Classical Music

We had nothing against punk ourselves, it was just a peripheral tangent at best when you had all the funk you wanted thumping out of tiny boombox speakers from WESL and other radio stations and no money for records at all. It’s funny how punk Jambox was by sheer accident and by dint of a range of influences that stretched from Captain Beefheart’s immortal Trout Mask Replica to Jaco Pastorius or the Mahavishnu Orchestra. You take a love of free jazz style noise rock and fusion jazz and mix it with a certain amount of dexterity and an overabundance of energy minus the inclination to try to sound coherent and you get the signature Change Music sound.

We’re playing Classical music for ya
We’re a group of infant prodigies
We’re playing Classical music for ya
We’ve each written twelve symphonies
But we’re declinin’ to play ‘em for ya
Because we’d rather Jambox at our ease
We’re playing Classical music for ya
And if we could you know we might
We’re playing Classical music for ya
And if we could you know we might
We’ve got the sound of a million
In the air it’s quite a fright
But we’re playing Classical music for ya
And we’re gonna jam all night

Over the brewery and into the grain
Mash madhouse mixture desires grow plain.

We’re playing Popular music for ya
We just formed ten minutes ago
We’re playing Platinum music for ya
Tragical blues sick rules? Dog no!
We’re playing Popular music for ya
And we’re number one on the charts
We’re playing Platinum music for ya
And we’re number one on the charts
We’re playing Popular music for ya
This is where the jammin starts
We’re playing Popular music for ya
And we’re gonna break your hearts.

I blush to admit that I alone am responsible for the tone and braggadocio of this song, though it was written with Slash Brannon, who contributed the two most beautiful lines in the song: “Over the brewery and into the grain/Mash madhouse mixture desires grow plain.” which is the most beautiful lyric ever written of a man longing for a beer. I also used one of his signature catch phrases “Tragical Blues Sick Rules” which might have actually been one of his super-short little poems. Another one of his mini poems in the same vein was “Sort short lock shit type niceties OUT”

Slash and I started out playing together acoustically when we became roommates living on 18th Street near Russell in the greater Soulard area of South St. Louis. I wasn’t a great guitar player; I was possessed of just the most rudimentary ideas of music theory and a few chords, some of which I had simply invented, though any fingering you can think of has probably been done before.

Slash Brannon, however, was a good violin player, very fast, and he played with a technique he had developed on his own that was more like bebop than anything else, long shimmering runs of notes that seemed crazy at first but which made a unique harmonic sense after you started to grasp the patterns. The sound of my classical nylon-stringed guitar and the violin blended well, especially since I was fond of playing the bass strings and he held down the high end, when acoustic, without much of the unstable screechiness that most of us dislike about amateur violin.

I have strong visual memories of us sitting in his room next to mine in the weak winter sunlight playing together, just me doing chords in patterns and him improvising along. From the start I was organizing my chords into melodic structures that resembled songs, in order to make it easier to jam to and to make it easier for me to enjoy what he was playing. Much of the stuff we played ended up turning into songs over the years, especially after we started considering ourselves a band and got Rico DeBool to play bass.

Many times through the years I played with Slash I longed for a return to the acoustic sound we started with. Amplified guitars and violins were exciting, but the sound wasn’t nearly as light and pleasant. I never really accepted Rico DeBool’s bass playing, also, even though he was light years ahead of his time in some ways. I would have preferred a bass player like Kent Gray, who could do slamming funk patterns you could dance to, while Rico was strictly an improvisor and fond of strange melodic lines that bubbled away under the melodies in an almost random manner. This left the guitar and vocals alone to hold up the melody. When Fojammi joined up as drummer, he played the drums in the same random, melodic manner, until whatever melody we once had was like a tiny little voice in the back of your head screaming, almost inaudibly, that something was wrong here, that something was not quite right.

Here's a Fojammathon version of this number that takes it to a more Rockabilly place: