Sunset in Comal County

Dear Tori,

This is what you’ve been trying to cop from me for the last 15 years. Please try to keep up.

Love,
Kate

Well, at least that’s the way I see it. If you haven’t heard already, Kate Bush has a new release out, titled “Aerial”, and it’s really amazing. Apparently, Kate’s been busy raising a son for over a decade - but she finally decided to let us hear what’s been in her head.

There’s so much to say about what I’m hearing on “Aerial”… that for right now, I choose to simply say:

Buy it. Listen to it. Love it.

I missed you, Kate. Welcome home.

Harlem Road in Ft Bend County

In November 2003, I took on the task of tallying responses to a question on the Looper’s Delight mailing list that the illustrious Rick Walker posted. The question went something like this:

What looping gear do all of you own and use?

Wow. About one month, 96 respondents, and one big bottle of Aleve later, I had tallied all of the answers into a spreadsheet and run some simple statistics on them. The results are still available here, at the Looper’s Delight File Library (a feature that I’m proud to have contributed to the list also!). The file is in the “Tools and Utilities” section of the library.

I just noticed a few days ago that the 2 year anniversary of this survey was upon us. In 2 years, a whole lot of new looping gear has become available, and looping has become a much more common concept among mainstream musicians. It seemed like it was time to do the survey again. Oh, my aching head.

This time around I’m a little older (2 years, to be exact) and a little wiser (not much, to be exact). I’ve setup an online survey to handle the task, and this time we’ll actually get some additional statistics (age, gender, location, primary instrument, years of looping).

If:

• you stumble upon this blog and you’re not already aware of the survey
• you do live looping, even if it’s in your bedroom
• you have about 3 minutes to spare

…then please go to the survey and fill it out. The more, the loopier.

I’ll start providing some simple statistics here in a few weeks, and I’ll leave the survey open until the end of January 2006, at least. Should be interesting to see how the data has shifted, and how well some of the new looping tools are penetrating the market.

Happy Thanksgiving meateaters!

Just got an email saying that my Visual Thesaurus subscription has been renewed for another year. $12 bucks. For one millisecond I thought:

Damn! That’s beer money I could have saved.

But then I went to the site again (for the first time in about a month), and I quickly remembered why I bothered to give these people $1/month in the first place.

If you haven’t ever checked out the Visual Thesaurus - just go do it now. It’s free if all you want to do is browse. This is how I like my technology - smart and fun.

I’ll admit that I’m a gearhead when it comes to guitars. I love noodling with new and interesting effects, amplifiers and the guitars themselves. However, I also consider myself to have reasonably good taste in guitar tone, and there are a lot of things that just done survive the honeymoon period because in the end - they don’t sound good.

Well, here’s a pleasant surprise that has survived the honeymoon period. It’s called the Jet Slide, and it’s a nifty little innovation that overcomes a lot of the problems that guitarists have faced when trying to incorporate slide guitar into their live playing.

See, the classic guitar slide is a cylinder of either glass, metal, bone or ceramic that slips over one of your fingers on your fretting hand. But that can present a real problem when you want to alternate between slide guitar and traditional guitar playing in a single song. Usually this means having the slide somewhere close to you as you play, and having to quickly grab the slide, put it on, play the slide part, take it off, put it down (or throw it down!), and get back to playing traditional guitar - all without missing too many beats (especially if you’re the only guitar player in the band). It’s nerve wracking, and very prone to mistakes. Who needs that?

Here’s what a traditional slide looks like while being played:

I’ll admit, I have seen a few pros who can somehow play traditional, fretted guitar while they still have one of those bulky cylinders on one of their fingers. Usually, they accomplish this by putting the slide on their pinky, and using the other 3 fingers to fret. I tried hard to figure out how to do that, but I just couldn’t make it happen with any effectiveness. I felt like I was giving up control of the slide having it on my pinky, and I still didn’t have full use of the other 3 fingers. That’s a no-win compromise.

The Jet Slide is an ingenious device that makes it easy to leave the slide on your hand while still being able to play fretted chords. I could try to explain it further, but you know what they say - a picture is worth a thousand words:

See how he’s able to fret some notes, and then flip his finger into position and have the Jet Slide pop into place, ready to play slide guitar? It really works. And it’s not hard to learn at all. No steep learning curve or anything - just do what comes naturally, and the slide pops into place.

