November 16, 2006—Los Angeles, CA
Seymour Stein is a dinosaur, a living breathing music industry dinosaur. I must admit I first heard his name through a Belle & Sebastian song. He started Sire Records. He signed Madonna and the Ramones among so many other world-changing bands. The music history of the label he built is a big reason why we wanted to be a part of Sire Records.
We were doing overdubs on the song “White People For Peace” when a voice comes on the intercom announcing that Seymour Stein was here to see us. Was this a joke? Sure enough, Seymour slowly walks into the control room and introduces himself. He shakes our hands and we exchange introductions.
“Can I hear some songs?” he asks, breaking the awkward silence.
“Sure. Let’s just finish up these overdubs first,” says Butch.
I did my best to finish up the overdubs but was nervous with Seymour standing right beside me listening to me play. I’m not sure if I nailed the part but Butch let it go after a couple more takes and asked the engineer to put it on stun volume for playback.
“Johnny Ramone would have either loved it or hated it!” Seymour says after the song finishes.
“It’s an upper and a downer at the same time,” adds Butch.
“Sounds like a speedball,” says Seymour.
December 14, 2006—Los Angeles, CA
The Sire Records team came into the studio today. They listened to the eight songs that we had ready to play them rough mixes of. The songs played, they gave us a thumbs up, told us it sounded great, and then left quickly. All except for A&R. A&R had suggestions. The idea was proposed that we edit the length of “Thrash Unreal” to make it shorter. Some lyric changes, written by A&R, are suggested, as are vocal harmonies. Listening to A&R talk makes me want to punch a hole in a wall.
I don’t want their personal touch on our music. I’m at the end of my rope with compromising.
You’re always a baby band in the major label world until you’re a has-been, unless you blow up. Everyone makes me feel like I’m just an asshole they just put up with.
I said my ex-wife’s name last night while Heather and I were having sex. Heather didn’t say anything. I’m hoping she maybe didn’t hear it but how could she not? I wasn’t thinking about my ex-wife at the time. I was there, mentally present with Heather, it just happened. What the fuck is wrong with me?
December 20, 2006—Los Angeles, CA
I left the studio tonight with a CD of 14 rough mixes, the songs that will become our fourth full-length album. I am alone in celebrating the last day of tracking; the rest of the band left back for Florida a couple days ago. Just me, a pint of Guinness, and cable TV. The future is uncertain, but my time spent here in L.A. will always remain a happy memory. Thank you, Butch.
Goodbye, Los Angeles. Goodbye, Oakwoods Apartments.
We’ve been offered a $400,000 publishing advance by Warner/Chappell publishing. The lawyer says it’s “unheard of for a young band to get offered that much.” I asked the manager how many albums we would have to sell to recoup. We would have to sell 450,000, just shy of gold.
I don’t trust the manager or the lawyer. They’re just looking to get paid. They’d leave me high and dry if the band were to fall apart. I’m going to turn down the advance.
I’m flying to south Florida in the morning to spend Christmas with my mom and brother.
It was the first day of 2007, and Heather and I were both a gin-and-tonic deep at Jacqueline’s, a dive bar in Chicago. We’d had drinks there during the tour on which we met, talking about nothing, talking about everything.
She was caressing my hand in hers, spinning my ring around my finger. It was an old ring my mother had given me, emblazoned with our family’s Irish Catholic crest. I guess I wore it for its sentimental value.
Heather gently slipped it off of my finger and played with it, examining it in her fingertips. She slid it onto the index finger of her left hand where it fit loosely. It moved down the line to her middle finger. She removed it again and then held the opening to the tip of her ring finger, looking up at me, not saying anything as she slowly slid it down toward her hand.
I could see the thought in her eyes, the “yes” waiting behind her lips. This was the part where I was supposed to ask her. As if on cue, “Come Sail Away” came on the jukebox and put a lump in my throat. It just came out of my mouth.
“Will you marry me?”
5. THRASH UNREAL
We were married on April 11, one year to the date of our first kiss. We told no one. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous.
The South Beach Satellite Courthouse was all but empty except for a bus driver protesting a ticket and a young woman sitting in wait.
A middle-aged Cuban woman named Doris performed the service for $30. Doris’s thick accent made her English hard to decipher but completely charming. Not fully understanding what she was saying, we held back laughter as we kept jumping the “I do” part. We didn’t plan on telling friends or family that we were already married, and agreed to have a more formal wedding at the end of the year, when there was more time.
We drank champagne and shared a salad and French fries. We made love in our hotel room, the first time as man and wife, and then went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. She told me it was the happiest day of her life. I still have the picture of her in a silver leopard print bikini, jokingly posing for me on the beach like a 40s pin-up model. It’s a black-and-white Polaroid, the kind you have to physically pull from the camera and hope the film actually develops. I used to keep that picture pinned to the roof of my bus bunk. Heather, still smiling from that day’s private adventure, frozen in time.
Just before she fell asleep in my arms, I whispered in her ear that I hoped I would never stop exciting her.
