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