The real secret is that little tab of metal sticking out from the slide. It’s hard to see in the animated picture, but these two pics make it very clear:

Your pinky naturally grabs on to the metal tab as you move your hand from a normal fretting position into a traditional slide guitar position. To get back to fretting, all you have to do is kinda pop your fingers away from the fretboard, and your pinky releases the metal tab, letting the Jet Slide fall away from your fingers (ready to be grabbed again).

Simple. Effective. And damned cheap.

That’s the way I wish all of my guitar toys were!

I’m a big time Flaming Lips fan. They’ve traveled a lot of musical roads over the history of the band, but all of it has, at a minimum, intrigued me. Clouds Taste Metallic, The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots did more than just intrigue me - those albums obsessed me. They captured something special about these strange guys from Oklahoma. Something hard to put your finger on… which makes it all that much more special.

I’m excited to hear that The Lips are working on a new album, planned for an March 2006 release. At War With The Mystics is going to have much more rock guitar goodness, which is a good thing. It also sounds like the band was inspired by their work on the cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and Steven Drozd has done some further experimenting with heavy layering of harmony vocals.

Wayne Coyne also makes numerous references to a “Black Sabbath feel” in this article from Billboard. I think that’s probably a relative reference as opposed to an absolute one, but one can never quite tell where The Lips are going next.

That’s exactly why I love them.

The Zoo

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the band that I was in from 1995 through 2001 - Bickley. Bickley was a punk rock band. Bickley eventually became many things - a regional (if not national) success, a way of life, a series of truly crazy experiences, and complex web of urban myths. Bickley also became an aesthetic for the guys in the band - we knew if something was “Bickley”, and if it was, we pursued it with unbridled passion.

As with most bands that last uninterrupted for 6 years, there are more stories to tell than I will ever remember. In the coming months I’m going to recall some of those stories - both fun, sad, and scary. If nothing else, there’s some sort of therapy in it for me. And if I’m lucky, perhaps an old Bickley fan will stumble upon this site and share in the fun.

So let me tell you how the whole thing started:

Randy Morris, a close friend of mine since grade school and my former college roommate, had met and become close friends with a guy named Matt Lambeth. Matt was a self-proclaimed “art fag”. He had attended art school at the San Francisco Art Institute, and experienced the punk and art scene of San Francisco during the mid and late 1980s. Another one of Matt’s close friends was Steve Hitt. Steve had been a graphic artist in Houston for a number of years and had even done a stint as a stand-up comedian. I had met these clowns through Randy, and we had done a few things together - primarily related to drinking too much beer and listening to music. So, as fate would have it, one night we ended up at The Blue Iguana (RIP), playing pool, drinking beer, and generally being debaucherous. And then it happened…

Someone mentioned Laverne and Shirley. Someone did a Squiggy impression. And then, Steve began to sing the title song to the hit TV show. And I don’t mean he just sang it - he really sang it. With a slight edge to his voice, and a genuine inspiration that was clearly fueled by the 3 Guinness Stouts he had already drank - he completely blew us all away. I remember standing there with a pool cue in my hand, thinking - damn - this guy should be in a band. So I just said it - “let’s form a band!”. What happened after that will always be a bit of a haze to me, but I do know that Steve, Matt, Randy and I started hanging out at my house once a week, playing in the upstairs loft.

It really happened so easily. Looking back on it, I remember that we had to go and buy Matt a drumset - he hadn’t owned one since high school. He didn’t have enough money to buy one outright - so Steve and I pitched in a little and helped him out. We told him that we’d either become big rock stars and he could pay us later - or we’d just sell the kit when things got boring and get our money back. We bought an old but good Pearl set from Rockin Robin’s in Houston. They were really helpful until somebody handed them the cash, and then they basically opened the side door and told us to load it up on our own. If I remember correctly, we snagged two extra cymbals and stands
It started out innocently enough. We were playing Nirvana, REM, old Green Day, and Queers covers, and fooling around with a few simple songs of our own. At that point, I don’t think anyone really thought we would ever really play a show. We’d just waste a few hours each week making noise. Our biggest fan at that point (besides the four of us!) was my next door neighbor, who would wash his car in the driveway every time we played, and whoop and holler after each song (or when we just fell apart and stopped). I never did find out who filed the noise complaint with the neighborhood patrol - but I’m positive it wasn’t our #1 fan. It must have the people on the other side of my house!

