Satori: Mercy

If you haven't heard the song "Mercy", then you should brace yourself.  It's thirteen and a half minutes long.  Now, I've written long songs in my life, but this song never succumbed to the problem that many long songs succumb to: they're boring or repetitive. It's a bit weird having one of your best songs be so long.  There weren't a lot of ideal opportunities for playing the song live.  Which is too bad, because it's not only one of my best songs, it may be one of the best songs period. Yeah, I said it. 

First, let me make a recommendation.  At the end of your day, instead of watching Netflix, put on your headphones.  Clear your head for a few minutes and meditate on the silence, then press play.  I promise that you won't be disappointed.  Go do that before you read any further. 

See? I wasn't lying. Okay, so the first thing I want you to know is that the four of us did that live in the studio without vocals.  We just had to remember where we were in the song as we played through the entire thirteen and a half minutes.  

***

So I wrote "Mercy" when I was 20 years old.  I had finished my second year of college, and I would not be going back any time soon.  I had a lot to process, and I don't need to go into details (that's another album entirely), but I left school feeling like a villain. At Kenyon, we lived a pretty sequestered life, but occasionally images would filter in from the outside world.  One of the enduring images was that of the compound in Waco, Texas burning down as it took the lives of the Branch Davidians inside.  I can't say that I had been following the story closely, but when I watched the footage in April, it felt quite surreal. 

The song "Mercy" was about a standoff.  It was also about a group of people who were cornered, but while there was some inspiration from real life, it wasn't exactly about Waco.  "Mercy" was more of a Western.  The song is about what happens when you can't run any further. If you want to know peace, you have to stop running on and on. 

Musically the song has a lot of influences.  Fugazi, sure.  And a little bit of Slint, but frankly, the song is better than Slint.  Yeah, I said it.  I'm going to have my Louisville underground license taken away for good, which is fine, because they never really liked me anyway.  

***

So we managed to record the song with the band playing the song live, but the song was far from over.  First, Andrew Lee and Brian thought that the middle part needed some rhythmic glue.  It wasn't really clear until we had started trying to mix it.  We had run out of tracks, though, so they had to trigger the percussion track live every time we tried to mix it.  

Another problem was the vocals. I was having a hard time hitting the notes, because I had gotten the flu while we were recording.  One solution was to sneak in a flute solo that was playing the melody that I was singing, which added another layer of complication to mix-down, because Brian played the flute solo live everytime we mixed it down.  And of course the song was 13 and half minutes long, so if we messed anything up, we had to start over.  At one point, we felt we had gotten the mix we wanted, but we were listening back and we had to go through the whole process again.  

Fast forward thirty years.  I had always been unhappy with how my vocals sounded. As we began remastering the songs, I decided to add some backing vocals- which I had been singing along with for decades.  I was fortunate enough to be able to bounce the idea off of Andrew Lee, who approved, and so we went ahead and added vocals to a song that I had recorded when I was 21.  

Satori: Mercury

There are a lot of questions about "Mercury" , like what the title has to do with the song.  As engrossed as I was in mythology, the title has to do with the element, though I can't tell you precisely why. This was a period in my songwriting, where I wrote on the edge of consciousness.  The song sprang-forth fully formed like Athena, and I sang it with conviction, but what does it all add up to?

Bands like Slint and Fugazi had seduced me with their lyrical opacity.  I don't know if it was the goal to bury meaning in obscurity, but that was certainly the effect.  At any rate, I strongly recommend that you try to unravel the meaning of the song, because I feel you would be rewarded for doing so, but I don't think my doing so would be any help...

When the band first started playing the song, it was loud and aggressive.  When we went in to record the song for the record Brian and Andrew gave our arrangement a thumbs down, so the night after we tried a take of it, we sat around with acoustic guitars trying to re-arrange it.  I guess we liked the vibe of the song on acoustics, because that's how we recorded it the next day.  

