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.