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.