Too Much Joy

It took us a while, but we’ve finally created a lyrics section. You can browse lyrics by album, or by track title.

We’ve got just about every song Too Much Joy ever released in there. We left out covers, unless the band added some of their own words to it, or unless it’s “Seasons in the Sun,” because everyone always leaves off the third verse of that, and it’s the best part.

Let us know if you find any bugs in there — it’s got a bazillion links, and while we’re pretty sure they all work, we might not have double-checked every single one.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the shows we did while touring on the re-release of Green Eggs and Crack in 1997 would be the last gigs we played for ten years. And the last of those were two shows in one day in San Diego. The first was an afternoon set at some street fair; the second was a way more inebriated affair at a complete dive called Homer’s.

Tommy dug up this footage recently, which was shot by friends or fans using his camcorder. Here’s a surprisingly tight version of “Poison Your Mind,” which includes shots of a three year-old Abby Quirk dancing (which she does about as well as her dad).

The first new Surface Wound track, “Blowed Up,” has been posted on Eclypse’s MySpace page.  It’s OK, since Eclypse rapper L.E.D. guests on “Blowed Up.”

Surface Wound’s full-length album (whatever that means these days) comes out this fall on Acquired Taste Records.  It is called “The Kids Are All Gone.”

These aren’t exactly rehearsal tapes, but they are a bit rough, so we figure they qualify. These 5 tunes (and the accompanying interview) were recorded in a Manhattan studio whose name I can’t recall sometime in 1992 for a syndicated radio program called The Other Side, which was hosted by Curt Smith from Tears for Fears.

Mr. Smith, as you can hear, was both funny and gracious, and since it felt weird to be interviewed by someone more famous than us, we wound up asking him more questions than he asked us.

As with all Rehearsal Tapes episodes, we’re including a way to obtain the downloads. Sometime next month we hope to do away with the a la carte pricing on these things, and implement a way for folks to pay a single price that will unlock access to every single current and future download on the site — so, hundreds of tracks for one low price, which seems like a reasonable compromise between fans who ask very nicely for downloads of everything we post and band members who tend to think only the stuff we officially released was ever meant to walk around proudly in public.

We have no idea what would be a non-evil price to charge for such a thing, so please give us some suggestions.

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We’re focusing on a track from Mutiny this week. Here’s what Sandy remembers about “Sort of Haunted House”:

The initial riffs for SOHH were composed to my rinky dink drum machine. It was a period of time when we were ripping off beats from some of our favorite hip hop songs (need I add, clumsily) and seeing what came out (“Unbeautiful” began the same way). Of course, when we took the song into a live setting, Tommy brought it to life in his own inimitable way.

When we recorded it we laid down that original rinky dink beat to retain some of the loopy vibe, and you hear a snippet of it in the song’s outro — followed unceremoniously by Tommy destroying said drum machine. Tim and Jay must have taped it back together.

Since Tim can’t say it, I will: these lyrics are awesome – maybe some of our best – and the song was fun to play, though rarely performed (while I was in the band).

My own recollections pretty much match Sandy’s, though I’m not quite as fond of the lyric as he is (personally, I think the bassline is what makes the song; it’s up there with the bass riff in “James Dean’s Jacket,” in terms of bouncy goodness). To me, the lyric was just an exercise in writing a story-song that Johnny Cash might sing. The title comes from a stray line in Don DeLillo’s Libra — a particularly DeLillo-ish sentence in which a character describes the overall vibe of some location with five simple words: “Very sort-of haunted house.”

Like a lot of DeLillo sentences, that one made me pause in admiration, and the song grew out of that pause, as I tried to imagine what a literal sort-of haunted house might be like to live in. I figured the phrase “sort-of” meant there’d be a ghost, but not one you were particularly afraid of.

For some reason, this one never found a permanent home in our set lists, although we did play it live a bunch before we recorded Mutiny. I remember, because the band had an argument about whether or not to play it at some show in Minneapolis that was being broadcast on a local radio station. I wanted to play it, because then we’d have a decent recording of a brand new tune, but the other guys feared it wasn’t solidified enough to get documented for all time like that.

I don’t believe the bashing metallic noise you hear at the end is an actual drum machine being broken. We may well have recorded Tommy kicking a drum machine to bits, but if memory serves the actual sound of that wasn’t particularly dramatic. So we set up a microphone in the kitchen of Messina Music and did numerous takes of us dropping a container of a bunch of random metal objects (washers, hammers, and other stray crap) onto the tiled floor. We kept adding more metal junk and dropping the box from an ever higher point until we got a noise that sounded sufficiently cathartic.

The fact that it also sorta sounds like a guy with a noose around his neck kicking the chair out from under him and making whatever pipe he’s tied the other end of the noose to go “Sproing!” is just a bonus.

Update: Bill just sent through his own blurbage about the tune:

When we first discussed my producing the album that was to become Mutiny (or, Don’t Worry, Bea Arthur) one of the songs on the demo the band sent me was “Sort Of Haunted House.” And in many ways this was the song that helped me ‘get’ them. Its lyric sensibility (like the fact that it’s a SORT OF haunted house) seemed to me to typify the band’s whole smart, arch, self assured (wise ass!) but also self deprecating aesthetic.

That IS TMJ. No other band could have written it.

