The Athens Games

The pressure of recording ‘Siamese Dream’ mounts day by day with no relief, and seemingly no end in sight…we take Sundays off, but because we are so fried we normally just spend the day sitting around the apartment watching T.V., not even bothering to go outside or do anything relaxing like go to a park…Jimmy and I in particular are sucked into the vortex of being trapped by the album, giving us nowhere to go and nowhere to hide…we are absolutely consumed by it’s making, and secretly wishing it all to be over soon…

Each morning I wake up around 8am and get right to work…since all the songs are ‘written’, musically speaking, my entire focus is on finishing the much discussed and much fraught over lyrics…songs where the lyrics are pretty much finished even remain a stoic concern, as I continue to pick over each and every line until it seems there is no more doubt, and that there isn’t any other way…on the fairly unfinished ones, in order to focus my attention and guide me when I get lost, I have a little plastic box that is filled with white index cards…each card has written upon it a random thought, a quote, a passage from a book, a collection of themes, song titles, or a set of lines without a home…when I get totally stuck, I thumb through the box and look for inspiration, and when a card gets used it goes to the back of the box…this helps me achieve a stronger cohesion throughout the lyrical themes, and brings together all that I am trying to say into a bigger story and message…

My weapon of choice is my typewriter, a basic $100 piece of plastic that has no ability to correct mistakes…I had once read somewhere that Bob Dylan liked to type his lyrics, because he felt that the actual kinetic process of typing, along with the rhythmic sound of the keys striking helped him write better…I don’t know if that is true, but I take this to heart, typing every line over and over until I get it just right…there is only one problem with this method, and that is that I am very superstitious…I work on every song basically the same way…first, there is a ‘raw’ page, where I try to intuitively generate the raw materials for a songs lyrics, and therefore mistakes are tolerated and welcome…working this way, I generate page after page of subtle variations on a particular theme…for example, if the lines in question are something like: “I had a dog, and he was grey, I took him home, and made him o.k.”, that would be typed at the top of the page…this would be followed by an optional play on the words, something like “I had a thought, and it was grey, I look for home, and there I’ll pay”…doing this all down the page, I might then put in a fresh piece of paper, and ‘steal’ the lines I like best…so in the case of putting together the 2 examples, it might turn out something like this: “I had a thought, and she was grey, I took her home, and there I’ll pay”…and so on and so forth until it would take some kind of shape that seemed to say whatever it was I was really trying to say…this becomes a way of ‘intellectually’ approaching the album’s deep themes of abuse and betrayal without having to be in the true emotional space of those emotions, and allowed me to stay in said space for longer periods of time because the temperature in there isn’t as hot…once a lyric submits to the will of this process, I go for what I would call a ‘final’ page, which has it’s own set of rules…’final’ doesn’t necessarily constitute the end of the road, but rather the beginning of the end of the process…each page looks about the same…the title sits alone at the top, and then the lines as they stand at that given moment are typed out in a concise, perfect and error-free form…if I make even a single error, either in spelling or how the paragraphs separate themselves, I rip the page out and start all over again on a fresh piece of paper (the backsides of pages that have errors are never used)…this is a maddening process, because I make plenty of typing errors along the way (I type normally with 2 fingers), and often times get lost in the thought of a particular lyric and miss that I am supposed to separate what should be 2 distinct paragraphs (or sections)…I do this because I take my mistakes to be a sign that something is amiss, and that perhaps my concentration wanders in a particular moment because it is not good enough, and that if it was I wouldn’t make a mistake…this creates a heightened state of awareness, enforcing that each line must ring, resonate, and be approved from upon high (or possibly down below!)…even when a page is finished, and ‘perfect’, I may change my mind in the next second about one word and the whole process starts all over again…

I usually don’t listen to anybody else’s music when I am recording an album, because I don’t want to be influenced at all by whatever another artist is doing or has done…if I do fancy a little something to take my mind off of my work, I will usually listen to something that is as far away from my musical style as possible, so that there is no spill into my soul…I had never been a fan of the blues, especially the ‘old-timey’ kind, but for some reason I had picked up a re-issue collection of a seminal blues singer named “Blind Willie McTell”, who had recorded sides in the 30’s, 40’s, and again in the 60’s (when he was ‘re-discovered’ by some college kids---little did I know at that time that Bob Dylan had once recorded a song called ‘Blind Willie McTell’)…during quiet mornings, one song stuck out in particular, because it rang the bell of my heart in the way I was feeling day after day…the song is called ‘Belle Street Blues’, and in the song the singer talks about how Belle Street whiskey will ‘make you sleep all in your clothes’…the songs appeal to me had everything to do with the way he sang his blues, not so much what blues he was singing about…

Jimmy disappearing for a day was not an uncommon thing…avenues of finding him would suddenly dry up, and you knew that he was up to no good as those in his inner circle miraculously didn’t know where he’d run off to, or perhaps they didn’t want to know…the first day of his disappearance, I head to the studio as always at my appointed hour of 11am, and tell Butch what is going on…this is not the first time Jimmy has vanished during the making of this record, so we take it as business as usual and plot the day around his absence, dealing with bass and guitar tone issues (our failsafe position if we are not tracking drums)…the second day, we start to get concerned…we ponder whether or not we should call the police because maybe something terrible has happened…we make some calls, and everyone spoken to says they haven’t seen hide nor hair of him…so we spend the day editing drums, which has an ominous bitterness to it because we are all hating Jimmy, and listening to him play take after take just deepens the bile…day 3, we are in a panic, calling his family and friends back up in Chicago, fearing the worst…we come to the conclusion that if we don’t hear from him by the next day we are going to file a missing persons report…none of us truly believes anything terrible has befallen him that isn’t of his own doing…the next morning, someone lets us know they had seen him the night before at a concert…not knowing we are freaking out looking for him, this person tells us that Jimmy was in great spirits, and that if he saw him again he would let him know we were looking for him…we decide to take action, and call up the local radio station in Atlanta and ask if we can go on the air…they are willing, and we do a live interview where we announce to all of metropolitan Atlanta if you see our drummer, will you ask him to please come back, call us, whatever…this is dealt with in a semi-humorous way, you know, “ha ha, a’int drummers ca-ray-zee!!”…

Now that the word is out, we get a report from someone that night that they have seen Jimmy at an R.E.M. show in Athens, Georgia, which is about an hour away! We are absolutely ready to kill him now, and almost no work is getting done because of the obvious distraction of the forever imploding drummer…we as a group come to the conclusion ‘fuck him”, let’s just focus best we can and let him have his day in the midnight sun…finally, on the 7th day, he calls our apartment…I speak to him sitting on the floor in his room, his stuff scattered everywhere like one would expect from someone who is running out the door for a night out…he tells me that he has done so much cocaine that he literally went blind, and this so freaked him out that it woke him up…he is contrite, and all I can tell him is Vince is coming to pick him up and not to move…waiting for him to arrive, we decide to put our foot down finally…when he arrives, he goes straight into his room for awhile, and when he comes out, we tell him to sit down because we have something to tell him…he is going to finish his drum takes, and then he is going into rehab…if he refuses, he will be fired…