Sorry for not posting any more blogs at the moment. I have been in the mixing studio, mixing Television & Summer. I will be done on Friday. I will try to post in the evenings but if I am not able to, the blogs will pick back up on the following Monday. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding.
With great steaming piles of love,
M.
There’s this really amazing poster that an old friend of mine, Soup, had hanging on his wall. It was for a Spiritualized album called, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.” And that title just blew me away. Mostly because it was such a simple idea, we’ve known it since we were kids, but the majesty of it, the mind-blowing awesomeness of all of us careering through space, for a brief moment, was made new. Every day we travel thousands of miles. Always on the move. We’ve been, all of us, to different parts of the solar system. The homeless, school-kids, postal workers, tap-dancers, porno stars, truck drivers, baristas, mariachis, even our pets, every living thing on the earth is a space traveler. That, for me, is pretty jaw-droppingly awesome.
In fact, when you take the time to consider anything, I mean, really consider it, it blossoms into a whole spectacle of brilliant magic. For instance, I have some plants in my apartment. I’ve had them for twenty years. For twenty years, I have managed to keep these plants alive. And I was wondering, do they like me? Do they know who I am? I mean, not in the sense that they might be able to articulate it, but I’ve been feeding them water and giving them new soil and taking care of them for 20 years. And I have no idea how long they’ve been around before me. I mean, what if, twenty years ago, I purchased plants that were hundreds of years old? It’s strange to think that I am responsible for anything’s life, considering how badly I’ve managed to muck up my own. But here they are, just surviving.
I used to really want super-powers as a kid. But I think about my plants and wonder if, you know, if they could think, if they would be thinking, “Ah man, I wish I could move around like that. I would love to jump out of my pot and just run around. Or play that guitar. Or jump on that bed.” I mean, it’s entirely possible that to plants, we’re gods. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a pretty incredible time to be alive, floating through space, living as a human. I got really lucky. And I’m super grateful I know that I don’t express that often. But I am. I love my life. And the people in it. And the fact that I get to make music and write songs and give back to this spectacular spectacle of majesty and magic. But then again, that’s just now. Come calling in a couple days and I could very well be miserable again. But that’s just it. It just keeps happening. The world keeps floating, plants keep growing, and I get to be a part. A very, very small part, mind you. But a part, nonetheless.
Smashing through walls like some miniature hulk,
M
Let me start at the beginning. Well, not the very beginning. The very beginning would consist of me, a left-hander with a borrowed, right-handed, Peavey guitar, writing my first songs on my living room floor. That story might be told in the coming days, just to outline my personal hubris, poor financial skills, terrible taste in clothing, and wonderful, wonderful friends. That story might be told just for the fact that, frankly, if not for a few strange and out of character decisions, I might never have written or recorded a single song. The beginning I was talking about, however, was the night that forever changed the future of Get Set Go and many, many other bands who we had the inestimable good fortune to know over our long and storied history. Now, let’s hop in our way-back machine, or TARDIS, if you’ve got one, and return to late-September of 1998. You remember 1998, yes? Rap-rock? The Sopranos? Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Body-piercings? And shitty, shitty, shitty LA bands selling ten dollar tickets to go see them play at shitholes like the Whiskey and the Roxy? I mean, sure, Spaceland existed. But the Jabberjaw had shut down. Eagles Cafe was slowly suffocating. Moguls was no more. And there were myriad other little venues that were slowly going out of existence.
We were all partying at Shmed’s place on Hill Ave, in Pasadena. The group consisted of Shmed and Soup from the Holliston Stops, Nate and Sean from Otto (soon to become Arlo), and Tom Sanford (who joined Arlo during the Stab The Unstoppable Hero days.) And we were grousing about the fact that there were no places to play anymore in Los Angeles. And what could we do? And I proposed that perhaps we find an out-of-the-way venue, and ask to take over their worst night. If it’s a place struggling for more revenue, they could always use an infusion of 12 to 15 beer-guzzling rock musicians to help boost bar sales. I proposed that we ask to take over a night, say a Sunday, or a Monday, or a Tuesday and just play every week. I remember that a couple of them looked at me like I was nuts. I think it was Tom who made the point that there was noooo way in hell that we could draw a crowd every week. And I remember responding with something like, who cares? We don’t need a crowd. Let’s just play. We’ll get better on stage. We’ll play every week. We’ll get comfortable playing live, we’ll drink beers, and we’ll sing along to each other’s songs. Because, truthfully, for me, there could be nothing better. I loved those bands. I loved the music they played. It was like I was hanging out with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Having a place to play, and play with them every week…just us? Sign me up.