We began tracking the song by recording a layer of shaker tracks first, which in retrospect was a little crazy.  While the technology existed, we didn't record any of the songs to a click.  Brian may have tried to get us to do it, but we didn't think we needed it, and I think most of the songs were well-rehearsed enough that we didn't need to (and didn't have time to) record tracks one by one anyway.  

At any rate, after we got our shaker tracks, we recorded the guitars and bass, and then added Dan playing just toms on the track.  All the vocals were recorded later (which turned out to be a bad idea, but I'll get to that in another post).  At any rate, a good song can't be tied down to a particular arrangement. 

I sit in my rooms and I plan my riots

I know the walls are coming down soon

I burn a candle, my only diet

I lay my soul to the bludgeoning tune

There is a voice in the empty quiet

Beyond the stars, beyond the moon

There is a pull, and I won't deny it

Pulls off my flesh and opens my wounds.

Here is my hand, it's an invitation

To escape this grip that's dragging us down

Make no mistake: this is no liberation

We won't embrace that risk-free sound

You must abandon that familiar scene

Open your eyes, 'cause there's no going back

Don't imagine the break will be clean

Tonight's the night, we begin the attack.

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than 

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than you

Tonight's the night the struggle commences

And tonight's the night, the struggle will die

It's nothing more than an attack on the senses

But don't be afraid, 'cause you understand why

It's all a part of the tension you feel

It's the last time you'll be able to choose

Let it sink in and know that it's real

Give it away, you've got nothing to lose

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than 

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than you.

Satori: The Plague

"The Plague"  is a real unicorn of a song.  It is a punk-rap song in a Medieval setting that alternates time signature as it propels in to a bridge that is full-on evil clown music. It should've been a hit, right?  Some folks will never get past the very harsh sound, but there is a deep dark meaning underneath the cacaphony. 

When it came out, some folks thought that it was about the AIDS crisis, but it was bigger.  "The Plague" is a story about a disease that comes and catches a whole population off guard.  Like the Black Death that inspired it, this plague is big that you have to confront it, because "The Plague" is the fear of death itself. 

When I was a freshman in college, I read Albert Camus' The Plague, and the story certainly resonated with me.  Camus' novel is about the human condition.  How does one confront a plague that kills with no rhyme or reason?  Camus' novel spends a lot of time with his absurd heroes- people who in the face of the plague persist in their humanity.  The hero never "succeeds", but fight on anyway.  This is Camus' absurd hero, and it might seem like an oxymoron, but he seems to admire his absurd heroes. 

So if the plague is our own fear of death, the song illustrates how not to confront it.  Hiding doesn't work, because it's already inside of you.  There are no heroes in the song. No anti-heroes either, I suppose. Just people who haven't confronted their fear of death. 

The music goes a long way to create a sense of dread and disjointed-ness.  The structure is very strange. There is only one chorus with singing on it.  The song has four different time signatures. And yet, it is musically coherent.  

Nobody saw when it came to town

It crawled through the sewers and the underground

Rose out of the shadows while your shades were down

Entered the houses without a sound

Open your eyes.

A voice was heard but no one turned their heads

Thinking it might be someone else instead

Gathering strength while your eyes were closed

And when you opened them up, you were already dead

Are you paralyzed?

Don't look out the window 'cause you don't want to see

A face that it wears from a memory

You can't wish it away, and you can't wake up

Your heart feels a tremor, but it won't let you scream

Here comes the plague

Here comes the plague

Recognize the face now the mask is gone.

Here comes the plague

Here comes the plague

Recognize the face now the mask is gone.

