Off To See The Elephant

Ham Radio Central

Recording The Coast Is Never Clear, June - October, 2000.

Ham Radio Central

Computers! Robot Wars! It was the year 2000. Isn’t this what life was supposed to be like by then?

We chose John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone as our studio to record our third album, The Coast is Never Clear. Recording started on June 10^th. Capricorn Records gave us a budget to cover the costs, and Tiny Telephone had decent rates for the amount of gear they had. As with Heartstrings, we’d be making arrangement and instrumentation decisions in the studio as we went along. For Coast, that meant referring back to our individual demo tapes as we went. Choosing Tiny Telephone meant we could take the time we were accustomed to when recording on our own yet have an engineer in a decent room with better equipment doing it.

John Croslin was that engineer¹. He was a singer, songwriter and producer from Austin, Texas who had led a band that Danny and I liked in the 80s, first called Zeitgeist, but more commonly known as The Reivers. St. Cin also saw them play a show in Santa Monica in ’86. JC produced all but one of their records during their initial run. He had an analog studio in his back yard and began recording bands around town in Austin, notably Telefono and A Series Of Sneaks, the first two records by Spoon. Sometime later, he came out to SF to produce an album for John Vanderslice, who convinced him to move to San Francisco from Austin and become the main house engineer and a studio partner. He was experienced as a songwriter, and laid-back in temperament. We needed someone who was technically competent, and also patient. But if you’d ask him what his preferred method of recording was, he didn’t mince words: “Definitely Analog.”²

John Croslin, Tiny Telephone Studios, San Francisco, July, 2000

Tiny Telephone was built around a Studer 2-inch, 24–track analog tape machine, but ProTools, the industry standard Digital Audio Workstation, running on a Mac G4, was brought in and synced for extra tracks and used for editing purposes. It was a requirement by us for the making of Coast. We would come to rely on the computer heavily for this record.

The studio was located in a cluster of tin-roofed industrial shed-like buildings at the south edge of the Mission District just above its boundary with the Potrero Hill District in San Francisco. Directly facing us on the opposite side of the cluster was the compound for Survival Research Laboratories, founded by a new media performance artist and machine inventor named Mark Pauline. SRL’s byline was “Dangerous and Disturbing Mechanical Presentations since 1979.”³ This was the shop where they built robots to blow each other up in shows and events throughout the United States and Europe. Needless to say, things were not quiet over there, which can be problematic if you’re trying to run a studio. The show they were likely working on while we began recording Coast was advertised thusly:


LIVE PULSEJET DEMO: Mark Pauline will be present and demonstrate a pulsejet engine similar to those that will power the Pulsejet Hovercraft and Pulsejet Fire Tornado in the upcoming live SRL Phoenix show. Pulsejets are sophisticated but simple jet engines with few or no moving parts, high thrust to weight ratios and incredible sonic capabilities. EAR PROTECTION REQUIRED.

We were out of the frying pan with Phoenix Thunderstone, and into the fire with SRL Phoenix. How quaint was it that we used to complain about loud bands at the Art Explosion recording Handsome Western States and Heartstrings, when we now had a PULSEJET FIRE TORNADO to contend with?

Tone Vendor, our record label in Japan, requested that someone keep a studio journal for “the press.” Miles gave me the honors, with the right to edit it as he saw fit. As with Heartstrings, I had already kept a meticulous studio journal, which is included in this supplemental document. I may have taken a few unnecessary liberties with this “press” version, thinking somehow that would be more interesting. Miles did a good job of whittling it down and here’s what was published. You can be the judge:


June 11th, 2000: We're recording at a place called Tiny Telephone. It's located in an industrial zone across from Mark Pauline and his Survival Research Laboratories (www.srl.org). It's already becoming apparent that due to loud explosions and robot wars, Take 1 will often turn into Take 122. Our engineer, John Croslin, is trying to keep the mouse population down but the little rascals have threatened to eat their way into our master tapes. It looks like they have the upper hand.

