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On David Bazan’s Crisis of Faith, and Mine

Note: This essay makes several references to my time as a teacher, coordinator, and administrator at Ritsumeikan Uji in Kyoto, Japan. I have written about my time at Ritsumeikan prior in my piece about good and great talkers, and in my piece about hiding in a hotel room for 36 hours after being seriously overworked for months in 2012.

In case parts of the timeline referred to above are not clear, I began working at Rits Uji in 2002, started with the IB program at Rits in 2008, left my job temporarily in 2018, and rejoined after COVID was settling down in 2021. Also, if you like this essay you will like my longform analysis of the great Michael Knott’s album “A Rocket and a Bomb.”

Epigraph:
“There’s real people in them big, big trucks…” 

David Bazan

I’ve always experienced David Bazan (the Christian-adjacent singer songwriter with Pedro the Lion and later solo) not as a songwriter but as a kind of emotional barometer for whatever stage of adulthood I’m in. Every few years I realize he’s already written the song I need, long before I know I need it. He’s not confessional; he’s just brutally, unfussily truthful in a way that feels like being read by somebody who doesn’t care whether you agree with him.


This is a field report on five Bazan songs—what they meant, what they revealed, and how they secretly mapped the last twenty plus years of my interior life.

1. BIG TRUCKS

I first heard “Big Trucks” in my early Ritsumeikan Uji years—2003 or 2004 when I was digging deeply on the site eMusic. The song was first released in 1998 on Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard to Find a Friend on Made in Mexico records, and is track 3 of 12. There is also a single version which is track 6 on the 1999 EP The Only Reason I Feel Secure. I was into Pedro the Lion back when the air was still clean and my responsibilities hadn’t yet calcified into the adult structures that would come later. I was living in a rental apartment, and still had that sense that life was flexible: the rhythms of teaching, the long days, the long nights, all of it felt new and fresh.

The thing about “Big Trucks” is that it’s so effortlessly literal you almost miss the emotional charge. A child asking his father why he doesn’t respond when another driver flips him off. A parent trying to explain something unexplainable with reference to the humanity of truck drivers. The gap between innocence and knowledge opening in real time.

When I was 28, the resonance was simple: the world is bigger and harder than we think, and adulthood arrives the moment you realize you don’t get to choose the scale of the forces that hit you.

Even then, before IB coordination, before butting heads with my principal, before everything that happened in 2018 which led to me leaving my job, the line felt like a premonition. The big trucks are always coming after all.

2. BANDS WITH MANAGERS
Bands with Managers is the lead off track on Pedro the Lion’s 2004 record Achilles Heel. I was already into the band as mentioned above by this time, and Achilles Heel would prove critical listening in the years that followed. By 2007 the IB tidal wave was approaching, and my days were already starting to feel compressed. I was “going places,” as Bazan mocks himself for saying, which is exactly the problem: I actually was going places. I was acquiring managers, and then heavier managers, and then the structural expectations that come with being the adult in the room.

That’s why I love this song so much—because it’s funny, cutting, self-aware, and self-disparaging all at once:

“Bands with managers are going places.”

He’s laughing at the absurdity of ambition, the ridiculousness of believing your ascent is meaningful, and at the same time he’s wincing, because he knows he’s been swept up in the same machinery.

By 2007, I felt that too. The joke was aimed at me, but gently.

The line I lived was this:

“I’m going places, apparently — and it’s funny, and it’s ridiculous, and I think I’m about to be crushed.”

Ambition and pressure make strange bedfellows. Bazan gets that. He names what most adults won’t: that sometimes “success” feels like being hauled upward by a crane you didn’t ask for.

3. FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS
Foregone Conclusions is track two on Achilles Heel. This is one of his most devastating songs because of its simplicity. The line that gets me every time:

“I don’t wanna believe that all of the above is true.”

This is Bazan calling out doctrinaire Christianity and he’s not subtle about it. It’s almost embarrassingly plain. But middle-aged truth is often embarrassingly plain. For me the line hits in two places: first, in that long stretch where adulthood felt like a narrowing of options; and second, in the recognition of how many “beliefs” I’d inherited and carried long after they’d stopped serving me.


One idea that slowly died in me—over years, not months—was the belief that I could be happy in some uncomplicated, stable way. I don’t mean not depressed. I mean the fantasy that happiness arrives and then stays. By my early forties I knew better.


Happiness is local, flickering. It’s take what you can get. What lasts, perhaps, is meaning, purpose. Bazan already understood that twenty years ago. It took me a little longer.

4. YELLOW BIKE
Yellow Bike is track 2 on Pedro the Lion’s 2019 record Phoenix. If there’s a perfect adult loneliness song, this is it.

“My kingdom for someone to ride with me.”

This line is not necessarily about wanting a partner or romantic longing, although it could be. It’s about pace—finding someone who can move at the same internal speed as you without distorting your life. After 2018, I didn’t trust the world to ride with me in a clean way. Not institutions. Not leadership structures. Not women. The only sane posture was self-containment.


And then came Mela. Mela was first my Periscope friend (Twitter’s discontinued video live-streaming platform), and then my text buddy and then phone buddy in late fall and early winter, 2018. This was not a romance, nothing really other than hours on the phone, day after day. Neither of us were working, and we covered every subject under the sun, including prominently the boys she was with, the boys she was chasing, and the boys that were chasing here.

Mela was the first person after 2018 who matched my internal rhythm without triggering anything. She didn’t need anything from me; she didn’t misread me; she didn’t overstep. She just rode beside me lightly for a window of about six weeks.

That’s what Bazan means by “someone to ride with me.” Not permanence—just pacing. Not dependence—just parallel motion. A few blocks of shared speed. Enough to remember you’re not built for solitude.

5. LITTLE HELP
Little Help is track 3 on Pedro the Lion’s 2024 album Santa Cruz. This is the one that lands hardest in midlife.


“All I needed was a godsend/ All I needed was a little help from a friend.”

For me, that friend was Tommy. During COVID I was on sick leave, drifting, half-collapsed inside myself. Wine in bed, online chess all day, the sense of dissolving in slow motion. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was real. I wasn’t moving toward anything; I was sinking.

And it was Tommy who refused to let me disappear. Not gently. Not metaphorically. Literally. Texting. Calling. Telling me he’d drag me out of my house if he had to. Making me come out with him twice a week in Kyoto, even when I barely had a pulse.


One night we were in a tiny reggae club, drinking Red Stripe, and at around 10:30 p.m., in the restroom of all places, I felt happy for two seconds. Not enlightened. Not healed. Just briefly, unmistakably alive.

That moment didn’t save me. Tommy didn’t “fix” anything. But he interrupted the slide. He held me upright until I could stand on my own again. In the end, that’s what Bazan means. Not salvation. Not heroism. Just stubborn companionship. That moment when someone refuses to let you lose it. And that’s when the line stops being metaphor and becomes plain fact: All I needed was a little help from a friend.

6. CONCLUSION
Overall, I really like Pedro the Lion/ David Bazan. Even more so than Michael Knott, he is a kind of black sheep of the Christian rock movement, and he may even be cancelled by some, I’m not sure, but I think other people, even some of faith, appreciate his relentless questioning, his searing honesty. I don’t know what the state of his faith is today, but it’s been a fascinating and fruitful experience following along the twists and turns of his art and career.

Dedication:
For Tommy — I’ll knock down your door anytime.

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Everybody Tips

Note: There’s a Ryan Adams song that’s always felt like a quiet diagnosis. The emotional math is simple: people give you just enough tenderness to keep you upright, but never quite enough to really move you from wherever you are. It’s from “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” — track 5 on Easy Tiger (2007).

You find out you’ve been underpaid, in a sense, for years, not because anyone meant you harm, but because the default setting in some long-forgotten form was never double-checked. The system assumed it was correct. Everyone assumed it was correct. And the thing is, it makes sense—you look like the sort of person who doesn’t need tending. So you stand there with the revised numbers in your hand, not angry exactly, just noticing the symmetry of it all. This is the pattern: people offer small kindnesses, small gestures, small acknowledgments.


Everybody tips.

Just not quite enough to knock me over.

It reminded me of something from years ago at my little IB school here in Japan. Back then I was stretched thin in a way you can only be in your thirties—trying to prove something, mostly to myself. I’d rush through lunch like it was another task to complete. One day Scott, one of our English teachers and a high school homeroom teacher, watched me finish a meal in about two minutes and said, gently, almost to himself, “That’s not good.” It wasn’t an intervention. It wasn’t even advice. Just a small observation from someone who was paying attention in the limited way people do. A tip, not a gesture. A flicker of care that landed, and then the moment passed.