You knew it once crawling out of your cave

You built your castle and you thought you were safe

You hid in your tower and you played your games

And you thought it returned, but it never escaped

Now eat your poison

The messenger arrives, but you already know

You're losing the battle and it's coming in slow

The fear penetrates, but you can't let it show

You got nowhere to run to, nowhere to go

Don't let her voice in

The queen arrives, she seems distressed

The look in her eyes, you can't even guess

You don't even notice the blood on her dress

But you scream at the air, when you see the rest

It takes you back to a time when the rumors were real

And it always was true what they said about you

When you hid in the corner away from the beast

That recognized your face

And you knew you were guilty of whatever you did

When no one was watching you,

But someone always is watching you watching you

And that's the way it felt, but you did it anyway,

And you did it anyway, and you did it anyway

And there's no going back to your wishing wells

Back  to your carnivals

Back to your fairy tales

Back to you merry go

Back to you wishing wells

Back to your carnivals

Back to your fairy tales

Back to your merry go round round round

Satori: Awakening

"Awakening" is the last of the early songs recorded for the album Belief.  I can still hear all the influences of this song- The Who, Fugazi, etc. There's even a little bit of Traveling Wilbury's in there.  The song is a bit of a second cousin to "Belief." The story here is mostly about bringing the recording back from the dead, but I did want you to know three things:

1. Becky Kupersmith wanted to call our first album, King of All I see based on a lyric from this song. 

2. Ryan Jones sang on the bridge, and probably should have sung on a lot more songs, because he's a better singer.

3. The breakdown is my favorite in any song. 

This particular recording has an interesting story behind it, because the original master no longer exists. So Andrew McKenna Lee and I had to resurrect the song using a casette as our master. There had been an expectation when we finished the album that we would put out a CD, but then we discovered how much a CD cost, and we opted to put the album out sooner rather than later, so we put it out on casette.  We argued that we could release the CD version later.  Sigh.

The two biggest problems with a casette master are: 1. The speed and 2. The hiss.  The speed meant that the song was not at its original tempo and not quite in the original key.  This was pretty easy to fix.  The second problem was the hiss, which only became noticeable in the quiet parts.  We Eq'd some of the hiss away, but you also lose a bit of high-end sparkle, so I added an acoustic guitar, which doubled the guitar part I played on the electric. This meant that I could eliminate the original intro, and have the acoustic as an intro, which meant I needed to re-record the vocals for the intro and try to blend it into the original once the original recording kicked in. 

Unfortunately, the hiss returns thoughtout the song whenever it got quiet, so I began adding other sounds and overdubs to mask the hiss- the sound of a wave, a ringing bell.  You'll notice these elements whenever the band gets quiet. 

The last spot of hiss was at the very end.  So I just recorded the last note for bass, drums and guitars.  Hopefully you can't tell the difference, but now that I've told you...

 

Satori: Belief

 

"Belief" is another early Satori song. The story of the song goes back to the summer of 1990 when I went to Greece.  So much of my writing my senior year was colored by that experience.  The cover of the album was shot there, and yet, that's me jumping off a cliff into the water.  I believe a gal named Janet McClelland took the shot, and this was in the era of analog photography.  There was no checking to see how the picture came out, and an action shot like this... well, who knew.  There had been several instances of cliff jumping on that trip, and I had taken several pictures, and I felt certain they would all turn out awesome.  I asked Janet to take one, just so I could be in one, but I didn't think it would turn out. Hers was the only that turned out. 

At any rate, the first time I jumped off a 60 foot cliff, I was extremely nervous.  I needed to clear about twelve feet from the launching point in order to land in water that was deep enough.  I was in the middle of a sleepless six week trip, and I was high on adrenaline and emotion, and I can't say that under any other circumstance would I have taken that jump, but I did, and the fact that I did stuck with me. 

Well, fast forward about six, seven months. The music came first, and while we jammed on the music I felt compelled to utter one word: belief.  I wrote the rest of the words that night. The song and the picture go hand in hand, as do Satori and belief.

It might seem a bit odd for a band with a buddhist name to be singing about belief.  I did not have a conscious understanding of Buddhism at that point, but I had read Kerouac's Dharma Bums, the year before and it had magnetized me towards Buddhism. In the book, the narrator climbs a mountain with Buddhist friend, Japhy Ryder, and the friend tells him as they come down the mountain that you cannot fall off the mountain if you simply let go to the mountain.  Or something like that.  While I was in Greece, we climbed mount Olympus.  I did it with my guitar, and I ran down the mountain following Japhy's advice, and found that he was right. I couldn't and didn't fall of the mountain. 

