I am listening to some old school beats, trying to get into a mood to use my drum machine sounds on something.
It isn’t something that I just jump into.
I have to be in the right mood for drum machines, I guess.
Without a reliable drummer, this is the best that I can do, I suppose.
Growing up in Detroit, during the birth of Hip Hop and Techno, it should be no surprise that this had an influence on me.
As kids, many of us would tape The Electrifying Mojo off of the radio at home and then breakdance to it during recess.
Breakdancing!
Remember that?
Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim are the closest things to it that I listen to nowadays.
I just don’t hear much happening in that genre that interests me much, lately.
Thirty years ago, it was much, much, different.
I still like all of that stuff and the groups that inspired it (Kraftwerk, Parliament-Funkadelic, etc.), although by and large I am pretty much a punk rocker at heart.
This news is just shit-flavored icing on the shitcake.
Lemmy Kilmister has died, at the age of 70.
His birthday was just a few days ago.
Damn.
His health has not been very good for the past several years.
In fact he recently had to cancel a show in the middle of the first few songs, apologizing to the crowd who came to see him, because he was too sick to perform.
That was when I knew he would be gone soon.
An inspiration to thousands of fans, including me, the man was a rock & roll legend.
He never gave up.
He never sold out.
He always did whatever the Hell that he wanted to do, the way that he wanted to do it.
If someone didn’t like it, they could fuck off.
LOL.
Not only was he a hero to me and others for his music, but the way that he chose to live his life.
I started playing bass guitar in the late 1980’s, around the same time as the funk punk / funk metal craze was beginning to gain popularity.
I wasn’t deliberately trying to imitate anybody in particular, although I did get compared to Les Claypool and Flea quite a bit.
I don’t slap nearly as much as they do, just a little bit… as an accent.
But, admittedly, funk music is part of my repertoire.
I grew up on bass players in the 1970’s like Rick James, Bootsy Collins, Larry Graham.
Hell, even the Bee Gees had some good songs.
Add to that funky punks like Mike Watt (Minutemen / Firehose), Rob Wright (NoMeansNo), Larry Boothroyd (Victims Family), and Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd.), then it is no surprise that I sometimes got lumped in with guys like Flea & Claypool.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers are okay, I guess.
They have always had a great rhythm section.
Without Flea, their band is nothing.
The RHCP’s songwriting, though, has always been kinda…. mehhhh.
Most of it kinda sucks.
A weird thing about them is that their best albums are usually released just after they have replaced yet another guitarist.
They use them up like batteries, sorta, and have to keep changing them to be any good.
Honestly, Anthony Keidis and Flea are the Beavis & Butthead of the group.
Keidis is an annoying asshole and Flea is an idiot, like his retarded friend.
Maybe their personalities suck the life out of guitar players.
I dunno.
I gotta respect Flea as a musician, though.
He did evolve over time, grew as a player, and was never half bad to begin with.
The dynamics of their guitars, created by original guitarist Hillel Slovak, has always been impressive too, no matter which replacement has copped his style.
The Island of Misfit Noise went through many permutations during its original 15-year run.
MarshaKat and myself were the the only constants of the group, a bassist and keyboardist who both played some guitar.
The name changed a few times before we finally settled on the IOMN.
Now, it is not as much of a real band as it is a recording project, with many contributors coming and going.
I still wish that I could have made it work somehow.
One element that I wanted very badly was having two drummers, who could play some interesting rhythms that would be impossible for a single percussionist.
I dug bands that had double-drumming lineups, like Grotus, the Melvins, the Butthole Surfers, the Boredoms, … Hell, even the Grateful Dead, the Doobie Brothers, the Allman Brothers, and James Brown’s backing band the JB’s all had two drummers.
Unfortunately, finding any drummers around the Detroit area who are into that sort of thing was nearly impossible.
We had it going like that a few times.
It was great while it lasted.
But, they always quit before we could accomplish very much together.
Finding even a single drummer was sometimes difficult because, as one guy put it, my ideas were “too big and weird.”
I guess projecting a bunch of surreal film footage on a wall behind the band is too ambitious for some.
I eventually built my homemade ShitKit drumset because it didn’t look like we were getting anywhere without a dedicated percussionist.
