I failed. I could never explain the structure of the song in any fundamental way. I could only play it to my own internal rhythm.

By this time, we already had recorded versions of every song we were able to play. But “Always Leaving Providence” could not be captured. I was also itching to play acoustically in the city. So I decided to go into the studio.

1993. Or early ‘94, not sure. Looked through the classifieds in the Phoenix, the arts circular that dirtied my fingers every week the entire time I lived in Providence. Found an ad for “Danger Studios”. Called. Booked a day.

I lugged my amp and guitar down there in the snow. I spent the day wrestling three songs. One was an instrumental that I think is the first piece of music I ever wrote on guitar called “Horizon Mother”. It became an intro to “Cyrano”, one of the first songs I wrote in my Providence apartment. The third was “Always Leaving Providence”.

Both “Horizon Mother” and “Always Leaving Providence” were solo acoustic recordings. But I wanted to layer another guitar track into “Cyrano”. I played my acoustic through my amp, putting a phase effect onto it, which causes a kind of cascade.

I distinctly remember the engineer guy rolling his eyes and saying something snide to another employee when asked about his day. It was difficult to get the two guitar tracks synced and my lack of experience meant that I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted. The dude gave off serious Guitar Center vibes. 

I had the last laugh, though, because “Cyrano” came out great. I walked out of there with a master of what I considered my first solo single: A-side “Always Leaving Providence”, B-side “Horizon Mother/Cyrano”.

As is the case with all of my musical projects, it remained hypothetical. The Mahoneys continued to attempt “Always Leaving Providence”, but mostly the song began to envelop me a little bit more each time I sang it. Those desperate dreamers trapped within, trapped in Providence, pointed accusatory fingers at me, saying, “You’re no better than us. You’ll never leave. You’re trapped, too.”

By the fall I was living in Harlem, the cassette of  “Always Leaving Providence” tucked into my backpack as I tried to prove myself wrong before it was too late.

Here is “Always Leaving Providence”.  And here is the overlong B-Side “Horizon Mother/Cyrano”.

Years later I would have the ultimate revenge on that engineer, as this version of “Providence” was chosen to appear in the Showtime series “Brotherhood”. He got paid by the hour to help me out and I still get royalty checks on that motherfucker.

My Secret Career 4: The Mahoneys Play The Ocean Mist

I left for France in the fall of 1991 suffering from Lyme's Disease. While in France, I decided to buy the cheapest acoustic guitar I could find and learn how to play. By the spring of 1992, I am regularly strumming at French bonfires. I am terrible but determined.

I return from France in June.

That summer is eventful. I got asked to be in "South Pacific" at Theater By The Sea. This was a dream come true for me, since I'd grown up on musicals in Matunuck. To begin my professional acting career there seemed too good to be true.

The end of the summer brought another theatrical blast from the past, as I booked a job with Looking Glass Theater, a touring children's theater company who had entertained me at South Road Elementary School as a child. We drove the van, loaded and unloaded the sets and costumes, taught the kids their special parts, and put on a show two times a day, five times a week. I was also cast in a play at Alias Stage, an incredible work called "Kind Ness" by Ping Chong. I was doing two shows a day and rehearsing at night.

Parallel to this was my part time job. I worked for a company called Perspectives which ran a number of group homes in Rhode Island. The residents had various developmental challenges and our job was to facilitate their daily lives, both in the home and at whatever jobs they had. It was a very intense job.

I had started work there the previous summer in anticipation of going to France. I met a number of very cool people and enjoyed myself very much but then I got Lyme's Disease in the middle of the summer and I basically had to go on bed rest in order to get ready to go to France.

When I finished up "South Pacific" and got the Looking Glass Theater job, I knew I could pick up shifts here and there at Perspectives so I got back on the payroll. It was there that I reconnected with John Mahoney. We had gotten close enough the previous summer that when I gathered all my friends for a goodbye concert (Buffalo Tom at Club Baby Head) he and a number of his siblings came.

Somewhere in here I started writing songs. I don't remember most of them and didn't record any of them. But one day I was hanging out with another friend who worked at Perspectives and who was the leader of a very popular local band called Super Bug. He pulled out his guitar and I overcame massive shyness and sang one of my brand new compositions. I had only been playing guitar in earnest for about nine months at this point and I'm sure it sounded terrible but he encouraged me. He said I should start a band.

I can honestly say this thought hadn't occurred to me until that very moment. I guess I still thought that somehow Justin, Tom, Chris and I would make Fecund Youth happen and I would just get to go back to being a singer. But the thought stuck in my head.

Cut to later that summer. Word spreads through the Perspectives grapevine that three guys have been jamming and they are looking for a singer. I bring my electric guitar to a small garage space off of High Street. There I meet up with Pete and Rob, two Perspectives employees I have met a couple of times and Neal, a non-Perspectives person who just so happens to be good friends with John Mahoney.

