If there had never been a full break between us, then the night that strained our friendship closest to its breaking point, the one that propelled us farther away from each other than ever before, happened when I was twenty-three, on a visit to Lex and Jim’s Brooklyn loft, after I’d broken up with my first intense and long-term relationship with Maggie Bell. This was long after I’d moved into Philadelphia, after college, after the conversation on the bridge over the Schuylkill River going past 30th Street station that I mentioned at the beginning of this memoir, the one where I doggedly defended my decision to stay in Philadelphia against Lex. Even after that conversation, intensely combative thought it was, Lex and I had remained friends. We’d even discussed starting a band between the two cities, headquartered in their Brooklyn loft. I was going in the direction of becoming a writer. But even with twenty-some short stories under my belt, plus two (what I would now call practice) novels in the bottom desk drawer, I hadn’t committed to it in a way I finally would six years later when I met my wife and decided to get serious about a great many things including her. It was only an hour and a half by train, I could go up on weekends, and now that I had a full-time job in publishing that paid me more than enough as a single man living in Philly to be comfortable, I could do it. But somehow it never came to fruition.
At the time, I was still serious about songwriting, convinced of an innate talent, but my belief had dampened. I played songs for friends and roommates, at parties and gatherings, original material, and they all seemed impressed. I’d get requests to play at our late-night post-bar hangouts and lead rooms full of partygoers in a chorus of The Band’s “The Weight.” But beyond this, I had no way of getting my message out. My voice wasn’t good enough to go the singer/songwriter route. I needed a band and couldn’t find one. But my songs were getting better. At least I thought so. Lyrically I was growing more sophisticated than I’d ever been while writing songs with Lex. When I first met Maggie, I’d written a song for her called, “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love,” a title I lifted from the Built to Spill record. She was the first girl since Lana who inspired me to pick up the guitar and write a love song. There was a sappy edge to it, but even then, the lyrics and melody had a wit to them that I picked up from listening to Elvis Costello. “You look like you could use a little rest/so why not build your shelter next to me/if everything don’t work out for the best/I’ll write a lullaby so if you’re trouble you can sleep.” I even played it for her, which was the first time I’d actually played a song for the girl I wrote it about. But I didn’t tell her that it was about her. “And if tonight your bed feels like a strange place to sleep,” I sang to her. “And you’ve got no one in your life to comfort you/’cause you’ve been hurt before by all the company you keep/I am here to show you that there’s nothing wrong with love.”
One of the things I experimented with in the song, despite its overtly saccharine lyrical content, was that I wrote a different melody for all three verses. Then I wrote a different melody for the first two choruses. For the third chorus, I recorded both overlapping. These were ideas I never would have thought of when writing with Lex in high school, and I was happy with the result. I then wrote her another song, a very quiet late night tune that sounded to me like something that would end an R.E.M album or something off the Velvet Underground’s self-titled record called “Hold a Candle,” and I played it for her and told her I wrote it for her and she liked it.
Though of course, when it turned out she loved me back, I had to turn to new subjects lyrically. Happiness isn’t great for inspiration, but I wrote another song, shortly after we got together called “A Different Point of View,” a song whose melody, born of a cross between listening to Beck’s Sea Change and John Lennon solo records, took me by surprise. I had started running into Nick Maldonado, an acquaintance from high school who’d been in another band, in Rittenhouse Square, and since Lex and I couldn’t get the New York/Philly connection going, I tried to start something with Nick. I’d cart my guitar from West Philly to his place in Center City and we’d sit in Nick’s apartment and try to write songs together. He’d play a riff and I’d try to come up with someone over it. And then I’d play him something I wrote and he’d try to sing it, and he was taken with “A Different Point of View” and liked to sing it while I played, but I still had trouble ceding control over the things I wrote, and when other people sang my songs it never sat right with me. I liked hanging out with Nick and playing with him for the short time we tried it out, but our styles didn’t mesh and after four or five sessions, I think we both recognized that, and the connection eventually fizzled out.
Still, I was looking around for options of people to play with. My roommate from my time in Rome had a band out in Pittsburgh. He played the drums, and one weekend, I packed my guitar and took Amtrak out to see him. Maggie and I were heading toward our breakup that weekend, and I’d already written “Where Are We Now,” and Matt and I spent the full weekend, just the two of us, in his band’s rehearsal space working on demos of that and “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” and “A Different Point of View.” And I had a great time flushing the songs out, hearing them with drums, putting in extra guitar parts and bass lines and background vocals, though all the while a feeling of sickness crept over me, knowing that I was heading toward losing Maggie, knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it, worrying that she would start to date her coworker Dick. It occupied my every waking moment when I wasn’t playing music, so I tried to keep playing, to keep coming up with new melodic ideas. Matt had a computer equipped with Pro Tools, and I worried for a time that it would bore him while I tinkered around. The sessions usually started with me showing him one of the songs and him figuring out a beat. Then we’d record a track with me on rhythm guitar and Matt on drums, but once we had that down, I started working on bass lines or keyboard parts, and he just sat there, recording, trying to make it sound good.
