This week, Merlin and John talk about:
The Problem: They were differently-comfortable, referring to John Flansburgh’s transition on how he acted on stage and on TV where he was differently comfortable later on.
The show title refers to John having a sense memory and remembering the traffic noises of the 1970s that were much louder than they are today.
John starts the show singing Merlin’s name to the melody of Hello Mary Lou.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
The Young Ones (RL204)
John watched The Young Ones when growing up. In some production stills there was a 5th room mate who looks like Cousin Itt (from Addams Family), obviously a woman with long hair combed over her face. She makes an appearance of every episode of the first season, but Merlin has never seen her. She is incredibly creepy, sitting behind the couch with hair in her face, like a Korean Water Ghost. It is a real thing, not just an Internet thing, it is what they call an Easter Egg.
John knows a lot about things from 4Chan. A lot of people don’t know that they don’t know a lot about John and Merlin likes that. He deploys personal information tactically.
Merlin sent John some screenshots of the girl in the background and John thinks he knew about that, but he can’t remember knowing it. It would have been 1984.
Traffic being louder in the 1970s (RL204)
In the 1970s traffic sounded a lot louder than it does today. There was a time when there were no governors on the loudness of car horns and all cars that came out of Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s sounded like they had a boat horn, and cars in the city would pile up and honk with a deafening noise, there were still cars that went ”auuuga”. Cities were so loud that they actually passed laws that governed the volume of a car horn. There was the whole concept of noise pollution. It made a tremendous impact on quality of life in cities right away. Car mufflers were a lot louder and it was considered an element of a cool car.
You could buy cherry bombs, Thrush, and Glasspack. People might vaguely remember seeing a Woody Woodpecker character on the back of a muscle car and thought what that was. It meant that it was a person who paid to have their car go ”pum pum pum pum” Every once in a while there would be a traffic scene in a 1970s movie and John will have a powerful recollection of what it used to sound like. John has a sense memory or a soul memory.
John’s best friends from childhood not being online at all (RL204)
John’s childhood best friend was Aaron Kinneman and over the last 20 years John has searched for him innumerable times, trying to reconnect with him, but he has vanished without a trail and John doesn’t know how to spell Kinneman (probably Kinnaman) It is astonishing that in our contemporary life there is just nothing, and Aaron is not the only one. There is not a single trace, not even those terrible white pages. There are billions of people who pull it off to live in the modern world and be completely invisible on the Internet, but as somebody who spends a lot of time on 4Chan it is hard for John to imagine that even if he wanted to dox Aaron he couldn’t.
It is frustrating because there are a few people from his past that John would like to get in contact with and compare that to all the people from his past that he is in contact with but would rather not be. He dated a girl in college named Latonia Wheeler and you should be able to find that name, but you can’t.
Merlin’s best friends through the ages (RL204)
A couple of years ago Merlin reconnected on Twitter with his best friend from 1st grade named Rob who is now the executive producer of many television shows. He is the first fellow with which Merlin competed to see how far they could pee from the urinal.
John has been in two different pissing contests: One was with the Catholic priest at the outside wall of the fish bar in Ketchum Idaho, ”Ibit” and then there was Peter Nosek who was taught by his father to be able to pee over his own shoulder. Neither one of them were especially tall, which might be an advantage, but it also requires a lot of stream control. For an 18 year old that was an incomparable talent. John would never have tried that, he would be covered in pee. It is a thing that makes you a local legend. Peter had many of these talents and remains a legend to John.
One of Merlin's dear old friend from the age between 7-12 was called John, and almost every weekend they were sleeping over at one another’s house. He got Merlin into comics and he was an uber-nerd who introduced Merlin to Lord of the Rings. At one point he was able to move from his room on the main floor into the attic. That was also where they put the cat box, and a cat box from the 1970s is a damn side away from cat boxes today.
