Too Much Joy

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.

Free Download

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.

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.