My understanding of satori was that it was a brief flash of enlightenment- though many buddhists today would argue that is kensho.  But it is a point where we experience a kind of enlightenment, where we are able to see into the nature of reality.  Typically, this requires the exhaustion of the rational perspective through the use of koans and meditation, but the result is deep understanding. 

This goal of enlightenment was paired with my fervant desire to live as richly as possible, which might seem to in no way related to any buddhist concept.  There was a tension there to be sure.  The goal of the music that we created was a sonic illustration of that tension. The verses of "Belief" are all about winding up the tension for the release of the choruses. The song is all about tension and release, which was Nirvana's formula right?  It's a bit ironic that I wrote this song, before I knew they even existed, and about a year before Nevermind exploded onto the scene. But Kurt Cobain had a much darker view of the world. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.  

I think what made us different is that we had an open mind about the world.  It wasn't dirt, but it wasn't perfect.  Were we true buddhists?  Well, I remember chanting buddhist chants before a show to center us.  But then on stage we sought to unleash the fury of belief.  It seemed a bit of a contradiction. 

I never say what the belief is, because it doesn't matter (to some extent).  If you are with the universe, and the universe can carry you, then your belief is true and good things will happen, I suppose.  But we need belief.  We can't live our lives without it.  We are not widgeteers put on this earth to create units for distribution.  We need meaning and depth and purpose.  Belief is what propels us forward.  

Somewhere in the thirty years since I wrote this song, I find myself among the crowd that sees the world through a materialist and mechanistic worldview.  The world is a series of numbers, and we must follow the numbers to make choices.  Science will show us the way, right?  Except that science is just a tool, and it can't answer the questions that matter the most: What path should we follow? Why does it matter?

Beliefs are future-oriented ideas.  If you act, you act on belief.  If you raise your child, you do so based on belief.  Even something as mundane as putting money into an IRA requires belief, because the future is unwritten.  Why do we construct the lives that we construct?  Reason can't answer that.  It can hopefully support it, but belief is a faith that we are heading in the right direction.  You don't need a religion to have belief.  You just need to believe. 

While belief propels us towards the future (and out of the circumstances that steal our energy), satori is the stillness.  It is the quiet.  Just as we need strength to conquer our demons, we need peace to surrender to our angels (not exactly a buddhist concept).  But the stillness and the quiet provide us with the space to reflect on harmony. Belief shoots us out of the cannon while satori gives us a place to land.  

I often paraphrased Steven Wright and spoke of Satori of that moment when you fall back in your chair and then catch yourself.  For a second you don't know what's about to happen, and it could be terrible or it could be a tremendous relief.  For the band, the satori was the moment in the song that captured that uncertainty.  In "Belief" it was the second before each chorus when the music stops for a second, and there's no certainty that it will land. 

The tension between the satori and the belief runs through our music. We might think of tension as a negative, but the tension in the bow-string is what sends the arrow through the sky. 

Dirt

I was a senior in high school when I wrote "Dirt." I think I had recently listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers album, "Blood Sugar Sex Magic", which may have influenced the rap-ish style of the song.  I remember sitting in my old bedroom for some reason, and writing the song in one sitting.  Even at 17, I had written epic songs. At five verses, this certainly qualified, but unlike some of my other epics, there wasn't any fat to trim. If you scroll down and read the lyrics, I think you'll see why I'm justifiably proud of this accomplishment. 

At that point I was heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, and what I can only call underground music- alternative, punk? It wasn't alternative yet, and it wasn't punk like the Clash.  I listened to Jane's Addiction, Dinosaur Jr. and I frequented hardcore shows in Louisville, because that seemed to be the only scene for young musicians, but I can't say that I was ever welcomed into that scene. At any rate, this is what results when you combine early 90s alternative with Bob Dylan.  

