I don't like it.

I'd figured any writing I'd do about my summer and winter in the barn on Lake Stickney would be done at a remove of at least ten years, meaning this sentence and whatever is about to follow is about six years premature. The trouble considering the recent past is that I am still essentially that person about whom I write. The kid has not yet congealed into a goofy cliche, and so any truly insightful revelations are best kept in the basement, so that they don't throw the present illusion too badly out of whack. Self-revelation can be a day-to-day game, but one rarely played by those with anything to say.

Jesus. What a douchebag. Okay, so I have always been pretty pleased that The Horsefaced Boys (self-titled, I suppose) isn't fully available on the BR website (Ed: No longer true). It's been that way for as long as it's been listed there, but I never brought it up with Charles. Couple of reasons for this. The first is that I would have had to find some fault with the beautiful thing which Charles has created and maintained with such inexplicable faith and skill. The other part is that I don't want just anybody listening to it.

Listening to it, alone in my apartment just now, I got up to go turn the volume down.

Ultimately, I feel there is something poisonous about this record. It is ahead of its time, ahead fifty years to when half the people are gone and the only birds left are crows and sparrows.

Which is not to say that it isn't a great recording. Basically on that day I was trying to make a Frogs record (I'd just seen them or something) and Andrew I don't think has ever listened to a Frogs record. So, interesting mix right there. Andrew doesn't even do a funny voice in the course of the whole thing, I think.

So anyway, I do this sort of standup-comic thing mostly, and Drew emotes with his reasonably beautiful voice. We do some standard noodling for the first track, then it's off to funnytown! First off it's a couple of BR "standards," starting with "Survivor." I guess I'm pretty funny on this one; you tell me. I do get in a very funny line: "He was the survivor / of a condominium fire." I'm not sure why that's funny, which suggests that it really is.

Whoa, almost too soon now comes "Stranger," which has been covered by others and probably shall echo all the way down to final days of Man. Which isn't bad, considering I started (I think) with this Laurie Anderson song in my head and immediately started making up a bunch of shit. Drew's playing is really excellent here, a perfect structure that makes all else possible.

And then, the one. "You Don't Love Me," the "Alone Again or…" of BR, vacuum-sealed for the future people sitting around at their dial-ups surrounded by shit and wrappers. This is Drew's composition, written about a real person (though hopefully never sung to them.) Anyway, the less said the better. Just imperfect enough to be you-know-what.

"Hippie Girl" is really good, too. Oh shit, I hadn't heard this for a while! This is nuts! This was probably the genesis of "It's gonna be great!" which was the highly localized catch phrase for a while there. Let's bring it back! "I try not to think about those days…" the fat guy sings. A moment of real pathos!

The rest is probably just for the academics. Somebody has the brilliant idea of giving me the guitar and we're way back down in the sludge again. Drew's singing is really good but he doesn't have much to hang it on with my playing as weak as it is. See it's all my fault! That's my cat, Kim, freaking out, though. The growling goes on for a long time but manages to stay interesting. Look to the animals!

Capped by the only Frogs/Martin Sexton medley in existence, for those of you who watched all the credits.

There are people who know specific details about the making of this album, but I'm not one of them. I'm pretty sure it wasn't conceived as a Brown Rainbow album, but as with all of these early entries in the discography it hardly matters. To my ears, the first and last tracks sound the least like "baseline" Brown Rainbow, while the middle two tracks almost sound like something we could have recorded last week. A bit. It's really just the presence of a real drummer that makes this album sound so different from other Brown Rainbow recordings. It almost doesn't sound real to me. When the hot drums kick in, suddenly everything sounds organized and forward-directed.

Track Three is the most interesting for me. The noodling atmospherics keep rolling along, never really developing but refusing to die out. A taste of '80s nostalgia occasionally emerges. At the end, we get a long, quiet keyboard solo. This solo leads directly into Track Four, where it suddenly becomes more conventional sounding, and the whole thing turns into a nice hypno-jam.

I don't think the "poll" thing is going to work, since you have to be a LiveJournal member in order to vote. Let's keep it primitive, then: I give this album a solid 5 out of 10. It has its tiring aspects, and its moments of unlikely brilliance.

I'm glad that Brown Rainbow history starts with this album. I don't know if Jesse had any idea that it was going to become a Brown Rainbow album when he made it (and I don't even know for sure when he made it), but Brown Rainbow has claimed it and loves it as best it can.

Which is to say, a lot. That a piece of music can be so brutal and so hilarious at the same time is remarkable enough. That it deftly avoids logic and always seems fresh puts it in a realm unreachable by most of us losers. The way the interjections from the radio are never wrong; the way the insanely distorted drum breaks are always unexpected; the way the howling feedback suddenly gives way to a bare voice saying "Huh!" How did it happen?

