21. “The past is the past, the future is new...”

This is a line from a song of mine called "Days Gone By" from 2018, by the bye. It jumped into my head while writing this, though actually the lyric is itself a reference to trying to move on from my old band, and so has nothing directly to do with 2023. (Edit: I very recently revived this song, in a remixed form, so now it does have something quite directly to do with this year's music, strangely enough. How fitting!)

Anyway...

At the end of 2022, my desktop computer started acting up.

It had acted up before, and I'd deleted all of the contents, rebooted, and continued using it without a problem.

Now, it was acting up again.

I decided that, after deleting everything on the HD and putting it back to "factory settings," again, this time I would buy a new computer (a laptop, the one I am on now -- it had been three years since I'd bought the desktop computer, and the first one had crashed so many times Apple had had to replace it, the replacement now, again, acting up...) and retire the desktop for good, which, in fact, is exactly what I ended up doing, finally.

Before doing so, however, and after having ordered the new one "custom" online, and then having had to wait until the beginning of the new year for it to be delivered (it ended up arriving on January 2nd, 2023, which was pretty cool, though I had secretly hoped that it would instead arrive on the 1st, since that would have been even cooler...), I wanted to organize and back up some of the files on my older laptop, the one I'd been dipping into periodically to do all of those compilations and remixes that ended up on things I'd released last year, as I talked about in an earlier section of this essay you are now reading...

Anyway, as I was in the process of doing so, I recalled that I still had an old external HD, a slightly clunky black thing that I had socked away in a drawer somewhere, one that perhaps I could clear out and use to back up the data from my old laptop, instead of having to buy a new one. Someone had given it to me years ago, as I recalled, and I remembered that it had been given to me full of data, though I could not recall what the data was, exactly, nor who it was that had given it to me, or why, except that it must have been something band/music-related (I thought that maybe it was stuff from my first band, Chattering Man, but this turned out to be incorrect, as will soon be divulged). And so, digging it out of a drawer, I connected the old device via the USB drive of my old laptop computer, opened up the blue folders that lay within, and there I found both video and audio files for two complete shows (and a third, though in audio format only) from way back in 2016 of me and "my band," that fragile reptilian unit, the one and only (drumroll, please)... Glass Gecko!

How now to describe the feelings I experienced as I reviewed (as well as re-viewed) the videos here in my Tokyo apartment at the end of last year, not only many, many years after-the-fact, but also so many, many experiences later in my own life and development, both as an instrumentalist/composer/musician, but also as a human being (which I am, certified non-A.I., 100% flesh and bone and blood, too, not to mention sweat, tears, creative impulse, etc.)... 

I vaguely recalled having watched these videos before, shortly after they were taken, but since, at the time, I was not at all proficient with transferring video data or doing my own editing and the like, as I am now, the files had ended up, post-breakup of the band, neglected and forgotten, lying dormant inside that old, clunky, plastic external hard drive. The reason I had all-but-forgotten about the videos now seems fairly obvious to me: 

After the breakup of the band that same year, and what must have been not long after I'd received the HD with this data -- the last of the shows that was on it (the audio-only show) was one that had happened fairly late in the game, if memory serves, not too long before we'd splintered into unequal parts (1 part solo me, 3 parts instrumental band them) -- I'd not only lost interest in the project, or then, literally, "ex-band/project," focusing, as I was, more and more on my own songs and developing my own style of solo performance, learning to do better and better home recordings on my own, first via GarageBand and later LOGIC PRO X, etc., but also I was still, at the time (and, actually, for at least another year or so thereafter, particularly while their band was still active around town) feeling more than a little bit bruised and sensitive about the fact that they had, I felt, dumped me and reformed themselves as a trio, an "instrumental" trio, a mixture into which they had apparently, from time to time, allowed in a guest vocalist for performances, a friend of the bassist and drummer, one whom I knew, too, though not very well... They had reformed firstly without telling me, as I discussed early on in this essay, and then, I'd realized, after I had learned about their reformed three-piece unit, now with a new feline name, that "our" fans had followed them to their shows, and not to mine, or so that's what I'd told myself at the time, my emotions gaining the upper hand, clouding my ability to reason and to move on more quickly than I finally did after some time. (Just how many songs had I written about them [!] and about the breakup [!!] in late 2016/early '17... "Fragile Reptile," "Dog," even the lyrics to "Black Nail" were a reference to them, the "broken reptile," the "open sore...forevermore..." and so on. Fortunately, the lyrics to the latter were and remain somewhat indirect and abstract.)