June 13th: On a day like today, one can only conjure up images of the skeptical architect with arms crossed and a long face with the occasional loud sigh in view of unfinished concrete pillars, [rebar], and a crew perpetually on lunch break.

June 14th: Inspiration has not yet come out of the closet.

June 15th: Halfway into today's session we heard a loud explosion then smelled something burning. The power supply to the 24-track fried thanks to Pacific Gas & Electric, California hippie politics, overpopulation, and 100-degree heat. Unfortunately, our art requires electricity.

June 22nd: We are not Boyz 2 Men, The Oak Ridge Boys, The Backstreet Boys, or any other "boys." Nor are we the Statler Brothers, the Mills Brothers or the Everly Brothers. But the mixing board was once used by the Pointer Sisters, and we were "so excited" because we finally recorded our first live multiple ON KEY harmonies as a group.

June 27th: Miles threatened to hit me over the head with a mic stand. This is going to be a long record.

July 2nd: It is becoming apparent that our visions of a truly orchestrated record by the use of large ensembles and choirs is a cheap fantasy but an expensive proposition. Thank god for the Mellotron.

July 25th: Some things were tried, most failed. Mostly we talked about it and did less of it.

July 26th: I tried some guitar sounds which inspired exactly no one.

July 31st: We're fighting more, of course, but now we make each other do sit-ups. If I mess up a guitar part it's 25 sit-ups. If Miles messes up, it's 5 sit-ups and a beer. That's the way things work around here.

August 8th: I pinched a nerve in my right thumb on a shitty tambourine and could not finish so we decided to put it in Pro Tools. I don't remember anything else, besides the four beers I drank in 35 minutes.

August 12th: Near the end of the evening, I could hear Bill Evans, ever the soft spoken devil's advocate, tell Miles that "Good Man" was not groovy enough and that maybe we should just start over. Well, you can imagine the rebuttal. I left before any chairs got thrown.

August 17th: We were going to record a song called "The Weight Of My Tears" tonight because it was sounding pretty good while we were practicing, but the minute the tape started rolling we stiffened up like a jam band on crank. It reminded me of Ice Cube in "Friday," where he's hanging out with his friends all loose and smiling but then someone shows up with a camera, so he puts on a "hard" look and frowns for the picture. After the flash he immediately starts smiling and talking again. We're all just a bunch of Ice Cubes.

August 31st: During Heartstrings we used our friend's apartment to record the strings. It had high ceilings and a lot of natural light. This time we only had three string players and the only "Natural Light" was provided in cans by Steve St. Cin and his plastic cooler.

September: Vocals.

October 12th: Miles was listening to my mandolin solo over and over again, another obsessive-compulsive disorder moment. Apparently he didn't like the dropout in one of the speakers and thought it best to pan them more towards the center. I rolled my eyes, which provoked a small argument. I kept my eyes on the clipboard just in case I needed to duck. This is what happens when you become, as Morgan Freeman says in "Shawshank Redemption," INSTITUTIONALIZED!

October 18th: Today was our last day recording. Miles couldn't think of any lyrics for our final song, so Steve St. Cin offered a lyrical suggestion that had something to do with the video game "Asteroids" and the dinosaurs. Anyway, Miles is off to Nashville in three days and then to New York for mastering so hopefully we'll all have copies to pop into our stereos and kick back with a glass of wine to show our wives, fiancées, girlfriends and families that this shit is still worth putting our ever-growing responsibilities on the line for.

The sessions got off to a strong start. Danny Sullivan came in and nailed all of the songs that would end up on the record in the first two days, plus a couple more we’d abandon for other reasons. Andy Borger came in and nailed his four in one day. I didn’t have to worry about incorrect mic placement or having enough space to cover the things that needed to be, sonically, for drums, and I felt grateful for that. The drums sounded big and full – we had a lot to work with.

Making Coast started off a lot more laid back for me than Heartstrings. We had a professional to roll tape, and I could concentrate on being the best I could be as a utility musician and vocalist. I played more guitar on this record than the first two and usually got called in for all sorts of random stuff: tubular bells, glockenspiel, timpani, you name it.

I was also in charge of voicings, writing and conducting the harmonies for the vocal parts. And I arranged the horn parts, though a good chunk of those I ended up multi-tracking by myself, for better or worse. Uncut Magazine notoriously argued it was worse:

“The DIY production can smother their delicate melodicism, and those parping horns can sound distinctly cheap and shrill. [Jan 2002, p.131]⁴”

You will be hard pressed to find the word “parping” in an American English dictionary.

Stevie La Follette’s main job was to score string arrangements, play organs, keyboards, and bass, but he also had some nice guitar parts, like the slide for “Gravity’s Bringing Us Down” and the front-and-center acoustic guitar for the chorus of “A Good Man is Easy to Kill.”

Pat contributed guitar riffs that had a little twang to them, and keyboard parts, many of which were also string parts and orchestration ideas. We’d end up using more keyboard strings on this record than real strings, for a variety of reasons, mostly time, money and aesthetics. Pat also brought a couple of his own songs for the record, one of which I would end up singing lead vocals on, “Burned by the Sun.” One song, which would end up not making the record, was “Battlecry of the West,” which Pat began writing on a piano at his sister’s house in Danbury, Connecticut, with me joining in on a muted trumpet while we were staying there on our very first tour with the Apples in 1997. We used to play it in our set before it had lyrics, calling it “Polar Bear.” Pat’s initial hook line was “Bye Bye Polar Bear,” a reference to bi-polar disorder. This song would become a staple of our live set in later years, showcasing our growing confidence in singing three-part harmonies onstage. And he co-wrote “Gravity Is Bringing Us Down” with Miles. Or, perhaps, Miles co-wrote it with him.⁵

Beagle came up with catchy and interesting keyboard and guitar ideas but would often struggle nailing them when it came time to tracking. One of my jobs was to keep tabs of “on the fly” parts people were coming up with that Miles liked. Most of this work was concentrated on Beagle’s behalf. Sometimes we’d have to snip him in ProTools, or copy and paste things, and sometimes I’d step in and play his parts when we were pressed for time. And then, every so often, Beagle would come in and nail a part in one take, like the long, repetitive and pervasive, growling Moog intro for “Gravity.” He’d nail long parts that we fully expected to copy and paste in ProTools in one or two takes, and parts that should have been easy to finish quickly, he’d labor over forever.

Miles sat in the Director’s chair primarily during the instrumental sessions. At first he wasn’t really planning on contributing much on guitar at all. One of his cited reasons for shifting gears is that he felt he didn’t want to repeat himself, and this was the whole point of the demo tape exercise we all underwent. He wanted the band to contribute more and not just dictate the parts for people to play.⁶

He also wanted to concentrate his efforts on getting better as a vocalist. As time wore on though, we felt we needed the attitude of his guitar playing. He’d be the first to tell you he’s not nearly as proficient technically as a musician. But there is a swagger in his playing that, quite simply, none of us have.

That said, all five of us, Miles, Pat, Stevie, Beags and I, played guitar or keyboards somewhere on the record. Danny and I split percussion like shakers and tambourine depending on whether he was there or not. There was a lot of pinch hitting. Our philosophy was whoever was in the room at the time who thought he could swing it was given a shot. If it didn’t work out, someone else would go to bat. I tended to hog the ball when these opportunities came.

As with Heartstrings, we also brought in guest musicians to make contributions to the Coast Is Never Clear. They were credited more clearly on Coast, because one of the things that used to annoy us (or maybe just me, or Stevie too) was a certain confusion over how many band members we had when we recorded When Your Heartstrings Break. It was because of the credits. Everyone was listed as “the players,” so people thought we had ballooned into a twenty-piece orchestra. The core band members did the bulk of the work, but you’d never know that based on the questions we kept getting, or the comments we’d read.

On Coast, we cited contributions per song by guest musicians. There were fourteen guests, and they probably put in more collective hours than the guests for Heartstrings, but hardly anybody knew that because of the way the credits were written. Only the question about how we came up with our name would be more annoying.

No, it was not because of Ferris Beuller. Beulah is the land at the end of life’s travels in John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.”⁷ Capisce?

