Off To See The Elephant

Get To Lickin'

Pre-production for The Coast Is Never Clear.

Get To Lickin’

After the Wilco tour, Miles hopped on a plane for Japan where he stayed in Kumagaya through the holidays of 1999 into January 2000. He sent us copies of songs he recorded on a four-track. It had scratch vocals and guitar, with a few hints at horn line ideas and stuff. Each of us was expected to come up with his own ideas on a tape, playing along with what Miles sent, and then have them ready upon his return. We were to work independently in silos. The tape was followed up with a motivational message to each member on a separate postcard a week or two later. Here is what mine said:

“Dear Bill,

I’ve been reading the papers and the Pack ain’t goin’ nowhere so get off that couch and get to lickin’ on that tape.

XO, Miles”

Get to lickin’. This was old mailroom jargon. It was a shot across the bow.

Kiera and I, by then, were living in a bigger apartment in Berkeley that had a second bedroom that I had set up with some of my recording gear, including the trusty old Tascam 238 that we had used for Handsome Western States, and the Fostex Board for both that record and When Your Heartstrings Break.

Beulah’s days at the Art Explosion were numbered. The space would be the latest victim of greed. All of the bands were going to be evicted from the place and the “illegal renovations” that had happened ten years prior — which essentially meant all of the rooms in the practice space — would be torn down. The owners’ plans for dot com riches from their warehouse space investment would go unfulfilled, however. The big bust was right around the corner and the building would stay empty for a number of years¹. By the end of ‘99 we knew the eviction was imminent, so I took home all of the recording gear, set up shop and got to lickin’.

At first I took the cassette Miles had sent me and put that into one track, with the idea that I would add my parts on top. But it soon became clear that this was pretty limiting. I started to form some ideas in my head that were out of the scope of what was on the tape. I decided that I would make my own “record” instead, treating it as something that could have been worthy of release in our early days. That was the goal I was reaching towards, anyway. To do this, I would re-record all of Miles’s parts myself rather than just add to his existing tracks. This would give me the freedom to change the tempo, change the key if I wanted, basically do whatever.

The foundational challenge in doing this was the lead vocals. Miles had guide vocals with “fake” lyrics. In order for me to start over from the ground up, I would need to write down my own approximations of what the mumbled words might be on a piece of paper. I didn’t put too much thought into the cogency of the stanzas – my job was to focus on the music. Reading the results on the page were weird and sometimes comical, and relegated to the trash bin soon after. Ephemeral, or so I thought.

To my delight, I recently found the ripped-out pages from a legal pad that had all of this, stapled together and hiding in an unlabeled manila folder just waiting for me to one day find it and share, dear reader, with you. I’ll use the first song on Miles’ tape as the example, not because the words I wrote down came out the funniest, but because that was the spark for this whole idea. I gave it the title “We Need More Time.”

This song would indeed need more time – its evolution would have a longer arc than most. Though earmarked for the Coast Is Never Clear, we ended up stalling out in the studio and it wouldn’t surface again until we recorded some B-sides for a single release a little later. That song would be called “Waiting for the Sunset.” And then, much later, it would morph one more time into the song “Me and Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore” on Yoko, our fourth and final record.

Here's what I wrote down, complete with “track” notes along the top:

“Without a homey and a wall complete…” Scratch lyrics transcribed by yours truly.

For the recordings, I’d create fake drums as the foundation for how I wanted the song to go. I used this big, heavy wooden desk that, I think, came with the apartment we were renting, as well as a desktop mic stand with the CAD E100, as my “kick” drum by gently pounding on the desk with my right fist until it sounded close enough to a real kick. The stand served as a shock absorber and would provide the “thump” that was needed, as long as I didn’t pound the desk too hard and clip the mic. For the “snare,” sound, I’d slap on the backside of an acoustic guitar with my left hand open. I’d usually record this at the same time as the kick. I’m not sure if I used two tracks so I could EQ the “snare” differently or not. I’d overdub an “egg shaker” for the “hi-hat” or “cymbal” sound as needed. To save tracks, I’d bounce those two or three fake drum tracks into one. This was the basic back beat.

Sometimes I used a homemade “egg shaker” that I had created with a round end piece of some kelp on the beach near Santa Cruz on a day trip with Kiera when we first met². I had put some sand in it and taped it shut with masking tape. This provided a more subtle and less shrill sound than the typical plastic “egg shaker” you’d buy at guitar center. If that technique for the backbeat of a song – banging things out on normal or found objects — was good enough for 1950s recordings at Sun Records Studio, it was good enough for me.