We called our major label debut New Wave. The title was supposed to suggest rebirth, the beginning of a new chapter in the band’s history, but it all seemed cursed from the start.
“We can control the medium. We can control the context of presentation…”
We rushed to put a last-minute album cover together, having blown our budget hiring a photographer to take photos for it that no one ended up liking. Compositionally, the shots were fine, but we wanted something that expressed youthful renewal. Since the subjects in the pictures looked freezing cold as they were taken in Germany in February, it didn’t make sense to use them for a summer release.
To kill time in the studio between takes, I had been working on a stencil design based on a picture of a snarling Florida panther photocopied from National Geographic magazine. Using an X-Acto knife and a Sharpie, I had meticulously traced and cut out the image. With no other artwork options, I insisted we use it. The punks could call me a sellout for abandoning the scene we had started in and signing with a big, dumb corporate label, at least I could say I remained true to my art, designing cover artwork the same way I did when I lived with my mom.
Two weeks before its scheduled release date in the summer of 2007, as we were touring through Europe, headed to Munster, Germany, we got word that the album had leaked online. The label panicked and went into damage control mode, scrambling to corrupt the files, but it was too late. It was already out there. Album leaks and declining album sales were still a new phenomenon at the time. I didn’t want anyone punished for piracy, but at the same time, I did feel that control had been stolen from me.
Sometimes the leak worked to our advantage. People in the crowd that night were already singing along to songs that weren’t even out yet. Seeing the immediate enthusiasm for our efforts felt reassuring, like we had made a smart decision signing to a major and were on the right path. But as usual, for every one fan we gained from the exposure, it seemed like we lost two because of our corporate partner.
After that night’s show, an anarchist squatter cornered me outside the venue. As if reading from a script, he ripped right into me. He didn’t like the venue we played. He didn’t like our new songs. He didn’t like how many amplifier
s we had on stage. He didn’t like that we were traveling in a tour bus and not a van. He didn’t like that we signed contracts with a record label. He didn’t like that I didn’t speak in between songs when we played, and said that I wasted a chance to inform people. He told me that he had originally planned to storm the show with fellow squatters, but when they saw that tickets were only €10, they decided it wasn’t enough money to storm a show over.
Interactions with bitter crustpunks like this were becoming more common. Seeing them outside our shows made me apprehensive since they were usually only there to protest us or vandalize our bus. They’d sneak into the venues and spit on us from the front row or hurl bottles at us from the back.
Sometimes after our sets, if we would hang out and share our beer with them, they’d give us a pass. “I was ready to write you assholes off,” one of them told me outside our bus, taking a sip from a 40-ounce of Olde English Malt Liquor. “But I guess you’re still cool in my book.” We talked about punk and Crass records until his friend picked a fight with a passerby and all the crusties piled on. I took the opportunity to slip away, back to the bus. As I looked back, the guy was standing with his back against a wall, a broken beer bottle in each hand, bleeding profusely from his face.
We came back to the United States in desperate need of some time to relax. Instead we jumped into the last tour we should have been doing at the moment, co-headlining with Mastodon, and supported by Cursive, Planes Mistaken for Stars, and These Arms Are Snakes. Mastodon were metal behemoths who partied as hard as they rocked. They set a bar for substance intake so ridiculously high that none of us could possibly keep up, though that didn’t stop me from trying. A show in Milwaukee had to be cancelled because Brent from Mastodon was too fucked up from the night before.
By the start of the second week, I was decimated. I woke up in Denver with my nostrils sealed completely shut and running a temperature of 101 degrees. I felt like walking death. I had to cancel a major photo shoot that a label representative had specifically flown out to accompany me to. Instead of going, I asked the tour manager to call me a “rock doc.” I had come to rely on the trick J. Robbins had taught me while making Searching: what to do when you absolutely have to get through a show but aren’t sure you physically can. A doctor will come make a house call to the venue and open up their black bag and give you whatever you want to get through the show, a shot of cortisone to reduce swelling of the vocal cords and a shot of vitamin B12, both needles stabbed into the butt, maybe a couple Valium for nerves, and you’re ready to rock. But I wasn’t as ready as I thought.
Two songs from the end of that night’s set, my face went white as I felt my stomach drop. Still strumming through the chords of the song, I rushed to the side of the stage to find our guitar tech, Matt Steinke.
“Matt, you gotta get me a fucking box!” I shouted over the amp.
“What?”
“A box! I need one right now!”
He could tell by the panic in my face that I wasn’t joking. All he could produce on emergency notice was a FedEx mailer box. I grabbed it from him and ducked behind the road cases, dropped my pants, shat in the box, and was back up and playing before the song ended. No one even saw me. We finished the set and I carried the box off stage with me. The show must go on, truly.
It was a terrible tour to lead into a record release. A good time, sure, but it probably took 10 years off my life. We could have used a month off afterward to recover, but we had other obligations. We were moving fast, jumping immediately into a press tour and filming a music video for the album’s single, “Thrash Unreal.”
