Vandalized

I suppose I’m not entirely sure of this, but I’m fairly certain that this is my most well-known tune.  I played in a band a long time ago with the wonderful Matt Nathanson and we played some of my tunes.  This was one.  The group recorded a record, which has gone unreleased.  I was at my most passive-aggressive during the sessions, and Matt and I became much better friends after the group split.

I was living in Claremont when I wrote this, in late 1991 or maybe very early 1992, right after I’d graduated.  The demo above was recorded, me as an alum, in Pitzer’s band room, one of the last things I recorded there.  I knew almost immediately that the tune was the best I’d yet written.

Well, it’s late at night. There’s nobody around.
Just the sounds of the cars upon the asphalt ground.
It’s the waiting time, When the hours grow still.
And I gaze on through the glass inside my windowsill.
Though I know that you must be somewhere in this world,
In this place where, at birth, you and I were both hurled, To think that we once were relating
Is a thing that has almost grown foreign to me.

It’s a bad sight, such a terrible waste,
To spend your time talking in such bad taste.
It’s the same old line, though it’s not you I blame.
It’s your teachers and television that you put to shame.
The night’s lasting longer because I’ve filled my head
With the things I could have done and the words I could have said.
But, in truth, I was only spectating and that’s a permanent part of reality.

So many rude lines, so many petty crimes
And you don’t feel a need to apologize.
Tonight is the time that you stick in my mind,
But from now on I won’t become vandalized.

Now the room’s started filling with the dawn’s early light
And the end has arrived of this long night.
I turn off the television and I hit the bed
While your shade is still haunting my ever-vulnerable head.
And there’s no use in trying to compromise
When the kindest things we say are when we tell each other lies
But it’s time I should quit my complaining and behave with a little more dignity.

So many rude lines, so many petty crimes
And you don’t feel a need to apologize.
Tonight is the time that you stick in my mind,
But from now on I won’t become vandalized.

I sort of stumbled into a band with my dear friend Will Stephens and the fantastic guitarist Jack Devine.  This was the same Jack who recorded me on my first two demos (sent, sadly, to no record executives nor used in any way other than to entertain friends).  We began with a fourth, a great pianist named Brad, who was a Bill Evans fanatic as I remember and added a gentle quality to the proceedings.  He missed a couple rehearsals and in the process we became a “power trio,” called The Little Band that Could, shortened to The Little Band. We gigged a fair amount at the Colleges and at a few parties off-campus and ended our career by making a series of recordings that held together well.  It was the first batch of tunes I had that held together as a record.

Copies of the record, such as it was, circulated among a number of musicians and music fans around the Colleges, and it garnered a number of fans.  In hindsight, I certainly know how I could have done it better, but damn if we didn’t do a pretty good job with it.  At the risk of flattering myself, I often felt that the set was my Modern Lovers record.  Jonathan Richman cut his series of demos with John Cale, etc., consisting of music that was at once the least typical of his musical career but the most in tune with the way the musical winds were blowing among his contemporaries.  This was the closest I came to being hip.

The Little Band tunes were the rockiest I’d ever recorded, in the rockiest way, at a time when “grunge“–which I never really had an interest in–was coming up.  Maybe I was willfully perverse, or maybe just dedicated to self-sabotage, but with God or whomever in my mind I approached the band as a rock version of the trio Sonny Rollins recorded with at the Village Vanguard for Blue Note, the one with Elvin Jones on drums.  Jack was Sonny, I was Elvin, and Will was Wilbur Ware, holding us together.  The result was interesting, but that and the fact that we needed, were we to “get anywhere,” a singer more in tune with the times, ensured that the band was an interesting diversion that solidified the misconception, held even more strongly by me than anyone else, that I really didn’t care about broader commercial concerns.

I’ll look back, though, and say that I do think, however interesting the Little Band’s version is, that the demo takes the cake.  It’s both the mandolin and the harmonies, that and the fact that the song benefits from the wistful quality of the demo’s vocal more than the angry tone of the Little Band version.  The song in fact is an expression more of grief than anger.