From there, I added guitars, trumpets, the fake lyric lead vocals and vocal harmonies galore. That was another reason to write down the fake lyrics – if you wanted to harmonize with them, you’d need to figure out a close approximation of what you were singing along with. In fact, I’m pretty sure that was the main reason I decided to start over from scratch. When I started thinking about how I was going to sing along with the original tape, I needed to write all of that shit down anyway to figure out harmonies. It would have sounded stupid if I had just made up my own fake lyrics on the fly each time that didn’t match up with the vowels and rhythms of what was already being sung.

This was one of the things I had stressed out about when we were running out of time to even start the lead vocals for When Your Heartstrings Break. We also had to do the backing harmonies, and those could take longer to get right. We couldn’t do them in advance if there weren’t real lyrics yet, unless we were just doing “ooh” and “aah” parts.

I had a focused, moment of clarity over the winter of 1999-2000, pouring out everything I had in me onto that tape. By mid-January it was done. In hindsight there were some outlandish arrangement ideas, like a version of “Silver Lining” that had nine overdubbed trumpets bounced together in batches and nothing else except for me tapping on the back of my guitar. I think I was aiming for an “Eleanor Rigby” type arrangement. None of that made the final cut. I would barely play on that song at all.

Then there were other songs, such as “I’ll Be Your Lampshade” and “Popular Mechanics for Lovers,” where the tempo, backbeat and key melody lines were pretty closely replicated on the actual Coast album. In fact, for at least one of the two, Popular Mechanics for sure, Miles had the click track for the real version set to my demo; the end result in both songs is pretty close to what I did on my tape. Yes – for The Coast Is Never Clear, we would use a click track. More on that later.

As far as I know, those of us who were sent tapes dutifully followed our instructions to work independently and not listen to what the others were doing until we felt we were done. On January 19th, the guys came over to my house to have a demo listening party. My goal, as the host of this gathering, was to be sure mine was played last – I wanted to wrap things up with a bow in case anyone was harboring doubts about whether the emotional baggage I had was worth dealing with in the band moving forward if my contributions ended up being shit. I was pretty sure that no one went to the lengths I did in putting my tape together, and until then I kept this information close to the vest. Yes, I was feeling paranoid about my status in the band at this point in time. I felt this whole exercise was a test. I took it personally.

We popped in Stevie’s tape and Beagle’s tape. They had some catchy stuff on keyboards and guitar – lots that made the record. Pat said he forgot to bring his. Then I put my tape in and got the reaction from the others that I was hoping for. Pat was the liaison between all of us and Miles throughout his absence, and he must have talked me up on the subject of our tapes, because about a week later I got a very nice email from Japan:

“I hear through the grapevine that you’re once again the MVP of the group. Thanks for putting in all of the work that you did. It means a lot to me, more than you’ll ever know.”

In late April, shortly after our tour with Gomez and the UK shows, all six of us got together with Miles over at his new apartment on Prince Street near the corner of Sacramento in Berkeley for a band meeting to talk about plans for the new record. When his girlfriend had moved to Japan around the time Beulah hit the road for the fall ‘99 tours, they had both moved out of their SF apartment. Beth Lisick, a well known author, poet, columnist and performer, and a friend of Miles from when their paths crossed down in LA, had just bought a house in Berkeley and agreed to rent him a room when he came back to the States. Her boyfriend, whom she later married, was Eli Crews, who would later become Beulah’s bass player. Beagle also lived right across the street from them at the time. This left Stevie La Follette as the lone SF holdout, the rest of us were now rooted in the East Bay.

At the Prince Street meeting, we started off discussing the topic of drums. The first announcement was kind of a big one: We would have other drummers playing on the record. This idea of multiple drummers on a Beulah record was not without precedent, since I played four of the drum tracks on Heartstrings and all of the drums on our first record. But there were visions of grandiosity for this one, a studio budget with the time pressure that this entailed, and a certain self-imposed pressure being newly signed to a major label underpinning it all. There would also be computers heavily involved in the recording process. We would use ProTools, by then the established digital audio recording software, quite heavily. And we would also be using a click track.

There were two drummers who would play on some of the tracks on the album. Andrew Borger, a session guy and friend of Beth’s and Eli’s who had played on recent Tom Waits records, and Dan Sullivan, my old friend from Chicago, the first drummer I ever played a gig with when we were 17 years old.

Since Jordan had told me Danny was living in the Bay Area during the difficult time at the end of our first UK tour, after Steve had flown home for the birth of his first child, I had reconnected with Danny and started hanging out with him occasionally, catching up on old times and talking music like we always used to. I’d seen him play a couple of shows with the Plus Ones, the band he was in at the time, and he was sharper than ever. He sang vocals too.