At this same time, another mutual friend of ours - Sean Kelley - was having some success with a band of his own, Sad Pygmy. Sean (better known to the world as C-Dog) and his girlfriend (now wife) Carol Sandin, along with Phil Krieg and Bob Lederer made up the psycho punk band that was Sad Pygmy. We’d all go see them play around town - Deep Phat, Emo’s, The Blue Iguana - and often we’d end up at their practices in Francisco Studios - a scary old warehouse next to a Chinese fortune cookie bakery in the Houston warehouse district. It was after one of these Sad Pygmy practices that C-Dog asked Matt, Randy, Steve and I to play a couple of our original songs for him.

It was the first audience we had as “Bickley” (we didn’t have a name at that point - more on how “Bickley” became our name later), and we played 3 songs - Dino, Superman, and Call Girl. Something happened at that moment. I’m not sure what it was for everyone else, but for me - it was the look on the faces of my Pygmy friends and the realization that we had something very unique, fun, and exciting to share. We were just 4 guys, slamming out some simple chords and singing some raunchy but harmonically pleasant vocals, and everyone liked it.

Fast forward a few weeks. Sad Pygmy has let us move some stuff into their room at Francisco’s, and we’re talking about trying to book a show. This is when Randy decided that the fun was over for him. I remember him saying that he honestly didn’t have any aspirations to play in a “real” band that was intent on playing out. It was sort of a defining moment for us - did we really have those aspirations? We talked it over and decided that we did. With no hard feelings, Randy gave us his blessings, and we asked C-Dog if he’d play bass with us. He said yes, and before I knew it, we were trying to write 10 good songs and build a set list so we could play our first show.

So how did the band get named Bickley? This was the first of many myths that we eventually created about the band. People would ask us - “what does Bickley mean?” at almost all of our early shows. By that time, each one of us had one (or more!) myths about the meaning of the word. Steve would say that it was the name of his uncle who had been executed by the state of Texas for a series of homicides. I would tell people that I traced my earliest ancestors back to the quaint little village of Bickley, and that they were all witches, so we named the band after them to continue the strength of the coven. Depending on who asked whom, you might get one of 10 different answers - all of which were completely false.

So here now, for perhaps the first time in print, is the real story of how we chose the name Bickley and how it stuck:

We were searching for a name. One that would evoke a certain feeling of intensity, of being an outcast, of being an outsider looking in. After all, that’s what we were. Older than most of the musicians around us - especially in the punk rock scene in Houston - we knew we were going to be viewed as slightly off-kilter. So at the end of a long night of playing and drinking a LOT of beer, we finally stumbled (literally) upon the image of Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.

Remember how he shaved his head into a mohawk, and took his dark vision of justice out into the streets of New York? Yeah! That’s what we want. What was his name again? Travis Bickley, wasn’t it? Yeah, Travis Bickley!! Let’s call ourselves “Mr. Bickley”. No wait… just… BICKLEY!!

Once again, fate was working her magic:

• DeNiro’s character was NOT named Travis Bickley - his name was Travis Bickle, but we had already had at least 6 beers each, so we didn’t remember that
• Sad Pygmy was leaving to go on a short east coast tour just days after this conversation, and C-Dog made stickers that said “Bickley”, and distributed them at every show

The day after Sad Pygmy left (armed with Bickley stickers and an exciting story about this new punk rock band that C-Dog was playing bass in) I saw Matt and Steve. They told me that they’d just remembered the character’s real name. It was too late. By the time C-Dog got back home, we had come to terms with the fact that we had an erroneous but totally unique band name, and we never looked back.

Much much more to come on the life and times of Bickley. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, you can find information about the music that we released by following this link to Amazon.com. Or, just search for “bickley punk” at Google, and browse around for a while.

And tell your mom to quit calling me.