The core instrumentation would usually be two guitars, bass, drums, piano, and a keyboard organ, Moog, or sampled mellotron sound. Though this record “rocked” a little harder, perhaps, due to the quality of the analog tape, mics used, room played in, louder drumming, and the experience of a real engineer rolling the tape as well as some time on the road helping us gel as a live band, we did not track most of the instrumentation that made the record live.

As with Heartstrings, we’d lay down drums first, and combinations of two to four of us would plug directly into the board up in the control room to play along and sing scratch vocals to guide the drummer, whoever he happened to be. Sometimes we’d record the guide vox, bass or one of the guitars, but we rarely kept those tracks.

The big difference was the use of a click-track, the other new requirement in the making of this record. Then we’d layer the kitchen sink on top of each song and sometimes subtract later. We all had ideas from our tapes that we wanted to try, and though we figured out some of this during rehearsals, it was still kind of a scrum at times to hear what things worked together and what didn’t.

With “Gene Autry,” it seemed like we kept everything everyone had and then added some more. It was cluttered. And then there was “Silver Lining.” Aside from Miles’ surf guitar riff which the song was written around, Stevie’s fuzz bass combined with Danny’s powerful drums pretty much made the bulk of that song work. We added minimal flourishes after that.

Miles often delegated the role of playing and singing the scratch stuff to me. There were times, looking back, where I think that decision, along with the use of the click-track, stiffened up some of the performances. While it is true that I am probably a better technician, when it comes to swagger, I don’t have it. I’m kind of boring. Go back and listen to “I’ve Been Broken, I’ve Been Fixed” on Handsome Western States, where I played almost everything myself, and compare that to the rest of that record and you’ll get the idea. We might have done better to have Miles more hands-on leading the takes on guide vocals and scratch guitar in hindsight. But I suppose you can’t argue with a certain technical brilliance, if I do say so myself.

Coast represents a band in transition. On one hand, we were a great live band. We wanted to capture that more for this record. But we were also becoming technical perfectionists. And we had a computer at our disposal to “fix” things. It opened a debate about what really needed to be fixed, and what didn’t really matter. The making of this record was a crossroads between our DIY, analog roots, and the digital world we were all transitioning into, and visions of grander ideas that, we thought, might be easier to execute with the aid of computers.

The Coast Is Never Clear was our ProTools record. It was a professionally polished version of When Your Heartstrings Break. At least, musically. The lyrics Miles wrote were markedly different, a break in form, which I’ll touch on in a little while.

Coast was also the beginning of a transitional period in terms of our membership. That had already begun with changes behind the drumkit, and it would continue as we approached the end of working this record on the road.

The best example of this struggle between the human element and our tendency to want to rely on the computer software to fix every mistake was a session on July 29^th, and it wasn’t the usual suspects on one side of the debate or another. We were at the midway point of our time at Tiny Telephone and were in a bit of a funk. John Doe of X stopped by to pay us a visit, which was cool. Later, we had once again gotten bogged down about something tiny, and I was complaining about how it wasn’t much fun getting so nit-picky about everything.

Miles, along with Stevie I think, came up with a suggestion: How about all five of us plug in and play guitars live together? Croslin and I, who had often sided with “leaving mistakes alone, blah blah blah” were suddenly the skeptics. Well guess what? It worked! You can hear the results of this experiment in the “Don’t say you miss me” bridge section of “Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out.” It was fun, and we broke out of our funk. Miles had been saying earlier that we hadn’t had any “serendipitous” moments in the process of making this record yet. And then we proceeded to have one.

Once it became time to do vocals, we underwent the same exercise: We did group harmony vocals together for the first time on Coast. On our first record, I sang all of the harmonies. On the second, I still sang most, but we branched out a bit, with Miles or Pat chiming in, and also Carlos Forster made a cameo. This time around, everyone in the band sang somewhere. We’d bring in groups of three or four Beulahs to sing, but I started out by having them sing in unison and then sing a different note on the next go-round. As the recording progressed, we got confident enough to sing three parts all at once, which was a big step for a group of guys not formally trained to do that. From then on, that is how we’d start off.