Merlin’s cat has two cat boxes, which is standard now. Maybe it was what the cat was eating or drinking, John Siracusa would call it evolution, maybe it was the quality of litter, but you got smacked in the face with the sense memory of that cat box from John’s cat named Blackie. They had both a cat and the dog named Blackie and the dog was scared of the cat. John’s dad’s cat was named Puppy and when the cat died and he got another cat he named it Puppy 2, which is so adorbs.
Merlin’s friend John’s grandmother was married to a guy for a long time and when he passed away they decided that his grandmother, whom they called Nanny was going to move in with them. John’s dad, who was a machinist at one of the great machining plants in Cincinnati. Milacron made the precision tools that made the precision tools. He set himself to the task of going through their unfinished basement and making an apartment for her. Unfinished Basement is an incredible album. He made a beautiful apartment with a full bath with a shower, a kitchen, it was carpeted because it was the 1970s, and she lived there for a long time and helped with the kids and she was awesome, and uncannily enough she got married to another guy at their church who was in his 60s.
When she moved out then John graduated from getting to be in the place upstairs to getting the entire finished basement. He had his own apartment inside the house when he was 11. He had a ping pong table, all down there! It was astonishing. They were good Christian kids and the worst thing they did was watching other people do fireworks. One of the kids got really injured and got burned and had to wear a thing on his neck.
John Hodgman had the whole half of a house.
Confident reporters at The Stranger (RL204)
There are a couple of ”reporters” for The Stranger alternative newspaper in Seattle who are not young enough that they can with any right maintain the incredibly arrogant narrow-minded progressivism that they do. It would be believable if they were 20, but they are 30 and they are writing the political columns for a local alternative paper. They are so awful and they are so confident! They literally in the newspaper clench their fists and stamp their feet and go: ”Meeh!” The other day there was some article about homelessness and people who wear ties are ”Meeh!” and Sean Nelson posted it on Facebook with an oblique comment such that 90% could see it as the New Yorker thing of retweeting his colleagues.
A few people including John recognized that he was posting it without comment because he despises this person and doesn’t like working with him. John wrote in the comments: ”Reading this guy is like reading Rik from The Young Ones’ journal!” and the writer commented after him: ”I am sorry, I don’t get that reference!” John replied: ”Don’t worry about it, it is a reference from the 1960s!”, which felt good. Go fuck yourself, Rik from The Young Ones.
John’s mom not giving him a bedroom in her new house in 9th grade, John’s dark basement room (RL204)
John had the same experience. Right before 9th grade his mom moved into her new house. This was the time when she decided he was so incorigable (?) that the way she was going to punish him was to make him live with his father. In the new house there was a bedroom that should have been John’s bedroom, but she turned it into the fern room or the sowing room and John was not welcome. She basically climbed into it and said: ”This is my dog crate!” (reference to RL54 when she was teaching her dog that it was her kennel) and she populated it with a bunch of mom shit, just to say that even if he moved in and put posters of Porsches on the wall, it is never going to feel like his because the first thing in there was a sowing machine.
John went to live with his dad, but then he moved into that room and over the course of time it became clear that he needed to be somewhat more sequestered. They had a large basement in this house with the footprint of an entire floor, and 3 of the 4 walls were just windowless walls and the back wall was all windows and a sliding glass door, except it was underneath a covered porch on the second floor. Basically this entire basement never saw the sun and it was Alaska and in the winter time that daylight that came in through the windows amounted to nothing. In the style of the late 1960s/early 1970s they had paneled the walls in unfinished rough-sawn wood, like a barn,
The lighting was that up along the walls they had built cantilevered enormous light fixtures with bumpy plastic sheeting inside and each fixture had 4 light bulbs in it and there were 10 of these fixtures throughout the basement, meaning 40 light bulbs illuminating this basement, but because everything was made of barn wood they produced almost no light and it felt like you were in Batman’s lair if Batman’s cave was a barn. It was pretty doomy, but it was built in the late 1960s as a party space and it had an orange bar with a sink and refrigerator and shelves for glasses and booze and around the back there was a sauna and a tanning bed in the old style, which was a piece of orange foam on a bench and two hot red tanning bulbs.