Looking back, I think that’s why the moment stayed with me. It was concern, yes, but it was also something rarer: someone catching a glimpse of the strain I kept tucked under the surface. I wasn’t used to that. Most people saw the polished version—competent, fast, self-sufficient—and adjusted their care accordingly. Scott’s comment didn’t rearrange my life, but it landed in that narrow space where a person can be briefly seen without being exposed. A small kindness with a little weight on it, though not enough to shift anything. Another tip.

When I think about it now, it wasn’t an isolated moment. My life is full of small gestures like that—light touches of concern, half-noticed details, people offering just enough care to register but not enough to alter the trajectory. It’s not their fault; it’s how most of us move through the world. We read surfaces. We assume competence means comfort. We assume steadiness means abundance. So what comes my way is always the manageable version of kindness, the soft-edged form that stays within social limits. It accumulates, in its way, but it never quite tips the balance.

And then there’s the other meaning of the word I keep circling. To tip isn’t only to offer a small gesture—it also means to wobble, to shift the weight of something just enough that it might tilt. In that sense, everybody does tip me. Every small kindness knocks me a little off balance, just not in the dramatic way Adams means. It’s more like a brief lean in the direction of connection, a momentary swerve in the steady line of the day. A soft recalibration, not a collapse. The world nudges, not crashes. It’s movement—just not the kind that bowls you over or forces a change. The cumulative effect is real, but subtle enough that you only notice it in retrospect.

Most days, that’s all life is: a series of micro-tilts. A colleague covering five minutes without comment. A student bowing an extra beat longer than expected. A friend sending a small message at the exact right moment without knowing why. They don’t change your direction, but they do alter your angle by a degree or two. You barely feel it while it’s happening. You just register that your emotional center shifts slightly—a soft lean, a subtle recalibration, the faintest sense of being moved without being moved on. These moments don’t rewrite your story; they just keep it from calcifying. They are the human version of a brushstroke: slight, necessary, almost invisible unless you stand back and look at the whole canvas.

Every once in a while, though, someone doesn’t just tilt you—they land with actual force. It’s rare, but every few years, if you’re lucky, someone steps forward with something closer to full human weight. No calibration, no optics, no politeness. Just the clean, unmistakable feeling of another person showing up without trimming the edges of what they mean. Those are the moments you remember because they interrupt the pattern. They don’t just adjust your angle; they reset your coordinates.

That’s what happened to me in 2018. I’ve told this story in my Bad Moves piece, however to re-state I’d been traveling to see the band Phosphorescent in New York, Boston, Philly, and D.C. I was moving through my own private fog, the kind you don’t mention to anyone because you don’t want to make a spectacle of it. I told the merch gal I’d flown in from Japan, not as a plea for anything, just as passing context. She passed it on to Matthew Houck, the lead singer. And he didn’t do the socially appropriate thing, the small nod or the quick thanks. He came down off the stage and hugged me. A real hug, the full weight of it, twice across two different nights. No hesitation. No half-gesture. He gave me the exact amount of human force the moment called for.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hug itself, but the certainty behind it. Most gestures come wrapped in hesitation or self-consciousness; people soften their own impact before they even reach you. Houck didn’t. And part of the weight was this: he’d been through it himself—not abstractly, not a decade removed, but in the very songs he wrote on Muchacho, the record he made after his own life had come apart. He’d talked about it publicly, openly, without varnish. So when he came down off the stage to hug me, it wasn’t fandom or performance or politeness. It was recognition—one human being who had already walked through his own fire seeing another who was still in it. And the thing about weight is that you feel it instantly. It bypasses the usual filters, lands somewhere deeper, rearranges whatever you were carrying. For a second, you’re not holding yourself up alone. Someone else is taking on a share, however briefly. That’s why I remember it. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was unmistakably real.

I still don’t expect the big gestures. Most people don’t have them to give, and institutions certainly don’t. But my little allowance situation reminded me of something I should probably stop forgetting: I can be steady without letting people assume I’m inexhaustible. I can be competent without accepting the bare minimum as my baseline. Everybody tips, and I do appreciate it. But that doesn’t mean I should be content with being underpaid, overlooked, or treated as some kind of default. The small gestures matter; they keep things from freezing over. They’re just not a substitute for fairness, or for the kind of presence that actually moves you.

And if I’m honest, before the Houck hugs the last time I got knocked over didn’t happen at a show, or in a meeting, or anywhere you could itemize on a form. It was one of those chance crossings where someone walks in at full voltage, doesn’t shrink themselves, and then carries on while you’re still quietly recalibrating. Nothing official changes. Your job is the same, your allowance is the same, your life on paper is the same. But now you know, in your body, what real weight feels like when it lands. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to pretend that tips—however kind—are the whole story.

Dedication

For the White Russians — the ones who tilt the whole room just by arriving.

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I Have a Crush on Katie Park From Bad Moves

Epigraph:

Could you read between the lines
Or was it just so obvious?

Bad Moves

New Note: This is an older piece, however I am re-releasing it here. I recently shared a longer piece about some aspects of my life, including, quite centrally, music, so this seemed like a good time.

As with anyone’s story, there are layers to mine. One pretty big layer is when in 2018 I traveled to New York/ Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. to see the band Phosphorescent. I saw Phosphorescent four times total on their C’est La Vis tour and they were amazing. I bought a sweatshirt from the merch table and the merch gal told Matthew Houck, the lead singer, about me because I told her I’d come all the way from Japan to see the band. He came down from the stage and gave me a big bearhug, not once but twice at two of the shows. He knew I was going through it, and I needed a hug. He’d been through it too, big time, before and when he was writing Muchacho a few years prior.

As I was seeing Phosphorescent I also took the opportunity to see a few other bands. I saw Yo La Tengo twice at the Borwey Ballroom, Jay Som in Boston, and most memorably The Hold Steady twice at the Brooklyn Bowl where they were playing a three night set. The opener for The Hold Steady was a band called Bad Moves. I had never heard of this band, however, and I don’t say this lightly, they put on a better show than The Hold Steady. Now an opener should try to do just this, to “steal the show,” so to speak. A Bad Moves stole it big time. I was enraptured by their lead singer Katie Park, and met her at the merch table which she was running, which is recounted below. My friend I met at the shows, Austin, pushed me to check out their album Tell No One in depth, which I did, and I loved it. On the train from Washington D.C. back to New York I wrote the first version of this piece, which has been fairly extensively edited since then. This is my sneaky favorite piece, maybe not my best, but you can be the judge. Here it is:

I love live music. More than that, I love live music fans, and music fans in general. This piece is basically about being a music fan, and was inspired when I saw the band Bad Moves open for The Hold Steady in 2018 at the Brooklyn Bowl. They were touring on the back of their first full length, Tell No One. While at the Bad Moves/ Hold Steady show a music geek introduced me to a band called Swearin’. Swearin’ has been around a little longer than Bad Moves, and in 2018 had released Fall Into the Sun. The two bands don’t really sound all that much alike (Bad Moves is basically “Power Pop” and Swearin’ is basically “Indie”) but they write somewhat similarly about matters of love and friendship.

Let’s play a game that we live in a world where a record by a band like Bad Moves or Swearin’ would produce radio hits. I want to live in that world. Or maybe I don’t; maybe it’s better for everyone that bands like these stay a little more on the DL. Let’s first take a look at Fall Into the Sun. (Swearin’s frontwoman is Allison Crutchfield, and the band is mostly her baby.) My pick for the single would be the lead off track, “Big Change.” 

The song opens with this soft-spoken reminiscence — basement shows, empty cans, old romances, long nights of half-drunken idealism. Crutchfield sketches a friendship held together by music, chaos, and the sense that they’d accidentally stumbled into their own mutant little world.

I really like what Crutchfield does here. She is basically writing about a friendship solidified over a shared love of music. Now, I know a lot of people. I also have some friends. When you ask an adult, “How many real friends do you have?” the number will vary widely. A lot of people will say “four or five,” something like that. People in general have surprisingly few real friends. I have ten or fifteen, maybe more, but am only in regular contact with about half that number. A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other. Music, obviously, is another great basis for a friendship.

When Crutchfield sings “no art degree, no conservatory/ just Katie and me,” I’m reminded of the refrain from Don DiLillo’s Underworld: “who’s better than us.” If they can do it, why not us? Fuck ’em. That’s what attitude looks like kids–take notes.

So “Big Change” is my single from Fall Into the Sun. (“My single” here just means the song I would choose as the single. For some records, the single is super obvious, while for other records it’s debatable. Bands and producers, in my opinion, do not always get this right.) A good record will tend to have at least two singles; three is a bonus.

For Fall Into the Sun’s second single I’ll go with “Grow into a Ghost.” It opens with a chugging guitar riff with an almost Krautrock drum line. The song is a perfect 3:10–in and out. Do you know anything about lost love? Swearin’ does.

