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.

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.