Sorry this is late, folks. I had big plans for this TOTW, but I may have bitten off more than I can chew this week.
Anyway, enough excuses. Tracks of the week #s 96 & 97: Aftermath USA, and You and Your Crystal Meth. The meth songs.
AFTERMATH USA
When I crawled out of bed this morning I could tell something wasn't right There were cigarettes in the ashtrays They weren't your menthol lights There were beer bottles in the kitchen And broken glass on the floor Someone must have slipped me something Passed out a couple days before
The car was in the carport sideways Big dent running down the side Never seen anything as frightening As when I took a look inside Smell of musk and deception Heel marks on the roof-line Bad music on the stereo All the seats in recline
The aftermath staring me right in the face I'll get around to breaking even one of these days
My credit cards have all been maxed out The meat in my freezer all thawed The IRS laid the facts out It's all worse than I thought The welfare lady said enough is enough The kids ain't been to school in weeks
Crystal-meth in the bathtub Blood splattered in my sink Laying around in the aftermath It's all worse than you think
For me, this song is a highlight on ABAAC. Love the guitars, the Faces feel to the music (I remember reading an interview where Cooley said the guitars in this song are the sound he hears when he sings in the shower, or something like that...can't find it). Live it's always been kinda iffy, which probably has to do with the way it was originally composed. David Barbe on how the song came to be:
Another one was “Aftermath USA” – we were in North Carolina working on A Blessing and A Curse and that wasn’t even a song. The band came in to work on something else and just jammed for maybe a couple of minutes. I came in the next morning to listen to what we’d done the day before, heard this little 40-second jam come up, and thought, “Hey – that’s pretty cool!” So I spent maybe 30 minutes putting this thing together and rearranging it a little bit. I played it for the band, when they came in and they said, (long pause) “That’s great … what is it?” (laughter)
And I said, “It’s you guys, yesterday afternoon.”
And they were like, “When did we do that? ”
“It was just a little jam you did – but I’m telling you: write some words, come up with a bridge, and you’ve got a song.” And, of course Patterson did – and there you go. http://www.jambands.com/features/2012/0 ... id-barbe?3
I'm glad they brought it back on this most recent run of shows. I hope it sticks around.
You've become such a mess. You and your crystal meth
You lost your family and wrecked your truck, I used to love you but now you suck We were friends, among the best; You and your crystal meth
I ain't exactly a no-drug guy, Don't dig the way that you get high Hope your kids don't see you throwing up, Hope they ain't there if the house blows up Hope you ain't murdered in your sleep, Up all night with that cranked out creep You ain't eaten and you ain't slept; You and your crystal meth
Indiana and Alabama, Oklahoma and Arizona. Texas, Florida, Ohio, Small town America, right next door Blood soaked your pillow red; You and your crystal meth
The recorded version of this song doesn't do much for me. It feels too experimental to be a "song" in the traditional sense, but not experimental enough to really be all that interesting sonically. The live version is an entirely different beast. The version they played before Goodes Field Road in Milwaukee a few years ago floored me. Very similar to this one:
**
I'll try to add some more stuff throughout the week. What say you, 3DD?
Iowan wrote:Aftermath was the song that hooked me on DBT.
In a fair world, that would have blown up on rock radio.
It took me years to really get into DBT. I first found about them in late 2000 when Patterson sang a verse on the song Lazy Guy, on the Slobberbone CD E.Y.T.W.R.W.R.T. They just never really clicked for me untill I heard the pre release stream of A.B.A.A.C. on myspace. By the time Aftermath U.S.A. was over they were one of my favorite bands. I remember being at a Dylan show in Stockton and telling my best friend Tom how good the record was and him asking me how political the songs on the album were. He said what he didn't like about them was their "bullshit politics". This is the same guy who just ten days ago after the Tahoe show told me that it was one of the five best shows he has ever seen in his life, and he's been to hundreds just like me. He said his favorite songs that night were Gravitys Gone and Aftermath.
You and Your Crystal Meth isn't the greatest song but it's OK and it fits well on BTCD. I've never had the pleasure of seeing it live. And while it may not be in Patterson's 5 best songs (or his 10 or 20 best), it's got one lyric that I think is as good as any he's written:
I ain't exactly a no-drug guy, Don't dig the way that you get high
Aftermath is fantastic. Like a lot of Patterson's best songs, it paints a crystal-clear picture that you can see in your head as you listen. And I love how "bad music on the stereo" is included among all the dangerous and life-threatening indignities recounted in the song. That one might even be the worst of them all.
I am in complete agreement with everyone's remarks about Aftermath. I have a better appreciation of ABAAC then I did years ago when I first heard it. I originally didn't like Aftermath when I first heard it, and the same could be said with Space City. Now, Aftermath along with Space City and Gravity's Gone are my favorites from that album. Good lyrics and just something about that "Faces"- style guitar-crunch that gets me every time.
