Bad Copy

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You might find
That The Love Songs are probably available?

While Corbett was working on his (cough cough, award-winning) documentary Turn It Around, his band, Bobby Joe Ebola & the Children MacNuggits (hereafter referred to as BJE), still performed whenever possible. Corbett’s unique position in the middle of the entire East Bay music scene offered him (and by extension, his band) many opportunities, specifically opportunities related to Green Day.

Lyz Luke was putting together one of their Undercover Presents… events, this one celebrating the anniversary of Green Day’s Dookie. Each act they selected would be assigned one song from the album, and get to record that song in Studio A at Berkeley’s revered Fantasy Studios (where Dookie was recorded, among others).

BJE was asked to contribute early on but for months just couldn’t get it together, largely because Corbett was busy flying all over the country interviewing the Iggy Pop’s of the world. As Frank and I were also in BJE, the idea of “keeping it in the family” and just passing the song down to The Love Songs came up. I also wonder if maybe our own Colonel Tom Parker, Kamala Parks, twisted a few arms on our behalf – you never know with her. Like Lyz Luke, she is a woman who gets things done. But it is my sense that because the scheduled recording session was barely a week away there was little option but to let The Love Songs take BJE’s slot.

When The Love Songs were finally given the green light we were left with barely more than a week (i.e. a single practice) to learn the assigned song before going under the red light.

On each of our seven full-length albums you can find at least one Metallica joke/reference. Our first order of business for this gig, as always, was to answer the question, “How do we wedge a Metallica joke into the song?” Imagine our delight in finding out our assigned song shared its name (“Pulling Teeth”) with a track from Metallica’s debut album.

Drawing from both “Pulling Teeth” songs, we began the song by melding the Green Day bass line with a melodic theme from the Metallica bass line. (For those not in-the-know, the entire Metallica song is, no joke, a 4 1/2-minute bass solo.) Careful listeners to our version (below) can hear a classic Cliff Burton motif underneath the opening section of the song.

Once we got into the studio we asked the (wonderful) engineer, Alberto Hernandez, to provide the second Metallica nod by delivering his own “bass solo, take 1.”

Many years previous, Frank’s predecessor, Jackson, coined the phrase “Love Songs – hair metal without the hair or the metal.” It should come as no surprise, then, that during practice any time we got to the lyric “Accidents will happen/But this time I can’t get up” I involuntarily sang “Accidents will happen/They all heard Ricky say.” (We later tried doing this in the studio but were vetoed by the producers, probably for litigious reasons. How we got away with adding a Metallica lick, let alone two, is beyond me.)

Last, we peppered in The Love Songs’ requisite ingredients: herky-jerky stops/starts, over-dramatic minor chord progressions, and frantic guitar diddly-doots. Once we shoehorned all that into the song we were good to go.

For all you Classic Albums geeks here’s what the studio experience was like… We were still wrapping up our Oh, The Places You’ll Go Wrong record with Chris Dugan (coincidentally in Green Day’s home studio). That was the first record The Love Songs did not self-record, and thanks to Chris’es’s’z’ chill demeanor, and original “butcher baby” version of The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today LP, and infinite studio wisdom, and Van Halen worship, and insider stories about the making of Chinese Democracy, we were made to feel very much at ease despite the studio’s large, beautiful, and state of the art facilities. It was in direct contrast to our usual digs.

Dugan @ Jingletown Studios (above) VS. Simba @ Dutch Oven Studio (below)

So we weren’t intimidated by going into Fantasy Studios from that standpoint, but I think we were a little over-excited to be recording in the same room where the following songs were also (supposedly) recorded:

Credence Clearwater Revival – “Suzie Q”
Huey Lewis & the News – “The Heart of Rock n Roll”
Chris Isaak – “Wicked Game”
David Lee Roth – “Yankee Rose”
Journey – “Open Arms”
Europe – “The Final Countdown”
Starship – “We Built This City”

Also, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Apocalypse Now were mixed on the same console we were using. Lots of history and mojo in that room, and here we come wheeling in amps with chewed bubble gum mashed into the corners.