There was also a giant doll sheep head hanging on the wall above the television, a big sheep that had been killed by John’s mom’s boyfriend, and when you were down with all 40 lights burning, producing the illumination of dusk in a sand storm, this dead sheep was eyeballing you no matter where you were in the room. At a certain point John’s mom asked him why he wouldn’t just live in the basement and they put a bed down there, thankfully close to the windows, and that was fine with John because he was a cave-dweller anyway.
No-one ever used the sauna, it just became a place to put the Christmas wrapping, John never used the tanning bed or the bar, but he had this enormous space that he could shoot bows and arrows in. He had a 12-foot long bull whip that he would practice with until he hurt himself very badly and he would hang it in the closet and say: Leave it, but the next time he would see it he would try again. Down there was where they put their IBM PC with 64k, it was where he would go make out with his first girlfriend. He wasn’t the nerdy good kid that would watch other people do fireworks, but he wasn’t having orgies down there either.
One time John’s mom was wondering why the humidifier didn’t work anymore and when she opened up the top of it she discovered it was full of bottles of booze. It was a good hiding place, but he should have done it in a way that didn’t affect the operation of the machine.
Merlin being into sharp things and playing ninja (RL204)
Merlin was very into throwing sharp things like dart and knives, sometimes kitchen knives. He would try to get the right distance from the wall where he could get a couple of turns in, which was a good feeling. Eventually he got into Shuriken, throwing stars, which you could pick up at the flee market unsharpened and you would sharpen them yourself. He only carried them to school in his wallet. Later he had a condom in his wallet that he never used, but for a time he had a Shuriken shape in his wallet. He never deployed it because the better ninjas do not keep their weapons inside of a pouch in their back pocket, at least not the primary weapon.
Later Merlin would get into functional ninja things, like running around in people’s back yards with a sweatshirt over his head, but he never had the toe shoes. They had sweatshirts, rubber chucks and later actual nunchucks and they would carry things that they imagined the suburban ninja would need. He cannot imagine how many retirees they scared by running past their air conditioner at 9 o’clock. They probably weren’t thinking: ”Ninjas!”
The classic American male attitude is: ”I have never driven a car, but I have seen lots of fast car driving and I am sure I would be a good car driver. I have seen so many fight scenes, I bet I would be pretty good in a fight!” and in this case Merlin has seen stealthy ninjas and certainly he could be a stealthy ninja.
John could be one, too, but he never had any affection for ninjadom, maybe because he wasn’t introduced to Bruce Lee in the same way that other people were, he was certainly around in his childhood and all the Kung Fu fighting was all there, but John never identified with it. In the very early 1980s Ninjas were still cool and a new-ish idea, but then America got burned out on ninjas because there are too many fucking ninjas today. They are ruining TV shows right now. The more ninjas you add to something the less interesting it gets. You need exactly one ninja that you almost never see!
Merlin always wanted to be a monk, the character class in D&D, because they were the coolest, they had a vibrating palm, they could fall 4 feet per level. John doesn’t know why he would fall 4 feet per level if he could conjure an orb. Imagine one guy having a Big Trouble in Little China style electric orb hovering above his hand and the other guy’s palm is vibrating and he is falling. Merlin thinks that there is too much napping for the magic people, but John is not opposed to napping as long as somebody is watching over. Merlin dreams / thinks about secret spaces constantly.
Underground Seattle, thinking about having a dungeon (RL204)
When John was 6-7 years old he imagined that anytime you dug in the ground anywhere in Seattle there was a city under there, and they dug a lot of holes, looking for the roof lines of Underground Seattle. By the time John was in Junior High he knew there weren’t cities under the ground, but he did suspect that there might be dungeons. John thinks about his own house and how expensive it would be to retroactively install a dungeon.