You and Your Crystal Meth is one of my least favorite Truckers tunes and my least favorite along with "Lisa's Birthday" from BTCD. To me it's just one of Patterson's "stream of consciousness" tunes that would be best left for a solo album, if that. Blaaaah.
Aftermath is a great rock song. Somewhat treading the same territory as D.I.Y musically.
I like You and Your Crystal Meth as well. I like the haunting atmosphere created by the piano and the heavily echoed slide guitar (I am assuming thats what it is), also the "movement" starting around 1:50. Works very well for me. It creates the perfect soundscape for such a dark theme (mandatory for a band like DBT to touch upon). It also functions very well on the record as a set-up for Goode's field road (musically, not necessarily lyrics-wise, but maybe that as well). Serves as great example of Patterson's willingness to experiment and take the band into 'avant-garde' territory on occasions. This just adds to the depth of the band imo.
REAX: One song I really admire off your new album is “Aftermath USA” about the destruction of a relationship via crystal meth. Do you use this type of extreme example to present a metaphor for common, smaller disasters in relationships?
PH: That one could also go in the other direction and be a metaphor for our current political mess in a lot of ways. At least to me, I don’t know if I was consciously thinking that when I wrote it, but after the fact, it certainly occurred to me that it’s a whole red state crank epidemic thing. It’s sad and tragic, and it’s done a lot of devastation in part of the country where I grew up. They are really having a serious problem with crank and baking crystal meth. It’s a sad irony to me, because the parts of the country that are the most devastated by that tend to be the red states. It’s been the polar opposite of the crack epidemic and what that did to the inner cities of America. This is the rural, pick up truck, and Bush-backer version. I am sure that those themes entered into my subconscious in the writing of that song.
Clams wrote:And while it may not be in Patterson's 5 best songs (or his 10 or 20 best), it's got one lyric that I think is as good as any he's written: I ain't exactly a no-drug guy, Don't dig the way that you get high
You mean, it's not: You lost your family and wrecked your truck, I used to love you but now you suck
You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
- DPM
Clams wrote:And while it may not be in Patterson's 5 best songs (or his 10 or 20 best), it's got one lyric that I think is as good as any he's written: I ain't exactly a no-drug guy, Don't dig the way that you get high
You mean, it's not: You lost your family and wrecked your truck, I used to love you but now you suck
I kind of like that line too Cortez but, before you laugh at me uproariously, here's why I like it. From the viewpoint of the narratir who has obviously lost a friend to the rough drugs it actully works for me. It's hard to be eloquent in a situation like that so why try? The song is raw and real an I really respect it for that, I can't go so far as to say that I love the song but I do think it's powerful in it's own way.
We call him Scooby Do, but Scooby doesn’t do. Scooby, is not involved
I was listening to this song in the truck the other day, with the volume kind of low and my mind kind of started to wander and I thought I sort of heard After and Math as two separate words.
Then I started thinking about the song maybe be about conditions in the States where drugs, crime, poverty are kind of a result of the After the Math of Republican budgets, when Bush was president. Patterson does like to slam certain Republicans at some shows.
That's my 2 bits, but like I said, my mind was wandering on a long drive.
cortez the killer wrote:You lost your family and wrecked your truck, I used to love you but now you suck
I kind of like that line too Cortez but, before you laugh at me uproariously, here's why I like it. From the viewpoint of the narrator who has obviously lost a friend to the rough drugs it actually works for me. It's hard to be eloquent in a situation like that so why try? The song is raw and real an I really respect it for that, I can't go so far as to say that I love the song but I do think it's powerful in it's own way.
be better off with this potato eater has a similar charm.
The studio version of Aftermath kicks some serious ass. I prefer to think of the lyrics literally but the fact that they can be taken in multiple ways is pretty darn cool. I have yet to wrap my ears around the "new version" they've played at recent shows - i mean why turn a practically perfect rocker into something else and something lesser? But OTOH, i haven't heard it live yet, either and it's a pretty good bet it works better that way.
By any objective standard, Crystal Meth is not one of PH's better efforts. And yet...and yet...the damn thing works on some level and sticks w/ ya if you let it. Clams makes a good attempt at explaining what the "magic" is; I'm not sure I totally agree, but it's more than good enuf til something better comes along. Or, it could just be a perfect example of how I'm incapable of objectivity when it comes to anything Truckers. As at least a couple of people have said, I think it's also important that DBT addressed this subject.
What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard
Here's what Patterson has to say. Interesting as always:
Y'ALL:
Noticed that this weeks songs selected are Aftermath USA and You and Your Crystal Meth. Thought I'd chip in a couple of cents worth of chatter in light of our having brought one of those out of retirement lately.