Midway through the record, she writes to an old love with that drifting, half-in-the-desert melancholy she does so well — remembering who she’d been before they met, watching someone fade into absence until they feel more like a ghost than a memory.

Swearin’ is good, but Bad Moves is better. And the star of Bad Moves is the exquisite Katie Park. (I know they are a collective, but my world is my world baby.) Before their show Katie was at the merch table selling…magic eye! That she made by hand. And what did it say? The magic eye said “Bad Moves.” Obviously. I checked it out and chatted for a few minutes with Katie, trying to play it cool. It was the highlight of my year. 20 minutes later she and the band were on stage, crushing it.

The single here is pretty easy. It’s “Crushed Out.” The band released “Crushed Out,” “Spirit FM” and “Cool Generator” as the singles, all of which are excellent. Maybe “Spirit FM” is catchier than “Crushed Out”? Possible. But “Crushed Out” has more lasting power in my opinion. “Crushed Out” is about exactly what it sounds like. It has a basically perfect power pop structure with a killer hook, a classic bridge, and a theme at once super obvious and super deep–the power of a crush.

The whole song is a tumble of infatuation — that feeling where you can’t focus, can’t think straight, and every look or scribbled message feels like it should be obvious to the other person. It captures the power-pop rush of a crush so clearly it almost stings.

Baby, if you are crush-prone that power never goes away. Bad Moves knows this–it’s kind of what the record is about. Crushing out that way can be pretty obvious–do you think I’m crushing out on Katie at all? Nah, this is just a piece of music appreciation.

Cool Generator is my second favorite song on the album, but my “sneaky favorite” is “Missing You.” A sneaky favorite is just what it sounds like: it’s that song that may fly under most people’s radar but that you have a special soft spot for. My all time sneaky favorite song is “Three Drinks” by Craig Finn of the aforementioned Hold Steady. “Three Drinks” shows up on Finn’s 2016 EP Newmyer’s Roof. It’s nearly acoustic, unlike most Hold Steady songs, and sounds just a little bit country. Three Drinks is about a woman (most great songs are) who may have been a child star once upon a time, and is now a drinker. It is an example of a certain type of song that Finn is amazing at, the deeply empathetic look at adult relationships in all of their gloriously flawed complexity. In this sense, Three Drinks fits in with “Spinners” from The Hold Steady’s 2014’s Teeth Dreams, “Tangletown” from Finn’s 2017 solo record We All Want the Same Things, and “Esther” a Hold Steady single from 2018. Finn’s writing on Three Drinks and Tangletown is at its absolute apex. 

“Three Drinks” delivers Finn at peak empathy. A woman with a messy past drifts through a hotel lobby filled with minor disasters, trying to hold herself together until that magic window — the hour between the third drink and the one that tips the night over the edge. Finn nails that space between fear and transcendence where people feel briefly holy.

The refrain focuses on that magic hour between drinks 3 and 4, when matters begin to move from the slightly anxious first stage of the evening to something entirely other:

So anyway, my sneaky favorite on Tell No One is “Missing You.” The song starts like the others, high-speed power pop, and after two verses switches to a near-spoken word breakdown of the tug-of-war between a crush and the expectations of the world around. Guess which wins?

“Missing You” turns into a spoken-word confession halfway through: the push-and-pull between what the world tells you not to do and the crush that keeps winning anyway. It’s simple rhyming, almost naive, but devastatingly effective.

I officially support these sentiments. .

So that’s my sneaky favorite –doesn’t mean it’s better than “Crushed Out” (it isn’t) it’s just a little sneaky. I’m all about sneaky babes and sneaky favorites, on all levels.

In addition to the Magic Eye, Bad Moves also engage in a little publishing. A little literature. Specifically they publish a pamphlet called “The Virtues of Wearing White.”

Chatting with Katie, she acknowledged more than a passing familiarity with the literature of the Jehovah Witnesses. I love Witness literature. Both Witness and Bad Moves publications have a real “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day” vibe. If you know me this is not a secret, but I’m a hardcore closet New Ager. There, secret’s out. I’ve messed around with all kinds of New Age action. Once I attended a Kabbala meetup in Manhattan. There were some hardcore New Agers there too, seriously. Those folks were not in the closet at all. Shining eyes, whatever color they are wearing. Me, I like black because it’s easier to launder, but Bad Moves have me thinking. (One other publication you should take a look at if you are into this kind of thing is the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a serious piece of literature. God is great baby, god is great.)

When I was younger my parents had a friend called Tom Hutchinson, who, predictably, went by “Hutch.” Hutch owned a boutique coffee shop there in town and I drove a delivery van for him for a bit. But that’s another story. Anyway, Hutch was a weird guy and he hated the Witnesses. It was one of his favorite topics. He’d call them the “Witlesses,” and say: “When they come to my house I turn the hose on ’em.” People thought this was pretty funny, but I was not that into Hutch’s attitude to the Witnesses. I mean, he didn’t want anyone trying to convert him on his property, which is fair; however, I felt, and still feel, that if someone wants to come to my door, give me a little literature, and talk about how god loves me I’m gonna let them. I genuinely like the Witnesses. They seem like lovely people. Read more

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties

Killer Parties (Live) — Nights That Almost Killed Us, Nights That Made Us

Note: This is the second part of our series on songs of The Hold Steady that take up the intertwined themes of nightlife and the complexities of adult relationships. Part I is available. This piece will deal with “Killer Parties,” specifically the live version from A Positive Rage.

“Killer Parties,” written by Craig Finn, closes Almost Killed Me (2003) and provides its title line. But the 2008 live version is the definitive one for me — a 10-minute slow burn that opens not with guitars but with an invocation. Finn’s spoken intro sets the terms for who this band is, who the audience is, and why these communal nights matter.

I. The Invocation

Before a single lyric, Finn does what Finn does: greets the tribe.

He jokes, he rambles, he self-deprecates, he misdirects — and then he lands it:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here. Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

That’s the thesis of The Hold Steady.
Everything else is commentary.

The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there.

When I saw them twice at the Brooklyn Bowl in 2018, I wrote:

Hold Steady fans are pretty much fanatics… They were super possessive of their space, they all seemed to know each other. One guy sized me up and said, “I want to not like you, but there’s some kind of aura around you, man.”

That’s the thing: the fans are a little cliquey, but the band itself is radically welcoming. Finn means it when he thanks people. He means it when he says he’s met half the room. He means it when he collapses the distinction between performer and audience:

“We are, and you are, The Hold Steady.”

That’s what the spoken intro really says.

II. Charlemagne and the Unsaid

The song opens with a classic Finn move — an elliptical report of something that happened, but we’re not going to get the details:

If they ask about Charlemagne,
be polite and keep it vague —
another lover lost to the restaurant raids.

Charlemagne is the old recurring character, drug-dealer-adjacent, always on the edge of calamity. Did he OD? Get busted? Get swallowed by his own myth?
Finn doesn’t tell you. He protects the dignity of the fallen.

This is identical in spirit to the opening of “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.”

I’ve known people like this. You’ve known people like this. Someone falls off the map, and when they resurface, it’s a new person in the same body. The specifics get blurry; the compassion gets sharper.

III. Leaving, Loving, Running

The next verses broaden out:

We left because we were young and in love.
We left because we needed space.
We left because we heard about this mythical country called the United States.

When Finn sings that line, he’s not being literal — he’s describing the classic American story: the pilgrimage to the realbig city. The wide open possibility. The idea that somewhere else — New York, especially — is where the real life is.

I relate.
I left my hometown and moved halfway across the world.
Finn moved from Minneapolis to New York; I moved from Spokane to Asia.
And like him, I sometimes feel pangs for what I missed.

But I needed space. I needed something bigger.

IV. Killer Parties

Then we hit the geography of sin:

Virginia for lovers.
Philly for brotherhood.
Pensacola for pills.
Ybor City for the nights that go too far.

And then the line we can quote directly:

“Killer parties almost killed me.”

Finn doesn’t romanticize this. He’s looking back at the nights that were ecstatic and dangerous at the same time. Nights that reshaped his body chemistry. Nights that made him who he is.

I’ve had my run at nightlife — nothing like Finn’s, but enough to understand the way one night can rewrite your wiring, for better or worse.

V. The Blur and the Transcendence

The final verses repeat themselves, because that’s how memory works:

We partied (I think?).
We departed from our bodies.
We woke up in Ybor City.

The nights are a blur — Finn partied but gets the details secondhand. What he does remember is the transcendence, the weightless moment when the body gives out and the self floats somewhere above it. And then the long, punishing hangover that follows.

For me, Ybor City has always functioned like El Dorado — the mythical endpoint of the American night. Maybe Finn has been there; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe you can only reach it by running the gauntlet of long days and longer nights. Maybe you can only get there by losing yourself a little too fully.

I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me.