John doesn’t mean shipping containers buried in the desert dungeons (see Dreams and Fantasies), but stone-walled dungeons. Not the 12-year old girls in a Reader’s Digest article with a pipe. It wouldn’t be a sexy dungeon either, but there would be a sexy component with safes down there, and John could be very comfortable down there. Whenever someone rings the door bell it would flash a light downstairs and he would go on the CCTV and make a decision.
John fantasizing on his way home from school (RL204)
John had to walk home from school and he spent a lot of time fantasizing. He had a key on a red string. There was a bus, but then you would just be home and then what would you do? John wasn’t somebody who read comic books or played video games, but he would stare at the wall at home, so why not walk home, which would take him an hour or so. He would fantasize in a state of total dream place. He was perceiving the world outside, but in his mind he was far away. Early on one of his fantasies was that he lived in a Richie Rich world where he was a very wealthy boy who had a bunch of adult things that were scaled down, a la Bugsy Malone. He had a half-scale Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and rather than having to walk home he would drive himself home in his imaginarium. (see RL252)
He was picturing himself driving that Silver Shadow on the bike paths of Anchorage Alaska, the fantasy didn’t extend to living in Monaco, which would not have been plausible. Whenever he sees a Silver Shadow on the road now, and most of them only exist as wedding cars anymore, he still pictures himself in it and pictures both him and the car at 3/4 scale. Merlin would love to see that! Then John got introduced to Lord of the Rings in 7th grade and the concept of all of that, Lord of the Rings and D&D came together as a package deal, and he was spending the entire time walking home from school conjuring spells.
Trying to conjure an orb was a little bit later. When he was a little kid people in Seattle talked about Underground Seattle, a neighborhood on the 1st Avenue where they at one point raised the level of the streets during one of the many redevelopments of Downtown, and they just covered over the first floor of shops and stuff and decided that the second floor of buildings was going to be the first floor, like they did in Chicago. In Anchorage during the 1964 Earthquake the buildings actually fell a story, which was not good, but the buildings weren’t destroyed, they just dropped one story so that the front door was now under street level, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The thing about Junior High is that you are not thinking it all the way through, but John was pretty sure that was the way to be successful with girls. Standing at an all-school dance, one guy is doing a fucking card trick, the cards keep coming out of his sleeves, and John is leaning against the wall, they are playing Devo’s Working in a Coal Mine, and the cool girls go out on the dance-floor and John wishes he would be able to go dance with the girls, but then he would conjure an orb and who would go dancing with these other guys?
They had a private conversation about the great card artist Cardini who produced a perfect fan of cards, but he can’t get rid of the cards that keep coming out. He was married to that lady who wore a bellhop outfit. Merlin is glad he didn’t see that when he was 12. If John could find a woman who would wear a bellhop outfit he would be married. If she would stand there with a Cheshire Smile and a waste basket while he would throw cards into it! She would never get sick of it and think he would be so interesting because of his card sleeves.
Thinking that everything would fall into place if you just could get good at this one thing is another boy pattern. That is why there are guitar players, or snatching the coins off your elbow. Merlin’s cigarette tricks were very modest. He could do some match tricks and some minor 1st-level Zippo tricks. They smelled so good and Merlin had a Zippo collection, one of the few collections he ever had. He had a Kiwanis Zippo, a Chesterfield Cigarette Zippo. ”When you are ready to become a man, you let me know!” is what they guy said to Merlin about the Kiwanis Zippo.
Freemasons, Shriners (RL204)
A lot of their listeners are Masons. They are allowed to talk about it because the masonic brotherhood is not a secret organization, but they are more than happy to explain almost everything about masondom with the addenda that John can’t use their last name when referring to them. John knows not a small handful of masons distributed across the county and the world who contact him every time they talk about masondom on the show, and say: ”As I have said before, we are not a secret organization and I would be happy to walk you through the steps. Let me explain again things that you can google about our fraternal organization that does many helpful things!”