“I’m not boring you, am I?” I asked.
But he shook his head.
“No man, this is awesome. I like to watch the way you work. With us, we write the songs as a band, so we just sit around and make every decision in like a committee, which works out well for us, but it’s impressive that you can come up with everything yourself and just make a decision about it and go with it.”
But that was also part of my problem, the reason I couldn’t continue playing with Nick. I could never cede control to anyone but Lex. And we weren’t writing together anymore, so I was left to make all the decisions on my own because I didn’t trust anyone beyond him. No one in my life had earned the right to critique or alter my music. Of course, I was still self-conscious in spite of his compliments. When we recorded “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” you can hear me say as the song begins, “You’ll find out just how gay these lyrics are when you hear them without the…[music behind me].” Because when I sang them, Matt wasn’t listening to the playback but just listening to me sing, which was somewhat embarrassing. But I was satisfied by the weekend, coming away with four recordings that I felt represented the songs I’d envisions when I wrote them. The thing was, I had started to just hear things. In high school, I always had to write with a guitar in hand, to work out a riff and then put music over it. Now I was leading with lyrics. I’d thing up a good line, a good verse, and then put the music to it. This might have been the result of my literary endeavors. Wanting for a while to be a poet, I’d written a poem every day for a year and sent it out via a listserv to college friends, professors, family, anyone who’d read, probably plenty who didn’t read but just deleted it and saw me as a nuisance. I didn’t ask permission beforehand; it was simply if I had your address, you got the poem. Some of them were godawful, some of them good and among my first publications when I started to send my writing out, but it honed my skill. It got me focusing on words, the accuracy of them, rhythm, meter.
The thing I liked about lyrics was that, when you got to sing them out loud, you could put an inflection in your voice that could change the meaning with tone. I didn’t fret about adding a cliche to a song lyric in the way I did when I wrote stories or poems because I knew that I could make the cliche new just by the way I phrased it, to wink at the audience, which I pulled off most successfully in one of the last songs I wrote before putting down the guitar called, “I Won’t Fall in Love with You Again,” about Maggie’s successor, a woman who broke up with me and came back repeatedly until I decided the cycle had to end (though she did introduce me to my wife and for that I’ll always be grateful). With that, over a country rhythm, I sang, “Now if you want to dance with me, I’ll dance with you so gracefully that some girls might mistake me for Astaire. And every time you come to town or tell me that you’ll be around I dress my best and put gel in my hair. But if you want to stay tonight, I’ll tell you that it’s not all right because I have a heart left to defend. You know you broke it once before, you broke it twice but nevermore, ’cause I won’t fall in love with you again.” In the end, they were probably my favorite lyrics of anything I wrote, though that’s tough to say. I always had a lot of fun in those days with lyrics. The more vitriolic but humorous, the better. “Your heart was like an open book, for anyone to take a look, and strangely almost everybody did. Or maybe an open can with contents in the frying pan for every hungry man to lift your lid.” My tongue could get sharp when I felt let down, deceived. I’ll admit a certain bitterness existed at the time, but bitterness makes for a far better inspiration than happiness when it comes to songwriting. After I returned from Pittsburgh Maggie left me, and within two months, I found a band to play with. I think it was the only way I was able to make it through those first few months without her.
Maggie’s roommate Dana, during the time I’d been with Maggie, had been dating a guy named Tim, who played guitar. He had another friend named Tim who also played guitar, and they were looking for musicians to start a band. He told me about it one night when I ran into him at the basement bar Sugar Mom’s. Amidst the exposed brick and bomb shelter ambiance, he told me they needed a bassist and drummer to round out their lineup. I didn’t know the first thing about playing drums, but I asked, “Do you have a bass?” It turned out the other Tim owned a Fender bass. “Well, if you have a bass, I’ll play bass for you.” And as I left, a lot drunker than was good for me as happened often in those days, my mind was awash in the possibilities. I liked the fact I’d be joining as a bassist. I’d always had distinct ideas about how rock bass should be played. In our own songs, I’d asked Gabe to play root notes or else wrote a bassline for him and asked him to play that. But bass could augment and add to a song. And I thought, how nice I won’t be writing the songs but able to bring something to someone else’s music. And that moment’s elation, the idea that I’d be involved in playing music with people again, pushed aside the nausea that overwhelmed me in the weeks after I found out Maggie had started dating her coworker Dick.