VI. The Ex-Introvert Who Still Wants the Night

And here’s where my story threads into the song:

I am an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert — something I’ve talked about with several friends. I’m too old for some of the clubbing I once did, but I still love the nightlife, still love running around, talking to strangers, seeing where the night wants to take me.

And it takes you to strange places.

I think this is the real theme of “Killer Parties”: The appeal of the night, the call of the road, and the deep human need to leave the known world and find out what’s waiting elsewhere.

I return to this song in all kinds of circumstances — when I miss the road, when I need a reminder that the self is porous, when I want to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

VII. The Circle Closes: Community

And yet — for all the mythology and all the escapism — Finn always brings it back to community.

The Hold Steady isn’t just Finn narrating the lives of misfits. It’s Finn saying:

We survived the killer nights.
We made it home.
We found each other.

The live intro becomes the retrospective moral:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here.
Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

And so the whole arc — the wandering, the leaving, the nightlife, the blurring of memory, the near-death nights — ends where it must:

With the people who showed up.
The people who stayed.
The people in front of the stage.
The people who are, themselves, The Hold Steady.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs

I. Setting the Frame — What the Song Is “About,” and What Finn Says It’s About

“Most People Are DJs” appears on Almost Killed Me (2003), track three if you don’t count the spoken prologue. If “Killer Parties” is the band’s thesis on community, “Most People Are DJs” is the thesis on the scene—why it’s fun, why it’s corrosive, and why it matters.

Finn himself once said:

“Just a reaction to life in NYC in the 2000s… The part I don’t get is when I get emails that start with ‘Come see me DJ’ and end with ‘Here is what I’m going to play…’ I think DJing, like rock criticism, tends to be a way for people to participate in the ‘scene’ without the risks to the ego that go along with producing art.”

His hedge—“Of course, I don’t apply this to all DJs”—isn’t convincing. And that’s okay. Artists don’t owe us diplomatic consensus statements. What he’s really saying is: there is a gap between creating and curating. Between risk and commentary. Between the ones who make things and the ones who play things.

Now: I don’t fully agree with him.
And that’s part of what makes this song fun to write about.

Because the truth is:
Finn is reacting to a very specific time and place—New York in the early 2000s—where the “scene” was swollen with people who wanted proximity to art more than they wanted the agony of making it.

But he also wrote a song so overflowing with confidence and adrenaline that, even if you disagree with the premise, the song still wins.

II. Alliteration, Lineage, and the New York Scene (Early 2000s)

One thing that hits immediately in “Most People Are DJs” is the density—the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the almost cartoonish velocity of the lines. Finn came out of Lifter Puller, a band whose songs were so tightly coiled with alliteration they were practically tongue-twisters set to guitars. That sonic fingerprint carries directly into Almost Killed Me.

“Jet skis into the jetty,”
“skipping off the good ship,”
“searching for the merchant”—
this is Finn still flexing the Lifter Puller muscle.

But something is different now.
A subtle pivot.

With The Hold Steady, the alliteration stops feeling like a hallucinatory fever dream and starts to feel like a narrator in full command of his mythmaking. LP was chaos; THS is authorship. LP was young-person disorientation; THS is a guy in his early thirties cataloguing his own survival.

And that survival intersects directly with Finn’s take on the early-millennium New York City “scene.”

If you didn’t live there then, it’s hard to reconstruct the vibe, but from the outside—I was never a New York resident, just a visitor—it felt like every bar and backroom was filled with:

  • people wanting to be seen
  • people curating themselves more than expressing themselves
  • self-mythologizing in real time
  • and a thousand micro-scenes stacked on top of each other

New York has always been a city where people come to reinvent themselves, but in the 2000s, with the rise of the internet, music blogs, Vice magazine, and the early social media era, there was suddenly an audience for every aesthetic micro-gesture. DJ nights proliferated not necessarily because people loved vinyl but because DJing let you participate in culture without risking the humiliation of failure that comes with creation.

Finn clearly bristled at this dynamic—at least enough to write this song about it.
But crucially: he’s not sneering. He’s needling.
He’s amused and annoyed in equal measure.

Because he had just spent years in a band (LP) that nearly no one outside Minneapolis cared about. He’d paid his dues in the purest sense—tiny clubs, no money, hardcore kids, bad drives, worse mornings—and so when he encountered the Manhattan version of a “scene,” it must have felt surreal. A party ecosystem where participation wasn’t dependent on talent or risk, just aesthetics.

And so the song becomes a little manifesto:

Some people create.
Most people curate.
I know which side I’m on.

But I don’t fully agree with Finn here. DJing, like criticism, can absolutely be an art. Plenty of DJs are actual geniuses of sequencing, mood, texture, and propulsion. And Finn’s own songs rely heavily on the idea that everyone constructs a soundtrack for their life. He lives inside the psychology of people who soundtrack their heartbreak, their addictions, their breakthroughs, their mistakes.

So his jab at DJs is both sincere and playful—an elbow thrown by someone who knows perfectly well that without DJs, nightlife wouldn’t exist.

Still, the tension is productive.
It pushes the song forward.
It gives it its bite.

This is where Finn’s shift from Lifter Puller to The Hold Steady becomes clear:
LP described nightlife as a labyrinth; THS describes it as a world he made it out of, barely, and will now narrate for the rest of us.

Almost Killed Me is a debut in name only—it’s actually a rebirth.

III. The Ice Machine, the Trash Bin, and the Myth of Mis-Spent Youth

If the early verses of “Most People Are DJs” sketch out the external landscape—Ybor City confetti, jet skis, five-second dealers, Phil Lynott doppelgängers—then the center of the song turns inward. The gaze shifts from the scene itself to the person who once tried to survive inside it.

And it starts with a line that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t:

“I was a teenage ice machine…”

It’s metaphorical, but also literal in the sideways way Finn always manages:
a kid who kept it cold, kept it contained, kept taking in whatever the night handed him. Drinking until he dreamed, and when he dreamed, dreaming only of the scene. It’s the way youth can feel like preparation for nightlife, not the other way around.

Then comes the image of the little lambs looking up at him—those younger kids just entering the arena. There’s no arrogance in it; it’s simply the moment you realize you’ve shifted from participant to veteran, from the kid on the floor to the older presence leaning against the bar. It’s an eerie, recognizable sensation for anyone who came up in tight little music worlds, whether Minneapolis hardcore or the DIY venues that orbit all cities.

And then the next admission hits harder:

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin…”

Here Finn stops ornamenting the story. He talks frankly about taking everything the scene gave him and jamming it into his system. He doesn’t romanticize those years—he frames them as messy, hungry, adrenaline-charged, and sometimes self-destructive. It’s the classic Hold Steady blend of humor, regret, and affection for the person he once was. Anyone who’s lived through their own version of that era understands the mixture of pride and embarrassment that comes with looking back.

Then the song shifts again, suddenly back in a room, back in a body:

“She got me cornered by the kitchen…”

It’s one of those instantly recognizable nightlife moments—some stranger with a lot on her mind talking too closely, too sincerely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finn’s response, “I’ll do anything but listen,” is both funny and revealing. It’s the impatience of a younger self who wants motion, wants noise, wants the next thing, not the emotional monologue of someone he’s just met.

But the real anchor of this section comes next:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This is the line that echoes back to the earlier “tiny white specks” but deepens it. We may be insignificant on the grand scale, but we’re still soft, still human, still easily bruised. For all the bluster and late nights, there’s vulnerability baked into every corner of the scene. Finn recognizes it, even here, even in a song that pretends to be about DJs and parties.

And this middle section becomes the emotional axis for the entire track. The drug years, the clubs, the kitchens, the impatience, the kids, the tiny planets we all carried around–it’s Finn turning his own biography into something mythic and still somehow intimate. It’s the moment the song stops being an anecdote about nightlife and becomes a portrait of the person who lived it.

IV. “Teenage Ice Machine”: Finn’s Youth, My Youth, Everyone’s Youth

This is where the song really cracks open — the run of verses where Finn folds his own misspent youth into the larger portrait of nightlife. It’s the part where the memoirist in him steps forward.

“I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed…”

Finn describes his early years in Minneapolis with blunt clarity: he was taking whatever the night handed him, jamming it into his system, chasing scenes and dreams and any story worth telling. He’s frank about the drugs, the bravado, the hunger. And that image of “kids like little lambs looking up at me” shows the strange dynamic of growing older inside a scene — one day you realize the new kids think you know something. They think you’ve made it out of the maze.

And Finn knows these kids. He knows their impulsiveness, their devotion, their need to be part of something burning and bright. He knows it because he lived it.

