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A lot of Too Much Joy lyrics were written separately from the music, and then either given to Jay and/or Sandy to see what chords and melodies they’d come up with, or recited straight from my notebook of possibilities as the full band worked on some new riff during rehearsals.

“Theme Song” was scribbled on a page before being handed to Jay, and I remember being disappointed when he played me the music he’d written, as I’d been hearing something fast, anthemic and Mekons-y in my head. “Trust me, this is better,” he said. If only he’d always been so right.

We recorded it at the tail end of the Cereal Killers sessions – after we were supposedly finished tracking, in fact, because Ed Thacker was mixing what was supposed to be the completed album in a separate room. Tommy had gone home months earlier, so there are no drums per se on the album version – the percussion you hear is Mr. Mister’s Pat Mastoletto hand-thumping on some two-inch tape boxes and various other implements.

The studio version is fine, but I don’t think anyone realized just what we hath wrought until we started playing it live. As Jay foresaw, the chorus lyrics lend themselves to drunken swaying, and the tempo he insisted on was perfect for deliriously exhausted audiences to slur along to – so perfect, in fact, that most nights the crowd would keep singing it for at least five minutes after we left the stage. The tune very quickly secured itself a place of honor at the end of most every show, and it never seemed right to repeat the same spoken bit before the final chorus rounds, so I did my best to come up with a new, site-specific spiel every goddamned time we played it. If you saw us more than a few times, you may have heard me repeat myself once or twice, but I think at least 90% of those spiels were one-time-only affairs.

I don’t know if this is the best song Too Much Joy ever wrote, but it is definitely the most Too Much Joy song we ever wrote, and it figures in several of my favorite-ever onstage memories. One time, at TT the Bear’s in Cambridge, we led the crowd on a parade during the song, straight out of the club, down the street to a different club called the Middle East, down the stairs inside that club to the bewilderment of the audience who’d gathered to watch whatever band was onstage, then back up and into TT’s. And the last ever time we played, at the Knitting Factory in 2007, we passed out several hundred mini-tambourines so the audience could play as well as sing along. I don’t think the sound of all those teeny tiny shaking cymbals will ever be equalled in my mind, and the one silver lining to the fact that we didn’t manage to arrange any shows to celebrate the pending Cereal Killers re-release is that I highly doubt we could have topped that noise.

Sandy, Jay and I all graduated from the same high school the same year. The former grad who gave the commencement address was an astronaut in name only, as he hadn’t yet actually been to space. It wasn’t the most inspirational choice. Usually commencement speakers have accomplished something substantial, and their job is to convince all of us who haven’t yet done much of anything with our lives that the potential is there, and to give us some advice from their own experience on how to make it blossom.

But this guy’s example was pretty much telling us that years from now we might still be waiting in line to realize our dreams.

That fear, coupled with the dawning suspicion that even if/when you DO achieve your aspirations the satisfaction might be very brief and fleeting, is the subject of the song. I really can’t imagine what a drag walking around on earth might be after you’ve semi-floated on the moon.

Producer Paul Fox got all mad scientist-y on this one, laboring over the vocal effects and background noises. I seem to remember him saying something along the lines of, “I want you to hear god’s face.” Have I mentioned how good the pot was in L.A. at the time?

Interesting might-have-been: my original desire for the cover of what became Cereal Killers was based on a lyric in this song. I wanted a shot of an astronaut standing next to that U.S. flag they planted up there, only holding a lighter to the bottom corner, with the flag just beginning to burn (yes, I know the physics of this are probably impossible, but still, sweet image, right?) and maybe a Too Much Joy patch somewhere on his spacesuit that you wouldn’t notice till the 5th or 6th time you looked at the cover.

I wish we’d done that. But Tommy was against burning the flag. Even when I compromised and said the flag didn’t have to be on fire, the astronaut could be just on the verge of lighting the flag, he was still against it.

These are the compromises you make, in a band.

Speaking of Mr. Vinton, here are his own recollections of the song:

This was one of the more stranger tunes on CK. Although at first listen it appears to be a straight ahead rocker, there are some really cool changes throughout the song which really don’t mess with the tempo that much to be noticed. I absolutely love the B parts of the verses with Tim singing falsetto, and the way the drum beat and bass changes makes the part that more special. The end of the song includes an outro of us just going crazy. We never really played this song much live, but when we did it was a free for all at the end. It usually culminated in some combination of Jay writhing on the floor, Sandy hitting someone with his bass (accidentally), Tim jumping into the crowd, me destroying my drums…anything would go. I do remember our good friend/roadie Mike Arata creating a mic stand he called “stand o’ death”. The mic stand would be crudely set up with pyro/fireworks/shrapnel (who knows what he really packed in there). He would then instruct Tim to light it at a certain point and that would be our Kiss portion of the show. This certain point (from what I remember) would sometimes happen during “Goodbye Ohio”. I’m still amazed we never caused a fire or injury doing this…but we did piss off a bunch of club owners. 