We talked influences before we played. Tim One had followed a similar trajectory to me. The Smashing Pumpkins to Radiohead. Branching out in the early aughts. He liked Spoon and Modest Mouse, and he wanted to play guitar like Johnny Greenwood, experimenting with sonic textures, which I was on board with. Tim Two, who I didn’t meet until our first session in his apartment in Fishtown, adored shoegaze, a genre I’d listened to only tangentially, but Tim One and Tim Two gave me an education. I’d leave our sessions with ripped CDs of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain. Best of all, they could both play, which hadn’t been a given when I agreed to join. Of course, they too were likely relieved when it turned out I could play bass. These things go both ways.
From the first session, it was clear we had chemistry, but already I overstepped the bounds of my promise to myself to hang back and only contribute basslines. Both of the Tims had come equipped with loaded pedalboards. Reverb, phasers, delay, and a host of other sounds dear to shoegaze. They played me a song they were in the midst of writing, but because of the wall of sound, I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I listened for the melody in their chord progression, thinking of how to add a bassline, but I was lost.
“Why don’t you guys turn off the effects?” I proposed. They both had acoustic guitars there, and I suggested they pick them up.
“If the song’s any good, it’ll work with the effects and without. Let’s strip it down to its essential elements.”
I had told myself beforehand that I wouldn’t do this, that it was their band and I’d go along with their flow. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was compulsive. To take control and lead. I couldn’t avoid doing it. And yet, because it was our first session together, Tim and Tim agreed to it. They strapped on their acoustic guitars and played a riff that I now recognized as moving, beautiful. I went against instinct and started to play a bassline that was more like guitar, strumming two notes, and when they came to the chorus I wrote a melodic overture to the chords they strummed. Midway through, Tim One suggested it needed something else, like a bridge, and they fooled around a bit and came up empty. “Hand me the guitar,” I said. “This is the main riff, right?” I’d been watching them and had learned the guitar part visually. “And this is the chorus?” I tinkered, variations on the theme, and wrote the guitar part for the bridge and followed it up by adding another bass part. It came natural to me to assert myself when ideas weren’t readily coming to the group (the way my Pittsburgh friend Matt described his band writing songs as a group was entirely foreign to me), but the Tims adopted the bridge and seemed to like it. Tim Two had already named the band A Certain Smile, and over the next two weeks, he wrote lyrics and we recorded a version of it on Pro Tools. That they’d taken my suggestions about acoustic guitars and incorporated the bridge I wrote made me emboldened. When Tim Two had laid his vocal track down, I asked if I could try to layer backing vocals behind his lead. I could hear a counterpoint, not so much harmony as an alternate melody that fit. So I used lyrics to a song I’d written with Lex and plugged them in the background, which I felt made the song more dynamic, gave the nostalgia of Tim Two’s lyrics—the song was called “Scrapbook”—a darker undertone.
Maggie had been the first girl who loved me back, and whenever we weren’t playing, I suffered her loss acutely. Would anyone ever love me again? She was beautiful. Would anyone that beautiful ever love me? I was scared of getting mired in self-pity, so I drank a lot and swung to the opposite pole: overconfidence. And being overconfident, I was blind to the problems this might present with Tim Two, who was, by nature, insecure. For the first month or so, we got along fine, our bond solidified by a minor catastrophe. We had been playing in the finished basement space of Tim Two’s apartment. I had brought over microphones and a small bass amp, and as we sat, rehearsing, I noticed a brown line of water coming in underneath the floor where his washer and dryer were.
“Um, Tim, is that supposed to be happening?” I said.
He was facing away from it and turned and said, “Oh shit.”
He got up and ran over. The water kept seeping in. It surged through the basement floor and receded like the waves at the beach. It moved over tile and carpet. “Hit the breaker,” Tim One called, and Tim Two did it, and we started to haul our equipment upstairs as more and more water swept under the floor. It came in brown waves, and didn’t stop as we hauled our amps up the stairs. It came so quickly in fact that we couldn’t get everything, and even though he’d thrown the breakers, I felt a surge of electricity as I grabbed one of the mics, and at that point, we had to stop. We huddled upstairs as the waters reached a foot, two feet, three, as they made it to the top of the stairs. We called emergency serviced and found out that a water main had ruptured. We didn’t the lose all of our equipment, our guitars were fine, as were the more expensive amps, but the mics were fried as well as my little bass amp. The water in the end made it up to about two feet below the stairs, a murky swamp of brackish water filling the first floor. So Tim Two was out of a house, but insurance put him up in a hotel and paid for the lost equipment, and the ordeal of us rushing everything up the stairs as the water poured in brought us together. A good story to tell others, a good myth about the foundation of our band. But it wasn’t to last. Two things happened that created tension between me and Tim Two, and a third came and broke it apart.
