Welcome to "All the Parts of the Buffalo!"
In this inaugural posting I would like to call attention to a song that "All the Parts of the Buffalo" is releasing, today, called "Lipstick on a Pig." The lyrics and music were written by myself (David Bashwiner, formerly known by the pseudonym Jacques Classique, but now transitioning to Michael Jaguar, or, more formally, Michael Jaguar DumDum) and by Jason Warshof (sometimes, when we dress up as foreigners, known as Wolodymir Croftman). Jason and I have been best friends for fifteen years, since our first day of college, and we've been writing songs together that whole time—though we've fairly consistently lived across the country from one another and have been pursuing numerous other trivialities (Jason's a writer, I'm finishing up a PhD).
Recently J came for a visit, and we did what we always do, which is wake up lazily, stroll off for a coffee, and upon return sit down with the guitars for a few hours and reminisce about the old days. We played in a band throughout college (at Cornell) called "The Ralph Bethea Wreckage." There was no guy named Ralph Bethea in the band, it was just the two of us (though the real guy exists and is running around in the deep south somewhere), and we wrote good songs, good solid songs, which were dramatic and funny and sappy and full of beautiful chords and sublime moments and heartfelt emotion and absurd antics. Our hero at the time was Mitchell Froom, Suzanne Vega's producer (and husband), and we wanted him to produce us. It was a dream that led us to scratch out a few drafts of a letter on notebook paper, but which we never quite had the guts to send. It's conceivable, however, that we camped out in front of Suzanne Vega's p.o. box one afternoon (J had written her a song, one of his most beautiful and heartfelt).
Well, we've always longed to start up the band again. Not exactly start it up again, perhaps, but to record our songs professionally (we always used my four-track, which was burned up in an apartment fire a few years back, thanks to Kirsten Johnson's cat—who, incidentally, though sadly now deceased, used to lick her nipples to wake her up in the morning). And over the past couple of years, when we've gotten together—though we only see each other once or twice a year—the music's just been magical. And that makes us lament even more that we never pursued it professionally.
So, just a few weeks ago, J was visiting me, and we'd taken our walk to get coffee and talk about girls, and had returned, and were now playing music. I showed him the few tracks I was working on at the moment in my humble little electronic studio; they were: a track called "Michael Jaguar," which had pretty much only a beat and a short melodic idea; a song I'd written for a German girl I'd met at a club (before getting drunk and passing out in an alley and sadly never seeing her again) called "You've Got it Going On!"; and finally a lyrical idea I had called "Lipstick on a Pig."
I recorded everything as we played through it, as I had been thinking—though my recording capabilities are extremely lo-fi, and we were by no means producing polished performances, this being essentially improvised—that I would like to release them in a low-key way, on line, just make them available—as a sort of anthropological "field recording" of a couple of friends getting together in a midwestern town and having fun playing music on a rainy afternoon.
Well, when I'd come up with the first lyrical ideas for "Lipstick on a Pig" a few days before, I thought to myself, "Oh no, I can tell this is about to take a lot out of me." Because though songs do sort of just come, for every moment of copying down the words, there are the accompanying hours of playing midwife to the creation, and those take quite seriously away from everything else that is going on in one's life at the time (such as my PhD). When the first lyric arrived into my head, as I stood up at the end of a day of studying, perhaps the very first day of the lipstick controversy, and I had looked at the NYT website before heading home—it went: "I'm so angry, you make me want to scream..." and it was about Sarah Palin—I knew that I was on the verge of having at least the next several hours, and quite possibly the next several days, completely sucked out of me by this song-to-be.
Like I said, the song, initially, began with the line "I'm so angry," and it went on in that vein, and was a pretty vicious attack, and was going to be set in a heavy metal style—but all this seemed contrived and forced after a while, and I let it die. Then J came, and like I said we played through two or three other tracks first, and we were starving, and hadn't even eaten lunch yet at 4 in the afternoon, and were literally on the way out the door (though J still had his guitar in hand, and I think I was brushing my teeth)—and I said, hey, what do you make of this? and read him the lyrics.
And then he just sat down and played through the first verse pretty much as it is on the recording. I turned on the minidisc player and recorded everything he did in the next five minutes, and that's when the bridge came out as well. I was glad to have recorded it because, as I'd expected, sometimes earlier brilliant things can get forgotten in their details and as a result simplified, and that would have happened to the bridge if we hadn't recorded it as it was first created, and then gone back to relearn it from the recording. And it's a pretty beautiful bridge, I think. (We used to play a game called "bridgewriter"—more on that in a later post.)
So then we started coming up with lyrical ideas, which continued into the next day, and before J left for his plane trip back to the east coast on Sunday evening, we'd assembled the first half of the song (up to the first chorus) and made a makeshift recording.
The very next day, I called my good friend Jon Cowperthwait, who's now in San Francisco (and LA?), and told him about the song, saying I think we'd done it, and did he have any thoughts on what to do with it visually, perhaps to get it on youtube?
Well, we had a great conversation for over an hour and then I never heard from him again! The Los Angeles air has perhaps gotten to him.
Then I called everyone I knew: Andrea Voelkel, formerly of my last band "Immanuel Won't," to do animation; Paul Wilhelm (who wants me to use this pseudonym for whatever strange reason) and Majel Connery to continue singing and playing through it with me in Jason's absence; Richard Whaling, also of the former "Immanuel Won't," to work with me on assembling a recording; and Ben Kolak, one of the producers of Crime Fiction (a film I wrote the music for, which you can get on netflix), to make a video. We also called up Paul's old band the "Valois Family Flatpickers," to begin working out the song amongst themselves so we could perform it live.
The song had become a country-ish song at this point; and within a few days, through several text messages and emails back and forth between J and me, the lyrics were completed. I did several mock-ups in my own studio, and then I got together with Richard to record it more professionally in his. I played all the instruments, but we called in Majel and Paul to lay down backing vocals, which I arranged in essentially five-part a capella format. (There are accompanying instruments, but it could be performed a capella.) It started sounding, strangely enough, like a Spike Jones arrangement from the 1950s. That was never a conscious intention, but that sound began to emerge when a) Richard told me to sing "pig" more as "pee-ug," and that gave me the idea to do the whole track in the accent I do it in; and b) we started adding in the supporting vocal tracks, and Majel's voice especially is able to create this beautiful and—i don't know how she does it, but—very classic 1950s sound. (She's a genius, by the way, and you can check out her own blog at consider the lillies of the field.)
