The Continuity of Discontinuity recording 'Wrecking Ball'
Plus name dropping Fiona Apple, Tom Morello, Incubus, and GUSH
We had practiced enough. With the metronome, without the metronome, running the bass line again and again, remembering to bend the guitar string on the and of the 1, after the bridge, moving from head to chest to head voice like a banshee again, again, again. We knew our parts.
Continuity.
Then, there was the tape. The headphones. The microphone that Fiona Apple just finished using for her Shadowboxer album. The vocal booth. The microphone which the producer claimed was telling the truth but made me sound like a purring miracle. The big voice which I could send out over screaming guitars in front of crowds of sweaty people was suddenly very intimate. Every vibrato vacillation had an impact on the sound. Butterfly wings flapping in the universe. The songs which had long been friends, were unsettling in the booth.
Discontinuity and therefore, art. Which is messy.
We got really weird in the studio while we recorded Wrecking Ball. Would you like to know why?
First, the owners of the studio were in the middle of a divorce and finalizing production on Incubus’ first record and managing the various other hopeful rockers, like my band Gush, who came through week after week trying to capture dreams on tape. The male part of the divorce was Jim.
Discontinuity.
Oh Jim, of the good hair. And you know me, good hair and you have my heart. I crushed.
But I didn’t crush first.
His voice was so close to me, alone there in the vocal booth. He instructed me through the headphones, but he was in my head. The rest of the band had ceded control to Jim when it came to my vocal performance. Fiona Apple and all.
He begged instructions. Whispered demands. Grated my ear with new ideas until they bled from pure vulnerability and effort. I imagine you have heard a recording of your own voice at one time or another.
Discontinuity! (Do I really sound like that?)
Imagine spending years in singing lessons, which graduated to opera lessons, which graduated to touring jazz choirs and performing oratorios with orchestras in Dubrovnik and Los Angeles, which graduated to banging on a guitar and covering Annie Lennox songs (I need you to pin me down for just one frozen moment, I need someone to pin me down so I can live in torment), which led finally to a recording booth in Santa Monica California, a silk slip of a dress, hard nipples and a vintage Neumann Microphone. I was under the sway.
And Jim was in my year. In my head. And (in my imagination) in my bed.
He flirted with me mercilessly.
I thought he loved me.
(He didn’t, but I think he would have if our record had charted.)
Another layer: my future ex-husband was sleeping with our devout lesbian benefactor. I had been in love with him for a year or two, only to be spurned by useless fan-girls who came around after our shows flaunting fake cleavage and lipo. Plus, he had recently broken up with the bass player, Lisa, whose own sapphic tendencies inspired some of the best songs she ever wrote.
Continuity?
Another layer: bass player Lisa’s lithe girlfriend was dabbling in a side romance with a very tender young man, whose own music recordings would have made you fall in love with him too. This is how it goes.
Lisa wrote:
Only the clearest of minds, my dear,
could look at you now and know right...
He’s seen us, he knows,
If you want him you let yourself go
Please watch as he grows
As you want him you let yourself go
This was our day to day, in life, on stage, in the recording studio. These were the people in the booth: Lisa-bass player & part-time sapphic, John-guitar & apparently irresistible lover, lovely lesbian benefactor, myself vocals & vacillations between lonely fantasies, Jim the divorcing owner/engineer, plus Carl on guitar and Drummer Dave. We poured the intensity of the music in our groins, the absurd romantic fluctuations and searing hurt, into song. We lived in a perpetual state of heartbreak.
Discontinuity.
There was a grand piano in the studio - Fiona Apple and all. I had lost my touch on the piano, having not played for years. But Jim insisted. He pluncked me down on the leather bench, placing my hands on the keys, and left me to sit like a curiosity while the entire entourage watched from behind the mixing board, bathed in a smoky yellow light. I squirmed in the darkness of the song with my fear of improvisation, and the walls steaming with all of our unmet desires on the other side of the glass. That is how we ended up with a piano part in Wrecking Ball despite our pure bass/drums/guitar rock and roll setup.
Lisa was always extremely well-rehearsed. A naturally gifted musician, Lisa’s lyrics and chord progressions perfectly reflected her pixie-esque existence as a bright light in the dull world. I always thought she was a little bit touched. Some of her lyrical prosody crossed over into the magical - pure poetry, especially, but not only, on Wrecking Ball.
She had a way of piling glowing layers of blonde hair on top of her tiny head. Hair that fell around her shoulders and down her skinny back toward platform heels - thereby adding height to her tiny frame, gyrating behind her bass guitar.