These eight songs were recorded during sound-check at the Newport Music Hall in Columbus, sometime in 1991. We were touring on Cereal Killers, but gearing up to make the next record, so had been working on new songs in hotel rooms and during long drives (“Donna Everywhere” was written in the van, in fact, while a roadie drove us 90 miles an hour through Oklahoma, and my girlfriend seemed impossibly far away).

Two of these never got much beyond this stage – “You Can Count on the Moon” because it was too overwrought, and “Death Ray Machine” because we were too stupid (this is a different version than the live-to-two-track version that wound up on Gods and Sods).

The rest made it onto Mutiny, although in somewhat altered form for a couple. “Walled City” evolved into “What it Is” once we wrote a chorus and some more verses – here we’re just jamming on a single verse, trying to find a shape for the tune. “Strong Thing” went through the opposite process – the song’s fully formed, but half the words here got tossed out and replaced (not that it was any help; I love the music, but the lyric was doomed to suckage from the outset).

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This is Sandy, with the latest song of the week.

One of the earliest songs written for what would become Son of Sam I Am, “Clowns” is also a signature song of sorts for us. For one thing, it’s a media magnet: when Howard Stern mentioned TMJ on-air (a watershed moment for Tommy and I), the show discussed the lyrics for that song. More famously, Bobcat used it as the end credits track for Shakes The Clown. During Cereal Killers promo, I remember our biz people telling us that Bobcat Goldthwait, who we loved, was a big fan and wanted to direct a video for us for “Crush Story.” I guess I was unclear what the next steps would be for this, but I remember waking up that Saturday to a knock on my apt door and this disheveled, balding ball of energy was at our door unexpectedly. Bobcat was a really enthusiastic fan and hooked us up with a tv gig on his show later on. He didn’t (and probably still doesn’t) drink though, and I remember him being appalled at our backstage liquor consumption.

Musically, “Clowns” exemplifies a lot of what one might call the ‘TMJ sound’: while the chords are simple and anthemic, the syncopated rhythm and layered harmonies (Sandy high, Jay mid, Tim low) in the chorus are in many ways our calling card. Live, the song also provides a ‘donut’ section for Tim to fill with all sorts of spontaneous verbiage.

If a TMJ virgin asks for a few song suggestions, I invariably include “Clowns.”

Here’s the song’s original and later-censored intro, pillaged from Jay’s “Bozo” record. Not sure why he had that actually.

Longtime friend-of-TMJ Bill Wikstrom just launched his own TMJ flotsam-and-jetsam site, Map Like Mine. We’re both flattered and a little weirded out by just how much stuff he’s collected over the years — the site’s crammed with things none of us have, including but not limited to old press kits, T-Shirt order forms, and a skeptical …finally review from Magnet.

Tim and Jay’s latest album as Wonderlick, Topless at the Arco Arena, hit stores today, so we’ll be doing some promotion this week.

We’ve got another Wine Time with Wonderlick webcast at www.stickam.com this Saturday night, 7/11,  at 6pm PST. Tune in, and bring your own bottle of wine — if you have a webcam, you can broadcast yourself as you watch (it’s actually kind of fun when everyone toasts one another). We’re contemplating starting an advice segment, so if you have any relationship or mother-in-law problems, send them in before Saturday, and Wonderlick will distribute sage advice to you during the chat.

We’ll also be performing a few songs and getting interviewed on KUSF on Sunday afternoon, sometime between 4 and 6pm PST. You can listen live here. The performance will feature a full band — a first for Lick. Cross your fingers.

This one began life as “a rock opera for two voices and bass,” which Sandy and I wrote in an apartment in Tuckahoe, NY one drunken night so we would have something to perform at a scheduled appearance on Wesleyan’s college radio station that Jay couldn’t attend because he was in California.

Because we were A) lazy and B) didn’t have much time, the “rock opera” was little more than some repeated riffs with half-spoken/half-sung narration that attempted to string together a couple of random songs we’d already completed which didn’t actually have anything to do with each other: “Sense of Power,” “God’s a Fag” and “Connecticut.”

The whole thing was pretty stupid, even by TMJ’s lax standards at the time, and it completely bombed when we played it at the station, so we wisely trashed everything but the title after the disaster at Wesleyan. A few months later the girlfriend I’d been sharing the apartment with went off to medical school. The band was heading to California to start recording what would become Son of Sam I Am three weeks after that, so I asked my dad if I could crash at his new house in the interim. His exact words to me were, “Guests, like fish, smell after three days,” which is a quote from either Ben Franklin or Mark Twain, depending on who you believe.

It wasn’t his warmest moment, but he’d just finished divorcing my mom, and had sold my childhood home in Scarsdale and moved into a new place in Chappaqua, so I guess he wanted to start his new life unencumbered by memories of his previous one. And it gave me an actual subject for the snarky title.

Many years later, my dad told my wife that Son of Sam I Am was his favorite TMJ album, because it ended with the words, “Hi, Dad.” Donna said, “I guess he never read the lyric sheet, huh?”

I said I guess not. But I’m glad he likes it.

Here’s the song as it eventually appeared on Sam:

And here’s a hint of what the rock opera version sounded like. As I said, it’s royally dumb, though I’m fond of Sandy’s dramatic delivery, and I still chuckle when the bum says, “I have epilepsy, just not at the moment.” The version below is just the bits that were meant to go in between the actual songs. It was recorded as it was being written on my answering machine, which accounts for the loud BEEPs you hear whenever we pushed pause, as well as the stray bit at the end from my friend Leslie, who called while we were working.