John wonders if some Shriners are listening to their program. Merlin’s grandfather was a Freemason in Scottish Rite and a Shriner and he was pretty into it. He had a fez and a bolo tie, he had it going on. He didn’t have the small car, though, at least Merlin never saw it and he passed when Merlin was 12 years old and there might have been a car in the estate and he just never saw it. His funeral was grotesque because they did a pretty crap job on his makeup and he looked like he just had some bad plastic surgery and then he got the Scottish Rite funeral and they put all this stuff in the coffin, like an apron, a magic wand, maybe some exploding cigarettes.
John’s extended family includes many Masons and he has been schooled from many different directions. They made a terrible mistake about the Knights of Columbus and John was corrected about that very intelligently. Sometimes even though they know better John and Merlin will say the exact opposite of the truth, some kind of intellectual dyslexia. John has never been Shriner-splained, though, and he does want to hear about Shriners.
John’s mom being racist against Hillbillies (RL204)
John’s mom loves all people to the same degree, which is to say not very much. Both John’s mom and dad were the two least racist people he has ever met in his life, they saw no color at a time when that was very unusual. His mom was only racist against two groups of people: Hillbillies, because she is from rural Ohio and if you cross the border of one county and go into the other county you are now in Hillbilly country and she hates them so passionately that she says things like: ”We never should have fought the civil war, but we should have let the South secede and they would be a third world country and we would destroy them in war!”, she says that about Trump culture.
Her philosophy is that we fought the war at the wrong time and we should have ignored the whole states rights garbage and the ”Keep the union together!” and fought the actual war about slavery later and then defeated the South and salted the Earth. ”Hey Sherman’s March, cool your jet! This is not a thing that we still talk about!” She is the opposite of a William Faulkner character, she has not forgotten, but she has not forgotten something very different. She is so North!
She sometimes talks about Bonaparte, we all call him Napoleon, but she talk about him in a way that has been transmitted through the generations of her family from a time when he was a living person they had a nickname for him and he represented a certain idea of Internationalism and anti-British-imperialism. She has several of those things and some of them seem like they have been translated through the Quaker side of her family from Calvinist times, small prejudices against people of different sects. She could make very sweeping generalizations about every protestant denomination’s characters.
John’s mom would say things about Baptists that would make it sound like they were eating dirt. They lived on raw crawdads and they would fight with banjos, but then all of a sudden Baptists were everywhere and now John can’t meet an Indie Rocker without finding out that they are Southern Baptists. There was a moment where Christian Rock went two different directions: Guy Fieri Rock, where people were wearing Bowling shirts with flames on them, and the other one was man-bun Rock where everyone had tattoos of doves on their chest and were playing the Glockenspiel very aggressively. Merlin’s wife can clock it and she will tell him to turn it off if it comes on the radio.
John thinks there is a setting on the compressors at the mastering studio. Merlin thinks it is a little too jolly. They sound like they are smiling when they are singing, which is not a bad thing, but if you can really tell that it sounds like they are smiling it seems manic. Eddie Vedder smiles with a grimace smile when he sings. He is more like a Rock Rictus. The Christian Rock singers are smiling because if you frown it lets the devil in.
John’s mom still has very strong opinions about The War of the Roses. She takes a side and there are people within the British royal family today which she can’t abide for reason that have to do with The War of the Roses. She grew up on a farm and her grandfather was a postman, and during the depression that was actually a pretty good job. Her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War for Ohio and at the time the South came all the way up. On the East Coast all the way from Maine to Maryland the North is pretty long vs the South, but at the point where Ohio touches the lake the North was exactly one state wide, meaning the Civil War had a different feeling from the vantage point of Ohio because the South was much wider than the North at that point.