Miles told Steve St. Cin that he would always be a member of Beulah. He was to play on some songs earmarked for the record too, including “We Need More Time,” (the yet unnamed track I mentioned earlier), and “Burned by The Sun,” which was originally a song he had recorded with Pat Noel for a project of theirs called The Airplanes. A barrier emerged for Steve on this record, which was the insistence of using a click track. We’d turn it off for “Burned by The Sun.”

I might as well let it all out now: I hate click tracks! They are the work of the devil³.

One of the things that drove Miles nuts when analyzing our first two records was to take note of the tempo at the beginning of the song and then jump to the end of the song and hear how much faster it was. He was not wrong. But it wasn’t like we were playing twice as fast by the end. The second thing was some insecurities he was feeling about his vocals. To make this easier, he wanted to start using Pro Tools to cut and paste some of the more repetitive things that were being sung, in choruses and so on as the case may be. And in order to do that, the tempo needs to be a close match in these repetitive sections without being a complete, time-wasting pain in the ass to stretch or contract in the editing process without sounding fake. We all had a tendency, in varying degrees, to rush the tempo. Playing to a click track was one solution to this problem.

As we’d find out later, though, playing along with a click can sometimes lead to people playing hurry-up or slow-down throughout a song if the playing would start to drift from the metronomic precision of the click. Even if you’re nearly perfect with it, there tends to sometimes be this subtle drift. As a result, we’d run into these pain-in-the-ass editing sessions anyway. Relying on Pro Tools so heavily to fix things can suck the soul right out of a recording session. We would find this out the hard way on more than one occasion.

A hubristic tendency accelerated in the recording industry during the 1970s, which was this need for complete isolation and control of things in a studio setting, and perfect, mistake-free takes on a part-by-part basis which ushered in the use of click tracks, among other things I won’t get into like playing in dead rooms so you can choose what type of “room” sound to add later.

When it comes to musicians struggling to nail some of those takes quickly or not being able to play some of the ideas the band leader or a big-time producer hears in his or her head, why do drummers get swapped out more easily than, say, the rhythm guitar or bass player? The matter is open to debate in terms of what is considered right and proper towards the common goal of making a “hit” record. The furthest I’ll go here is to say that having a click track as part of the recording process can turn into a fault line.

We’ll return to this subject later. Other instruments and players would get subbed in and out as we’d get deep into the actual recording of The Coast Is Never Clear, our OCD record if there ever was one. I will also preface this by saying we all became guilty parties of this level of obsession as time wore on. It was not just Miles, or me, for that matter.

By the end of 1999, Steve St. Cin was the only one in the band that I felt comfortable talking to about everything – about how I was feeling, what I was struggling with, what I was going through. He counseled me through so many tough situations over those years that I can’t even begin to count. Along with Kiera at home, it was Steve who talked me out of quitting Beulah when things seemed at their worst. He was like a big brother to me.

So, I burdened myself with an enormous amount of guilt, of feeling selfish, for suggesting that Danny Sullivan play on this record at all. But some of the songs we were doing were pretty loud, busy or driving, or some combination of the three — stuff that was out of Steve’s comfort zone. Steve’s style was more laid back.

After we played together in high school, Danny developed a fast and furious, loud driving style in Screeching Weasel, among other punk bands. Though it wasn’t my final call to make, I advocated for Danny because, if Steve wasn’t going to be doing these songs, I didn’t want it to be by some random session guy. I wanted someone I knew and trusted. I also knew Danny could play to a click, because we had one for some songs we had recorded back in ‘88 with Absent Presence, our high school band, and he was right on the money.

In May, we set up shop in a new practice space over in Berkeley, owned by a friend in Beth’s and Eli’s circles, Jon Erickson. Jon’s place was within walking distance of my apartment, a place he called “Casa de Eva.” This commute was great for me, but the room itself wasn’t. It was drafty and we froze our asses off in there, for one. We ended up practicing there for about a month, picking and choosing our tape ideas for each song and firming up the drum parts with the new drummers.

It felt weird playing in an unfamiliar room with Andy Borger behind the kit. He was obviously a great musician and would soon go on to bigger venues as the drummer for Norah Jones, but I missed Steve. I remember Pat saying as much. At the end of April we were all touring in the UK to play for John Peel, and then a packed house of fans who had chartered a bus four hours from Wales just to come see us and weeks later we were in a cold shack of a room with a stranger behind the kit. We only rehearsed once or twice with Andy. He was a session pro; he didn’t need any more practice than that. He’d end up playing four songs on the record. The standout track for me was “What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?”

