I’m much more active on Facebook.
Sometimes even……Twitter?
Music: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bitsyras/37898467811
Mark: http://www.facebook.com/marknettleton
Tweet Tweet: http://twitter.com/bitsyras
I worked on a new song this July 4th weekend:
I don’t think it’s quite done yet, but I’m going to let it sit here and cook for a while.
Never thought (or considered) that I could get nauseated at a concert until I saw the Butthole Surfers Monday night in Albuquerque. Sounds like your basic harmless hardcore punk band right? No way – it was a sonic and visual nightmare live on stage. I’ll try a description, though it has to be experienced to get the actual effect. Two drummers, flailing possessed, with green lights shining directly on their faces. After every song they both dropped out of sight behind the stage. They provided the heavy industrial beat. Very Heavy. The guitarist generally played with extreme feedback and screaming high notes, but effective as hell and sometimes even chords. Sometimes even clean strummed chords. The bass player didn’t do anything real spectacular, just played his bass in a wild frenzy. The singer guy (who played some occasional abusive telecaster) had stringy long black hair and no shirt and a white kind of potbelly body. Not fat – just too many beers. Sometimes he sange right into the mic, sometimes into the mic with a cop bullhorn and some other times through some thing that made his voice low and ominous and subliminal possibly. No matter what he did I couldn’t understand a fucking word out of his mouth. Everything he said is probably in my subconscious waiting to fuck me up at a later date. Then there was a bald headed topless dancer writhing around the middle of the stage like you see at Dead concerts. Tripping tie-dyed hippy girls. Only she’s a skinhead in a g-string. And not that cute really. These guys don’t play music in any traditional sense. Those heavy dual drummer drums, death screech guitar and banshee wailing (or low and subliminal) vocals and pounding bass. No songs really, but extended insanity jams.
The films shown behind the band on a screen. These guys are sick. They weren’t bad at first – some old black white stuff I didn’t pay much attention to, then some Jacques Cousteau fish exploration stuff, where the guy running the projector kept twisting the lens, so the picture contorted and went in and out of focus with the beat. Then we see things like amputations, electrocutions, that sort of thing. Then “Mechanized Death” by the Ohio State Patrol. Nice long closeups of people freshly dead as a result of violent car wrecks.
The climax of the thing, for me, was when the music was peaking louder than hell industrial crash scream drone the movies all bloody, strobe light flashing on stage, performers, mostly topless girl dismembering a huge stuffed panda and some kind of glitter flakes floating around all over the stage like those little Christmas snow things but with the strobe.
I don’t know if it was the massive amount of coffee right before the show or if it was the show, but I had to go out and get some water cuz I couldn’t stand in there anymore.
(I do hope my writing has improved. Gawd.)
I did the Chai House open mic last Thursday. This was my second time jumping out of that particular airplane into the terrifying blue freefall of solo performance. The first time, a couple weeks previous, was great: I announce my status as an open mic virgin, played two or three songs, wasn’t super nervous, didn’t really fuck up much, the audience was warmly receptive. Some nutcase street guy started trying to sing along with me and I just smiled at him and rolled with it. No big deal. Why did I wait so long? It’s easy. Feels great.
Last Thursday. Whole different deal. Michael Jackson and Farrah die. That weirds me out (MJ anyway) more than I realized. I don’t get off work as early as I would have liked, so I get home, rush around getting cleaned up and ready, and drive to Ballard. Unlike the first time, the parking sucks. I finally end up five blocks down Leary and have to hike up with my guitar, feeling like some street hippie. The list opens at 7:30 and it’s like, 7:45 and already filled with names. In my nervous confused state I put my name (as Bitsyras) in the wrong place, though of course I don’t know this yet. I get some soup and a beer and settle in at a table.
After two and a half hours or so of throat singing, tap dancing, interminably long two-chord songs, off-kilter spoken word, and earnest young girls softly strumming expensive guitars, I’m thinking there might be a problem. I confer with the host and yup, he’d seen my name on there but since it’s kind of weird, and was in the wrong place, he had ignored it. But ok – he’ll put me on after this next spoken word guy. Spoken word guy goes on, speaks, comes off, and the host then brings up somebody else. This is where things started moving into weird bad dream territory. And I was feeling like an idiot just expectantly sitting there all this time. The crowd has thinned considerably. Fiiiiiiiinally it’s my turn. I take the stage and I’m totally fucking drained. All the snappy witty patter I’d thought up – poof. Gone. My tribute idea of playing the intro to Billy Jean – that ain’t gonna happen. I mumble some nonsense about Bitsyras being easier to google than Mark. I play Waterside. I’ve played Waterside hundreds of times. I fuck it up. Miss chords, forget words.
