Off To See the Elephant

My time with Beulah, and music before and maybe after

Twenty years ago, Beulah, the band I helped start, was reaching the finish line. I kept a regular journal and set off to write a book about the experience before I’d forget. When I finished that, I shelved it. It would have become an “unauthorized autobiography.” Yes, I’m afraid you’ve read that paradox right.

It’s gathered dust long enough, so I’m going to put it out in pieces here - but only the things that have aged well or are worth a second look. I suspect the bulk of it – the parts that make me cringe when I read it now and are beyond editing as I go – will stay in the bin in case there’s anyone in the next generations of my family who’ll want to read about how I felt when I was 34 years old. Hope you enjoy the journey. It will probably end like this:

“Seeing the Elephant

Upon reaching a crossroad several miles from home, where vision was obscured by a tall hedgerow, the farmer urged his horse into the intersection. At that same moment the circus train, led by the elephant, reached the crossroad from a different direction. The resulting collision smashed the wagon to splinters, killed the horse, and knocked the farmer unconscious. The circus train passed on as though nothing had happened. Awakening after several hours, the farmer surveyed the destruction and stated dryly, ‘Well, at least I’ve seen the elephant.’”

-Gerald Conti, from the June 1984 “Civil War Times Illustrated”

Ballad of the Lonely Argonaut

Half by sea
through the isthmus or the cape they're roundin'
Overland
follow the shallow ribbon of the Platte

And El Dorado waits
like an avalanche
And the boys are off to see
the elephant

How does it feel
to roam this land like Harte and Twain did
How how how does it feel
a thousand miles closer to hell

Overland
they pass Scottsbluff
and across the basin
Half by sea
they follow the coast and through the gate where

gold is coated with gold on the languid hills
where they wait for hours and hours
cool gray ladies from Shirley's letters cheer
and they sigh for hours and hours

The luck of the roaring camp
and how they taunt
the outcasts of the flats
and their poker face

cannot hide the fever of the children’s crusade
slow slower than slow
days fill into one another

Gold is coated with gold on the languid hills
where they wait for hours and hours
cool gray ladies from Shirley's letters cheer
and they sigh for hours and hours

-Miles Kurosky

It’s so hard not to be crushed

March 1st, 2004:

I’m sitting in a gray cubicle in the dark at 6:16 on a Monday morning, in a drab, non-descript building, South of Market, San Francisco, contemplating a two-month tour of Europe and America starting April 14th and what that means for me to be able to keep this dumb job when I get back.  I am a Customer Support Representative for Xpedite Medialinq Services, a broadcast fax and permission-based email service provider, and I’m wearing a headset waiting for the next call.  Most likely it will be someone with a New Jersey accent bitching at me because he’s having trouble sending out a mass fax of his latest mortgage rates to his brokers because the phone line to the fax machine is unplugged.

Beulah, the band I’ve put all my creative energy into for the past eight years, is nearing the end of its run. We released four records worldwide, each selling better than the last. We’ve gotten favorable reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin twice and have been featured in practically every indie magazine that I can think of. We did a John Peel Session at the BBC and played on the Conan O’Brien Show for NBC. We also got good write-ups for our records and concerts in the New York and London Times, and even made it into GQ. That’s right – Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

We’ve had some great tours – been to every state in the U.S. except Alaska, Maine, Florida, Hawaii and South Dakota. We’ve toured the U.K. three times and have been to France, Belgium and the Netherlands. We’re about to more than double the number of European countries we’ve been to this time around and finally hit Florida in the states. In Germany we were recently featured in Der Spiegel, the equivalent to Newsweek here in the U.S. Even Yoko Ono has given us her blessing. Her publicist contacted us asking why we decided to name our current record “Yoko,” and Ms. Ono – or her publicist maybe – ended up asking us if we’d be interested in remixing one of her songs after our leader, Miles Kurosky, sent her a very thoughtful letter about how her name represented “change, progress and risk.”

We’ve accomplished a lot, but it’s been a financial juggle for me. I’m finally to a point where I can pay the bills, rent and have money to stave off the doom of inevitable, crushing SF Bay Area debt -- when I’m on tour. I can only make that kind of a living from music when I’m on the road. And I don’t know about you, but I enjoy the company of my wife. And Kiera wouldn’t enjoy the company of nine smelly rockers in a van for six months out of the year. Neither would I.  

“Medialinq customer support, this is Bill, how can I help you?”

A day in ‘95

Recently I dug up the old tapes of “Handsome Western States,” Beulah’s humble first record, recorded by yours truly on four and eight track cassettes. They sit in a 3x10 rack meant to be hung up on a wall, under my bed gathering dust. The first one is labeled “Beulah 1,” dated October 7^th, 1995. Back then, Beulah was just Miles Kurosky and me, and I started out playing the drums.

The first song we ever recorded together is a crude, “loud rock” version of “Calm Go the Wild Seas,” a song that would end up on our second record, When Your Heartstrings Break, three years later. When I hear my crude attempt at drumming on a kit that didn’t belong to me, Miles’s skronky guitar and the pitchy “fake” lyrics he’s singing, the feeling I had at the time comes right back like it was a few days ago: “How am I here, right now, in this moment?” Miles had this belief in himself that was infectious, that could make you feel like you were in the presence of something great. That first night was a shaky, tentative start, but the attitude and belief was already there – and I wanted to be a part of it. 

At the time I was the lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter of my own band, 17 Reasons. 17 Reasons were rehearsing three nights a week to play – for the most part – sparsely attended local shows in small clubs twice a month.  Beulah started as an experiment for me, a side project. I was attending recording classes at San Francisco State and beginning to explore the possibility of a career as a recording engineer. Miles, an old co-worker of mine in a mailroom, had just broken up his band, a two-piece called Pocahontas.  We weren’t the best of friends.  When we worked together, I remember a conversation where he talked openly about this, that coworkers should not be friends because, to put it in his words, “you already spend forty hours of the fucking day together in some shitty job.” Why would you want to hang out with the same people in the time you have left?