Lisa was the pied piper/creator of Wrecking Ball - a two-part epic that opens with a waltz leading all of us lemmings into broken-heartedness. The lyric portrays her watching her lithe lesbian lover walk through a gate toward a man, and casually threatens:
If one thinks as close as too close my dear
You’ll find my things covered in white.
My things will be covered in white
This is when the song waltzes closer to the edge, by way of a psychedelic blossoming into a visceral 4/4 time. A curse. The lover cast aside by unwelcome surprise:
You caught me waiting on a peak
With a wrecking ball
The water shallow
But too deep
For this blazing doll
You meant to quote me in my name
To the waiting mob
Since the lantern did a fade
It was a random rob
The vocal performances at the end of this song are some of the best vocals I ever participated in - all related to what Lisa and I did together. We sure had fun with those harmonies. We held nothing back from the forsaken unison melody either. We reveled in it. Blending punk inspired, Bowie-esque drama and operatic wails into a witches brew of lost love.
I think we recorded it before I had enough technique to truly pull tho se vocals off. It was hard singing, but the parts got stronger and stronger over the years. Lisa’s performance was pure rock and roll betrayal. My favorite part of this song is Lisa’s broken gasp just as the song leaves the waltz behind for the four on the floor. A gasp that could be a knife in the heart, or the peak of pleasure. It was totally unrehearsed.
This was recorded on tape without auto-tune, and it shows. And I don’t fucking care. It was glorious discontinuity.
The night we finished laying down Wrecking Ball vocals and began the mix, one of the engineers shared a demo with us titled Fuck the Devil’s Cock. It was insanely catchy and well performed. We were all transfixed.
The lyric was prescriptive, as indicated by the title. And within the song there was a lyrical question posed:
Since when does the woman do the fucking in the ass?
To which the forty-something lesbian benefactor insisted on raising a point of contention to the engineer/composer, who was a kid in his twenties. She spelled it out for him, exactly since when: since forever.
The guy blushed! Here he was playing his song “Fuck the Devil’s Cock” for us, at peak volume on hundred thousand dollar speakers, and the lesbian benefactor with her Jeniffer Aniston haircut, made him blush to his toes.
Then we all went to the Troubadour to see Incubus and hang out in the green room afterwards where Tom Morello was chilling at the corner bar. I decided to head over to saddle up next to him and casually order a drink. I took ten deep breaths before making my approach.
But there was a rope around the bar area. Who ever heard of a roped off area in a green room, which is by nature already roped off? There was a man there looking very serious about his manning. Manning the rope. Tom was the only one behind the rope.
So I was like, “Fuck you I won’t do what you told me!”
Just kidding, I did what they told me.
By four am I was back home in Long Beach, with a screaming intensity blazing between my ears and legs - lonely to the point of desperation, brimming with creative ideas, besieged by desire but too exhausted even to masturbate, sore from headbanging to Incubus, and thankfully, blissfully, alone.
Wrecking Ball
Lisa Salloux, with Gush
Part I
Can't see the yellow wasp anymore
And kisses are given by flies
Can't see the root of it anymore
The water leaps over
And pries it open
Bound by the body that lies beneath me
Bound by my journeys at night
Only the clearest of minds my dear
Can look at you now and know right
He's seen us; He knows
If you want him, you let yourself go
Please watch as he grows
If you want him, you let yourself go
Let it go; let it go
I live in a circle of all I know
The circle it grows all the time
But I need a new shape in this atmosphere
As things get all twisty and trying
Who drops the gate as I move to enter
I hope its not he, your new Knight
If one thinks as close as to close, my dear
You'll find my things covered in white
My things will be covered in white
You watch how we flow
If you want her you lay her down slow
You watch now you know
If you want her then lay her down slow
You take her; you take her
Part II
You caught me waiting on a peak
With a wrecking ball
The water's shallow but too deep
For this blazing doll
You meant to quote me in my name
To the waiting mob
Since the lantern did a fade
It was a random rob
Chided, guided
Stubbornly united
Endless dwelling
For the guards
To put it straight I got my head
Into your vestibule
What you did to me in there
I'm now a drooling fool
I am not one to contemplate
Just why the bird flies down but
She hits the surface now and then
She spins my world around
Grounded scoundrel
I am stunned
Crafted and jaded
Bless your heart
Like all the fairy tales I write
I got the ending down
Pull me closer; count my heads
To find the twisted crown
They say in danger all is fair
Guaranteed amour
The lady asks if I'm okay
How long can I endure
Baited, sated
Lovingly created
Resting, nesting
I am charged
I am charged
Baited, sated
Lovingly created
Resting, nesting
I am charged
I am charged
Bless your heart