If I remember correctly (as they say, "Hindsight is 50/50") I believe I wrote YAYCM first. We had just been given a very old upright piano as a wedding present and although my skills are less than rudimentary, I was trying to learn a little more and was doing a little bit of writing on it as a way of changing up my approach to writing. (Something I try to always do). It was the middle of the last decade and the crystal meth epidemic was in its height, especially in the rural parts of the country. My hometown was being ravaged by it in ways comparable to the crack epidemic that urban areas experienced a decade earlier. The wife of a close friend got strung out on it and ended up killing herself in a car accident. I had another friend and supporter of the band die of a heart attack around that time, certainly partly due to the damage done from that most unpleasant of drugs.
The song basically wrote itself. I kind of heard it in my head, sat down at the piano and wrote it. It felt very primitive and unfinished and spoke on a very guttural level that I felt was appropriate for a song dealing with that subject matter. It didn't need to be poetic because Meth isn't a very poetic drug. Crank doesn't make you strive to be Yeates or Keats, it makes you edgy and pissed and makes your teeth fall out. It makes you look like shit and smell worse. The movie "Winter's Bone" came out some years later and I thought nailed it. What a fantastic film. It's much more important to me that a song conveys it's emotion effectively and appropriately than for it to be 'poetic' or 'deep'. Sometimes a song needs to get under your skin get on your nerves, make you a little pissed to be doing it's job. I can get as technical as anybody when I feel like the subject calls for it, but more often than not I prefer a gut reaction to a cerebral one.
I recorded it at Chase Park one afternoon in late spring 2005, shortly before the band went to North Carolina to make A Blessing and A Curse. I had that simple piano part and I wanted to loop it and build from there. Probably didn't want the band standing around waiting for me to do it, so I went in one afternoon with Barbe. He got really into the idea and could picture what I was going for early on. Not long afterward, Cooley liked it and put a simple guitar part on it, then John Neff, who was just starting to play with us again did that haunting Pedal Steel part that took it to another level. Neff's playing on that particular song was a key part of his reconnection with out band. Barbe started turning on more and more echo and reverb giving it all a very druggy and disconcerting feel that I considered a part of the song. (Barbe is listed as a co-writer).
I seem to remember that there was talk of fleshing it out further, but it just seemed more appropriate to leave it skeletal. I had sort of planned it for the Blessing/Curse album but it was a little controversial within the band, as at last one member seemed to hate it. It was kind of polarizing from the start, which was fine with me, but at that time there was plenty of other things to fight about so it was left off of the album. As someone who grew up loving Punk Rock, I tend to go for the view that part of an artist's job is to stir things up a bit. Much of my favorite music is polarizing to some people and part of being a musician is to try to push boundaries from time to time. Not saying that song was pushing any boundaries or that it was even any great piece of art, but I never shied away from the song's ability to annoy some folks. It's a very short song, almost more of a fragment of a song which seems appropriate for a song about a drug that has caused many people to only have a fragment of a life.
In my writing, if I write a song about something, I usually write several. It's not something I would ever set out to do, just how it works for me. I might write 10 songs about something and most people will only hear one of them, if any at all. While it's on my mind, I write. Occasionally I might take elements of several of them and make one better song out of it. Around the same time that I wrote YAYCM, I also wrote an unfinished country song called The Aftermath of Our Wicked Ways (or something like that). I didn't consider it a keeper, but it was hanging out in the same notebook with the other songs that I was considering for that Blessing/Curse album.
The story Barbe tells about the creation of Aftermath USA is dead on correct. I don't even think some of the players involved even had the others in their headsets, we were just warming up about to record a song (if I remember correctly, it might have been the song "Goodbye") getting levels and tones on amps, etc. Barbe must have heard something that perked his ears and he pushed record and captured a few seconds of what we were doing. Later on that night, he must have revisited what he'd recorded and liked it enough to go in early the next morning to experiment with it. Again, probably wanting to do so without everyone standing around waiting for him to done. He looped the best few seconds of it and when we arrived that day he played it for us.I remember Cooley saying something kind of smartassed like it being 'the sound he hears in his head when he's taking a shower' or something like that. Our albums are about 95% live takes, but given the situation the band was in, doing a song in this very different (for us) way seemed like a nice diversion. Barbe was convinced that it was one of those happy accidents that could make a positive contribution to our project.
The recording of that album wasn't going all that well. There was a lot of negativity in the air and honestly there wasn't the usual over abundance of songs that we usually have by that point. Jason wasn't liking my songs, I wasn't too keen on some of his. I don't think Cooley was liking any of it. I knew we had "Space City" and "A World of Hurt", both of which I consider in our very top tier of songs, but a lot of what we had was fragmented and unfinished. We had just released two albums in two years and were playing 200-250 shows a year. Cooley and I were both new parents and making that transition, mostly from far away, which was weighing heavy upon us. Jason and Shonna's marriage was falling apart and we were feeling rather divorced from him ourselves. I took the unfinished country song and applied those lyrics to this crazy dissonant loop that Barbe made and then we recorded a chorus section which Barbe spliced (literally) onto the tape. There you have it.