Even within the state of Ohio and the patterns of migration of people to the West, Southern Ohio was populated with Scotts Irish, who are the people John’s mom is referring to as Hillbillies. That is totally Merlin’s family. He is from Cincinnati, most of his family is from Kentucky, and there are all uniformly English, Irish, and German. In the middle of Ohio there are people which you would call Northerners from a puritan mercantile class. Right across the top of Ohio there is a thin band that is maybe only 120 miles (200 km) wide that is Quakers and Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a misnomer because they are German Calvinists.
In Ohio they regarded this the last vestige of civilization in the entire middle portion of America and they felt like a bollwerk and some of that persisted until the 1950s, but John doesn’t know how the people of Toledo and Van Wert feel now, it is probably just Denny’s and Shari’s there as it is everywhere else, but back then it was pretty strong feelings.
It is the same in John’s dad’s family: Their connection to the past is still so strong even as they have lost exactly what their problem was. If you start talking about the Lancasters and the Red Res and White Res (?). She has really strong feelings about the whole business with Richard III. The Hunchback in the parking lot is a terrific Morrissey song.
The second group of people his mom is racist against are Shriners, which John forgot to mention, but he follows up about it in next week’s show (see RL205).
Morrissey, They Might Be Giants on the Carson show (RL204)
There was a story recently about when Morrissey finally appeared on the Johnny Carson Show in 1991 right after Carson had announced his retirement and the other guest on the program was Bill Cosby, which was an incredible moment in TV. Morrissey not only ruined Bill Cosby’s appearance, but Carson said on air several times: ”I wish I was already retired!”
There was a lot of penned-up Morrissey energy. The Smiths never appeared, they never had a hit really, and within popular culture there was very little awareness about The Smiths and: ”Who the hell is Morrissey?” He had gone on record several times, saying: ”Why is Belinda Carlisle on the Carson Show and I am not?” in his wonderful humble and admirable style, but he arrived on the scene and everyone in the audience was a Morrissey superfan, they completely disrupted the show, ruined it in every way, screaming for Morrissey throughout, and Bill Cosby and Carson, these two dinosaurs from the long-ago times were trying to grasp what was going on.
According to Merlin there are few things more insufferable than a loud audience screaming enthusiastically for something you have never heard of. Merlin has been that guy and he tries not to be, and he has been on the other end of that. It was a triumph for Morrissey in that he was finally on the Carson Show. He said that he was tired of being this successful with no recognition. Merlin makes an amazing Morrissey impression.
The footage when They Might Be Giants where on there is incredible. The Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) seem legitimately joyful to be playing with Doc Severinsen, they got the whole band cranking. John Flansburgh underwent a transformation while John Linnell had a certain on-stage quality that he retains to this day. He recognized that he was the front man of this era, he was present in what he was experiencing and he still is in the same way, while Flansburgh early on never looked at the camera. He is doing his Flans thing, he is herky-jerky, it is part of his bit.
When crowd-surfing first became a thing Linnell would call it ”Pass the dude” and Merlin still uses that term. They had a clear distance from the mainstream Rock stuff and when you saw Flansburgh do his moves that were a parody of that it was tongue-in-cheek, but now he legitimately just fucking rocks out. If you took Flansburgh out of those early TMBG moments and it was just Linnell singing and playing the accordion you wouldn’t say that this was nerdy Art Rock, but it would be Pop.
Then something happened within the TMBG dynamic, particularly within Flansburgh, whom John knows quite well, it might have been when they added a live band, where Flansburgh became a different character on stage and was very much looking at the audience and was present in a different way. On the Carson show he feels like he is a member of the Severinsen band and is interacting with them. Also when they appeared on Letterman for the first time and they had Paul Shaffer and his band. You saw Flansburgh be differently comfortable with the band.
Long Winters songs being different live vs on the album (RL204)
John feels like an heir to that in a way that he wouldn’t have said before. In 1989 he wouldn’t have told himself that he would be an heir to this, all the way down to how many Rock solos, his glasses are falling off and he is falling on the stage and it is pretty fucking great, but John is also aware that it is a pastiche of Rock. He is commenting on Rock solo, but he is also really enjoying Rock solo. It is maybe even an heir to Punk through a TMBG refraction.
