rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

Ghosts in the Answering Machine: Something Creaky This Way Comes

    1st off I was wrong, as usual. The Tension Envelopes reunion will not take place in January, but in April. All other previous info still applies.

     So, who are these Envelopes, and why are they so tense? I was talking to guitarist Rick Neblung the other day and he commented that bassist Carl Simmons has' a memory like a steel trap' and I agree. His historical reminiscences re: Tension Envelopes on burninglight and elsewhere are likely yards more accurate than anything I might vaguely remember beyond feeling.

      But, oh, what a feeling.

     Anyway, it was 197something and I was like 6 months away from my second divorce, alcoholism was a comin' to git me, I was working as a receiveing clerk for a Great Metropolitan Communications company and playing 'Sweet Jane' in one lousy barband after another.

     Enter Rick Neblung. Introduced to me by a female guitarist friend Allison Ruta(who helped me realize I had no business being married and for which has never been properly thanked or apologized to). It was this introduction that set the stage for Tension Envelopes.

     The start, of course, was false. Rick and I and Allison and Tom Fraunberger (remeber Tom?) made our cbgb debut under the Envelope name and were rickety, drunk and split down the middle between my and Allison's songs. We also turned into kinda a punkdrunk Fleetwood Mac as Tom hooked up w/my not-yet-ex-wife and Itried, pathetically and unsuccessfully to hook up w/Allison.

     Allison, if yr reading this I am sooooooooooooo sorry. Truly.

     Anyway that version imploded. Rick and I hooked up w/drummer Don Gunning for essentially 6 months of power trio basement jams. A great 'woodshed' period but Don wanted different thinbgs than Rick and I and we all realized it and that band split up as amicably as pie making room for the ACTUAL Tension Envelopes.

     Enter Carl Simmons and Mike Hegger. Carl plays bass so Rick moves to guitar. Here's what I remember.......

     The 4 of us 1st set up as strangers in Neblung's loft. I'd just written a 3 chord slice of psychodrama called 'Danny Miller', a death ballad for a fictional idiot who snorted a boatload of heroin 'cause he thought it was coke and, as a result, died. It starts...

'i think you better sit down, Ii got some news, Marie

About the man you loved and I wish you didn't have to

Hear this from me.....'

     The riff, in Rick and Carl's hands was suddenly huge and commanding, like a giant stepping down a mountain in the silverain of Mike's cymbals and the thunder of his toms. Electric blood flooded the room. I crouched my best Johnny Rotten and continued to the chorus, which swung it's song of doom

 '.... someone sold pure smack to Danny Miller

Thought it was cocaine..... but he was wrong.....'

     Each powerchord accent became the tinsel explosion of the punch to the eye. I grew a backbone and believed the words I was singing as never before......

' Stoned celebrities urging kids DON'T DO DRUGS!!!!!

Someone's dealing death out by the playground swingset

Someone's turning our children into ghosts.....'

     Everything got louder and taller and smarter and hipper and finely tuned just right. Guitar chords crashed like jetfighters, the drums generated a freakin' magnetic field and I started swinging that mic stand, guitar forgotten. I'm a singer now, dammit, trying to dress up empathy as sympathy.....

'Somewhere somebody's visiting theoir own private heaven

Huddled in the cold w/a needle in their arm

And maybe for 20 minutes thay ain't got no problems

Finall, sleeping like a kitten in some kitchen

Comfortable ........... and warm.'

    At this lull w/no prearrangement other than knowing it had to be this way,m the 4 of us crashed on the downbeat, ponding that riff like we were nailing it to a cross. It was that perfect and important. I improvised the lyrics we ended the song w/ever after....

'If you can love me black I just might love you back

Love me back, mommy.'

    Crashburn, slow cymbal dissolve. Neblung picks up the riff in a ticktock rhythm. Carl's bass slides across sympathy notes like grace on skates, Mikes rolling down an endless flight of stairs while my guitar speaks in tongues of flame and feedback. It ends w/a crash that echoes in the vast space like waves on a beach.

     Mike looks up w/that 100000 watt smile and, as Rick reported elsewhere, asked 'Well, am I an Envelope?!' Truth is, in that moment we were all of us, finally Tension Envelopes.

     We've lost Mike Hegger and it truly breaks what heart I have that he and I never got the chance to know each other sober, to talk as men and perhaps settle differences; to forgive and be forgiven. I was a mess and yes, made messes, may of which I still regret (sorry again, Allison, you deserved better) but I wouldn't trade a day becausee there was such glory in the noise.

     It's that noise that kicks the ass of the James Taylor/Confessional crap that soaks the spirit in self-pity, sending it sounth towards self-destruction. It's that noise, those songs (and new somgs) played by those people that right now signals if not redemption, then a pretty funky form of vindication.

     A second chance. To not just do what we do best but, I daresay, to be who we are best.