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they’d give me…”

It’s funny, and a little raw — Finn admitting he was just shoveling it all in, whatever “it” was. And the lines about being cornered in the kitchen and doing “anything but listen” land perfectly. This is the social physics of nightlife: the way adrenaline and self-invention outrun patience or reflection. The kitchen confrontation is a tiny scene, but it captures the whole era — Finn always moving, always dodging, always hungry for the next thing, the next rush, the next room.

And then the knockout line:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This connects back to the earlier perspective shift — from Minneapolis sidewalks to this tiny-blue-dot cosmic backdrop. It’s Finn’s version of existentialism: the world is hard, unforgiving, indifferent; we are temporary flashes of warmth against it. But the point isn’t despair. The point is urgency. You don’t get that many nights where it all lines up. You don’t get that many years where your body and your heart and your recklessness harmonize. You take the nights when they come.

This is where the song clicks for me. That line is the thesis.

V. “Everyone’s a Critic and Most People Are DJs”: The Thesis and the Tension

“Baby, take off your beret
Everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs
And everything gets played.”

This is the line that gives the song its name and its pulse. Finn has already sketched the landscape — Ybor City’s chaos, New York’s 2000s absurdities, his own Twin Cities coming-of-age — and now he turns outward, toward the observation that set this whole song off in the first place.

Finn has said himself that this was his early-2000s response to the particular New York ecosystem where everyone wanted to be adjacent to culture without the exposure of making anything. The emails that said “come see me DJ, here’s what I’m going to play,” the ubiquity of people who curated rather than created. And he delivers the line with this mixture of mockery and affection — like a guy who remembers how much he once needed subcultural scaffolding and who also knows how flimsy that scaffolding can be.

But I don’t totally agree with the dismissiveness, and that’s part of why the line hits so hard for me. I think critics can make art, and DJs — literal or metaphorical — can shape the emotional weather of a room. I DJ my own life, like anyone who uses music to modulate their mood or define a moment. Spotify is my deck. The commute is my booth. There’s a pleasure in that autonomy that isn’t fake or lesser, just different.

Still, I get Finn’s point. There’s a risk he’s insisting on: the risk of putting something authentic into the world, the risk of failing publicly, the risk of making something instead of just spinning something. And this is the part where he plants his flag:
he is a maker, not a curator.
And he’s calling out everyone else — kindly, but unmistakably.

The song is gentler than the critique. It’s not a scolding. It’s a reminder: life isn’t a playlist you assemble from the safety of the booth. You have to actually step into the room. You have to actually take the hit.

This is where the song becomes more than a snapshot of early-2000s New York. It’s a life instruction.

Get in the game.

Because eventually everything gets played — your choices, your nights out, the people you loved, the things you messed up, the mornings you woke up on the floor of a city you barely knew. And at the end of all that, you want to be able to say you did it, not that you watched someone else do it.

VI. The Night Rolls On

The final verse snaps everything into focus. Finn works backwards through the chain of a night out—doctor to drugs, packie to taxi, taxi to club—like retracing the evidence after the damage is done. It’s funny and a little grim, but honest: this is how people actually live when they’re young, restless, and trying to outrun something unnamed.

A thousand kids fall in love in these clubs; a thousand end up bleeding.
Two thousand don’t sleep; two thousand still feel pretty sweet.

That’s the gamble of the night. Always has been.

And this is where my own life sits closest to Finn’s. I’ve said before that I’m an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert, and the night has been part of that transformation. I’m long past the age where I should be closing clubs, but I still love the energy of being out in the world, meeting people, letting chance decide the direction. The night takes you to weird places, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sketchy, and if you’re wired like me—or like Finn—that current is hard to resist.

And then there’s Ybor City, which in the Finn cosmology feels half-real, half-mythic. A kind of El Dorado of the American night. Did he actually go there? Maybe. But in the logic of the song, it doesn’t matter. Ybor City is where you wake up when the night has taken you further than planned. A place that might kill you or crown you, or both. I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone.

But the truth is:
the pull of that world—the risk, the release, the possibility—is part of what makes these songs hit as hard as they do.

VII. Closing Thoughts

In the end, Most People Are DJs isn’t one of Finn’s masterpieces, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a mission statement disguised as a party track. An early announcement that he wasn’t done writing about the night, about the kids who rush into it headlong, about the way music becomes a map for people who don’t quite know where they’re going but desperately want to get there fast.

The song is chaotic, generous, a little arrogant, and very alive—exactly what Almost Killed Me needed to be. It sketches the outlines of the universe Finn will later fill with addicts, romantics, bartenders, prophets, screwups, saints, and that long list of people who show up again and again in his songs because he sees them clearly. Because he was them once.

I keep returning to it not because it’s Finn at his deepest but because it’s Finn at his most open-throated:
young, wired, taking in the world at full volume.

It’s the sound of the door swinging open on everything that would follow—from the great epics (Separation Sunday, Stay Positive, Teeth Dreams) to the late-career short-story gems. You can hear the whole project of The Hold Steady rumbling under this song, even if Finn himself shrugs the song off as a joke at the expense of DJs and critics.

Maybe that’s the secret: sometimes the songs artists dismiss end up revealing more than the ones they cherish.

For me, this one captures something essential about the moment you step into the night—
when the lights go up, the bass starts running, and you feel, for just a second, like anything could happen.

It’s a snapshot of youth, of movement, of mischief and possibility.

And yeah—
I still feel pretty sweet.

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.

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On the Stage Banter of Matthew Houck and Dean Wareham

Introduction:

This post takes up the subject of stage banter with the hopes of gaining a window into what makes a great artist great. Before we get to stage banter, however, I want to look at Howe Gelb’s spoken introduction to Giant Sand’s cover of “The Pilgrim (Chapter 33).” Stage banter and spoken introductions are, clearly, related animals.

Gelb is the lead singer of the band Giant Sand, and the cover in question first appeared on Nothing Left to Lose, a Kris Kristofferson tribute album. The song was later collected on Giant Sand’s album Cover Magazine. You may know the song–it goes:

he’s a poet/ he’s a picker/ he’s a prophet/ he’s a pusher/ he’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned/ he’s a walking contradiction/ partly fact and partly fiction/ taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

It’s a good song, and Gelb turns in a sound version. But it’s his spoken introduction that really peaks my interest. On Kristofferson’s original he name-checks a number of folks who “had something to do with” the genesis of the song. Gelb repeats the original name-checks, slightly out of order, before listing a set of artists that he, Gelb, learned the song for:

Well, I guess when Kris wrote this song he wrote it for Chris Gantry-he started out doing it though by-ended up writing it for Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash, Norman Norbert, Funky Donny Fritts, Billy Swan, Paul Seibel, Bobby Neuwirth, Jerry Jeff Walker. Ramblin’ Jack Eliot had a lot to do with it. Me I ended up learning this song for Vic Chesnutt, Jason Lytle, Evan Dando, Polly Jean, Paula Jean, Patsy Jean, Juliana, Victoria, Bobby Neuwirth, Bobby Plant. Curtis John Tucker had a lot to do with it.

The alliterative Bobbys and the matching of Ramblin’ Jack Eliot and Curtis John Tucker make this speech into a mini-poem of sorts, and we know many of the protagonists. Hopper and Cash of course; Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot are folk singers, older than Kristofferson; Bobby Neuwirth is a folk singer, multimedia artist, and Dylan confidant in Don’t Look Back. Funky Donny Fritts is a session keyboardist, and I believe Norman Norbert and Billy Swan were session musicians as well. Paul Seibel was also a folksinger-I don’t know him; maybe you do. Kris’ meaning is pretty clear-a song like The Pilgrim doesn’t come from nowhere, and the folksingers he learned from are portals back in time to an earlier tradition to which he generously pays tribute.

Not being myself a 70’s session musician completist I did have to look up a few of the names. The Gelb names are more familiar, expect one. Vic Chesnutt, Jason Lytle and Victoria (Williams) are folk singers (or were, as sadly Chesnutt has passed). Evan Dando, Juliana Hatfield, and P.J. Harvey are/were alt-rock superstars. Bobby Plant would be Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame, Bobby Neuwirth is Bobby Neuwirth.

But here’s the point, after listening to Kristofferson and Gelb name-check Funky Donny and Curtis John, I feel an affinity for them-were I to bump into Funky Donny in an airport bar or lounge his presence would resonate with an essential familiarity. Even if I didn’t know precisely that it was he, I would recognize immediately that he was indeed funky, not to mention a serious problem when he’s stoned. And Curtis John Tucker, well, his role is still opaque to me, but he clearly had a lot to do with it.

What both singers hint at in their evocation of the circumstances surrounding the creation of a song is the presence of community behind the music. Behind or beside every Kristofferson is a Norman Norbert, behind every an a Bobby Neuwirth, every Gelb a Curtis John Tucker.