That lineup lasted about nine months, we played one gig, at 3's in Newport. I couldn't believe I was in another band. We called ourselves One Man Out because someone was always missing from rehearsal. Then the drummer disappeared, we think to escape police action. We recruited another Perspectives employee, Steve Clary, who I had known for years via a URI theater woman he'd dated. I'd been to Steve's house to see his band Busful of Witches play in the basement for a theater party.

It was like Ringo joining The Beatles. All the overcompensation we'd been exerting to carry the drummer led to an explosion once we got someone who could play. Our sound was transformed overnight. 

We needed a new name. Nothing would stick. Then we got invited to play our first gig, a benefit concert being held at a Perspectives building, organized by John Mahoney and his family. As a gag we thought it would be funny if we called ourselves The Mahoneys for the gig. It stuck.

Then I got to step on ANOTHER legendary Matunuck stage that I had forever wanted to trod. The Ocean Mist. Again Perspectives was throwing a benefit to raise money. We were excited to be asked to play. There is no footage of this night. If anyone took pictures, I don't have them. 

So I have no proof when I say that we destroyed that stage. But I know it to be true. By this point we were a tightly coiled unit, and we could play our songs in whatever style we felt, depending on the moment. We would pull waaaaay back, rev waaaaaay back up, it was all instinct and feel but it came out of being very well rehearsed. I am very proud of that night.

As with Fecund Youth, I had dreams of The Mahoneys developing a local following and then going for the big time. I believe we could have done it. But life intervened. Pete moved to Alaska, I moved to New York, and The Mahoneys were no more.

The following recordings were recorded live in Steve's basement to a four-track. These are essentially what you would have heard had you been at the Mist that night. We hung a couple of mikes and let 'er rip. They make up an album I call simply, "The Mahoneys: Live From The 20th Century". 

Like I wrote in the imaginary liner notes to this album, in the summer of 1993, we were a great band. 

 

 

My Secret Career 3: Fecund Youth Accepts One Final Mission

Fecund Youth makes one more appearance in my own personal discography. 

In 2017 I settled on the name Sun Zed as an entity to release music under. I did make music while I thought of myself as that name but I never released any of it. This is a pattern with me. One piece of music spans many eras, the song “Hitler’s Chalet”.

The story of the song "Hitler's Chalet" goes waaaaaaaay back. Long before I ever saw "Inglorious Basterds", I dreamt that I was to infiltrate Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat. The dream was vivid, with me riding up into the Bavarian Alps, formulating a plan to assassinate Hitler and thus put an end to WW2.

I could comb back through my dream journals to prove that I didn't crib this idea from Quentin Tarantino. My lawyers are still trying to get some money out of him for theft of intellectual property. I suspect that the glowing interior of the suitcase in "Pulp Fiction" was actually a page from my diary.

I had attempted to record a different song, with Cashel playing bass and lead guitar. I worked very hard at it, only to find that I had played the underlying structure incorrectly and now the lyrics didn't fit anymore. It sat on the hard drive for several years.

Then, and I am not really sure how this happened, I remembered the dream about Hitler's chalet. In the dream I was all alone. In the song, I rope Fecund Youth into the assassination plot. Quick as a wink, I scribbled new lyrics out, and finished the song. Here are the lyrics (such as they are) to "Hitler's Chalet" from Sun Zed:

Hitler's Chalet

Just another old man on a mountain top/Made me so mad I just about blew my top

The sidecar motorbike was vanished by the valet/Came back and ushered me into Hitler's chalet

We ain't got time to bleed/We only move at top speed

We need to breed/That's why we dropped our seed/"Fecund Youth!" is the creed!

Tommy D's on the parapet/Circling the drones

Christner's in the moat/Drilling in to cut the phones

J-Man is en route from the jet/If his parachute deploys before he hits the Rhone/He won't even get wet

Me, I'm serving up drinks in my rented suit/I'm about to drop the pills/Into the champagne boot

Sprinting down the hallway with a bloody corkscrew/Shaved off that stupid mustache too!

Well, who the fuck are you?

Here's Hitler's Chalet, by Sun Zed. But Fecund Youth would have covered the shit outta this song, right in between “King Of Rock” and “Fight For Your Right”. Or maybe this is Sun Zed covering an old Fecund Youth chestnut? Who can say anymore…

My Secret Career 2: Fecund Youth 2023, or "Hey Chris!"

Fecund Youth is no more. Founding member Chris Christner passed away in 2019 and it just wouldn't be the same without him. 

Christner was the definition of a gentle giant. He was the last one to join the band and the first of us to shuffle off this mortal coil. Which, by the way, was the name of a band I am sure he knew the entire discography of and had opinions about.

