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.