The humanity and camaraderie inherent in the spoken introductions to The Pilgrim remind us that artistic communities are vital in the creation of lasting artistic production–Neuwirth may not have been essential to Dylan’s art in the mid-60’s, but he was instrumental to its vitality; Kristofferson wrote “The Pilgrim” but it wouldn’t have been as good without Paul Seibel. And as for Curtis John Tucker, well he had a lot to do with it.

On the Spoken Introduction of the Band Members of Phosphorescent by Matthew Houck on Live at the Music Hall

On side two of Phosphorescent’s majestic 2015 live album Live from the Music Hall, the band plays a song from their 2005 album Aw Come Aw Wry, called “Joe Tex, These Taming Blues.” Houck’s early Phosphorescent albums are interesting–they are more ambient and keening than his mature work and some of the songs are really long.  Joe Tex is one of the better early songs, and Houck puts a little something special into the first couple lines on the live version: 

Is it ever gonna not be so hard to see you around/ or am I really really really really gonna have to really gonna have to really have to leave town

Houck is a master at harnessing the power of repetition—here each “really” takes on its own character and valance.  The band gives an excellent performance, which goes for about 4 minutes. It is apparently the second last song of the night, because at the end of the song Houck moves to introduce the band. Here he goes, as the band chugs on behind him:

Brooklyn, that’s Scott Stapleton playing that piano right there…

The first “Brooklyn” is loaded with import–Houck is going to drop some wisdom on the folks tonight. Stapleton plays a few understatedly beautiful lilting keys and…

Brooklyn, that’s David Torch playing that percussion right there…

Torch gives a little maracas shake, right on time, as Houck establishes the rhythm and flow of the introductions. The basic elements include a “Brooklyn,” which shifts in valance a little each time, and the band member playing “that (instrument),” “right there.”

Brooklyn, this is Rustin Bragaw playing that bass guitar right there…

A slight shift in the pattern–probably Rustin is standing next to Houck. Bragaw drops a couple of notes on his funky bass and on we go–naturally, the bassist gets the lowest key introduction.

Brooklyn, Christopher Showtime Marine playing those drums right there…

Houck reaches for a higher register here, both on the slightly more breathless and rushed “Brooklyn” and an uptone delivery of Marine’s nickname. Another shift in the pattern–Marine has a moniker. Showtime delivers a healthy drum piece and…

Brooklyn, the trigger finger Ricky…Ray…Jackson playing that guitar and that pedal steel right there, come on…

We’re getting there. The crowd is excited for this one; the pedal steel player is clearly a star. Houck pauses a beat on each name, “Ricky…Ray…Jackson, come on,” and the come on is both an entreaty to the crowd and also a general “come on can you believe this guy!” from the lead singer. Pedal steel is no joke. Also, Ricky Ray’s nickname comes before the name–he is in fact the trigger finger here tonight, his birth name is just data.

The trigger finger plays a couple of high notes and…

Brooklyn, last but certainly not least, the best looking one in the group, Joe Help, playing those keyboards right there, come on.

No fuss around the two-syllable “Joe Help,” which Houck delivers as if it was one word. Joe Help and Joe Tex, good looking guys that’s all.

I can’t tell you what a pleasure this has been y’all. Thank you for being here. Hope you come back again.  We’re going to play one more song; thank you guys so much again.  This is a song called Los Angeles; this is how it goes.

And the band plays a stunning closer.

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On the Between-Song Patter on the Bob Dylan Bootleg Record “Peco’s Blues”

Introduction

Behind any work of art, pretty much, there is some kind of “process.” The scope and complexity of this process differs across art forms, of course. The writer’s process is rather different than that of, let’s say, the magician David Copperfield. I find all artistic processes fascinating, and am drawn specifically to what happens “backstage.” Backstage is a world unto itself.

In the early 1970’s, the film director Sam Peckinpah was making a film called Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and he asked Bob Dylan to do the soundtrack. He also offered him a small role in the movie, a character called Alias. Dylan hadn’t really done a soundtrack before, nonetheless he headed down to Mexico to work on the film with Peckinpah. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid the film is ok; it’s not my favorite Peckinpah by any means. (That is reserved for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with the one and only Warren Oates in the lead role. Oates around this time also starred in the film Cockfighter, which features the greatest rejected tagline of any film even “he came into town with his cock in his hands and what he did with it was illegal in 48 states.”) The Pat Garrett soundtrack in many ways transcends the film, mostly because this is where we are first introduced to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which would go on to become one of Dylan’s best known songs, and is a really good soundtrack overall, however I am more interested in an extended set of outtakes from the sessions which are collected on a bootleg record called Peco’s Blues. Peco’s Blues features a number of alternate versions of the best known songs on the soundtrack, including Heaven’s Door and “Billy,” however the most interesting part of Peco’s Blues for me is the black and forth patter between Dylan, his sound engineer Chuck, and his band. This patter, I suggest, opens a fascinating and unique window into Dylan’s working methods and general approach to art. In what follows we will look at each incident of patter or conversation in the order they occur. All of the instances occur within the first 20 minutes of the nearly 70 minute recording as Dylan, his band, and the engineer endeavor to get on the same musical page.

Patter at the End of “Billy 2,” around the 7:34 Mark:

Dylan (D) wraps up a lengthy take of Billy 2 and asks his engineer Chuck (C):

D: Was that any good?

C: Pretty good Bob. What happened was was you hit the mic twice when you were moving around out there and we had a couple of clunks on it.

D: That’s too bad (…) Shit, I wish Sam was here. He’d know what to do.

C: That mic’s just a little more sensitive than the Sennheiser’s and I’m getting a little…

D: That’s too, uh…that’s…

C: And I’m getting a little puff of wind sometimes when you get real close to it when you sing.

D: That’s too sensitive.

C: Let me move it back a little for you Bob.

D: I think we must have got it though Chuck.

C: (with what sounds like a pencil in his mouth) Oh I recorded it, darn tootin’. I had a little puff from your voice once and you knocked the mic twice.

D: Well that might have been alls that we need.

C: You wanna, you wanna hear a playback on it?

D: Yeah, I would.

Comment:

We see right away here that Dylan is the boss and that the engineer is walking on eggshells a little bit. This is made clear by Dylan’s reference to “Sam,” who he obviously thinks is a better engineer than Chuck. We have more than a little sympathy for Chuck, as it wasn’t he that knocked the mic and he is trying his best to give Dylan the relevant information.

I love how Dylan here, while implicitly criticizing Chuck, also picks up on Chuck’s framing of the microphone situation and agrees that “that’s too sensitive.” However, the relative sensitivity of the mic is not Dylan’s main concern. Dylan, famously, likes to work fast. For some of his records that has been a positive, on these the sound and performances come across as organic and coordinated, like all of the players grasped their roles and just ran with them. On other records, Dylan’s preference for speed let’s him down, and songs, and especially the production, can feel rushed, even a little sloppy. Dylan famously warred with Uber-producer Daniel Lanois, who had produced U2 and Peter Gabriel among others before Dylan asked him to produce 1989’s Oh Mercy. Oh Mercy sounds great and was Dylan’s “comeback” album after a mixed, to say the least, mid 80’s period, however Lanois’ sonic fingerprints are all over it. Too much so for Dylan, who wanted a faster, looser approach. Lanois is no pushover, and held his own with Dylan. We get the sense that Chuck is no Lanois.

So, despite the knocks on the mic and the puff of wind, Dylan is going to be fine with using this version on the record. Chuck, of course, is going to want Dylan to play it again. Chuck, or someone, would win this one because the extended take of Billy 2 here is not the one used on the final album. The little tussle between Dylan and Chuck ends in a draw as they agree to listen to the playback.

Patter at the Beginning of “Turkey,” around the 8:40 Mark:

D: Hey Roger, when I stop, when I stop, you stop. I’ll do something else and you figure it out. So it might go like this (Dylan starts playing and the band fills in a little hesitantly behind him).

D: Say Chuck, Chuck?

C: Yeah

D: Let’s take this down and mark it under, uh, Turkey…We got a buzz in the amp.

C: I’m not picking it up.

D: OK come on now.

The band plays on the instrumental Turkey for about a minute before Dylan stops.

D: OK, this is under Turkey.

Dylan begins again, and this time the band fills in much better, the song sounding fuller and tighter in all ways.

Comment:

This is in my opinion the most illuminating of Dylan’s comments and gives us a window into his way of working throughout his career. As mentioned above, Dylan works fast and expects his musicians to do the same. Thus he instructs Roger that when he Dylan stops, Roger is to stop, Dylan will “do something else” and Roger needs to “figure it out.” Dylan’s instructions may not sound very fair to poor Roger, but I think they actually are. A musical team is in this case not unlike a sports team, say a basketball team, where even if an offense is running a designed play or “set,” players need to figure out what’s going on and adjust their own position and movements constantly and on the fly. There is no playbook, not set of absolute rules about how to accomplish this any more than there is a set of rules about how to follow Dylan musically. The musician, like the athlete, just has to work by feel, take in all the information around him or her, and figure it out. If they can, they will keep their job; if not, not.