When it came to uploading this album to the website, I had a problem: the thing is essentially one 97-minute-long piece. Things do begin and end, but there's nothing that (to my ears) sounds like the end of one piece or the beginning of another. I decided to cut it up into tracks of equal length, but 97 is a prime number; I broke it down to seconds, but the number of seconds (which I have conveniently forgotten) is also a prime number. So I just got close--fifteen tracks that are 6:03, and one that's 6:10. The nature of "All Answers Here Contained" is such that, for me, any of these 6-ish minute tracks seem like complete pieces in and of themselves, even though they're just random hunks of the whole. Listen to Track Twelve and try not to be moved.

Wave your hand: nothing happens. Dead spells. Chanting, or just talking to yourself.

It has been well over a month since the last Brown Rainbow session, and I'm starting to feel a little creaky. I don't think this is the longest we've gone without doing anything--last year was busy, and we still skipped May. I don't know how that happened. Back in 2003 I went for months without playing in Brown Rainbow, but there were sessions going on without me. Now I'm getting the itch. I'd like to say I'm brimming with enthusiasm and ideas, but really I just have an itch.

Since the beginning I've had a marked preference for regarding complete recording sessions as "albums." Part of it is just the slight perversity of brandishing a freshly-recorded tape and saying, "Behold! Our new album!" More important, though, is the desire to present the work...I'm trying to avoid saying "warts and all," but that's really what I'm getting at. It's not so much that I want people to waste their time listening to garbage; I just can't ever be sure what is a wart and what isn't. I don't trust myself, and so others must suffer. But that's not the whole story, either. I like hearing how pieces develop, and how the mood of the music can shift over the course of the session. I feel like the good parts sound better when you can hear the crap before and after.

The first BR recordings I was involved with were made on a bulky two-track Hitachi tape deck (where has it gone?), and that kind of primitive setup is still what I prefer. The equipment I use now is newer, and you don’t need a shim to hold down the “record” button, but the idea is the same. It’s a nice marriage of laziness and aesthetics for me—two microphones feeding into an analog tape deck means I don’t have to fuss over mic placement or recording levels very much, and the recordings I get tend to be pleasantly oversaturated and conveniently edited into 30-minute chunks.

The chunks are the best part. We play to the end of the tape and beyond; I can't remember anything that we've played that happened after the end of the tape. Maybe my memories are just reconstructions based on the tapes and a few photographs. Nowadays I feel I'm too aware of the end of the tape, losing the urge to play as soon as I hear the "chunk!", then just wanting to watch TV or maybe go to sleep.

Sometimes the end of the tape is sweet mercy, other times it's the cruel knock on the door stopping you in
mid-stroke. Someti

We had girl singer back in 2002. She sang and spoke, and even though she was coming from a place I couldn't really dig, her words went with Brown Rainbow's music in strangely compelling ways. One listener remarked that he liked it because he could tell that she really cared about what she was saying, while we (the musicians) didn't care at all. It wasn't quite like that. For me, it was more that I was desperately trying to not pay attention too closely to what she was saying. I was going with the general mood, but it would have been paralyzing to have been actually listening to her words, which were sometimes hideously open and honest, sometimes hideously artificial and tiresome. It made me feel awkward and embarrassed, either way, but I felt this was the way it should be. I have felt all of these horrible fake feelings, and once upon a time I would even write about them in horrible fake poems. So I guess I did dig where she was coming from, to my shame.

I have probably overlooked the role of shame in Brown Rainbow. I've thought about it now and then, but the shame has avoided my analysis. I can't quite find where it lives, but I think about all the post-concert torpors and depressions, knowing that we hadn't made anyone happy, that in fact there had never even been a chance that we would; and maybe we did make some people happy, but then we'd feel bad because that made it obvious that we desired acceptance. And being an avant-garde band, even a very quasi-avant garde band, means that we should be ashamed of wanting acceptance. But then what we're striving to do is accept, so maybe wanting acceptance in return is natural.

When I say "we" above, I really mean "I." I have no idea what anyone else involved in Brown Rainbow thinks, and I can only guess that my bandmates, whoever they may be, would be horrified by the above paragraph. Actually, I doubt that they would care enough to be horrified.

So she's semi-improvising a spoken piece, and I'm playing what I can on a trumpet, which isn't much. I'm sweating, as usual. As I honk away, I hear her start saying something about the way he moves when it's hot, and it seems to me that she's looking right at me as she's saying this; I turn away and start playing to the corner of the room. Then she says that she's known him for nearly six years, and I'm still playing to the corner but now thinking wait, she's *not* talking about me? She hasn't even known me six hours! I'm terrified that she might be making some kind of move on me, right in the middle of a song, and even so I feel slightly rejected when it becomes clear that she's not, and was it sick wishful thinking on my part in the first place? I manage to feel bad coming and going. I have to say, though, that later on when I saw her thong underwear riding up into view (maybe only the first or second time I ever saw this now-common thing) any weird ideas I had about her as a romantic figure vanished. I probably felt bad about that, too.