Basic tracking went so quickly that the producer, Brian Adam McCune, decided to experiment. “Let’s try it with a click track” was one abandoned suggestion. “Let’s have you not sing it that way” was another. Once all the mics and amps and levels were dialed in the whole recording was done in an hour, except the bass which took two hours on it’s own due to an issue with the intonation on Brian’s bass. Our time-tested solution to bass problems has always been to slowly turn it down until no one notices it’s gone (another nod to Metallica). But since this was a nice studio run by professionals we were made to watch Brian put screwdriver to bass until the problem was solved.

BUT GUESS WHAT – joke’s on them because we never did solve the problem and they just gave up like we usually do!

Fantasy Studios, 0
The Love Songs, 0
The Love Songs methodology, 1

Still, the song turned out pretty well, especially given that we only had one practice to orchestrate it and one night to record it.

The whole experience was a fun and unique feather in our cap, and we were only halfway through our obligation!

Once the tribute album was released there was to be a big concert where each act would perform their song in the order it appears on the record. Furthermore, Oakland would declare that day ‘Green Day Day; and the mayor would give Green Day a key to the city or some such civic hullabaloo.

On that fabled day (February 19th), fifteen bands all descended on the Fox Theater that afternoon to participate.

In a venue this size a band can’t just show up and plug in, they need to soundcheck. The sound people need to know what they’re working with lest the audience get a crummy experience at best, or at worst, an overdriven speaker array catches fire. So we went out to soundcheck, despite always refusing them on account of they always end with someone telling us to turn down. The stage was so big that our guitar cables weren’t long enough to reach from the amps to our respective microphones. And we were asked to use stock amps and drum kit provided by the venue which often take some time to get comfortable with. But we had as much time as we had cable-length and so our brief soundcheck had us leaving the stage feeling less-than-secure in our forthcoming performance.

Backstage, we sought the comfort of La Plebe, but they weren’t even there yet. In fact, they missed their soundcheck entirely and only showed up after the doors were open. But does La Plebe let these small setbacks rattle them? No. They go out – opening the show, no less – and blow the doors off. Gosh bless La Plebe. Also, shame on us for being so uptight.

The broader slate of artists brought in for this project was not only impressive, but also wildly outside the sphere of punk/underground/whatevs. La Plebe, us, and the high school ska band, Skank Bank, were as close to a Punk Rock sound/ideology/approach as the 15-band roster got. The poster for the show gave each band a description, including: Soul, Funk, Choral, Appalachian Garage, Arabic Urban Rai Fusion, Electronica… We were described as simply “LOUD ROCK” which I think is the most apt and accurate description of us ever to appear on a flyer.

Our turn came and it went pretty well, considering how demoralizing our soundcheck went (which I should make clear, was our fault). One review said, “Short, straight, and to the point — this is a punk rock record, and Love Songs came and delivered precisely that. The audience barely knew what had hit them by the time the song abruptly ended minutes later. If the somber songs that had started the evening had lulled the energy at all, Love Songs cranked it back into overdrive.” LOUD ROCK, praise be.

Afterward, we went backstage and it was like riding the rush hour train – so many people you had to turn sideways to get anywhere. And cameras were everywhere. At one point Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff stopped me and talked in a very animated, perhaps very intoxicated fashion. Later, some onlookers who watched the scene unfold tried to convince me that she was flirting with me. I assumed they were messing with me because they were also trying to convince others I was Jason Schwartzman. But to those onlookers’ credit, I saw a press photo of the interaction a few days later and, well, I blushed just looking at it.

I just tried finding that picture again but only found this post with a single tweet below it:

The craziest part of the evening – and the project in general – was that for once The Love Songs were the traditionalists. We cut our teeth playing almost exclusively hard core Hardcore shows. Imagine seeing us sandwiched between bands like First Blood and Jesus Fucking Christ, or between Corpse Fuck Corpse and SHAT, etc. I’m not even going to detail all the nü metal and shoegazer and folk bills we’ve found ourselves on over the years because bookers never really knew where to put us. The gist is, we’ve always felt like the odd men out. Granted, we never really tried very hard to fit in and, honestly, worked tirelessly to not fit in. (To remind you, we purposely named the band The Love Songs.) Yet, here we were playing alongside full-time musicians in the classiest mid-size theater in the East Bay, and yet WE were the ones described by another journalist as “the only band…what came close to ‘traditional’ or straight-ahead.” So then I guess in a backwards way that just meant that once again we weren’t fitting in.