That summer of 2005, I was listening non-stop to the recently released Faces Box Set (Five Guys Walk Into A Bar) as well as the UK version of the Rolling Stones classic Aftermath (UK). I renamed the song Aftermath USA" in a nod to that. I might have changed around a few lyrics, but mostly I just dropped the old lines into the new melody. Since it wasn't a song we 'wrote' in the traditional way, or even set out to record, it was an accident that got turned into something, I didn't have any control over things like what key it was in. I had been experimenting with singing in a higher register, singing a falsetto. It was a noble experiment in that it has enabled me to become a much better singer. I can probably hit most of those notes full-throated now, but I probably wouldn't want to night after night. When it came time to actually go out and play the song live, it just never really clicked to me. We were trying to cover our own song instead of play it in a way that we would actually go out and play or work it up even. I think we even did it on TV once, which was most likely a mistake, but...
I was actually bummed that YAYCM was left off of Blessing/Curse, but it turned out to be the best thing. As we were working on Brighter Than Creation's Dark, it just seemed like a perfect transition going from "Checkout Time in Vegas" to Goode's Field Road with YAYCM in between. A perfect segueway in an album that was partly about doing those kinds of things. A much better fit than having it on the album it was intended for. It also fit that show better, which is a consideration for us also and when we worked up the big full band version that we played live it was one of my favorite parts of that year's show.
Aftermath basically went mostly unplayed for several years. A lot of the songs on that album needed a break, as they tended to remind us of a troubled time that was still too fresh to appreciate. We did it a couple of times with a horn section, which was fun, but I just wasn't comfortable singing it.
I recently picked up a 'new' guitar. An early 30's Vega hollow body electric. I have it tuned standard instead of down a step where most of our songs lye. I was sitting around playing it one night last month and found myself playing that song. Playing it in the new key enabled me to now sing it six steps lower, which actually has become a bit of a sweet spot for my voice so I worked it up again. There was a couple of lines that always bugged me and I never liked the way it ended for a live performance, so I fixed those things and reintroduced it. We played it almost every night of the last tour and it was one of the highlights for me. It's actually suddenly a song that I like now. I call the new version "Aftermath Revisited".
David Barbe actually got a co-writing credit for his work on Aftermath USA because it wouldn't have existed without what he did. It's ironic that both of these songs are co-written with Barbe, but he was a compositional part of them as far as I'm concerned.
Wow. I am really impressed with Patterson's explanation of the process of writing these two songs. Now, having more incite into what went into them I have a totally different appreciation for them both (and I know it sounds cheesy now, in light of my previous post) especially YAYCM. Thank you! Everybody got that? This message board rocks! Now, if only Cooley could give us some insight on Lisa's Birthday...
That was a great and comprehensive summary from Patterson. Allways interesting to get a glimpse of the process behind the songs.
Side note: I notice the iTunes version of Aftermath USA has dropped out 'USA' in the track-name. I wonder if that is a coincidental error or some kind of censcoring?
Wow, thanks Patterson! I love getting to hear the band explain the back story.
Patterson, if you're reading this, that happy accident of Aftermath produced at least one new fan, and I've turned a bunch of my friends onto DBT as well.
REAX: One song I really admire off your new album is “Aftermath USA” about the destruction of a relationship via crystal meth. Do you use this type of extreme example to present a metaphor for common, smaller disasters in relationships?
PH: That one could also go in the other direction and be a metaphor for our current political mess in a lot of ways. At least to me, I don’t know if I was consciously thinking that when I wrote it, but after the fact, it certainly occurred to me that it’s a whole red state crank epidemic thing. It’s sad and tragic, and it’s done a lot of devastation in part of the country where I grew up. They are really having a serious problem with crank and baking crystal meth. It’s a sad irony to me, because the parts of the country that are the most devastated by that tend to be the red states. It’s been the polar opposite of the crack epidemic and what that did to the inner cities of America. This is the rural, pick up truck, and Bush-backer version. I am sure that those themes entered into my subconscious in the writing of that song.
Yeah, I've seen that quote before. Makes a lot of sense given the time and place.
Wow, what a great read. I could've read 100 more pages of that.
Nice nod to Winter's Bone, too. I've said this elsewhere on the board, but that's a book every fan of DBT should check out. I think Daniel Woodrell's a DBT fan, too.
Duke Silver wrote:Wow, what a great read. I could've read 100 more pages of that.
Nice nod to Winter's Bone, too. I've said this elsewhere on the board, but that's a book every fan of DBT should check out. I think Daniel Woodrell's a DBT fan, too.