And that's what this post is about. Before he joined the band, I barely knew Christner. By the time we left high school he was one of my best friends. He made me mix tapes of some of the weirdest out there music you will ever hear. We often disagreed vehemently with each other about this or that musically but that was the whole point. It was always a BLAST to talk music with him.

He loved all the punk music that we were into and emulating as a band, but he also put Blue Oyster Cult, Frank Zappa and Emerson, Lake and Palmer on tapes for me. He defended Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, a stance I still can't quite believe he was willing to argue. And every time I hear “Night Moves”, I think, you know what? Maybe Christner was right?

He loved prog rock, crazy shit that I'd never heard of. Often our conversations would start with "Hey Brendan" or "Hey Chris" and a lengthy deep dive into some song or band usually followed. I always called him Christner, EXCEPT when saying "Hey Chris".

I was deeply impressed that he simply decided to become a bass player in order to play our songs. Tom and Justin showed him how to play the songs, note by note, fret change by fret change, (even though he somehow started playing on a fret-less bass) and within a couple of months, he didn't need their help anymore. 

In 2018 we knew Christner was ill. By some strange convergence, it was clear that Tom, Justin and I might be on the East Coast at the same time that spring/early summer. I floated the idea that we might try to get together to play. Maybe Christner would be able to make the trip?

Probably against medical advice, he decided to do it. Fecund Youth would ride again. Justin's old friend was a drummer (we never had a steady one) and we decided to meet in Connecticut and rent a rehearsal space and play.

I am very glad that we did, even though it was clear that it was a lot for Christner to undertake. Even still, the guys ran through a ton of material, some old that I took the mic for, some new that Justin sang.

That night, Tom, Christner and I slept in sleeping bags in Justin's basement like it was a sleepover back in the day, laughing in the dark, full grown men on a teenage mission.

I was unable to attend Christner’s funeral. A death in my family occurred and the funerals were on the same day, across the country from one another. It upsets me that I couldn’t have been in two places at once. 

Cut to 2023. Again, Justin is stateside, visiting family. I now live in Rhode Island. We met up. And for the first time ever, I wrote something that seemed to me to be a Fecund Youth song. You have to understand, in this band, I was the singer and occasional lyricist. I had never actually PLAYED a Fecund Youth song on the guitar. I had never written the music, I had just sung along.

Here is Fecund Youth, improbably, again, with… 

Hey Chris! (FY '23)

It is just about hanging out with my three best friends. Who happen to be in a legendary band called Fecund Youth.

Tom and Justin actually both contributed to "Hey Chris! (FY '23)", Justin with the music of a section of the song which he played and recorded in five minutes in his brother-in-law's garage, and both of them yelling "Hey Chris!" along with me throughout the song. Each of them recorded those vocal parts across the pond and sent them via phone to me and I threw them into my computer and mixed them into the song. We'd come a long way from pressing record on a boombox.

I just wish Christner had been there to sing along with us. I really miss him.

for Shannon Louser Christner, Cameron Christner and Owen Christner and Christner

My Secret Career 1: Fecund Youth, The Band That Started It All

It would have been September of 1984. That's when my friendship with Tom began. Sophomore year.

Now, I knew of Tom, had known of Tom since junior high, but if I ever actually met him before randomly being sat next to him in math class, I don't remember it. How did I know of Tom? Well, Tom was infamous because in junior high he had shown up to school with a mohawk. This was when a haircut could get you in trouble. He had the same haircut as Joe Strummer of The Clash and it meant that he was a punk rocker. 

I can't stress how much this haircut reverberated through the school. It was DISCUSSED. "Did you see the kid with the mohawk?" Punk rock was not a widely known phenomenon at this time so the mere appearance of such a haircut was like an early version of the internet. It informed people. It was social commentary. 1982 was weird.

By the time I actually met Tom, he no longer had a mohawk. But I knew that he used to. Everybody knew. It was like the Scarlet Letter. We hit it off and somehow he invited me over to study for a test. And this is when I can honestly say that I was forever changed.

Now, up to that point, I had become obsessed with popular music. My childhood had revolved around our record player. We would put on musicals and act them out as we sang along. We also delved into my parents record collection, an odd assortment of folk music, Beatles albums, and Paul Simon. Then my tastes expanded once my older sister started listening to Casey Kasem's Top 40 broadcast. We would tape the show Sunday morning with our little hand held tape recorder and then wear it out during the week. “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” ruled supreme.

But punk rock? I knew The Clash song "Rock The Casbah". I knew about the episode of "Chips" which warned of violent punk bands. My notion of punk was also received via 60 Minutes style reportage. People were very worried about punk rock. To say you were a punk rocker was to reject all sense of decency and community. This nihilistic violent music was going to ruin the world.