The label suggested a director whose idea for the video was a satire of the show America’s Next Top Model. Instead of models, it would be a show about drug users called America’s Next Top Junkie. The video director assured me it would “break the fourth wall” and “have a humanness to it.” I hated the idea of judging people for their addictions. I told him I wanted to do something that explored gender and volunteered to cross-dress in it, appearing en femme, supported by some sort of narrative. I guess this was me trying to push the limits of how far I could take my suppressed identity. They told me I couldn’t.
Instead, we compromised on an idea from another director that felt forced and stale. It would depict the band playing in a basement underneath an upscale party. The partygoers donning tuxedos and cocktail dresses would spill wine that would rain down from the ceiling and drench us.
Once we begrudgingly conceded to the idea, we submitted a list of all the equipment the band needed, because why not milk it for some free gear? But when we showed up to the set in Los Angeles to film, half of it was missing. There was no hardware for the drum kit, no cymbal stands, and no heads on the kick drum. There wasn’t even a stool for Warren to sit on. The director told him to squat down on a crate and just pretend he was playing a full drum kit so we could start shooting, and that he would make sure to edit around it so no one would notice. I couldn’t see this going well.
I saw the writing on the wall early: We were screwed and were wasting our money, almost $100,000, on a disastrously bad video. But there was no way I was going to admit that to the band. After all, this awful compromise was one I had to fight for. So when the director told us to all run laps around the building before we started shooting, I ran the fastest. When he told me to take my shirt off for the shoot, I did not protest.
We were also pressured into asking fans to appear as extras since the director went over budget and needed people to work for free. I watched the video crew treat them like shit all day, leaving them waiting in a cramped storage area for hours with no food or drinks. We had to sneak them soda and chips so they wouldn’t starve, and a few beers for their troubles.
The director had a couple of his stuntperson jock friends come down and make sure there were at least some people in the party scenes that were aggressive and out of control. One of them jumped off a table and accidentally kicked a fan square in the face. The band stayed with her and helped ice her bleeding lip, but no one from the film crew even apologized. The feeling that I was exploiting my own fans bothered me more than anything.
Our scenes were completed in five hours. We shot 12 takes, getting drenched in fake red wine coming out of an overhead sprinkler system each time. Our skin was dyed pink from head to toe by the time we were done, but the A&R still urged us to be interviewed on camera for behind-the-scenes commentary on the making of the video. The director also wanted to be interviewed and, like a total asshole, insisted on lying on a white leather couch while doing so. I didn’t have high hopes for how the video would turn out, but I kept that to myself since the collective morale was already so low.
There were a lot of things I was burying deep in the back of my mind—the angry crusties who were jumping down our throats over our every move, the frustration with the label making us out to be something we weren’t, lingering guilt from my first marriage collapsing and the wife and child I abandoned, the dysphoria I was fighting to get under control, and all of my spiraling addictions. We spent a week between Los Angeles and New York doing media. I could feel it all crashing down around me.
July 12, 2007—NYC
After the interview at FUSE TV I find myself standing in silence next to Marilyn Manson, pissing in urinals in the green room restrooms. We turn to each other.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad.”
Neither of us wash our hands. He leaves the restroom before me.
Anxiety attack in the car service van on the drive to our record release dinner. Suddenly everything just feels wrong and I want it all to stop. Get me out of this fucking van. Get me away from these fucking people. I want to kick open the doors and run off into the NYC night.
Our performance on Conan feels like a success. We were finished before I even realized we had started. I left filled with adrenaline. Conan hung out in the green room with us, cracking jokes after the show. Out of all the late night hosts we’ve met, he is
the most personable. We all watched the broadcast together back at the hotel in the tour manager’s room.
I’m dying to know what first week sales figures are. It doesn’t determine success of the work to me but I am aware that Sire has a bottom line, and album sales will determine the politics behind our working relationship going forward. The number will have influence over the course my life will take for years to come.
July 14, 2007—Los Angeles, CA—Renaissance Hollywood Hotel
We don’t make it back to the Milford Plaza Hotel until 4 AM. Heather and I stay up for another hour finishing off our white drugs. It’s good coke, the kind that makes you open up and talk, which Heather and I do until the sun rises.
The SPIN Magazine loading dock show at Milk Studios is surreal. It feels like a real event, like there was no place cooler in the city at that moment. Seymour Stein brings Bill Paxton, who immediately walks up to me and James when he arrives backstage, congratulating us on the new album.
Paxton stands on the side of the stage while we play, taking pictures on his camera phone, and, after the show, leads us all to a bar a friend of his owns. He buys round after round of drinks.
I hold court with a group of friends in the corner of the bar, passing around a bag of blow taking turns doing key bumps.
Heather and I get an hour’s worth of sleep before lobby call to make our flight from NYC to LA.
Playing an acoustic show in a record store was the very last thing that I wanted to do when we got to LA. I was dreading it. I wanted to sleep for a day straight. On the van ride to Backside Records we start passing around a bottle of Jameson.
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