The Ryno Pen

Dear Both My Readers,

I’ve owed you a funny story for a while now. The current plague of introversion makes some stuff a bit to difficult to talk about, but let’s see if I can’t dredge up another bolus of the usual experience-garnished-with-total-balderdash that passes for attempted humour round this part of the Big Asylum.

It’s probably important to remind any potential bandmate or artistic collaborator that for me, it really is all about the music. I can remind myself to try and second-guess how somebody else is feeling when things are otherwise uncluttered by distractions, but when the Muse has hold of me, all bets are off: it’s Tunnel-Vision City, and I may even keep going way past meal- or bed-time, subject to calls of Nature only when she uses a bullhorn.

My collaborative efforts have been few, and I suspect that many have been monuments to the tolerance of others (Hi, Beako and Whit!), and I was an early adopter of tape-overdub technology.

As I trawl through the large collection of unlabelled studio tapes I’m currently cataloguing, some of these joint efforts¹ may find their way onto the blog.

Today’s anecdote, however, concerns The Collaboration That Should Never Have Been Suggested.

* * * *

It was R, one of the brothers who ran my (then) ISP who ventured the idea. While it’s great to have your Intarwubs from guys who are so local and needs-sensitive as R and P², there can be a downside to the familiarity.

You see, R had been talking to this other customer of his, a young woman, and she wrote songs, see, and wanted to get a demo tape together, and….

To a boy with a hammer, the whole world appears to consist of nails. Okay, R had heard some of my stuff, and he believed I might make something of the songs young Euphonia³ had written.

I had R make the call: manners are important when I remember them. We made a time to meet at her place Saturday afternoon.

Anyway, I arrived at her flat. For all the paranoid reasons of modern sexual politics and the stilted etiquette that springs therefrom⁴, I made sure we sat in the back patio. When she lit the first cigarette, I was even gladder of being outside and upwind.

Euphonia, twenty-something boganette, was enthusiastic about her songs.

^{Specimen boganette}

They would, she opined, get her out of the squalor of the Grogville Estate and into some utopia of fame and fortune she could only vaguely identify.

Knowing what slow and paltry things most writing and recording royalties are in the Oz market, I held my words and contented myself with nods and the occasional “Yeah, it’s good to have an ambition” kind of comment. She continued waxing optimistic.

“So, R said you needed a demo tape made. Got any rough tapes of your songs so I can discuss production and where you’d like them to be going?”

Um, no… “But I’ve got them all written down.”

Great. I don’t read stave, but I can muddle through chord charts⁵. We might find some common ground here.

Well, that was a great hope while it lasted. Here come the exercise books, and lo, they are full of lyrics.

Just
fucking
lyrics.

Worse yet, these were bad lyrics. The scansion was procrustean: there would have to be dropped syllables aplenty, not to mention an excess of melisma, just to get these words even loosely-draped around a beat. And the words themselves?

Now I’m the first to admit that Tanita Tikaram is an exception in the field of song lyrics. Rock lyrics don’t need much apart from rough scansion, and preferably some rhyme. But I ask you: should lines like

Now you won’t look at me
And my heart is very full of plea

be allowed to exist outside of a guarded secure facility?

I needed an out: time to think quick.

“This is interesting, but it would take me simply ages to work out where the beats should go. What I’m going to need so I can start on these is for you to write these out, broken into bars, you know, like one-and-two-and-three-and-four, with marking where the strong beats go, and show me where the middle section of the song goes.”

“When you’ve got a few songs set out so I can do some work, give me a ring.”

RESULT! She never bothered me again.

(For the protection of both the readers of this blog, I omitted the bits where Euphonia tried to “sing” her misshapen brainchildren. It was bad, trust me.)

TFF^™0

⁰ Those Fucking Footnotes^™.
¹ Not necessarily in the 420 sense, m’kay?

² You couldn’t beat these blokes for good service: when my modem was fried in a thunderstorm on the afternoon of the last working day before Christmas, R took it upon himself to drive out to my place on his way home, hand me a new modem, and tell me “we’ll fix up the paperwork on this when your household insurance pays up.”

I wish there was a way local operators like this could have lasted as the biz landscape changed, and I wish them the best at whatever they’re doing now.

³ Obviously not her name.

⁴ Things like Salesman Bill’s experience are an example why blokes should be careful around strangers too.

⁵ I can read drum notation, and recommend this book.