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| News | I can't say enough about this record. It would easily rank in my top ten albums of all time on any given day. This is where the Freaks truly find their rhythm, and begin actually creating the music for which they had always strived. After a relatively lengthy hiatus from recording, the Freaks return strong and refreshed. "Rocking Chair" and "I Got Happy" are ebullient rockers that open the album and introduce a new sense of acceptance of their homes and families and their place within them (although their families and friends have always been the first ones in their "Thanks" list in the credits, this album is expressly dedicated to them). Dennis Herring employs essentially the same production style on this record that he used on Camper Van Beethoveen's Key Lime Pie, but it (suprisingly) works very well with the Freaks (unlike with Camper Van—it made them sound tinny and overproduced). The result is a very polished sound juxtaposed with very rough song fragments, conversations, and studio interruptions which combine to create a very warm, homey feel to the record. The songwriting is incredible, the production is a perfect match for their sound, and the energy and emotion burst from every song. The standout tracks, some of which are the best of their career to date, include "I Confess", "I Got Happy", "My House", and "Never", along with the many unlisted song fragments that are sprinkled throughout the record. If you only buy one of the Freaks' records, this has to be it. So go do it.
Bryan Harvey—Guitar and Vocals Released 1991
Bryan's comments Towards the end of 1989, Johnny and I were pretty much spent. We had packed a lot into the three and a half years since we had formed. Our lives consisted of nothing but House of Freaks and one another, and frankly, we were sick of each other. We had worked our asses off and we were broke and had no personal lives to speak of. At the end of our tour with Concrete Blonde, Johnny told me he was quitting the band. I said fine and that I was going to continue without him. He went to Richmond and I went to LA. After a week or two Johnny called me in LA and said he thought it would be a shame if we gave it up after so much hard work. He said he thought we should try to get off Rhino and get a major label. I agreed. We knew that Rhino just didn't have it in them to break a new band and our only chance to ever make it or to make any money was to look for a major. We decided to do a tour of Europe with Bob Mould and then take a break for Christmas and then look for a label. My recollection of this time is spending a lot of time in my apartment writing songs and falling in love with my future wife. Johnny was living out in the country on an old farm outside of Williamsburg. We spent most of the winter of 1989-1990 hibernating. By spring, we were off of Rhino and shopping a deal. We ended up signing with the new label Irving Azoff was forming, Giant Records. We always had misgivings about the major label thing. But we figured that it's cool to be a penniless indie band for about 2 records, then you gotta try and sell some records 'cause your time is running out. By summer we had a batch of songs and we had picked a producer, Dennis Herring, who had produced a cool record or two by Camper van Beethoven. Dennis was a southerner like us (Mississippi) and was very much into our idea of trying to do a pop Captain Beefheart type record. I spent much of that summer making demos of a lot of my new songs on my new 4 track. Johnny and I didn't write together as much for this album. Many of the songs were written and arranged by me alone. Johnny was doing his own thing on his farm, writing and recording on his own. Unfortunately, label negotiations and Dennis' availability kept us from commencing recording until mid-September. I was very anxious to get started because I felt that we were losing steam. Music was changing. Our manager John had just signed Sonic Youth and was getting ready to sign Nirvana. It was the '90's and '80's alternative college rock was turning into grunge, although we didn't know it at the time. We decided to record in Richmond this time. Dennis particularly liked "All My Friends" and thought we should continue on that track. We recorded at the Flood Zone and we intended to fit in a bunch of recorded bits of stuff that Johnny and I had been recording over the summer on our Walkmans (Walkmen?). Bits of stray conversations, sounds from Johnny's farm. We had hours of weird stuff. Rocking Chair Johnny brought this song to me. He had the verse melody and I believe the first line. "I don't want to go, don't want to go myself". I added the chorus "strong as death sweet as love", which I copped from an Al Green song. It was written pretty quickly, as I remember it, in my apartment Richmond. I think it was basically about letting go and letting life happen. We were starting to ease back into our lives and letting go of the rock 'n roll bug that had been eating us for the past few years. I think this song turned out pretty well. I remember Dennis saying he wanted the song to appeal to the guy with the gun rack in his truck. I love the guitar sounds. Dennis, who had been a session guitarist, played the first part of the guitar solo and I'm playing after the "alright!". Dennis did burn me up over the first line (he's a real pain in the ass producer ... more on that later). He kept saying the first line wasn't strong enough. I told him that Johnny wrote it and the song was written around it, and what the hell did it matter anyhow? He just kept saying "it ain't great yet". So I spent literally 6 months rewriting that damn first line and he kept saying , "it ain't great". And so finally when it came down to the wire and we HAD to get that first line done, Dennis and Bev (the engineer) suggested this brilliant alteration, "I don't want YOU to go, don't want to go myself". Big fuckin' deal. I said hell yeah, I was just sick of dealing with it and hearing "it ain't great". What the hell did that first line mean? Nothing. Either way it