Winter 1990 - Six Crises

Mike, the lead singer of PG13 and my ongoing partner in Musical Crime came to me with several odd proposals in the years 1989-1991. Some of them resulted in some odd garage-funk music that we called "Spongebath", but today I'll tell you about one of the two "Rock Operas" we almost started. One was a musical history of Sammy Davis Jr called Yes I Can that we never actually wrote any music for, but give us 10 min and we could sing the whole thing out. I have half of a sketch from the dramatic intro, but it never materialized. We imagined a great "Sammy loses his eye" moment recording a ping pong ball bouncing across the floor, and someone shouting from the kitchen "MY EYE!" Perhaps it is better that we didn't do more with this.

The other we actually wrote music for. Six Crises, the Opera based on the book by Richard Nixon of the same name.

The first song we wrote was actually me alone: I was watching CNN Headline News in the apartment I shared with Erik, and there was something on about white bigots in South Africa, and this man looked a bit like Santa Claus but more Dutch, and he was spewing some particularly florid hatrid "We cannot allow them to take our land, rape our women, kill our children. We will FIGHT until the bitter end". But what was amazing was his VOICE: He had the most silken deep voice, a voice you'd love to hear telling you bedtime stories. A voice that probably had a beautiful laugh. A voice put to a very evil service. I couldn't believe my ears, and the next half hour of my life was wasted as I raced to find a videotape so I could capture this man's voice, since Headline news repeated their stories ever 30 min. I actually had to wait a full hour for this particular piece, but it was worth it.

Immediately, I got to work on a piece of music that was menacing and plodding, sounding a bit like a military march with low horns and some distorted synths percolating in the background. By this time I had my Yamaha SY77, which had some very good brass and strings sounds, and I was able to sound somewhat epic. It built and built, until everything dropped away and I dropped this voice in: I had filled the memory of my Akai S950 with this sample, and it was too big for a single disk, so I had to use it or lose it.

It wasn't a long song, under 4 minutes, but it was long enough to. We listened to it together and the voice gave us chills - Mike didn't even know where it had come from, but he was captivated. We decided this would be the music for the chapter on Alger Hiss.

But the music had its own contained presence and we never could add lyrics to it. We just called it Alger Hiss and let it sit over to the side on tape. We never loaded that sample up again, never worked on that idea again. There's something to be said for a sound demanding to be worked with, and that experience being DONE with. I never did a sample grab from TV after that, either. Done.

The other song we did was far more lighthearted - we imagined it to be Dick singing to Pat, making a statement of purpose before striding out the door to get his ass handed to him by Kennedy in 1960. It was called "This I Believe".

Right around this time I got the LinnDrum, and so the song was built around a slightly swung groove on the Linn, with the SY77 horns and strings, TX81z cutting through with percussive bass, and the Juno playing Organ as it did so often in the spongebath days. We wrote the song and cut the instrumental, but Mike never shared with me exactly how it would sound... until we played at the Seventh Street Entry in late Spring 1990, warming up for a rival synthpop band "X-Ray Kiss".

Mike pulled out all of the stops singing this, and I'm fortunate to have captured this on video because it was a true work of art. The video, by the way, was shot on a camcorder I had purchased just days earlier from Daytons, where they had a very generous return policy. And yes, that camcorder returned to Daytons just days later, before the 10 day cutoff. The salesmen were righteously pissed...

After that, we sort of let the Rock Opera thing drop, but it wasn't the end of our projects by any means.