1984: Twin Cities Triple Crown

Has any city (or in this case two cities) had a year like Minneapolis had in 1984?

For those not in the know, the Triple Crown is an unofficial achievement in Major League Baseball. It occurs when a single player leads the league in the three significant offensive categories: home runs, runs batted in and batting average. In one hundred and forty eight seasons this has only happened eighteen times, or eight percent of the years.

Sport is easier to quantify than music. Concrete statistics can tell you definitively who performed at the highest level in athletic competition. But music is not so easily defined. Something can be hugely popular but not stand the test of time. Something can be the biggest seller in the land and also be timeless. Often popularity and artistic merit do not go hand in hand, but since it is all subjective, who is to say what is great and what is not?

I am here today to retroactively award a rare Triple Crown to Minneapolis/St. Paul (The Twin Cities) for the year 1984. It’s the 40th anniversary of the ultimate triumvirate…

Triple Crown, Part One: Prince, “Purple Rain”

Firstly, and most world changingly, Prince dropped

Purple Rain on June 25, 1984. “When Doves Cry” was released in May and the album took off like a rocket. Prince had primed the pump for this massive leap with a string of daring, tuneful, shocking and subversive albums. 

But “Purple Rain” was a different animal altogether. The movie came out a month after the release of the album and by fall of 1984, Prince was the most famous person on the planet. No one will EVER be as huge as Prince was that fall. Ever.

I won’t even waste your time making you listen to me rave. All you need to know is that it happened, it was earth-shattering, and one man made it happen.

And where did that meteor of a superstar live, breathe and create? Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Triple Crown, Part Two: Husker Du, “Zen Arcade”

Husker Du, much like Prince, had been carving out their very idiosyncratic niche since the beginning of the decade. Playing louder, harder, faster and more intently than any of their contemporaries, Husker Du broke all the rules of “hardcore”. 

It’s mostly been swept under the rug, but early American punk music scenes were hardly the Left Wing empathy fests that people seem to retroactively misremember. The speed and intensity of the music drew violent, angry, close-minded crowds. Homosexuality was not celebrated. Skinheads came out looking for fights. 

Zen Arcade was released on July 3, 1984. A double album with extended jams, psychedelica and guitar solos, it was everything the punk underground supposedly rejected. But it landed like a hand grenade in a foxhole.

Their record label (the notoriously corrupt and litigious SST) was taken by surprise when it became as popular as it was. You couldn’t get it. Local record stores wrote down orders in pencil and reached out to SST in vain.

And then there was the music itself. It still sounds like it is happening live in front of your face. Angry, melodic, sprawling, howling, vengeful, spiteful, agonized spiritual distress.

Like every other aspect of underground music at the time, the sexuality of the group’s songwriting duo was a widely known but still covered up secret. I know many men and women from that scene who felt a sense of kinship and community, who were liberated from the constraints of a very conservative popular culture. 

The impact this double album had on underground music was seismic. All of a sudden you could write a fifteen minute instrumental with guitar feedback looped backwards and just plop it right next to a shimmering acoustic folk song.

Rules? Ha, we spit on your rules. The sound of Husker Du can be heard in scores of early ‘90’s “indie” bands. Hell, the very word “indie” came about in part due to the Huskers and their fiery approach to the music business. Emo, nu-metal, indie, you ask the purveyors of those genres what they were listening to in their formative years and “Zen Arcade” is bound to be on the tip of their tongue.

Triple Crown, Part Three: The Replacements, “Let It Be”

My bias is well known. Not only are The Replacements my favorite band, but I believe them to be the greatest American rock and roll band of all time. Including their triumphant comeback tour and subsequent re-releases, their career spans almost five decades. 

They released their masterpiece Let It Be on October 2, 1984. 

Putting the music itself aside, the iconic cover photo alone probably inspired the formation of thousands of bands, all clamoring to follow in the footsteps of these genius lunatics. 

You know the age-old debate, Beatles vs. Stones? Well, The Replacements are the American equivalent of both at the same time. Raucous, rebellious, melodic, ridiculous, sexy, pathetic, hateful, empathetic, infuriating, hilarious, tragic, low-brow, hi-octane, explosive, implosive…throw a dart at a thesaurus and whatever you hit they will encompass.

They were also one of the only underground punk bands I ever saw who had as many female fans as they did male. Make no mistake, Paul Westerberg was a post-teen idol, Tommy Stinson was ogled as a fifteen year old by throngs of twenty-somethings and their pin-up qualities were a massive part of their appeal. The rest of the punk world was barely sexual at all.