There were legitimate needs for digital editing, like copying and pasting parts people had trouble nailing in a reasonable amount of time. And then there were the little things, like the mandolin solo that I doubled for “I’ll be your lampshade.” Miles said he heard a “dropout” in one of the two tracks. It was very, very unnoticeable, but he said it would need to be “corrected.” And there were squeaks on acoustic strings that, to me, were natural sounds in the instrument, except that effect was exaggerated at times with compression, which sounded unnatural. The things that would need “correcting” in Miles’s point of view became more minutely specific as the process went on, and I felt we were getting bogged down with things that from my perspective didn’t matter – or, at least, could be addressed during mixing. It was certainly true that, with ProTools, it was quicker to do this as we went. You could see the things that would need to be cleaned if, for example, a mic was left on in between the actual parts of something. But that opened up the possibilities to put smaller and smaller things on the chopping block. Human tendencies are what they are – we create an innovation to increase efficiencies, and then that becomes a new baseline as we yearn for even more, until we realize we’re losing sight and pull back.

I coined a slang term for just this phenomenon: Ham Radio. Working in a call center for Cellular One, I would get calls all the time by people haggling over their bill, saying that they felt they shouldn’t have to pay for this dropped call or that one. This was in the days before unlimited calling plans. When you’d try to explain that the nature of cellular technology can lead to dropped calls from time to time, especially in hilly areas or near lakes, there would be guys who just wouldn’t take that for an answer.

The combatants were always older, white males, and they’d go off on a tirade about how they’ve been Ham Radio operators since the 1940s or 50s, that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I was just a kid, and on and on. And it would usually devolve into a filibuster where the dude would try and give me a history lesson about RF frequencies, why what I was saying was wrong in the case of this particular dropped call and sometimes they’d throw in how they just lost out on a $40k deal with a potential client because of it. I wanted to ask the customer about the possibility of losing out on his next call for a $50k deal because he was wasting his time haggling about the $40k deal with me, but calls may have been monitored for training purposes.

Getting lost in the minutiae means you’re getting “ham radio” about something. You should not be too ham radio in the recording studio. Ham Radio became our vernacular for getting lost in the weeds. Tiny Telephone, equipped with ProTools on a Mac G4 with Beulah at the helm, became Ham Radio Central.

Does a recording have to be perfect? Listen to an isolated, vocals-only version of anything off of the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” before answering. The vocals are amazing, but if you listen really closely, you can hear the cuts in the air from the edits and splices too. You can almost feel the sweat of an intern tasked with physically cutting and splicing actual tape for these edits.

As I mentioned, the main reason Miles said he wanted to use ProTools in the first place was because he was afraid it would take too much time to get his vocals right. And when he did, he wanted the ability to cut and paste it into the next section if the words were the same, such as the chorus, and tempo fluctuations would make that a lot harder. But Coast reflected how far he’d come as a vocalist, and I think he realized he was a lot better than he was giving himself credit for. We wouldn’t end up pasting his vocals all that much. In fact, I think the chorus for “Gravity’s Bringing Us Down” is the only time we did. Maybe “Hey Brother,” too. Somewhere in the long stretches of touring in support of Heartstrings, Miles learned to harmonize without “chasing” what the other vocalist was singing. It was a major milestone. He certainly had a lot of practice behind the mic by then. He’d always had a great voice as far as I was concerned, and he just got better and better as time went on.

We also used click tracks because Miles felt the drums on Heartstrings were uneven – this was both for the tracks I played on and Steve’s. He’d often a/b the beginning of a song and the end back and forth to check the tempo and it was one of those OCD things. We had three different drummers – well four if you count a track that I ended up taking a stab at which ended up on the cutting room floor. The thought was to have a bit more continuity there. But this sometimes led to full or half day editing sessions in ProTools where JC felt the tempo would shift unnaturally at times because of tiny lapses of falling behind and then overcompensating to catch back up.