Patter at the Beginning of “Billy Surrenders,” around the 18:10 Mark:

D: Let’s see now. You know, you know what we want when Billy starts (laughs) this guy Jerry Fielding’s gonna go nuts man when he hears this (laughs). You know what we want when like Pat Garrett comes down from the hills right, and all these guys come out like one by one. And Billy comes out, he’s almost standing in a circle you know, so like (indistinct) one by one and then there’s like a big pause and he stops and there’s silence. You know those big organ notes, those scary things (hums organ notes) (laughs). Can you get behind that? (Dylan and the band laughing.)

Comment:

The recording of the Pat Garrett soundtrack was pretty complicated, in large part because Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s usual composer, was relegated to a supporting role and apparently resented it. Accounts differ as to whether Fielding quit, walked off set (and maybe came back), actually did try to advise Dylan as requested, or some combination of the above, however the history of the film makes clear that there was friction. Dylan is clearly aware of the tension with Fielding, and makes a joke about it in a place where it doesn’t even seem relevant. Dylan seems to almost revel in the conflict, setting up Fielding to his band as a “suit” who is not in the field so to speak, and who Dylan enjoys winding up with his musical choices. Whatever the exact situation with Fielding was, the issue is clearly a live one at the time of recording.

My sense is that Dylan is mostly talking to his band here, as there are a number of people in the background laughing along with Dylan through this monologue. Despite his reputation for playing fast and loose most of the time, Dylan shows a pretty good grasp of particular scenes in the film and clearly knows what he wants. The “big organ notes” he mentions do indeed feature on the soundtrack, however maybe not to the extent Dylan wanted. I have to laugh at the very 1970’s question “can you get behind that?”

Conclusion

Overall, Peco’s Blues provides a fascinating window into Dylan’s working methods and expectations for his crew. Of course not every musician works this way; many will give much more precise instructions I am sure, and in the era of computer aided music Dylan’s approach on Pat Garrett is certainly a old-fashioned one. But I like it. It is absolutely worth listening to the entirety of Peco’s Blues to get a sense of Dylan’s working methods as well as how a band, here playing together live and recorded live, “figures itself out” and gets from sketch to finished product. I am myself not a musician but a writer, and the writing process, although never exactly easy, is perhaps a little less complex, mostly because most writers write by themselves, with an editor or editing team looking over the work at a later date. There is nothing in writing quite like “I’ll do something else and you figure it out,” and it is the shifting, quicksilver like nature of Dylan’s approach to music making here that continues to interest me and draw me in.

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Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)

I used to be free/ I used to be seventeen

Sharon Van Etten

Never said a word, I never had to/ it was my attitude/ that you thought was rude

The Replacements

Long may you run

Neil Young

Note: This is the last in our series about Saint George’s, the school I attended from Grade 1 through Grade 12. You can find the other parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Thank you to everyone who read this series.

Senior Year II, and After:

It’s time to wrap up the Scenes from St. George’s series, as I’ve said most of what I want to say about that time and place. Before I finish, I want to write a bit about the very end of senior year and the summer after graduation as well as the first winter vacation back from college, and add a short coda.

After a number of us seniors got busted for drinking on our senior trip, things were pretty much winding down. Because we were a smallish class, everyone pretty much got along and there weren’t many cliques, however it is true that the two or three-season athletes, myself included, lived in a slightly different world than those students who mostly didn’t play sports. After baseball season of senior year whatever remaining barriers between classmates crumbled, and sometime around here I finally got a driver’s license. As a result, I spent a bit of time out at Dyche Alsaker’s house. Dyche and I were not all that close, but I liked him for a couple of reasons. One was, although his family certainly had more money than mine, and a bigger house, he never acted like some kind of alpha, which was cool. He just seemed happy to have people over (his parents never seemed to be home) and to go with the flow. I was as well. Dyche’s house was in “the valley” (do all towns have a valley?), which was really just the open space between Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. Most of the real rich folks at St. George’s lived on the South Hill, so maybe there was something about the Valley that was a little more “beta” than the South Hill. At that point in time, as now, I was more than happy to hang with some beta-males, or at least in a circumstance where such ridiculous distinctions no longer obtained.

Dyche loved the band the Replacements and their lead singer Paul Westerberg, and I caught onto his passion for this band. Actually, I may have discovered them on my own first, as their single “Merry Go Round” played a lot on VH1 and at that time I was a regular viewer of their music video program. “Merry Go Round” is the lead off track on the band’s final record All Shook Down, which was released in 1990 and is still by far my favorite “Mats” album. I bought the record and played it over and over in my room as “rock music” was kind of verboten in the main part of the house for reasons passing understanding. I remember one specific day where we drove out to a lake, probably in Idaho, and Dyche boated us around while drinking and listening to Westerberg’s first solo record 14 Songs. 14 Songs is pretty good and has a catchy single “Knocking’ on Mine,” but it’s no All Shook Down. As for drunk boating, while not advisable, it is somewhat preferable to drunk driving because there is simply more space, and Westerberg made the perfect companion for such an outing.

Although I was already into a lot of music at the time, including Dylan, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and Dire Straits (this list holds up pretty well actually), I was impressed with Dyche’s deeper level of fandom and aspired to know more about my favorite bands. By the time I got to university I had a better idea of what it meant to be a music fan, and this was in no small part because of Dyche. Out at Dyche’s house, there was a predictable amount of drinking and hooking up; the first interested me a little, the second more, although I was still having a bit of a tough time getting anything going in that area. Drinking was easier. One night I drank most of a bottle of whiskey in the hot tub there, and people came to think I had a high tolerance, which wasn’t really true. I also remember commandeering a bed at his house one night when a classmate came in with a girl I did not know. Can we have the bed, they asked–we are stuck on the trampoline. This was not my problem I felt, however they persisted and I gave way. I suppose they needed it more than I did.

As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be much parental presence at Dyche’s house, which was a positive, but things never got too crazy. People came over, enjoyed the trampoline and the hot tub, and stayed the night instead of driving impaired. It was, all in all, a reasonably healthy developmental zone. This action lasted for a few weeks after graduation, and then kicked off again during the first winter after we went off to college. During that break there was a party at another classmate’s house–similar vibe, no parents, booze, and hooking up. I attended, and the next morning found myself with a girlfriend of sorts. This was a positive. What I recall about that night was, I watched the film The Graduate, walked away with a girlfriend, and smoked a cigar. Decent action, good action, bad action. Two out of three ain’t bad, baby.

Like all scenes of this sort, it didn’t last, nor did my girlfriend. I didn’t really know how to have a girlfriend, so to speak, and although we wrote letters from our respective colleges that spring the relationship had faded by summer. Nonetheless, the whole period, bisected by a few semesters of college, stands out as a crucial, if brief, interlude between high school and “real life.”

Coda:

Disclaimer: This section is pieced together from things I know and things I think probably happened. This is not meant to serve as a strict historical record of events that, for whatever reason, my parents have barely shared with me–and even if they had, this would only be one side of the story. Thus, in historical terms, this is kind of a reconstruction, so take it for what it’s worth.

St. George’s at this point should have been in the rear view mirror, and it mostly was. I came back as an alum, hung around a little, and moved on to the next thing, which turned out to be Japan. However, it was not entirely behind me because my parents still worked there, and my father, after I left, got sucked deeper and deeper into school politics. I wish to tread lightly here because there is so much about this murky period that I still don’t totally understand, however the basic facts as I know them are as follows:

i) After George Swope, who had a cameo in Part VI of this series, St. George’s had a new principal called Jonathan Slater. My father had wanted the job, and didn’t get it.

ii) At first, my father and Slater were fast friends, but I think this was a mutually cynical political relationship in a sense. My father was the head teacher and a power in the school, and Slater would have come in knowing this. They bonded under the auspices that Slater would give way at some point to my father, but this was never going to happen. I knew this, even if my parents did not. At first Slater would invite my family to Thanksgiving and such, and my father praised him to the skies. That changed however, and the two men became bitter enemies. This enmity led eventually to my father leaving the school.

Now St. George’s was an interesting place, and it was pretty much run by the rich folks that sent their kids there. There was some kind of board that pushed the principals around, and this was mostly made up of folks from the South Hill, who tended to be a little on the stuck up side–not terribly in most instances, but somewhat for sure. Also, by the time in question here Dyche’s father was on it, as I understand. I guess Dyche’s dad was the token Vallyer on the basically South Hill board, but then the school got a big donation from the Gates Foundation and I think Bill Gates’ sister came onto the board, or at least into the zone. In essence this was Western Washington doing a little light colonization of Eastern Washington, the red-headed stepchild of that state. Eastern and Western Washington are divided by the Cascades mountains, where Twin Peaks is set. Twin Peaks is in this piece.