The Clash had broken through to mass popularity but the underbelly of that success was very disturbing to mainstream early 1980's America. So when Tom invited me over, I knew I was entering a world that was foreign to me. I knew Tom was a punk. 

We climbed the stairs to his room. We opened math books and promptly ignored them. Now, I am probably misremembering because I always do, but I feel like Tom played DJ that first hang. Did he have a record player? I think he did. He put on a Minor Threat album.

Nothing prepared me for the sounds coming out of Tom's speakers. I looked at the album art the way a starving castaway might look at a gourmet meal. It looked homemade. It was so far away from the commercialized Top 40 music that I was familiar with that I almost suffered whiplash. 

What's more, Tom had an electric guitar in his room. A black Aria Pro 2. That he knew how to play. He flipped on a Ross Loudmouth amp, plugged in, and a distorted live guitar tone hit my eardrums for the first time. I had been to a couple of concerts (The Fixx, Squeeze) and my Mom taught guitar lessons, but that fuzz, that buzz, that distorted growl that came out of that black box literally altered the course of my life.

Sometime during that year, Tom and I "started a band". We called ourselves The FLAs, which stood for "Frustrated Landsacape Artists", a term our Humanities teacher Mrs. Franco had used to describe these poor painters who kept having to do portraits of rich bored royalty instead of the nature scenes they really wanted to be doing. We thought this was hilarious!

The first song we ever wrote together was called "Get Away". In fact, on the recording of that song that you are about to be subjected to, I announce the name of the band before I sing the first line. "This is the FLAs."

We spent several months writing and recording whenever we got the chance. And by "recording", I mean pressing record on my boombox and playing/singing live as the cassette rolled. I mean, you could see by looking at the Minor Threat album that these guys were just like us. They weren't seasoned musical professionals who had gone to the big city to make it. They were high school kids. They lived with their parents. If they could do it, why couldn't we?

A few months later, when I went to Tom's, he had invited Justin along. Justin also played guitar. He was joining the band. I had already been friends with Justin in junior high. We did a French project together that lives in infamy. We had hung out with a mutual friend on several occasions but we had not really continued to hang once we hit high school. We just weren't in any classes together. But it turns out that Tom and Justin had been flung together in a Latin and a history class and hit it off, much in the same way that Tom and I had in math.

Another phrase that a teacher had used was suggested as a name change to the band. Their history teacher (the incomparable Joe Laffey) was talking about a societal shift that happened during the French Revolution, maybe? He said that the conflict was between the crusty tired aristocracy and the "fecund youth".

The minute Tom, howling with laughter already, said, "Fecund Youth should be our band name", I was 100% on board. There were lots of punk bands out there with "Youth" in their name. Reagan Youth, Wasted Youth, Youth Of Today, Youth Brigade, Sonic Youth, it was a meme before memes. Our name was a subtle tweak on those, as we saw it, imbecilic slogans.

Fecund Youth. Say it five times fast it turns into a swear.

So the recordings that Tom and I had been making as The FLAs got co-opted. Justin learned the FLA songs and we became a three-piece. Sometime during junior year, Chris bought a bass specifically to join the band. He learned how to play our songs before he could actually play his instrument. We never got a regular drummer. But we rehearsed regularly and tried to concoct ways to play shows. Before Chris came on board, we played a party at another Tom’s house, opening for that Tom’s brother Steve’s group, who covered lots of hard rock and heavy metal. Eric Dwho lived down the road from me on guitar. They were pretty good, man. Erik S. drummed for us, too, a little bit, John B. joined on bass, and we attempted our songs. That was the first time I performed original music before an audience. I was instantly hooked.

This all was surrounded by the drudgery and magic of high school. Even when we weren't actually playing music, the band was an organizing principle in our lives. We were ALWAYS Fecund Youth. I designed posters. I drew album covers. I longingly looked at Chevy Econoline vans in used car circulars, imagining a barnstorm tour. If Minor Threat could do it, why couldn't we?

College loomed and I fantasized about not going, about turning Fecund Youth into a real band. I already planned on being an actor, why wouldn't I pursue something as reckless and uncertain as punk rock?

But Tom, Justin and Chris had other plans. They would be leaving Rhode Island to go off to college, while I would stay to attend URI. The idea of Fecund Youth lasted throughout our college years, however, with us getting together on breaks and playing, writing and recording more songs into my boombox, and even, on one memorable occasion, playing a New Year's Eve gig at the house I rented my junior year of college. 

All told we wrote a couple albums worth of material and amused ourselves for the better part of a decade. But more importantly, Tom and Justin showed me that writing a song was something someone like me could do. So eventually I begrudgingly picked up the guitar and began to write on my own. 

1984. Forty years of writing songs. And it all started with Fecund Youth. Here is unquestionably the very first moment of My Secret Career. Fecund Youth with Get Away.