When we brought Danny in for the first time, I was more comfortable because at least the two of us had a history. And, like Miles, he came up through punk rock⁴. But the other guys were surprised at how versatile Danny was. I had been saying this for months, even years, but now everyone else got to see for himself. And I also knew Danny was feeling “typecast” as a punk rock drummer. He wanted to slow down and stretch out.

He had this incredible ear. As part of the “audition,” I asked him to play the Lol Tolhurst drum part for “Killing An Arab,” by the Cure. He had done this years ago in high school. He was always practicing to LP records in his basement growing up, just like his dad, honing his technique by learning precisely how others played. I could have chosen to have him play The Who, Led Zeppelin or Metallica, which would have been fine, but I chose the song by the early Cure instead to make a point. It was a kind of parlor trick I wanted the guys to see. Danny played it exactly to the letter of Tolhurst’s less than polished drumming - right down to the sluggish kick drum, tentative snare playing and ham-fisted cymbal crashes. That’s not something you could do if you were just reading off of a chart. The point of the exercise was to try and lighten the mood for those of us feeling the burden of having “session” guys rehearse with us, but also to prove his versatility and, perhaps, a certain malleability.

I couldn’t help feeling that things for me were coming full circle, but my excitement over being able to play with my old friend from high school again was coupled with a sense of grief. I knew my best friend in Beulah, Steve St. Cin, was probably on his way out and there was nothing I could do about it except quit in protest. And Steve counseled me against that. He had other things he was facing anyway.

Steve was now a dad, in a very young family, and living in the Bay Area does not leave you with a large margin of error to be “gone ‘til November” and feed your family unless you’re in a high paying gig. Beulah in the year 2000 provided no guarantee of that. There were a lot of unknowns, a lot that was unclear. Steve, Sheila and Mazie would soon relocate up north to Chico. Steve’s day job had been as an academic counselor for the Athletics Department at the University of California at Berkeley by then. He took on the same role at Butte College in Oroville, but with a sizable salary increase and, for a time at least, a lower cost of living.

This is somewhat of a sidebar, but Steve, in this new role up at Butte College, would help Aaron Rodgers, the football quarterback, with figuring out the transfer credits moving from Butte down to Cal and the rest, as they say, is history in the pantheon of American Football. I am a big fan of the Green Bay Packers, which is the team that would draft Aaron from Cal. He would go on to have a Hall of Fame career in the NFL, with some avoidable drama and controversy along the way.

None of this is to say Steve just dusted off his shoulders and rode off into the sunset with a feeling of complete serenity and closure. It’s also not entirely clear that he and his family would have made the move up north had things played out differently during this period with Beulah. And though he told me at one point he was at peace with it, I know I wouldn’t have been fully, and I don’t suspect he was either.

A couple of years later, when it was clear that Beulah would not, in fact, become world famous, destined to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, or even carve out a living as a full time working band or sell that many more units on our next two records than we would with When Your Heartstrings Break — and we’d later break up and most of us would also start our own families — Steve sent me this photo of himself standing next to Pete Best, the original drummer of the Beatles.

Based on Steve’s outfit, I am pretty sure this was a 4th of July.

[Next chapter here.]

1. Here is a google maps street view capture of the space as it exists today. They have clearly moved on. Note the cameraperson in the foreground - no doubt checking an item off of the indie rock history bucketlist - “2425 17th St., first level: Where the first two Beulah records were recorded, 1996-8.” It doesn’t look like they ever bothered to repaint the stairs.

2. All hail the West Coast! First in a short running series of rabbit hole footnotes about meaningful instrumental artifacts made, not bought. This piece of kelp is something I’d use occasionally for percussion throughout Beulah recordings, as well as recordings before and after. I still have it. It has aged about as well as I have.

It came from a trip in 1996 with my wife, Kiera, soon after we met. The site, along the California coast off of Highway 1, is known to our family as “Abalone Beach,” but more famously as “Acid Beach.” https://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=6418&mode=big&lastmode=timecompare&flags=0&year=2002. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters did LSD there back in the 60s apparently.

Here is a snapshot of Kiera and me, foraging on that beach in 1996. The kelp is no doubt in there somewhere, nestled among the driftwood, weather-worn glass and abalone shells, waiting for its 15 minutes.

3. I must give credit to John Vanderslice of Tiny Telephone where credit is due, although he was talking about Pro Tools: https://tapeop.com/interviews/18/digital-or-analog-pro-tools-mix-24-work-of-the-devil/. I am fairly certain he had us in mind when writing this article in 2000.

4. “Punk rock was my first girl” - Miles Kurosky, the opening lyric for Silver Lining, one of the songs Danny played on for The Coast Is Never Clear.