Thinking about all this today, about the way I had been feeling at the time...indeed, to have watched those old videos then would not have been a very healthy activity for me to have engaged in, you see, so perhaps there was a subconscious, or at least semi-(sub)conscious reason I had forgotten about what was on this HD I had been given by...whom, again? Ah, yes, hadn't he been quite friendly with them even after the breakup of our band, my band (!), and hadn't he followed their band and not my solo career, etc. etc. ad nauseum!!! OK, OK, enough, you say! (Yes, I am being facetious, to make a point.) Well, indeed, this was my way of (100% negative) rationalization about all of this at the time, which is why I ended up rather miserable until I began to realize that I could just do my own thing and be happy doing it, without worrying any longer about the past or dwelling on it too much anymore.

Well, well, well. Bravo. Moving on now...shall we?

And so, getting back to my reactions c. 2022, i.e. the end of last year, whilst rewatching the old videos of my band that I'd all but completely forgotten existed.

Right. (Smooths the lapel of his collar...)

So, how I was feeling? Did it make me sad? depressed? nostalgic??

Not any of those things, actually.

On the one hand, I observed myself having certain thoughts such as, "Hmm, we weren't too bad together, really, and these arrangements aren't so bad, either." This was what I thought while watching the first of the two video performances, anyway, i.e. the earlier chronologically of the two videos, from a venue called "Buzz," which later went belly-up (the venue), though I in fact decidedly did not feel the same way about the songs/arrangements found on the second performance video, from later that year, which, performed at a larger venue (the same as where we'd done our debut, and the same livehouse where CM had also debuted, two years prior) was pure "Hey, look guys! We're a cool retro-yet-alternative post-'90s rock band with a retro '80's vibe and a really rad guitar player who plays fast guitar licks and does lots of long solos!" style amateur bravado. Also, I look really wanna-be-rockstar frontman in the second video, wearing eyeliner and moving on the stage awkwardly whilst playing some rather choppy rhythm guitar via the electric, obviously trying my damndest to keep up with the guitarist's faster-tempo, flashier rock arrangements of my originally quieter, or at least subtler, slower songs (the arrangements of which, as previously discussed, I had rather resented at the time). Pretty embarrassing to watch, but it was one stage in my development musically, an important one, in many ways, so I am now able to accept, if not fully embrace, it for what it was and what it is.

Other thoughts followed, as I viewed/listened to the performances, such as, "Ah, I'd forgotten about this song! I wrote this one, too, didn't I! Ha..." as there were some songs -- two songs in particular, both on the first video from our earlier show at Buzz, that I'd written and we'd arranged for the band, but which I have, to-date, never again attempted to (re)arrange/record and/or perform publicly again. Finally, when I reached as far as the encore portion of the first show (the one I liked/like), I had a thought that went something like, "I should really try to do something with this song again..."

The song I am referring to here is "My Friend," a piece I'd rerecorded in around 2017, shortly after I'd started using LOGIC and wanted to rerecord nearly all of the songs I'd earlier done versions of in GarageBand, though I had not again attempted to perform it in any form since around that time, and although it was, as I believed and still believe, a solid song which had, I thought, much potential if properly rearranged and played in a different style, one befitting of where I stood/stand, musically-speaking, "today."

And so, the very next day I picked up my classical guitar and recorded, rather casually, via the iPhone a video of myself in my room practicing the song, after I had gotten it into reasonably good shape play/arrangement-wise, a sort of "demo" for myself to refer to and possibly base a future (properly-recorded via LOGIC) recording on.