You wouldn’t think Punk or Metal of John’s music. As recorded it sounds very much like the very specific early Indie Soft Rock, which is not in the songwriting especially. Merlin always had a hard time putting John’s music in a box. John heard a lot at the time that The Long Winters were like the fucking Who live, but then people listened to the records and it was so soft and they couldn’t get into the sound. John hears that still. People listen to the podcasts and can’t reconcile the person because John talks about Hard Rock and they expected harder Rock.
When they were in the studio with Chris Walla as the producer it was a specific era that was suspicious of distortion and loud bass and bombastic stuff, even coming from a Punk Rock place. If there was one more guitar on every track that was going through a RAT pedal and playing on the E-string only it would sound more Rock. What Merlin treasures about When I Pretend to Fall is that it is a triumph of sequencing in the tracks and he is glad there is not that guitar on It’ll be a Breeze because it is a fucking album and it has its ups and downs.
Stupid feels like the first song on side 2 and as Tom Petty said: The first song on Side 2 had to be killer. Stupid is a classic example that was much harder Rock when they played it live. Even as they were recoding it the drummer Michael Schilling wondered why John wasn’t making this more Rock, but John was putting chime-y guitars on there. John was trying to make his singing pokey because that is what girls like.
Prom Night at Hater High was originally called Jet City, but Josh Rosenfeld, the head of the record label, decided at the last minute that it should be called something else as a way to make a contribution to the album and John was vulnerable and susceptible enough to that kind of contribution and he didn’t object to it. It is still Jet City on their set lists and it is a way better name for the song.
Live they play it like a Rolling Stones song from Exile on Main Street which is also how John wrote it, but when they recorded it they got a violin player, Sera Cahoone from Carissa’s Wierd, and she is doing a fiddle thing and all kinds of other stuff that Hillbillifies the song. Now John thinks it should have just been a Rock’n’Roll song, but that wasn’t their instinct at the time. They were trying to put every style of everything in the records, even the Dr. Dre keyboard, and Scott McCaughey is on one song standing in the studio quietly (see RL2), which is a very TMBG impulse, to do weird things in the studio that no-one will ever know about, but it will be fun an artistic.
The Long Winters never developed a definable and unified sound that would enable somebody to say that Owl City sound like The Postal Service, or that Interpol sounds like Joy Division, or Silversun Pickups sound like Billy Corgan, the smartest boy in the world. You can’t even say that The Long Winters are Rock’n’Roll, although that is how they were live and John is a Rock’n’Roll person, but at the time they were exploring the art of recording as separate from the other arts. Merlin is glad John did and he wouldn’t change a stitch of it.
Merlin encourages people to start listening to The Long Winters with When I Pretend To Fall because he thinks that you can enjoy The Worst You Can Do Is Harm more after that. When John made the first record he was coming out of The Western State Hurricanes that was a very Rock Rock band and he was making a lot of reactive decisions. The Hurricanes were this thing and now he was doing this other thing that is different. When he does a Hurricanes song now he is making it super-consciously very different.
By When I Pretend To Fall John was just writing songs and recording them how he wanted. Putting The Days to Bed is the one that many people say is the one they like the best, and there John was consciously trying to bring some Rock’n’Roll back into the band, to a degree that doesn’t seem incongruous. The video is awful, don’t even talk about it. The Western State Hurricanes on 29live is on YouTube.
The problem with the Western State Hurricanes was that John was still coming out of The Bun Family Players and in that band there was no song they could not ruing with a different time signature in the bridge. What if the drummer stood up in the middle of the song, stopped playing the drums, and played the French Horn for 2 minutes? That sounds cool! They were completely influenced by equal parts Rush and Circus Contraption.