So, long story short. We did it. It was at Mr. T’s Bowl. On Tuesday nights. And for the first year, for most of 1999, we played for only each other. I mean, a couple other bands joined us during that year. The Mash Notes, 1976, the Pinks, Freud’s Boyfriend, Dopamine. We were a little family. And we played for each other. We had a fucking wonderful time. Drugs, alcohol, music, love, and friends. I mean, it was fucking brilliant. And slowly but surely, more people started showing up. By 2001, the place was packed every Tuesday. And the awesome thing was, it was ours. It was our community. We knew every person that walked in that door. Or, if someone new showed up, we met ‘em, fell in love with ‘em, and integrated them into the, what was ostensibly, family. And it was this experience that has colored my thoughts and feelings regarding music. This sense of family. Of belonging to something bigger and better and more awesome and inspiring that we could ever be on our lonesome. And it felt that way from the very beginning, in October of 1998, all the way up until I had to stop doing in in 2006. It was 8 years of mind-blowing, heart-stopping awesome.
So, that’s what Get Set Go has been trying to do at Casey’s on the Thursday nights. We’re still in our first year. And it’s sorta progressing like it did back then. But not really. Mostly because, until now, it has been just us. I mean, sure, the occasional band joins us for a couple weeks. Or a few weeks. But they don’t keep coming out. And they don’t hang out. I’m not sure if it’s our age. Or if it’s just the alchemical mix of the bands, or whatever. I don’t know what it is. But I can tell you, I miss it. We have just now begun to have bands that seem seriously excited to play. Houndstooth, Mod Hippy, Gosha, and, of course, Sebastian Bach, to name a few. I’m hoping, with all my heart, that we’ll gather a few more bands into the fold. That everyone will spend enough time at Casey’s to have it feel like home. That we will sing along to each other’s songs, fall in love, and celebrate music the way it was meant to be celebrated. Dancing and singing like we’re the only people in the room. Because, if I have anything to say about it, we will be.
Anyhow, talk to you tomorrow.
Hope is for the hopeful, but hopelessness leaves you more time for writing songs,
Mike TV
Have you ever been really excited, or perhaps very frightened, and you’re trying to tell the story, you’re trying to fill the listener in on all of the details that led up to the excitement or the fear, and there’s so many moving parts, so many different little threads that need to be woven to actually have it make sense, and it just seems impossible? No? Crap. Well, that’s what I’m going through right now. There is so much that I want to tell you, that I feel I need to tell you, that I just don’t know where to start. I guess, in this sorta situation, it’s best just to start anywhere and start chipping away at the story, like a big block of marble, and hopefully it will take shape. And hopefully that shape won’t be the face of Cthulhu or Dalek Caan (James Caan’s much, much older brother? Grandfather?). Actually, now that I think about it, they’re both basically the same face. And why is it that squid faces are so disgusting? I mean, I bet to squid-faced creatures, we probably look something like a stick figure face. You know, smooth, round, with a few holes and a slit for a mouth. I bet they’re thinking, “How do they tell each other apart? And where’s the character? And how do they kiss? I mean, they have no suction cups! They probably slip off each other like greased seals.”
But I digress. My story, that’s what I was trying to tell you. Uh…okay, how’s this for a start. We’re finally releasing the side-project album, Televison & Summer, that Eric Summer and I have been working on since July of last year. It wasn’t because we’re lazy bastards that the project wasn’t finished. It was due to a lack of funds. And not a lack of funds necessary for completing the record, we still have the money we successfully raised via our Kickstarter campaign, it was a personal lack of funds for things like water, and food, and toilet paper. It was the sorta lack of funds that had me considering exactly how much space I had left in my public storage unit and if I still had any friends on whose couches I could sleep. It was an utter and complete financial system melt-down. Not unlike the Great Recession but, at least for me, dramatically more painful. So, I had to take a day-job. And squeeze all things music into the margins of my life.
So, Television and Summer is coming out. As is a 14-song Get Set Go record. It’s a collection of all the b-sides we had recorded alongside Fury of Your Lonely Heart. The hope was that we would release these as a collection of three more ep’s. But, again, the lack of funds made that impossible. It has also made hiring a professional mixer impossible. So this collection of b-sides is gonna be very, very, very indie. And by indie, read “roughly mixed.” But the good thing is, the songs are very happy to be released from their prison cells and see the light of day, even if they’re shabbily dressed, in desperate need of dentist visit, suffering from chronic halitosis, and plagued with scores of open, seeping abcesses. But even the homeless and the dispossessed deserve freedom, right? I mean, this is America. Sure, we can’t feed them, these songs, and we can’t give them jobs or even the spare dollar in our pockets. But at least they’ll have the freedom to walk the streets, like slightly better smelling undead. And that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. By the end of this month.
So, this is the end of blog one. I’ll keep chopping away at this block and hopefully elucidate everyone on the inner-workings of Get Set Go, the band, and yours truly, the always-one-step-ahead-of-his-personal-tumult, Mike TV
Armed with nothing but a wound and a song,
M.