still meant nothing. But it was that insistent anal approach to rock 'n roll that really pissed me off about Cakewalk, and Dennis in general, that made me hate recording and led directly to the off-the-cuff approach of Gutterball. On several songs on Cakewalk, we tried to capture the immediacy of my demo recordings. We even copied many of the parts that I threw down in minutes, sometimes taking hours to do what I had done in minutes on my demo. I kept saying "if the demo is so great, why don't we just release that?" No way. We did do that in Gutterball. Bob Rupe played bass on this one, copying a lot from my demo part, but adding that essential Bob Rupe gun rack, muscle car attitude. I think he did a great job and he's a great bassist. This song was the first and only single released from "Cakewalk". It got a fair amount of play but never materialized into a hit for us. Everyone was playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (which I think is a great song, incidentally). The little flute-like sound between "Rockin' Chair" and "I Got Happy" is me playing something called the nose flute. It's a funny little plastic thing you stick up to your nostrils and blow through your nose to make sounds. I got pretty good at it on the road and I was goofing off between takes, playing "Rockin Chair" on the nose flute. Dennis inserted it later. I Got Happy What can I say? I fell in love and got happy. I was no longer an "angry young man" spouting moral outrage. I started to feel a little embarrassed by my earlier songs and so I referred to them. I like that self referencing stuff in books and tv shows. John Silva said, "you can't do that, people will think you listen to your own music!". I'm not really sure what he meant by that, but I think it's funny anyway. I think Johnny may have had the music for the verses and once again I added the chorus. I remember doing a demo for this one weekend out on Johnny's farm when he was out of town. I came up with the riff and played it real sloppy. The demo is real trashy sounding, which is how I wanted the final version to be, because the lyric could be interpreted as "cute". I think the album version ended up too cute. I do like some of the sounds on it though. Johnny's percussion stuff is cool. The solo was neat too. It's me just fuckin' off trying to be "jazzy". I was punching in some stuff on the bass track and when it came to the solo I just started gettin funky, Dennis happened to record it and he loved it. It's pretty funny to me ... bass solo, ha! That was the funny thing about Dennis, he'd kill you spending and entire day doing a damn maraca part and then he'd keep something that was a total toss off. I liked that about him. I Confess This was an oldie that we had written in LA around the time we wrote "Sun Gone Down". I think it was another Johnny idea that I finished off. We even recorded it with John Leckie for "Tantilla" but it never made it on the album. It was a straighter more poppy version than the version on "Cakewalk". Dennis liked the song and wanted to record it. His idea was to arrange the song more like the way we did our songs on "Monkey". I was all game for that idea and quickly came up with a riff ala "Crack in the Sidewalk". I think this was another song where Dennis had me rewrite the lyrics. All in all I think this is a pretty crappy track. The lyrics ended up sounding forced ... a mock toughness, which was bound to happen once I allowed a producer to suggest a rewrite. In my opinion song lyrics should come from personal inspiration not commercial considerations. Granted, the original lyrics were unexceptional, but that's why we left the song off of "Tantilla". It never should have been released. It just wasn't that good. this is another thing that always bothered me about producers and A&R guys: before you started a record, they would listen to all your demos and then pick the list of 12-14 songs they wanted to record. That was it. If a song sucked, or if you just couldn't get a version that was any good, you still worked it and put it on the album. I also remember taking an entire day to record an acoustic guitar part for this song. It was hell and yet another example of an unnecessary exercise how the entertainment industry can waste perfectly good money. Oh yeah, one final gripe: throughout "Cakewalk" Dennis was saying how he thought that in the 90's people's attention span would grow ever shorter, necessitating the need for shorter songs. I didn't really agree with him. I love a good 2:45 pop song, but I felt the Beatles had established the template for that back in the 60's. Any shorter than that, and you barely have enough time to say anything or go anywhere. Nevertheless, Dennis decided we should lop off a few verses here and there in my songs. I fought him on this. Won some, lost some. Hymn This was from a tape that we had recorded with Bruce Olsen back in early 1990. Back then Johnny and Bruce and I went into Flood Zone and recorded several songs to convince Giant to let us co-produce our record with Bruce. We recorded Hymn, Honor Among Lovers, This is It and Cakewalk (which was actually an entire song, with lyrics). The tape was pretty cool, but Johnny and I were at odds about where to go with it and Bruce wasn't able to find the middle ground. So we decided we did need an outside producer after all. "Hymn" sounded pretty much like this on the original tape but it was remixed for "Cakewalk". A Good Man Well, this was the song that I thought was gonna make me a million. I was wrong. I remember my manager John Silva telling me after he heard this song that it would be a smash and that the new single by his other band, Nirvana, would have a certain limited appeal with "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and then fade into oblivion. Ha. Boy was he wrong ... although he still got rich. I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out. We stayed pretty true to my original demo, the feel is exactly the same. I remember singing on my demo late one night when my wife, then girlfriend, was asleep. I sang it really softly so I