Back to the skydiving analogy, this time it’s like I’ve been flying around in some fucked up old piece of shit plane for three hours and now I’m nauseous and need to pee and don’t really want to jump but I do anyway and then the chute doesn’t open.
Get done with Waterside and go into Breathe. Breathe is a song about dealing with situations like this. Breathe. Relax. It’s not a big deal. Yeah. Right. I’m nervous, out of sync, and the lyrics are like in a fog, only appearing in my mouth at the last possible moment. And sometimes not. I’m too embarrassed to make eye contact with the audience. Oh, and I’m rushing the tempo and again missing changes I’ve played countless times. I play one more short little thing (Batten Down the Hatches), finishing to scattered distracted applause.
Ughhh.
Get me out of here.
In the not so distant past, this experience would have thrown me down into a bottomless pit of despair from which I wouldn’t have emerged for weeks. Now I’m feeling the failure, no doubt, but I’m somewhat detached. I’m not taking it personally, and I’m shrugging it off, and plotting my return even as I walk back to the car. Somewhere along the line my skin has grown thicker.
Strangely, this feels pretty good.
I’m putting some energy into my vacant, wind-blown, spam-infested, neglected blog. I’m upgrading Wordpress, and thinking about what it is I wish to put across with this thing.
After spending much of two entire weekends recording in my basement I’ve got a couple songs to show for it. By chance both songs happen to be about the same thing: loneliness. Or is it not chance? Perhaps I’m trying to tell myself something….
Whatever.
Here’s a version of the classic Beatles tune, somewhat reworked, and perhaps missing some vital chords here and there. When we used to play this one in the band some people actually got rather annoyed that I would so blasphemously butcher one of the Fab Four’s iconic tunes, which, punk that I was, only made me want to further twist the knife in the bloated stinking corpse of sixties rock. Fortunately, I’ve mellowed out somewhat in the intervening years, and this version is actually recognizable.
Eleanor Rigby
Since I’m too damn lazy to come up with anything new, here’s a song I wrote a thousand years ago that we also used to play in the Bohiems, albeit about 20 times faster. I just listened to the old version (it’s in the Bohiems section of the site here) and can’t believe we used to play it like that. I sound completely different now, having apparently stopped affecting a ridiculous British new wave accent. I hope this version is an improvement. Stick around for the end wherein the piano rides off into the sunset.
Space and Fear
Being that this blog is for the most part, an unvisited island in the vast sea of information, I set up a music page on myspace: www.myspace.com/bitsyrasmusic. Check it out. Be my friend.
Glad you asked. Looks like a release date in March of 08. In Taos. Mark your calendars. Last I heard Dave wanted to call it “Love in the Field of Love and Sorrow.” Erin Currier is doing the cover art. That should be nice. She does some amazing work. I can’t wait to hear what Greg Martin has been doing with the recordings all these months. Soon. He claims to have sent me a rough cd but I haven’t seen it. For a release party Dave is talking about getting his brother Tim on drums, Greg M. on Bass, me on guitar, and Andy Bird on keys. Sounds like a hot little combo.
I wonder what Dave’s gonna call the band?
The version of Tennessee that I worked on (listen down the page) is being nixed in favor of an acoustic version. Apparently the album as a whole rawked a little to much, which is of course a scientific impossibility. But whatever. Sniff.
i just found out a couple of my old bandmates are now in a band called Lovestain. That sounds like a name that could have been in contention for the name of the movie/band that ended up being called Spinal Tap. Or at least one of their hit songs. I love the guys, but really – a little more thinking on this one, please. I’m 43 and I’m pretty sure they didn’t magically remain in their twenties while I kept marching down the timeline. They’re living in Taos, though, so I could be wrong.
Lovestain?! Tell me it’s just a one-off joke band. For halloween or something… Please tell me….
We’ve been watching a lot of House, M.D. around here. Maybe that has something to do with this song, which is really sort of silly and I don’t like the vocals.
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