I preferred the clunkiness of hitting pieces of scrap metal over the sound of commercially-bought cymbals anyway.
But, I am a shitty drummer and I know it.
For awhile, we had one guy named John Pirog – who’s only job was breathing fire and smashing shit up, like old TVs and guitars.
It was pretty cool, while it lasted.
But, he left to go make independent horror movies instead.
I thought it would be cool to maybe have three guitarists, one playing a classic Gibson SG through a Marshall amp, one playing a modified Les Paul with a Line 6 Variax installed inside hooked up to a really good quality Line 6 guitar/amp/effects emulator rackmount, one playing a Roland-Ready Fender Stratocaster with a bunch of Roland guitar synths and emulators, etc.
Either we could have had guitarists double on keyboards & samplers or simply had a dedicated keyboardist.
Currently, I kind of make-do by making sound collages on tapes and playing them back on my Dictaphone machine.
Will the IOMN ever be a real band again?
I dunno.
It is always possible I guess.
Will it ever be what I have pictured in my head?
Probably not.
It will just be whatever I am able to scrape together at a given time.
So, I will have to get-by, doing what I can alone, recording lots of stuff and maybe performing what I can as a one-man-band.
The Grammy-nominated singer writes about the darker side of her creativity
Beth Hart photographed by Greg Watermann Beth Hart/Greg Watermann
I don’t like to give credit to anything that’s dark or twisted like bipolar disorder: it’s a dangerous disease, statistics show that 1 In 4 people die from it by taking their own lives. But my doctor tells me that it’s a double edge sword – it’s not a good thing that I have it but I can be thankful because it’s a big part of my creativity.
I have to take medication regularly and this has had an impact me in a good way, artistically speaking. Before I was on medication the mania was so bad that I couldn’t concentrate, so although I’d feel very creative I could never really finish a piece of work because my mind was moving so fast.
I had so much anger and judgement towards myself for my work not being up to the standard that I expected it to be, so I wouldn’t allow myself to complete anything. And usually when I would be able to complete something would be when I was in a depressive state.
Grammy-nominated artist Beth Hart
Now that I’m on medication I still get the mania and depression because the medication doesn’t cure it, but it makes it so much more manageable. I can complete all the work that I start and if I am struggling to complete it, it’s really my own psychological things that are getting in the way.
It’s very important for me to do things like talk therapy. That’s where you begin to see the walls that your illness has put up as a way to protect yourself… but of course those walls also keep us from getting to the truth of things. When I’m on tour, one of the lovely things about meeting journalists is that it’s kinda like its own therapy so I can still feel in a secure place.
My doctor said when I’m feeling good, it’s not healthy; it’s mania but could be early stage mania which is hypo-mania, you feel very elated and have many ideas.What’s dangerous about that is that when you have the type of bipolar I have (Bipolar 1 Rapid Cycling), the early bouts of my mania feel fantastic and then very quickly it stumbles to be very spiralled out; paranoia, fear, even hallucinations at times.
Now I’ll go into what is called “spinning thoughts” that I cannot turn off in my head. until I go to the piano. Then I’m really able to be creative. Although I take the medication which has made a huge impact on my life in a positive way, still, honestly, when I’m a bit sick is when I’m at my most creative.
I didn’t think of my songwriting or music when I received the diagnosis of bipolar, what I thought of was “thank God”, there is an answer to why I have felt the way I have felt for so many years, since childhood.
I was so incredibly ashamed of myself, all growing up and through my 20s I thought I was a bad seed.
Once I heard this bipolar diagnosis it helped me to see that a big part of the illness is having self-hatred and self-doubt, which is why suicide rates for bipolar are so high, so this brought me great comfort.
When I’m in the mindset of either depression or mania, which is what really funnels my creativity, I will complete a song that day.
So I tend to become very obsessive and not leave the piano until I do – however when I come across pieces that I’m working on and I see that I’m struggling to find the lyric… that may take a year to write.
But no change or shift in mood takes me away from that once I start on it. If I’m feeling balanced I will probably leave it alone for a few weeks, and then once I go back I will shift back on the piano, and I will become very vigilant on figuring out that piece.
Beth Hart is playing an intimate sold out show at the Union Chapel on 14 December
For more information on bipolar disorder you can visitMind.org.uk