“Let It Be” captures them in all their glory. Yearning pain nestles next to a Kiss cover, snotty masturbation jokes keep company with overt declarations of unrequited love, and thunderous rock and roll anthems drop off into piano shuffles. Each song sounds like a different band but the whole thing is unmistakably The Replacements.

To sum up, over the course of just three months, three wildly different artists released three massively influential albums that altered the landscape of American popular music. And they all lived within twenty miles of one another.

Insane.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1984. The Twin Cities Triple Crown. Prince. Husker Du. The Replacements.

My Secret Career 00: Let’s Pretend

Pretend.

Pretend you have been an avid fan of mine for forty years. 

Pretend you wait with bated breath for my next release.

Pretend you followed me through thick and thin, putting up with my eccentricities and foibles. 

Pretend you defended me from my detractors when I dared to rap, of all things. 

Pretend you flirted with abandoning your fandom when Fecund Youth broke up. 

Pretend your hopes got up when I formed The Mahoneys seven years later. 

Pretend you loved my side projects even though there was no main project to be a side project to, and here are all of them in one place: Fecund Youth, Turf Farm Kings, The Mahoneys, Rhode Island Red, Onion, baby monolith, Bull Cancer, Bomer-B, New Mischief, High School Hero, The Congress Of American Musicologists, brenwillsull, Sun Zed and one last one that you will hear about shortly. 

Pretend you despaired when I disappeared into the recording studio for years at a time, waiting for the perfect time to drop new music. 

Pretend you interacted with my aliases the way I intended, as performance art projects to surround and envelop the music. 

Pretend you made road trips to see me play in South Kingstown, Orléans, France, Paris, France, Providence, RI, Matunuck, RI, Narragansett, RI, East Greenwich, RI, North Kingstown, RI, Harlem, NYC, the Lower East Side, NYC, Brooklyn, NYC, Chapel Hill and Rutherfordton, North Carolina, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, The Valley and Koreatown, Los Angeles, and Ossining, NY, all places I have performed music live. 

Pretend your hopes got up that I would have a massive hit with my song about September 11th and that it would catch on as a piece of art that honored that day and all that it entails. 

Pretend your interest in ME led you to discover Pimp Fu, Cashel O’Malley, Mike Death, Pulp Fever, Siobhan O’Malley, Dr. Mars, Josh Economy and The Army Jazz Band, Kerry O’Malley, Ian Carroll, Emma Carroll aka Lil Frex, Michael Gavagan, Regina O’Malley, Mercury & Mars, A Wish For Fire (Owen Beane), Poppa Foxtrot beats, Matthew O’Malley, Tony O’Malley’s barbershop career, Mike O’Malley playwright/screenwriter and Sheila O’Malley film critic extraordinaire. 

Pretend you marvel that one family has contributed so much great music and culture. 

Pretend you have too many favorite songs of mine to count. 

Pretend you know the guitar solos by heart. 

Pretend you bore your friends by constantly raving about my catalog. 

Pretend you keep the ticket stubs. 

Pretend you were thrilled when I announced that I was done with my old aliases and had adopted a new one: Bull De Jour. 

Pretend you got inspired and decided to write and record your OWN musical diary. 

Pretend you got great enjoyment out of spinning riddles and ciphers that perfectly describe your inner life but give absolutely nothing away. 

Pretend you couldn’t believe I was posting all 120-odd songs for free on YouTube.

Pretend I wasn’t your friend. 

Pretend you were a fan. 

Pretend the only thing you knew about me was what you sang along to. 

Pretend you already had tickets to my next tour.

Pretend my music means as much to you as it does to me.

Pretend.

My Secret Career 43: The New Mischief EP And The High School Hero EP

Sometimes you don’t need an album. Sometimes a few songs gather together and resist addition.

I wish New Mischief had turned into a full-fledged project and that we had completed an album. But life got in the way and we only completed these three songs. And completed is a very loose term. “Brainstorm” is done, “Feel The Vibe” is probably at 50% completion, and “What Is This?” is just a sketch waiting for a real work over.

High School Hero was the name I arrived at as the name my fictional character in “Searching For Certainty” would have for his band. These three songs seemed like they came from him, a deliberately tragic figure who was desperately trying to pull himself up and out of the void he had created.

Enjoy New Mischief and High School Hero, two wildly different styles.

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.