“Recaptured” is a series of old content – music, recordings, writings, photos I’ve been coming across in random shoeboxes and plastic crates. (Hopefully) by digitizing/writing this stuff up I will keep it from being lost forever.
For a few months in 2004 I had really, really bad breath. It was bizarre, but seemingly out of nowhere i found myself with the worst breath ever. At random times during the day I would find my tongue coated, literally coated, in white. I would brush my teeth, use mouthwash constantly, and nothing would work.
I developed a bit of a complex about it, where my primary social outlet was a loud crowded bar, where everyone shouts into everyone’s faces…I was terrified to open my mouth, let alone blather directly into someone’s face about…whatever bullshit i usually talk about. Friends bought me a lot of gin and tonics and jager shots.
Anyway, it was bad. I would get sensitive about things like the episode of Sanford and Son where they visited the “breath mobile” (turns out it was about tuberculosis, not halitosis, but it would still make me squirm), and the line in Big L’s “Ebonics” where he said, “if you got the dragon you got bad breath”…that one especially hit home.
If it was bad during the day or at a bar, then it was doubly awful if I smoked weed. It was cotton mouth times however many bong hits I took. I suddenly felt this weird kinship with Yukmouth, the rapper from Luniz. If I smoked, nothing could penetrate the layer of gross white all across my tongue. I often spent panicky moments in the bathrooms of friends apartments, pillaging their medicine cabinets for mouthwash…mints…i would do the finger toothbrush, anything. And nothing worked.
One night in 2004, at my friend Jackson’s house, it was the worst its ever been, because I was close to the highest I’ve ever been. I was always high at Jackson’s, on account of the ridiculously furry Technicolor weed he always had around.
Jackson was (and still is) an extremely close friend of mine. I met him in 8th grade, science class, and we bonded over a shared love of metal. He of Ozzy and Zeppelin, and me of Sepultura and Fear Factory. We fought a lot in those early days. He was a major pain in the ass, an agitator, and someone like me who took himself way too seriously did not respond well to agitators. He was always pushing my buttons, and delighting in the maladjusted adolescent fireworks that would ensue.
We were still friends though, and we hung out a lot. Excavating metal CD’s from bargain bins in weird record stores, smoking shitty weed out of even shittier homemade bongs, inventing snacks to eat while high (like the legendary Strawberry Sandwich of ‘97) and watching Conan late night in his parents basement. He was, one thousand percent, my friend. No matter how much shit we gave each other.
Eventually, we grew up…well kind of. By the time we were 16 or so, Jackson had developed a pretty insane hallucinogen habit. Acid, mainly. I blame all the fucking Gong he was listening to. One night in the midst of an especially long LSD fugue, he borrowed his parents car to go for a drive (I don’t think he had a license) late at night on a school night.
The way he tells it, (and I’m probably butchering this) was that he made it home, fried out of his mind, to some very angry parents. All they said was “go to your room, and stay there.” He was excited, because this allowed him to just bug out alone the rest of the night and deal with the consequences in the morning. So he went into his room, put on some music, and did what people on acid do. He says he opened his eyes after a particularly wild introspective flight to see two strange men standing over him, who told him to pack some of his shit, they were leaving.
While his parents looked on, the men stuffed him into a van and took him to Idaho. We didn’t hear from him for two years.
He went to rich kid jail, a glorified military school where Montel Williams’ daughter was a “classmate”. He came back a completely different person. Well, no one really changes, all the essential elements were there. He still had that amazing and manic sense of humor, he was still essentially Jackson, but he was completely clean, and focused, and he was ripped…exactly like everyone who goes to prison. He got huge by lifting milk jugs full of sand, or whatever.
We reconnected instantly, and both being a little older and wiser, we stopped with the quarreling, and just hung out. He was awesome to hang out with, he eventually got his own place, and started learning audio production, which he was a fucking whiz at. Skip forward a few years, he had come into some money due to a smart investment by his parents on his behalf, and he was living in an apartment in Bloomington, MN, producing music and slanging the occasional bag of insane space-weed.
We all hung out there a lot. Whenever I was home from school I would spend at least one night there, getting insanely high and making music. One particular night it was me, Ben (who is a whole other amazing story altogether), and Jackson. We sat down to record some shit, and my bad breath-ness was at its absolute peak. The drink and the mass amounts of weed had my face flushed and puffy, bug eyed and bloodshot, with a shag carpet of grossness coating my mouth. I felt hideous. I will never forget it.
But what was I going to do? So I grabbed the synthesizer (hooked into one of Jackson’s amazing softsynths), tried not to breathe through my mouth, and set the synth to an ambient setting (because Ben was always convinced I couldn’t play lead… he was right), Ben grabbed Jackson’s bass, a homemade (5 string?) fretless that a friend left when he went to join a cult, we set up a few live drum loops, and Jackson got on the mic.
Ben is hands down, the greatest bass player I have ever heard. A lot of people say that about their friends but this is The Truth. He had been studying Chapman Stick, the 10 string behemoth favored by King Crimson and other professional prog-wanker-wizards, so given his enthusiasm for the Stick, it was almost impossible to get him to pick up the bass. But when he did, it was clear that he needed the stick as a next step, because he had mastered every inch of every bass, ever.
Jackson “rapped”. Somehow, he had developed one of the most bizarre freestyle..styles I have ever heard in my life. It was an absurd mix of Mystikal, Juvenile, senile black man and cruise-ship-lounge singer. He could rap, but instead of typical punchlines, he would just spin off on these mad vocal improvisations/solos. Sometimes they made sense, sometimes they didn’t. But just like most of his Southern Rap pedigree, it didn’t need to make sense to be awesome.
So we “jammed”. Jackson spit out some madness about crossing lines, Bebop, Rocksteady, Shredder, and parents hacking off limbs, Ben pulled out a bunch of amazingly hammy bass tricks that he would have normally refused to do (the finger funk at 2:54!, the harmonics at 2:44!), and I followed along, reacting to Jackson’s vocal patterns…thinking I was Thomas Dolby or Tangerine Dream or Bernie Worrell or some such madness (I think I really shine from 2:25-2:49).
Anyway, all this backstory was propulsion to the point of us sitting down and recording the track i embedded below…which is probably far less interesting than whatever i just typed above. The resulting track was dubbed “Cross the Line”, for obvious reasons. I recently found the original burn from Jackson’s house that night, so I digitized it and threw it up here. It probably only matters to me (actually I’m totally certain that it does), but “Cross the Line” is my favorite piece of audio I’ve ever been a part of, ever. Stank breath and all.
Soon after that, I discovered flossing. Who knew?