However, unlike all those sources, I was really trying to dig through the dirt at that age to find something positive.  Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall" and "It's All-Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" were tremendoustly influential in terms of creating songs that present a cascade of images to the listener, but they both illustrated a kind of existential crisis, which I resisted.  Many of the underground music that I listened to had a cynical view of the world, which I also resisted.  As dark a song as "Dirt" might seem at first, it's not a cynical song. If anything, I was trying to demonstrate the bankruptcy of a worldview that reduces life to a shallow, materialistic emptiness.  How ugly is everything, if everything is dirt?

The song was easily Satori's "hit", assuming that you could understand what I was saying. Still, the song never left the set list in all the years of Satori's existence.  Often-times, it was the show-closer, with guitar solos, and drum solos.  The song always propelled itself into a lengthy jam.  The song evolved over the years and became less punk and more rap-rock over the years.  My idea of a rap delivery was MCA of the Beastie Boys.  

When we recorded this song in Pittsburgh for this album, we were playing the song live- minus vocals.  I felt that I had flubbed the solo, but Brian Gager and Andrew Lee (our producers) convinced me that it sounded great.  Because of the lack of sonic separation, we would have had to record the song from scratch, but that wasn't their motivation.  I think they thought my recovery made the flub seem intentional, and the intentionally late return from the second bridge gave the recording a kind of exciting uncertainty.

Brian had the idea that the video should end in  spy chase.  We used to joke that we made spy music, and the ending to "Dirt" certainly had that vibe. As you listen to the end, imagine a car chase with a James Bond type in a tux and fancy car. 

How much more can you demand of me?

I tell you the truth, you jail me for profanity

You're free of criminals, save for your own vanity

You ever be totally clean?

How many victims in your crusade for purity?

How close is your endgame of security?

Honesty is just another casualty until your vision is complete

So let's all clap hands

Don't blink if it hurts

No call to understand

If everyone is dirt.

Soul game, nothin' could be easier

Don't believe, it's a question of pleasing her

How much are you willing to release for her

Nothing but everything will do

Mystify, rectify, justify, testify

We've got a darkness nothing can purify

Don't be a hero Heros are crucified

Nobody sheds a tear

So let's all clap hands

Don't blink if it hurts

No call to understand

If everyone is dirt.

Once I had a dream, I had a vision

A light was tearing through all of religion

Saved from a head-on collision

Ready to taste our fate

Stared at- a victim of analysis

Tied down- political paralysis

Don't turn away! Visions of apocalypse

Tell me it's not too late

So let's all clap hands

Don't blink if it hurts

No call to understand

If everyone is dirt.

You stand tall, the moral majority

Let me introduce you to the mortal minority

Don't be afraid, it's the death of authority

We're ready to break away

Ask yourself what is it that's chaining me

All these years of testing and training me

Pressures' on, stripping and straining me

Why should I live that way?

So let's all clap hands

Don't blink if it hurts

No call to understand

If everyone is dirt.

You never blinked once at a traffic fatality

You were never quite sure it was a part of reality

Time's up! Face your own mortality

As gruesome as it may seem

Naked now, born without a history

Could it be the key to your nagging misery?

Now that your clean, it's the end of your mystery

Is it as bad as you dreamed?

 

Satori: a brief history

 

To listen to the album, click here. 

Once upon a time- very much in another life- I was in a band called "Satori."  The band began early in 1991 with me, Becky Kupersmith and Dan Chaffin.  That incarnation of the band spent most of its existence in Becky's basement. We wrote an album's worth of material, and we searched for another guitarist, because you're supposed to have two, right?  We auditioned my friend Dan Patterson, who had played with me in a band called Downpour, but he lasted long enough to impart a riff that became the song "Obvious War."  Then we tried Simon Furnish, who thought we were complete as a trio, though I suspected that he was just trying to be nice. 