From this time, the idea for the first of the three LPs I would end up recording before my 50th birthday had begun percolating inside of me…

22. I’m gonna be a half-centenarian soon, so I'm gonna record something memorable for the sake of "posterity"…

I recorded an LP of some of my older acoustic songs, things from my "band days," one or two actually going back as far as Chattering Man times (such as "Phantom," which we'd performed live as a hard rock song, though the new version would be quiet, dark acoustic, with a bit of an improv in the middle section, with some organic noises to later be added...), all (re)arranged now in my current style of loose, semi-improvisational play, with me rapping my fingers or knuckles on the guitar's body, adding harmonics via the neck, etc., etc. The lyrics for the songs, too, naturally morphed a bit at times, though I used the lyrics I'd originally written as a referent for all of the older songs, songs such as "More," "Memento Mori," the aforementioned "My Friend," things I hadn't attempted in years, all in brand new arrangements and, eventually, recordings. 

This was the concept I had for the LP.

I would record this cycle of songs via LOGIC (with proper guitar/vocal separation) on my Ibanez acoustic, rather than using the smaller Guild guitar I'd been using for pretty much everything "acoustic" since I'd bought it used last year. (As an aside: It had been a real find, as it cost half what it would have cost me new, yet was in pristine condition when I bought it, softcase included. It has since become my go-to guitar.) I decided to use the Ibanez, in part, because I had been using it regularly back in '16 when I was doing Glass Gecko (on both of the videos I've mentioned I am playing the Telecaster, but when playing the acoustic with the band it would always be on the Ibanez). The second reason was that the Ibanez acoustic definitely has a bit more "resonance" than the smaller, sweeter-sounding Guild (perhaps my former bassist from Chattering Man had been right about this, in retrospect, though my first Yamaha acoustic had been too large!). For "My Friend," as in the video rehearsal, I went with the classical, which has a softer, rounder sound, with its nylon strings...

Before recording each of the individual songs for the LP, one very cold winter's day early in January of the new year, while still on vacation from teaching, I sat down with the Ibanez and a blanket on my lap (literally, as it was very cold!), along with my trusty ol' USB recording mic and new MacBook laptop computer, and performed in my room a very long improvisation for guitar and voice, on which I not only played parts of various songs from my past, as I remembered them, in unbroken succession (and in real-time), but also I added, during the guitar improvs, some spoken word, completely on-the-spot, talking about the subject of being about to turn 50, about music and so on, both in English and, at one point, also in Japanese. The full improvisation ran for about 18 minutes, and after I mixed the entire thing (effectorizing the vocals at times when singing, and adding some quiet "noise" in the background throughout, which was actually the sound of my small space heater, recorded separately and with a bit of distortion later added for effect), I decided to split it into two separate parts, which on the LP are spread out, with all of the other album's tracks coming between them, apart from the opener (More) and closer (Phantom).

This LP could have been an all-acoustic "let's take a walk through nostalgia-lane, 'cuz I'm turnin' 50 now!" type thing, but, well, acoustic music, and these types of singer-songwriter numbers, are in fact only one small facet of the styles of music I do and have been doing over the years. Even acknowledging the new styles in which the earlier pieces were performed, looser and with tapping, etc., and that the improv/medley itself was something rather new for me at the time, too (I say "at the time" meaning that after the first one, included on this album, I later recorded a number of others as well, both in my room and eventually live, with guitar/vocals performed simultaneously and no other "overdubs"), I still wanted to include something more "electronic" on the LP as well, as a contrast to the acoustic work, and also because such a composition or compositions would also be "new tracks" (instead of rearranged songs from my past) and would give the LP tonal variety. 

My most recent project at the time (this past January) was "Kether to Malkuth," which was, for all intents and purposes, a Bowie tribute and an LP of so-called "covers," albeit radically reinterpreted covers. However, the thing was, the long middle section of "Kether to Malkuth" (i.e. the track) was essentially an original ambient soundscape I'd composed which, I thought, if extracted, could also work as a new, autonomous track. And so, I later remixed this section after performing a bit of "LOGIC X surgery" on it, and changed the ending completely, adding beats and noise via my Kaossilator synth pad before retitling it "Da'at," a reference to another of the "stations" of the mystical Kabbalah, and so also linking it with the Bowie tribute album in a somewhat subtle way. 