But we did have some things in common. For one, we were both bandleaders. His band put out a small seven-inch on a label called Insignificant Records.  Mine was the typical local band – playing to friends and, hopefully, friends of friends, making demos, sending them out to people, with vague ideas of knowing someone with ties in the music business, but getting nowhere really. I was in the middle of my third lineup change in three years. We were good (if I do say so myself), but by the time we’d finish one recording, the people in the band had moved on for one reason or another, so we hadn’t yet pressed anything to sell at shows (and wouldn’t), much less release anything on a record label. I was an aspiring artist, flailing in search of an identity.

I met Miles when he started working in the mailroom I was working at in May of 1994. We worked for a stockbroker on the 11^th floor in the Transamerica Pyramid in the financial district of San Francisco. We had to wear ties. We argued a lot. He always had to be right, and it was fucking annoying! But he was also extremely interesting and charming. We had wide ranging conversations in the common room, sorting the mail, which made the days go by a lot faster. And then before I knew it, he was gone.

Miles quit the mailroom before the holidays and then left town for a while. He ended up in Lawrence, Kansas to try to keep Pocahontas going, since his band mate was starting grad school there. It didn’t work out, and by the late summer of ’95 he came back to the Bay Area and called me. He had some songs he wanted to record and wanted to know if I could help him out. I was shocked!

I figured I’d never hear from Miles Kurosky again the day he left the mailroom – to go out on disability after a “swing dancing accident.” His girlfriend somehow broke his thumb. You can’t sort mail with a broken thumb, right? When he left, he said he’d never come back: “Not a day in ’95!"

I’m not sure why he chose me to help him out when he did come back – to the Bay Area, not the mailroom, mind you. I never asked. I guess maybe because I was still taking recording classes, and he knew I wouldn’t be in it for the money. We were broke – neither of us could afford to go into a studio. There was just something about his confidence – which I lacked – and a little voice in my head told me that this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. He already had a name for the project: Beulah. The name comes from John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Beulah is the land at the end of life’s travels. I started telling people about Beulah before we even got going!

My involvement for the next nine years would be rewarding in many ways. I would get to wear the hats of engineer, arranger, trumpet player, backup singer, guitar player, keyboard player, drummer, bass player (for one song that barely counts), songwriter (ditto), webmaster, music director, glockenspiel – pretty much everything but being the lead singer and front man. In other words, the opposite of almost every band I’d been in and project I had done up to that point. But the most exciting part for me in the beginning was the hands-on recording.

“What’s so hard about recording,” joked Aaron Young, another coworker in the mailroom when I told him I was going to take classes on the subject. He put up two fingers: “You just press PLAY, RECORD, REWIND... STOP.”

He had a point. The recording process is not some big mystery when it comes down to it. In the end it’s all about capturing a moment in time. But I’ve always been intimidated by the title of “engineer.” And the gear I thought one needed was prohibitively expensive and difficult to learn. If you wanted to put out a proper record worthy of release, the logic went, you needed to go into a studio and spend a bunch of money. But the person operating the tape would end up being some frustrated dude from an 80s metal band who had no idea what you were about. To replicate that “studio” level of quality yourself, and take the time to experiment, you’d have to pay a fortune...or take classes maybe and move to LA or New York¹.

By the mid-90s things were changing, and a light went on for me. I was not alone – and also, late to the party. “Punk” used to mean that you didn’t need to play technically well to be in a band; it was all about the energy you put into it, whether it was anger, protest, whatever. But the pioneering punk bands of the 70s that most people remember recorded in major studios. Even in the 80s, with the emergence of indie, bands booked time in recording studios, paying some professional in some way.

It seemed to me that the next realm for the idea of “punk” was recording. I’d recorded on a four track before, when I borrowed one when I was in high school, but I always approached it as a way to map out ideas to present to the band or to record a “demo” to book a gig or send to a record label. In the early 90s it became more accepted and widespread to record something at home and release it as it was. Bands like Pavement, Guided by Voices and Sebadoh had been doing that for years, putting out records that they recorded on four tracks using crappy mikes with gobs of hiss and noise from too much bouncing and ping-ponging. By the mid-90s it was almost as if that’s the way people wanted records to sound, as a form of protest against the slick, grossly over-produced recordings of the 80s.

For many people, like me at the time, this is what “Lo-Fi” meant. I never aligned myself with “punk.” I’d change my view later, but in 1994 I’d just been taught how to use a full mixing board by Rick McKay, our lead guitarist in 17 Reasons. I didn’t know how simple the concept of signal flow could be once you broke it down until Rick taught me in a way that I could understand. Not only did that spark an interest that led me to enroll in a recording course at SF State, I realized in the meantime I could also record better things on my own with the eight track and mixing board at our practice space without too much trouble. Since noise reduction, EQ techniques and fancy outboard gear seemed to me to be, perhaps, of secondary consideration for bands putting out records that I liked, I felt like I had a wider margin of error to do the job of recording and was less intimidated by just going for it. The learning curve, I felt, was more forgiving for someone starting out. Tape-Op Magazine would soon become the bible for people like us. “Lo-fi” wasn’t a fad like it may have become for some. We wanted to get better at recording ourselves, but we wanted to learn how in our own way.

When Miles Kurosky called me up in the summer of ’95 and asked if I wanted to record some songs with him, I was ready. You might say that was divine intervention, or you could call it a fortunate accident.

[Next chapter here.]

1. I had one exceptional recording experience in Wisconsin back in 1992, before I moved out to California a year later, but I’ll get to that in a little while.