Arguments were more the exception than the rule for Coast. Speaking for myself, Miles was complimentary of my playing and commented about my being a good pinch-hitter on more than one occasion when we were pressed for time. We were starting to repair things that had gone south between us and came to a head that night in New Orleans, a fight that had shaken my belief over whether I’d be needed anymore in the band moving forward. And I know in the heat of a moment we’re all prone to saying things we regret, sometimes the moment right after they come out of your mouth. It would take time to heal some of that - words can sting, and it can take a while for that to wear off, but the making of this record went a long way in that process.

Speaking from a personal standpoint, after this record was finished, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going anywhere. I knew what I brought to the table, and I flexed on that a little with the making of Coast, starting with the preproduction and my 8-track demo from the ground up. I felt like I’d figured out a way to reinvent myself, and I was further prepared for things to evolve again. Whatever direction that meant, I was mentally prepared to stay for the long haul, whatever it took. I just needed to chill out, take a back seat and not provoke things by saying stupid shit. That was the goal, anyway.

The space we worked in also went a long way towards making the sessions, though tedious at times, more productive and fun. We’d have creative, collective sessions out in the big room when John was editing. We’d circle around a couple of keyboards with guitars and jam out parts, enveloping ourselves in the song at hand. Vanderslice had a lot of toys to play with in there. It was a great, comfortable space to collaborate.

Another great thing was the front lobby. We could all rotate in and out, taking breaks to eat, drink, watch TV or play video games. The space was open and comfortable, not stuffy and smelly like the old practice space, which was one single cramped room. I was way less irritable!

The thing I took away the most from our time working with John Croslin was to think more clearly about what it meant to play “behind the beat.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about at first, as we were playing 4/4 and I always thought being behind the beat was what the concept of “swing” was. When we had a little time, Croslin would say whether or not my guitar line was “behind” enough and coach me to concentrate on that. I finally understood what he meant…there’s a fine line between dragging and being behind the beat. Danny and I always used to attack the beat, hit it right on the head—be as precise as we could. When I finally got it, I realized I’d been giving out similar advice to others in the band.

We all had a tendency to “rush” and play ahead of the beat at times to varying degrees. I’d feel like the tempo was dragging at times when we were playing to a click track. And clicks don’t drag, right? With Pat, and this goes back to Heartstrings when I’d be rolling tape without a click, I’d tell him to think a little “behind” when he’d naturally want to put his hands down on the keys. In his case, it would put him “on” the beat, and for me, slightly behind, but not “off” the beat. His rushing had a little more giddy-up at times.

Andy Borger’s playing was classic behind the beat, and the rhythm track on “What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?” is the best example. That song was tracked to the “Bossa Nova” setting on a Rhythm Ace drum machine – and if you listen to the drums, you get the sense that Andy could take or leave the drum machine, letting it sort of bob and weave ever so slightly before after what he was playing, but not in a way that sounded like he was trying to play catch up, more like he meant to do that. I started thinking this way about trumpet as well.

The big difference, or leap forward, in The Coast is Never Clear, had nothing to do with mechanics, gear, click tracks, abilities of players, where we played relative to the beat, hours put into the studio or any of that. It was in the songs. For one, some of the chord progressions were more complex (“I’ll Be Your Lampshade” would have nine chords, and a lot of major/minor resolutions, in the first ten bars), but the biggest change was in the lyrics. They were more direct, personal and honest.

Writing lyrics from the heart that don’t come off as cheesy is harder than being cool. Miles said at the time that he’d have a hard time reading the lyrics to Coast on a sheet of paper, they were meant to be sung. He was also aiming for the age-old idea, perfected at Motown or Stax, where the songs would be upbeat and the lyrics not so much. The subject matter was often dark, as with “Night is the Day Turned Inside Out,” or “What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades,” my favorite song on this record.

Miles’ lyrics – and I’ll include them in the supplemental document – were less about the art of the clever turn of phrase, or wordplay, and just an honest output of feelings.

You could always tell who had done their homework and actually paid attention to this record when they wrote a review about it. If they just heaped on references to sunny, happy, California laid-back vibes, they were probably just taking bits of previous things that had been written about us. Most rock journalists were just lazy, or too pressed for time to care about digging beneath the surface.