As for my version of "Word On a Wing," as earlier explained, it had started out as essentially an improvisation I had done on the keyboard (my Yamaha MX49, which I have been using since 2017's Laughing Moon project, by the bye), including both the underlying synth and the piano part I played atop it. I had an idea whilst commuting to classes on the train one day to remove the vocals from it entirely and see what it sounded like. When I tried this a day or two later, the track, I found, worked quite well, and in fact had basically zero resemblance to Bowie's version of "Word On a Wing," apart from the very first few opening notes, essentially a few bars' worth of single notes played on the piano, which I'd intentionally performed in the same way as on the original song, in homage. Otherwise, this was my track entirely, a new and original synth/piano piece that was also quite ambient. I retitled it "Scheme of Things," a lyric lifted from "Word On a Wing," referencing the tribute (as with "Da'at"), while also giving the track its own, original title.

And so, there I had my new album: rearranged acoustic songs from '15-'16, the long medley/spoken word, split into two separate parts, and these two longer instrumental/ambient selections which also indirectly made reference to my recent Bowie tribute.

What to call the LP? What sort of cover art to use? These were the main questions that remained for me to decide...

The original title I came up with for the LP was simply "0226," as in 2-26, or Feb. 26. I later added "23" to the string of numbers, making the official title "022623," since this year's birthday was "the big 5-0," and "0226" was "just" my birthdate, and could have referred to any other year equally. For the jacket, I used a photo I'd recently taken of myself outdoors, wearing a black hat that covers my eyes, my face unshaven and rough. The photo, on the jacket, is in black and white. One thing I haven't yet mentioned is that I sang both "Memento Mori" (or an extract of it, at the opening of the longer medley, which I entitled "A Memento Mori") and "More" (in full) on the new LP -- both are really old songs, written around 2015/early 2016 -- in a Leonard Cohen-esque half-sung, half-spoken lower-register voice (for me, though not nearly as low as Cohen's baritone!), as the photo I planned to use as the cover somehow had reminded me of him and his legacy. (RIP, Leonard.)

6. Gecko's Muse/Take me HOM (sic)

As I've said, my drummer and I were still collaborating at this time, even after the breakup of the band itself, as we had already formed an off-shoot of Glass Gecko while the band had still been together, with me nominally still the “founding member/leader,” though in reality subordinate to the power of the majority: “3/1.” This offshoot/side-project we eventually agreed to call "The Gecko's Muse." Actually, I loved this project, much more than its more powerful (and also much more troublesome) older cousin, as it allowed me to handle all of the guitar/vocal arrangements without the guitarist's ego involved, and also, since the drummer could also play guitar pretty well himself, he often helped me to arrange some of the fledgling songs we hadn't been able to do with the band for one or another reason. When it was just the two of us rehearsing together in the studio, we got along great, inspiring each other, cracking jokes, no issues whatsoever. However, whenever the four of us were together he always seemed, like a + attracted to a - polarity, to immediately drift over to their side, so, for me, the duo was much less stressful and, therefore, a lot more fun and productive and free.

To use a quite-fitting, I think, analogy here to describe why I had started this side-project in the first place (though the actual situation should be considered in the non-sexual meaning, of course)... I've often heard that if a woman who is married or in a longterm relationship sleeps with another man, it is because she is unhappy with her lover and has already decided, consciously or not, to seek out greener pastures. I now realize, in hindsight, that, for me, forming this side-project, for which I actually did not want to use the term "Gecko" in the name -- this was at the suggestion of the drummer, who wished to keep it "connected" in some way with the full band version, even as I was trying precisely to further distance myself from it -- was another step in the direction of "breaking up with my lover," so to speak. What I didn’t then yet realize, however, was that, in the end, my "lover" would end up being none other than myself.

As when I had first attempted to perform solo whilst still being active as 1/4 of the band, our duo unit was at first met with a measure of resistance from the others, or at least we had to go through the motions and first officially ask both of them at a meeting, "Is it OK, Mommy and Daddy, if I play in a unit with someone else from my own unit when class is not in session?" and receive their blessings. However, once the other two resigned themselves to the fact that we had already started doing our little project casually "on the side" to work on compositions I had written, since they themselves were often busying themselves with their own respective non-music-related things, they stopped questioning it. Yes, of course, I was still very eager to arrange many of the songs that the guitarist was often too busy, because of his job (he’d said), to arrange, and that the bassist had found too difficult to play (she’d said) when we tried them out a few times in the studio together as a trio. This was why I had decided to form a side-project with my/our drummer, I explained. In truth, though, I soon began wanting to focus my energies less and less on the “Gecko” and more and more on the “Muse.” Had the drummer agreed, I would have quit the band the very next day, even, really at any time, wished the other two a bon voyage without a second thought, but, as he had strongly felt that our side-project was just that -- a thing we did on the side when the other members were too busy to do the "full," the "true" version -- I did not have that option at the time. Had I done so, it would have avoided the mess that ensued, but then I also wouldn’t now have such titillating stories to relate here, would I…