     The beast is awakening. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 20:57 | link | comments (5)

Sherman, Set the Wayback to I Don't Remember

Random thoughts: Ok, either it's reality or it's television. It can't be both. Now there's a grand, sweeping statement (yeah, it tells the world ya ain't got a clue). How's the weather up there? I don't get to ask that question very often 'cause I'm like 6 foot 2 damn tall and people alays ask me that stupid question and Groucho Marx once said that the best way to answer that question was to spit on the guy and tell him it's raining, but has yr weather been as hot as ours? 102damn hot for the last 3 weeks. Or, oh my god, is yr place llike underwater in the flooding? I'm so sorry to be bitching about heat while people's lives float and drown and change irrevocably . From experience all I can say is, it sucks but that's all.

Try to find the good. Apparently that's what makes us human.

Wonder what makes a human torch?

  Feel like I'm living in a bad movie of the week about rural southerners and Hollywood's interpretation  of same as a kind of cartoon gothic opera. Suddenly my already seedy ghetto's been invaded by, and I'm sorry to say this, but ,,,,,,,,, stereotypes.

I myself have sunk to the stereotype of the grumpy old man who yells at the kids to 'turn that shit down' and while it breaks my heart on one level as I suffer not from an irony deficiency but in my defense it usually is shit and it's always too damn loud. And big ol' German Sheperds tied up all barking madness and teethteethteeth. Hank Sr blaring from the car radio at 1 am. Drunken howlings at the moon. A loud .love of life from louts who havn't learned that life is largely levels of loss.

When you choose to look at it that way. I guess.

And guess what? The (legendary) New Jersey barband Tension Envelopes will be reuniting sometime in late December/early January in the rocknroll hotbed of Fowler, Colorado. Ex Paul McKinney Band drummer Paul Costello will be filling in on drums (but not said drummer's shoes) for the late Mike Hegger. Still in the ridiculously early planning stages of this but suffice to say the more it hits me what we're actually going to do, the more twisted and excited this page is gonna be. Expect some type from both Eric Flesch and Speedy Firbank on this one.

Growing old in public.

tim

Posted by: timbyrnes at 21:36 | link | comments (14)

Bo Diddley Was a Gunslinger: On Mortality and Bomp Bomp Bomp Ba Bomp Ba Bomp Bomp

     Bo Diddley is dead. Long live Bo Diddley! Long live the spirit and the memory of the young heart articulating it's sorrowjoylovehatesexandmadness by spouting gibberish atop some driving beat. Long live the superherodom attained by strapping on a Stratocaster and plugging into the Marshall stack of collective conciousness. Long live the hopeful hopeless in their mission to get someone, anyone to LOOK AT ME and somehow register as more than a blip on local radar. Long live the attempt, through sound and words, to transform the randomness of the semi-wasted life into a culture. Long live the garage. Long live the cheap guitar. Long live the street dance. Long live the corner bar. Long live the idiots yelling out for 'Free Bird' when you've been slamming out Clash covers all night. Long live the woozy, frowzy drunk chick who can make you feel like Hendrix w/just one unfocused look and perhaps a lick of the lips. Long live the mixtape, the anarchist's answer to lousy radio. Long live the open mic night. Long live punk rock.

     Long live the blues.

tb

Posted by: timbyrnes at 22:46 | link | comments (2)

Themes for an Imaginary Western

    Viva Obama and his little old Mama and that's all I'm gonna say about it.

     For now.

     What I'd like to play around with is what kinda theme songs will the candidates choose. Obama's been pumping 'Beautiful Day' by U2 through his victorious speakers, while I believe Hillary was still using Fleetwood Mac's 'Don't Stop" and Old Man McCain was playing 'Glycerine' or 'Sixteen Stones'.

    Something by Bush. Get it?

     OK, it's patently obvious that I have nothing to write about and am simply sitting in the library typing at y'all and that ain't fair. It's a beautiful day - and speaking of which, I heard that Bono (not Sonny) has asked the Obama campaign to cease and desist using the tune of that same name, although no reasons were given. Or needed.

    Oh yeah, I have an empty head and busy fingers this morning. So how y'all been?

     I recently left one job to go back to another, the convenience store I almost had to manage. But now I'm the late shift (2 to 11) utility guy. I'm getting lots of hours and almost staying out of the politics, but you know what happens when you put 3 people in a room. They might not pick a leader, but they'll surely pick somebody to hate. That's from an old Star Trek and the best description of the birth of Politics I've ever heard. So far.

     Buster and Sarh say hello. Camille and the 100 cats all say meow. I say Watson whatever happened to J.F Murphy and Salt?

Be back when I have something to say. MMMMMMMMWWWWWWAHHHHH I Love you all!

tim

Posted by: timbyrnes at 20:24 | link | comments