The first was that I took Tim Two to a party. My friend George was celebrating his twenty-fifth. The band had played that morning. The insurance company was putting Tim Two up in a hotel and after practice I’d gone back with him to hang out, watch a movie.
“What are you doing tonight?” Tim asked.
“Hitting my friend George’s birthday party,” I told him.
“Mind if I tag along?” He asked.
“No, not at all.”
The party was at George’s apartment off South Street. It wasn’t going to be a big party, but it wasn’t a small intimate gathering either. One more person wouldn’t hurt. We got there and George was talking to this girl Ashley who he’d met online. He was good at that, presenting himself online, pulling girls with his profile. At the time it was MySpace. She was cute, so I greeted him and shook his hand and steered clear and got a drink. When I got back, I found that Tim Two had honed in on their conversation. He was interrupting George, stepping between him and Ashley, giving a routine I’d seen him give once before, the sad guy routine, the guy who gets girls by insisting no one likes him; sad sack reverse psychology bullshit, using low self-esteem to bag girls with low self-esteem. I’d hardly heard what he was saying before I pulled him to aside.
“Dude, you can’t do that.”
“What? What am I doing?”
“You came to party you weren’t even invited to, and you’re cockblocking the birthday boy.”
“What? We’re just talking! It seems like she likes me.”
“I don’t give a shit what it seems like, look around and choose someone else to talk to.”
I was distracted then by a few mutual friends of mine and George. I lost track of Tim for fifteen minutes or so, but when I looked back over, he was back at it. George caught my eye, shrugged, gave me a look like “What the fuck!” Above the heads of the partygoers, I mouthed the words, “I’ll take care of it.” I came back over and pulled Tim aside. I wasn’t as subtle this time.
“Tim, we’re leaving.”
I pulled him toward the exit.
“What? We’re leaving already?”
“You’re fucking up my boy’s shit, and now you’re fucking up my shit,” I told him.
“But I’m lonely,” he whined.
For a moment, I just looked at him. I pictured Marlon Brando slapping the shit out of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather.
“I don’t know what to do, Godfather…I don’t know what to do…”
“You can act like a man!”
Backhand, forehand, backhand.
I pictured it but didn’t do it. We left and went back to his hotel and watched something on Cartoon Network and then I went home.
The next thing that happened to cause strain was that Tim Two signed us up to play the talent night at Temple University. We had fifteen minutes to do a set, but we only had the one song. I’d played both him and Tim One “A Different Point of View” and they liked it, but it didn’t really suit the shoegaze sound they were going for.
“Mind if I try writing something for us? Something that sounds like you guys want us to sound?”
At this point, Tim Two was still amenable to things like this. I went home that night and listened to some of the CDs Tim Two had burned for me. I had an idea for lyrics and a melody I’d been kicking around. It was a song about Maggie. It was official that she had started dating Dick, and this drove me insane. She’d insisted and insisted she’d never go out with him. She had told me that he was like a brother. And so my lyrics went at her, called her out on this deceit. I even had a title. But I need to write out the chord structure and make it sound how Tim Two wanted to sound. I didn’t like My Bloody Valentine all that much. The soundscapes were alluring, but the songs themselves left me cold. They weren’t really songs to me so much as excuses to play with effects. I liked the first song on the Slowdive record he’d burned for me, “Alison” with its hypnotic longing, but the rest of the record bored me. What I loved was The Jesus & Mary Chain albums, Psychocandy and Darklands.
The next night we met up to practice and I’d told them I had it done.
“What’s it called?” Tim One asked.
“You’re Always Welcome Under My Umbrella.”
It was a title I took from my day’s in Rome. One night we were out and my friend Sara had forgotten her umbrella. I told her she was welcome to share mine, and she said that sounded like a song title. Maybe a Burt Bacharach chamber-pop song. But while listening to Darklands, I thought it fit The Jesus & Mary Chain template. Something like “Happy When It Rains,” which was my favorite song of theirs, or “Nine Million Rainy Days.”
Tim Two rolled his eyes. I knew how the title sounded to him.
“Just give it a listen,” I implored. I took Tim One’s guitar and turned on the distortion pedal, fiddling with the knobs until I found the right crunch, and I started to play. I sang, “But you’re always welcome under my umbrella, that’s the lie I’ll try to sell ya, for a short time. ‘Cause it’s raining, but you said, you find my love draining, you should look at it as training when I hurt you.”
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