Miles once said in an interview that he could have written an entire record of songs about necrophilia, and they still would have called it the latest output in the sunny, cheery, upbeat happy-go-lucky beach-going vibes of the Brian Wilson-worshipping revivalist collective known as The Elephant 6 Recording Company. Everything about that sentence is wrong, by the way, including the references to E6 itself. But you wouldn’t know that by judging just what you’d read and not listening for yourself.

As for us, you didn’t have to look any further than the title of our third record to figure out that other things were afoot. And I’m afraid to say that we would have no idea how prescient this album title would become, for both us and the world around us as the record eventually got released just shy of a year later and we hit the road to support it.

[Next chapter here.]

1. https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/1995-11-03/529994/ JC as he was just getting going with Spoon.

2. https://tapeop.com/interviews/32/john-croslin/ JC after returning back to Austin from what turned out to be a short stint in SF.

3. https://www.srl.org/ They’re up in Petaluma somewhere now.

4. https://www.metacritic.com/music/the-coast-is-never-clear/beulah/critic-reviews Most of the reviews were positive. But not Uncut. My one regret is that we didn’t have more horn players in the lower registers such as Trombone, Euphonium and the like. Tracking some of them in this early version of ProTools thinned out the sound, too, I felt. Compare the sounds of the horns on “Silver Lining,” which were tracked to the analog tape, and then “A Good Man Is Easy To Kill,” which were all tracked directly to ProTools. Nevertheless, the damage is done. If I ever decide to put together a horn section for something that requires a name, it will be The Parping Horns.

5. Miles’ addition to the song included some phrasing in the chorus that was slightly borrowed from the verses of one of my songs, called “Shake Your Bottle,” which was on the same compilation that Pat’s song “Burned By The Sun,” was on, called “Horseshoes and Barbeques” which is available here on Amazon for $3.50. https://www.amazon.com/Horseshoes-Bar-b-ques-11345-Compilation/dp/B001P2SYL4 Any geeks who want to find the hidden gems, have at it! While supplies last…

I agreed to forfeit any songwriting credit for the song, which Miles had advocated for, but said that Pat did not. I didn’t care either way, I could see Pat’s point of view. And I wasn’t gonna try and Mike Love that shit by insisting 33% credit for a tiny whiff of a hint of influence on one line in the chorus. Mike Love, for those of you who don’t know, ad libbed the song ending line “Good night, oh baby, sleep tight, oh baby” and argued he deserved 50% credit for the Brian Wilson masterpiece “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Fuck off…

Fun fact: When we played “Gravity” live for Late Night with Conan O’Brien two years later, I’d get paid more than anyone else because musicians union rules that the TV show honored stipulated that people would be paid separately for each instrument or vocals that they did. I would be paid for vocals, trumpet and guitar for the performance. Take THAT, Kurosky/Noel!

For legal purposes, I hereby deny any claim, both in past, present, or future, to the crumbs of songwriting royalties to that song, “Gravity’s Bringing Us Down.” If you delve into the lyrics which, by one interpretation, suggests “going limp,” I figure it’s in my best interest to steer well clear of it.

6. https://tapeop.com/interviews/22/beulah/ Nick Tangborn worked for Listen.com at the time he interviewed us for this article, which was on October 12. I noted this in our studio journal. Nick is from Minnesota and I forget where I met him - either at a Listen.com party, somewhere during Noise Pop one of those years, or maybe backstage for John Doe (or was that Ed Ackerson?) - but we hit it off immediately and I remember having a long conversation with him, starting off by saying it was unlikely Miles would agree for Beulah to do a Kris Kristofferson cover but I would, if he thought I had any pedigree. We made tentative plans to have dinner with our spouses. Nick, if you’re reading this, that offer still stands. I’m sorry we never got around to it before you up and moved to Austin.

7. Here’s the Cliffs Notes version of the Beulah Land in Pilgrim’s Progress: https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-pilgrims-progress/summary-and-analysis/part-1-section-10