wouldn't wake her up and it had a really great feel. We tried to capture that late night feeling for the final vocal. In fact, Dennis called me up one night at 3AM, and said "Okay, Bryan, come down to the studio now and sing 'A Good Man'". I did, and that was the vocal.... I wrote this one by myself. Johnny actually contributed very little. I think he might have played bass drum. I played all the instruments on the basic track and then we called in Marty McCavitt to play the solo (Marty played piano on "Tantilla"). I love how over the top loud, the solo is. Also, the strings are really nice at the end. Dennis did a fine job arranging the strings (actually synth strings) ... they remind me of the song "A Summer Place". This is probably one of my best songs, I think. I'm proud of it. Magpie Wing Totally Johnny. He wrote it, sang it, recorded it and that is what you have on the record, his demo. Definite Capt. Beefheart influence there. Cakewalk As I said earlier, this is the end of a song we demoed for the album. There was a pretty cool folksy, bluesy song that precedes this whole end jam. Dennis didn't want to use it for some reason. Consequently, the "Cakewalk" is a meaningless piece of instrumental drivel. It took Johnny & me awhile to come up with a good title for the album. We tried lots of different things ... "In the Midst of Heaven", was one, "Uh..." was another, then somewhere along the line I suggested "Cakewalk" because it seemed fitting. Johnny agreed. That was it. This is It Another good one, although Dennis cut the last verse off, which I don't like. I feel like the end is too abrupt. However, it's a pretty rocking track. I wrote this about my growing disaffection with the BIZ. I think I knew my time as a potential pop star was ending. Honor Among Lovers Written back in California on a camping trip Johnny and I took out into the desert. We went to Anza Borego National Park and camped in the high desert and wrote songs. I think we were trying to write a song that sounded like Mark Linkous' band "The Dancing Hoods". My House Mostly Johnny, once again. Johnny wrote the lyrics about his faltering marriage. He sang it ... made me leave the room while he did it. Dennis did the nice slide work ... the recorded version is a bit 'big rock" a la Pink Floyd for my taste but it was a nice song. Ants A silly one. Some cool sounds, though. Never I have to say this is probably my favorite all time House of Freaks song. I think it was recorded & produced well and has a great feel that captures everything I was going for when I wrote the song. However, it almost didn't work out like that. I wrote the song in my apartment in Richmond about my ex-girlfriend, who I kept thinking I was seeing on the street. I liked the idea of saying "I never think of you" when of course, that is the exact opposite of what I was doing. Musically, I was trying to do a Bob Mould thing. We had just finished a tour with him and I guess there was a drone sound I vaguely remembered him doing, fortunately, I'm not too familiar with his stuff, so I couldn't steal outright. I recorded a demo of this out on Johnny's farm ... no drums just a barrage of guitars and my vocal. When we went to record the song, Johnny suggested that he play a cardboard box instead of drums. Sounded good to me, but Dennis wouldn't hear of it and we recorded a full kit. Well when we did some early mixes of the song, before it was finished Dennis and Bev did that standard "rock" mix with the drums big and powerful. The song sucked. I took the mix home and played it for my wife, Kathryn, who said, " I hate to say it but it sound's like 'I ain't missin' you' by John Waite". (Kathryn has a great musical ear ... and has great taste). Next day, I told Dennis what Kathryn had said, and he was mortified. I told him I hated the big drums and that Johnny's idea of the cardboard box was more on target. Dennis spent an entire day remixing the song and making the drums sound like cardboard boxes. When he was done, the song sounded great. All guitars and vocal with a thumping rhythm. Like John Lennon said, "It's the sound, man". I'd love to hear someone cover this song. Remember Me Well I recollect Johnny singing this melody into a Walkman in my car once out in LA. It sounded kinda Irish to me. I put lyrics to it. We hired some horn players to do a Salvation Army thing. End of story. Well, Cakewalk was released in September of 1991. It had been almost 2 years since our last release and 2 and a half years since we had released a full album. The music scene was changing, we had lost our chance but it took a horrible tour to realize that. We had arranged a tour of the states with School of Fish opening, but a week into the tour, we realized that they had a hit and we didn't and so we finished off a 10 week tour opening for them. It sucked. Few people in their young audience knew or cared who we were. Johnny and I felt the steam running out. Because our arrangements on Cakewalk were for a full band, we hired 2 extra musicians to fill out our sound on stage: Bob Rupe on bass and Stephen McCarthy on guitar. It took us several weeks to hit our stride but once we did, it became a smoking little combo, unfortunately, no one in the School of Fish crowd cared and Johnny and I no longer had the 2 man band novelty to pull us through. Giant worked the record for maybe 5 weeks, then that was it. No video, some airplay for "Rocking Chair", no second single. When we played in LA, to our "home town crowd", thankfully headlining ourselves, I spent a great deal of time speaking to Steve Wynn backstage about trying to survive in the record biz. I didn't know Steve that well, but we had played a few shows with The Dream Syndicate when Johnny and I lived in LA and we shared a mutual respect for one another. Plus, Steve is a hell of a nice guy. After LA it was another month of depressing shows. We returned home pretty well sick of the whole thing. I don't think we were ready to give it up just yet, but Johnny and I were drifting apart.
ENTER GUTTERBALL........ |
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