Oh, one other footnote: that commencement speaker, I’m told, actually did make it into orbit, eventually.

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My last year in grad school I lived with my girlfriend (the inspiration for “Susquehanna Hat Company“) in Tuckahoe, right on the border of Bronxville. My walk into town always took me past this marker, which commemorates the spot where Mohawk chief Gramatan sold the land to some enterprising Dutch folk.

I always found this triply ironic. First, because Bronxville was very notoriously a “closed” community that actively kept out minorities well into the ’60s, so if Gramatan’s descendants had wanted to live there they probably couldn’t. Read more “Song of the Week: Gramatan”

As a title, “Nothing on my Mind” practiced truth in advertising, since the lyric is the result of an experiment in sitting down to write a song without first having a title, a single line, or any idea of what I wanted to say (I’d recently read that Paul Simon went to an office from 9 to 5 every day to compose, which made me feel a little lazy just sitting around drinking, waiting for inspiration to strike).

That explains the stream-of-conscious nature of the words, and also why I tossed in the bit about the coloring book — the idea being that any interpretation a listener might impose was going to be a lot more significant than the mostly random outlines I’d provided.

Or so I thought at the time. Read more “Song of the Week: Nothing On My Mind”

That’s Tiffany Levine. Now she’s a rock climber of some renown, but way back in 1988 she was the woman who inspired “King of Beers.”

Jay and I were killing time in L.A. with our friend Joe Williams, who had brought along his friend and that friend’s sister, Tiffany, who was gorgeous and funny, and who politely pretended not to notice as Jay and I fought all night over who got to sit next to her in Joe’s car, or at the first bar we went to, or at the second bar, and so on. At one point, in an effort to save some modicum of self-respect for both of us, Jay and I huddled, each of us trying to talk the other out of his hopeless pursuit.

“Tim,” Jay said, “she’s so beautiful, I’d sleep with her brother.”

“Great,” I said. “You do that, because I’m going to sleep with her. By the way, that’s a great line. We have to call a timeout so I can write that down.”

Because Jay is an honorable man, he helped me find a napkin to scribble the line on. Then we went back to our war, which I cannot tell you who won because I am a gentleman (Jay lost, though).

The rest of the lyric was inspired by and written during similar nights. It became such a staple of the live set that I’m not sure if there’s a night we didn’t play it, once it was released. It might be one reason we got a reputation as a frat-rock band, but at least one friend told me, “The thing I like about that song is it’s actually pretty honest about drinking. It’s not exactly a celebration.”

Since I tend to overemphasize lyrics, let’s see what producer Paul Fox and drummer Tommy Vinton have to say about the production and the music. Here’s what Paul sent me when I asked him if he wanted to contribute to this post:

2:20

What a great band, so different at the time from most anyone else.

The guys who could come up with stories inside their songs that could last for a lifetime.

And I guess that has come true, because here I am again looking at

“King Of Beers” one of the best of their tracks.

A driving track that reeks of the smell of beer, an acoustic guitar,

a band with no fear, a love of girls that they will never have,

but with a guitar that sometimes sounds like hell and then is saved,

by a solid drum kit and player who can’t drink beer, because he was also a cop !

Crazy fun !!

We had fun packed into 2:20, and to this day I love the crazy sounds,

the switch of the guitar to a nylon guitar and back again to the crazy

roar of Tim Quirk, the bass of Sandy Smallens, and the rest of TOO MUCH JOY….

Whooooooooo yah !!!

Gee, thanks, Paul. Cops can drink beer, though — I was  always a bit worried when we played NYC, because Tommy’s cop buddies would get plastered and do things like tear the sinks off the wall of the bathroom. In fact, Tommy’s recollections jump pretty quickly to memories of being drunk:

King Of Beers is one of the straight ahead rock songs on CK. I think Sandy and I did our basic tracks in one or two takes. Love Tim’s lyrics on this one. So much so that when playing this song live we emphasize the “why am I such an asshole, why am I here alone” lyric by dropping out all instruments. Always works and feels great as a live song. On a side note and not really related to the song, we were asked by Budweiser to do a radio commercial which we all reluctantly agreed to do. Once done it was played on all the big commercial radio stations, a first for TMJ. I actually did the speaking part, but it didn’t sound like me due to the large amount of jagermeister and beer that was consumed while recording…we were the literal kings of beer that day…and not in a good way…

If you want to hear Tommy’s drunken spiel on that Budweiser commercial, and read about  just how reluctant some of us were, I embedded the audio in a long post on my personal website about how that radio spot nearly broke up the band.