Hero: A one night draft

[Jeff]

www.savefile.com/files/4059261

Here is a song I wrote and recorded tonight. This one has some energy! The mixing and mastering need work—too much treble and the drums are too loud. But I am tired now. As usual, the vocal is just one take—so it starts off weak and gets stronger as the song goes on.

As for the lyric. I have no idea what it means:

Hero

Must have missed it by a ring
Strange message on the machine
I could’ve answered it
I think
Were you asleep?

Strange words collide
All the while
“Juvenile,” “Adult…”
Wish you weren’t
Wish you weren’t
But I bet you are
I bet you are

Wish you were here
My fucking hero

Outrage
Out-rage

PS Since I was able to get the file size down, I will put it in the Yahoo Briefcase, too.

[Betterout]

I dig it, Jeff. I like the 'outrage' bit, especially. I hear untold thousands of overlapping/staggered iterations here. Groovy tune, bro. I guess it's about missing a phone call from adult film star Ron Jeremy, who happens to be a frequently heralded hero in the f*^&ing realm.

[Tyler]

Ron Jeremy is a verifiable athlete.
Boning should be an olympic sport.

[Jeff]

Well, I wrote the lyric at 4 am, and I was pretty much incoherent at that point. It is strange but getting something as simple as this finished involves literally hundreds of thousands of small decisions. The hard part is just to line them all up into a path. When it was time to write and record the lyric I was drained of any creative umph.

I did kinda get the idea that it might be about finding out that your significant other was cheating on you. But I don't know. Is Ron J. a fucking hero or a hero of fucking?

Glad you liked it, Justin. Did you hear the DX7? (It's the piano sounding part on the chorus and the outrage sections.) I haven't recorded it in years. I think I will start using it again! Also, I am such a terrible guitar player that I had to custom tune it to play this song. That was so much fun and so effective that I think I will just play with tunings all the time.

[Betterout]

Alternative tunings can be great in the studio, but to my way of thinking, they can make the live experience either boring or overly-showy. This is because the artist frequently has only a few available options to pull it off effectively.

Plan A: Tune anew before every song. Tunings already take awhile, and exotic tunings even longer, so this can make the show far too long and too slow. For example, the BTS show we saw a few weeks ago fit this category, even though I don't think they used very many unique tunings.

Plan B: Have special guitars pretuned for every song. Sonic Youth is notorious for this. But how long does it take the average blue collar kid in the crowd to add two and two ($20 minimum ticket prices, 27 Les Pauls littering the stage) and come to the conclusion that the artist is hopelessly out of touch? Maybe that's why Sonic Youth has always maintained a high-brow 'tude over and above their early street cred.

Plan C: Hire a full-time guitar tech and have two primary axes (plus backups). Between every song, swap one out for a new one that has been specially tuned by the tech during the last song. The tech is constantly at work this way, and thus well worth their salary. This is how Matthew Sweet does it. For some indie acts, the costs associated with Plan C (double guitar costs plus a staffer) may be a little prohibitive, especially when these acts are often working without any net at all, driving to and from shows in their own van, setting up their own equipment, and manning their own merch tables (which they've stocked with goods they've supplied using their own operating capital) before and after the set.

So... I've just paid a healthy chunk of change to go see Jeff McBride and His Nameless Henchmen (just a hypothetical band name, but I kinda like it). It's time to play "Hero." What does he do?

[Jeff]

You flatter me. First off I can't imagine anyone paying to hear me play. I think I did one paid show in my life. I got $60 bucks.

Anyway, my solution is simple: One of the Nameless Henchmen can actually play guitar, so he doesn't need any strange tunings. Or if he uses them, then it's his problem. I am not doing any guitar acrobatics. I just can't play for shit.

If I had to pick a solution, then I like Matt Sweet's. But again, I doubt that I'll ever be faced with this problem. I do see that for you this is a live issue. (He he) What was your solution...just avoid alternative tunings altogether?

Jeff

PS Now that I think of it, I've done two paid shows. The second netted me $20.

[Betterout]

Live issue... I just caught that!!! Hee, hee.

Everybody likes music. Many folks are willing to pay for it to some degree or other, mostly on good faith that it will be worth their dollars. So if you've got music, then you've potentially got an income stream, however minimal and/or temporary it may be at a given time and place. That's what makes busking on street corners and in bus stations so common. It's also why musicians keep on ramblin' down the road.

Your $80 bucks for 2 gigs really ain't so bad. $40/musician/show is slightly above the going rate for a bar band at the seedy dives around these parts. And considering that you got $60 bucks for one show more than a decade ago, that's even a better sum. The absolute most my last band ever got paid was $120/musician for one show, and we had to pull every string we could think of pulling to get that. More often, our per-soul rates were far lower: $60, $45, $30, pro bono...

I personally like alternative tunings. Ever since 11th grade when I suddenly became aware that all those old blues men cross-tuned to open chords, that all manners of slide stylings were in one or another alternative tuning (G and E9, are fairly common), and that what gave the rock guitarists at that particular time their characteristic low end growl was a magical thing called dropped D, I have been switching up the ol' strings with reckless abandon. I mean, think of it: All the standard chord dictionaries are based on one seemingly arbitrary tuning system. Change just a single string, and you can throw those books right out the door. My favorite tunings are just the standard open chords, particularly E and D. From low to high they are as follows: E B E G# B E and D A D F# A D. D works particularly well because it involves tuning things down rather than up.

Of the three songs Cadmus Park (my duo with Chris) recorded at Ían Recording Studios in 1998, two of them used alternative tunings. "Ordinary Time" was in open E, and "Out of Your Sight" was in standard tuning with the high E tuned down to a rattly, floppy B. The latter was used so that the droning lead could easily differ by as little as a half step, without resorting to a Frippian juggernaut stretch. It also gave the solo an inchworm-y quality, with one string lagging just behind the other, and catching up only to be left behind again moments later. Cadmus Park had plenty of other songs with strange tunings, but we were never forced to deal with them in a live setting; we never played live!

For the record, .44 Reasons had a few open chorded songs, but I never played guitar on those (always the reluctant bassist). Newt and Big Dave relied on Plan A, and we were always being told that we took far too long between songs. Plan A sucks.

P.S. Perhaps 'nameless henchpersons' is slightly more appropriate. Or maybe even 'name-challenged minions.'

[Tyler]

Nameless Henchmen is good.
They could wear blank nametags.