We put together an album of material over that Winter and Fall.  We played at St. Francis High School, Jewish Community Center, and our big gig which was opening up at Laser Chase.  Not a lot of a exposure. Still we felt like we should record an album.  Becky brought a recording from a rehearsal using a jambox, and we took it to Mike Bucayu of Kinghorse.  He said we didn't sound passionate enough, which I suspect meant that we didn't sound like a hardcore band, which we weren't trying to. 

At any rate, we started recording an album at Ant-Man studios? It was on Barret Ave, I think.  We recorded six songs in an hour, and the guy mixed two of the songs in another hour.  We had a six hour package.  I thought we would be able to record another three songs, but when I came back, he said he spent the next four hours mixing, and we were out of money.  The math didn't add up, but I was an 18 year old without a lot of confidence.  We managed to get Becky's parents to put up the rest- though I've never heard the end of it. 

I had been jamming with Matt Frederick early that summer, and I was surprised that he could play guitar.  I had known him in Middle school, and didn't know him to play an instrument.  I thought he would make a nice addition as an acoustic guitar player in a punk band.  He joined on a few of the last songs in the studio, but in the end nothing happened with the record, because I didn't realize how much it would cost to actually put an album out.  I used to tell people that I'd recorded an album, but that the label chose not to release it, which in a sense was true. 

We played one show at Tewligan's that summer as a quartet, and then Becky moved away to Lansing, Michigan. Dan, Matt and I went off to college.  Satori went into hibernation until winter break.  

We had about three-four weeks off that break, and my friend Hewett was in town, which was never a given, and he expressed interest in playing, and the four of us jammed without a bass-player. We auditioned Frances Zopp, who hadn't been playing very long, and while we had similar musical tastes- she got me into fIREHOSE- I was hoping to find someone with more experience.  

Matt found Ryan Jones and we practiced as a five-piece for a single show at Uncle Pleasant's.  There may have been five people at the show.  It was clear to all of us that we were going places.  Well, except Hewett who never played in the band again. 

That Summer we played and practiced.  We worked up songs like "The Plague", "Mercury" and "Save the World".  We were eager to record and EP.  We selected four songs, and recorded at Mountain View studios in Richmond over Thanksgiving.  Again, the recordings were never released, because we hadn't budgeted for that.  I think it was more important to have a recording than to put out an album.  We did use the recordings as a demo, and we played a smattering of shows here and there, in Louisville, Kenyon, Transylvania over the next year and a half. 

The hardcore scene was not interested in us at all, but it was around this time that Nirvana, and Pearl Jam and the grunge scene began to pick up steam, and we were kind of grungy.  I mean, we'd played in barns, basements and bars.  That's grungy, right?

Despite a lack of any encouragement outside of our own circle, we decided to play as a band full-time when Ryan and Matt graduated, and before Dan and I's senior year in college.  That was when we recorded the album that was originally called Part of the Soil, but I renamed because we didn't have the original album cover, and I did have a picture of me jumping off a cliff in Greece, which we had used as a t-shirt.  

We worked with Andrew McKenna Lee and Brian Gager, who went above and beyond recording our album.  We spent an entire week on the recording recording as a band live (minus vocals) and then putting over various over-dubs.  There's a real vibe on the recording, because we were actually playing as a band on every track. We did manage to release an album (on casette).  Andrew and Brian were a bit disappointed with the results of our packaging, but we must've sold all 100 copies of the album, because none of us has any.  

We played on a monthly basis that year, but we had also made the inexplicable decision to live together as a band, which instead of bringing us closer together drove us further apart, and after the lease was up, we went our separate ways as a band, reuniting for one concert at Rudyard Kipling, which may have been our best attended show, ironically.  

Here we are years later, and having unearthed a copy of the album (now called Belief), I can honestly say that we should have gotten this into the hands of more people.  It's a strange album, and it veers stylistically, but there's a good chance you'll enjoy a song or two.