Now I don’t know much about Bill Gates, but I suspect he’s not a great guy. In fact, I think he’s pedophile-adjacent. But I know that Bill Gates is not a force for good in the world for a different reason, which has to do with my struggles with my Skype password a few years back. Back before Zoom came along and ate Skype’s lunch six ways to Sunday, I used the service and had a password for it which worked fine. Then Microsoft took it over or something and all the sudden I had to provide a Microsoft password to “get through” to Skype for some reason. This was terrible, because I try to avoid Microsoft at all costs and I didn’t even know if I had a Microsoft password. Certainly I didn’t want one.

But for weeks I could not get anywhere near Skype because of this password issue, and it was driving me nuts. I needed Skype for work and it just wasn’t coming through. In marketing terms, this is a “process” issue. Process is one of the 7 Ps of the marketing mix in business, and basically it refers to how easy, or hard, it is for the customer to access your good or service. Amazon’s one-click check-out is an example of good process. Microsoft’s multi-step, super frustrating, password labyrinth is the opposite. I got so fed up with this whole situation, and by extension Gates, that I even ranted about it and him on the short lived, but awesome, Periscope platform–which Twitter later bought and then killed.

So like I say, Microsoft sucks, Periscope rocks, Skype sucks and deserves its fate, and Bill Gates, in my opinion, also sucks. I don’t know anything about his sister, but her arrival was, I think, the catalyst for my father’s removal.

(By the way, the Skype password issue reminds me of the soft-water issue. When I was a teenager I would frequently see soft-water trucks driving around, and I wondered what in the world soft-water was. I am basically a huge fan of the prefix “soft” and wrote about it here. The only soft-prefixed phrase I don’t like is soft-water. That’s because, trucks and aggressive marketing aside, soft-water is terrible. It’s marketed as some kind of improvement over “hard-water,” which I guess is supposed to be full of minerals or something. However, soft-water is completely terrible. The absence of minerals means that it is totally ineffective at getting soap off your skin, so after a soft-water shower you walk around all day with a patina of soap residue stuck to you. Soft-water is awful and a total scam, just like orthodontists. There is no real connection between Microsoft passwords and soft-water, except both totally suck. I bet you Bill Gates is a big soft-water guy–he does look a little soapy.)

In any case, my father was friendly with the rich folks on the South Hill, and as a result we spent a lot of time at their various big houses. I was less enamored with the South Hill crowd as a whole, as I have made clear, although I did have friends who lived there, however my father was political so he kind of had to suck up a bit. But I don’t think he really loved this sort of hobnobbing–he never seemed really at home in these settings. My overall sense is that at St. George’s my father was mostly on the right side of history, but his shortcomings as a politician were his Achilles Heel.

So, the relationship with Slater was going south for a while, and then the principal’s little predilections started to become basically public knowledge. I don’t know if Slater is still alive–if he is he’d be pretty old, but I think it is a matter of record that if George Edwards liked him some beach babes, Jonathan Slater there was more interested in babes in the cradle, so to speak. Again, just something I’ve heard, but I’ve been hearing it more and more these days. The rumor was that Slater would spend time in, I guess they were, basically sex clubs in downtown Spokane, and his tastes ran as young as possible, staying, perhaps, just this side of legal. Spokane is not that big of a city, and with something of that nature, well word does get around.

So let’s use a little Occam’s Razor on this situation. Just looking at it, here’s what I guess happened. This dude Jonathan Slater was principal for a while and was good at raising money. He was also, like Bill Gates, pedophile-adjacent and Spokane is a small town. While his money raising skills gave him space to engage in some borderline bad action there in downtown Spokane and to cover for a few bad actor friends of his on campus for a while, over time tongues talked and whispers became louder and Slater had to go. My father (who is named Ross) ran point on this effort from within in terms of rallying the teachers to oppose Slater, and at the same time Ross was perhaps positioning himself to get nominated as principal, but I’m not really sure. However, the board didn’t want Ross to be principal because they recognized that he would be a “teacher’s principal” (like a player’s coach in a sense). Board opposition to Ross probably had a few aspects, some more flattering to the board, some less.

One aspect was probably that the board as a whole (I don’t mean any one board member individually, but as a collective over time) had covered for Slater a bit even when his little peccadillos were, or should have been, becoming apparent, and when they came to the conclusion finally that he had to go they wanted to do it quietly. Ross’ involvement was making that difficult. This aspect of the situation is not in the board’s favor. A second aspect is perhaps that the board realized that not only did Slater have to go but the school as a whole, the teaching staff and the administration, needed more accountability and standards, and having a teacher’s principal in place would, in their view, not advance this goal. This is more in the board’s favor.

I am not suggesting that Ross was anti-standards, quite the opposite in many respects, however it is true, in my view, that he was very much driven by personal relationships and by who was on his team. In this sense he approached school administration like he did coaching. And while there are positive aspects to this approach to administration, there are also drawbacks, which the board must have been aware of. Another factor here is that for someone who had serious political aspirations within education for several decades, Ross was in many ways still a limited politician. Although he associated with the wealthy class that ran the school, attended their parties, ate their food, and, at times, flattered them, he was, as I mentioned, at heart not comfortable in these spaces and indexed this in multiple ways. His other weakness, in my opinion, was a tendency to vilification, which as I say started with Slater a while before all the action came to a head. In this case though, I think the vilification was justified. All in all, in the immortal words of The Mendoza Line, mistakes were made.

Somehow the Gates sister got deep in the mix, and the board summarily fired Ross’ best-friend and right hand man. Ostensibly this was, I believe, for not updating his teaching credential, and/or for being habitually late for work (which he was), but in actuality this was a shot at Ross, whom they felt they could not fire. Ross did not take the firing well, and started to raise holy hell, using the Slater business as leverage. There was some kind of teacher revolt that was shut down, and then Ross was pushed out–fired, or left, I’m still not quite sure. Then, Ross sued the school (again, I heard this but my parents never really told me about any of it, but I believe they did eventually get some money), and the Slater business may have made the papers. The Spokane papers don’t have great archives (unlike the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), so I don’t know this for sure, but the basic narrative is along these lines, I believe.

With Slater and Ross both gone, the school moved on and probably the Gates sister installed her own puppet, and that was that for my family’s association with the school. Ross’ relationship with the South Hillers was pretty much shattered, and for some reason he took special issue with the role of Dyche’s dad (who he never had had a relationship with). I didn’t really know Dyche’s dad much, and when I did meet him he seemed pretty chill, so I’m guessing there might have been a bit of projection there. In any case, all those doors closed.

Years later however, one of the rich families who Ross used to be close with must have thought that having Ross back in the fold would be a good idea, and they decided to use me in a roundabout way to try and re-open the door. I was already pretty well along in my IB career here in Asia, and St. George’s was in the process of, or had become, an IB school as well. I got a message asking me if I wanted to come and consult with the school, and although I could totally handle a little consulting, this was a bit odd because I was based in Asia and surely they could get someone more local to give advice. I got the feeling that what was really going on though was the consulting gig was being dangled as a way get to Ross, but maybe it was in good faith, in which case cool. I told my parents about the offer and my mother was horrified that I would even consider it. That’s how bad matters were left with the school. But consider it I did, because if someone wants to fly me somewhere and pay me for my time, I’m probably gonna take it.

The offer fell through though, I’m guessing because the powers-that-were figured out that whatever they were angling for Ross to do wasn’t going to happen and they never really wanted me to consult anyway. I felt a little used, but not really–it was just politics.

Ross moved on to become principal of a Catholic school in Oregon, and was able to implement his team-based approach there and I think he did a great job. He is, I believe, a retired principal in good standing there, and he was widely liked, except by those that he let go. My father is a good man, and a moral one, but he was also a little tough and if he didn’t like the way things were going with a staff member he’d cut the cord. I understand this, and sometimes you gotta do it, but myself take a little longer term view of trying to get people to pull their weight. People are different.

The epigraph for this piece is from the Replacements, of course, from the song “Attitude” off All Shook Down. My two favorite songs on the record are “Someone Take the Wheel” (“I see we’re fighting again/ in some fucking land/ aw throw in another tape man,”) and “Attitude.” All in all I think I’m an alright fellow much of the time, but some people have said I have a little attitude myself. Well, if so I probably picked it up from the Mats.

And Mr. St. George’s, if your IB program is dragging a little or if you are looking for a little consultation in pretty much any area, hit me up. I’ll be there and it won’t even cost you that much. After all, I’ve always been a cheap date.

Dedication: For Dyche. Getting to know you was way more interesting than any subsequent politics. Thanks for the Mats. And for my father. Long may you run.

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Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…