Let me also say that one other part of the "Muse" duo collaboration I had enjoyed so much was that, after arranging songs together at the drummer's home, we eventually started doing recordings (with me as nascent engineer) at my apartment, via GarageBand and an external mic, with him on cahon (a percussion instrument) and me doing vocals and acoustic on my own songs and in my own arrangements, rescuing and reclaiming songs like "The Day I Cried" and "Box Man" from the “bad remix” surgical disfiguration they had been through when the guitarist had arranged them for the band. I later effectorized the cahon he played (since we couldn't record kit at my apartment, obviously) to sound like different types of drums, and I also used effectors on my guitar parts and vocals, turning the acoustic into a distorted electric guitar and so forth. This was at once the first time I had ever recorded an instrument other than my own voice and acoustic guitar, and it was also the first time I had begun to realize the potential of using a DAW such as GarageBand, with all its effects and other mixing options (which, of course, I would later develop much more over time using LOGIC PRO X and a MIDI keyboard). 

In any case, sometimes the drummer and I would just "hang out" for hours at his home, arranging or rearranging songs in more complex and interesting ways than previously; experimenting, too, with him on the cahon or even on the acoustic (he recorded his own style of acoustic fingerpicked guitar for my song "My Friend," atop which I recorded my vocals, for instance -- this version in fact ended up as the final track on our demo LP, which I engineered for the first time using GarageBand). We'd take short breaks to chat about the songs or to get a drink of water, and then we would practice/play some more, and so it was very freeform and casual and fun, while also being creative and inspiring to me. In contrast, the full band rehearsals had by that time become (for myself, though apparently not for him) a slog, and I felt as though my input was by then practically zero, so I definitely preferred doing the “Muse” project whenever I could instead. 

And then, again, things changed…

Perhaps a couple of weeks after the eventual and inevitable break-up of the band, which, as I explained at the end of the last section, soon after reformed as an instrumental “feline” trio, with the guitarist now as its official "band leader" and every trace of my songs and influence purged from their sound and style, I myself ended up somehow in a newly-formed trio with my drummer and another (this time male) bassist who had hailed from another instrumental trio (ironically). 

The bass player had met me one afternoon for lunch on the pretext of needing some help with his English, but then the conversation had quickly turned to music and the recent dissolution of my band. He knew that I had been performing from time to time with my drummer in TGM (The Gecko’s Muse) and offered to play bass for us "until I could find another bassist" (a bit of deja-vu, for wasn’t this exactly what the drummer had said when he first joined Glass Gecko for rehearsals-only?). We now, he knew, essentially had zero “bottom end” to our sound, without a bassist or keyboardist to add in the bass line, and he was a good player, and a confident one, at that. And so, we went into the studio one day, the three of us together, and that night communicated via Messenger, the bassist all jokes and hilarity and enthusiasm for the project. And so the drummer and I agreed, after discussing it for a bit together, to let him join us and see where this thing might go. 

Well, once it was official that we were now essentially a trio/unit, the bassist seized the reins, deciding everything for all of us, from the band’s name (no reptiles in the name! he despised reptiles!! “We’ll instead go by ‘House of Mirrors,’ or ‘HOM’ for short, like ‘[coming] home [to one's posse]’”...) and the unit's image and logo, to where we should and shouldn't play, how we should dress/look onstage (he even insisted we go clothes shopping together before our first show, and once even tried to make me wear a knit cap onstage, though on this point I was firmly opposed and stood my ground!), etc., and soon rehearsals became rather tense, as he and the drummer did not see eye to eye on things, and as the drummer, I could palpably sense, was also a bit scared of him, flinching whenever the bassist lost his temper and yelled at him, which was rather frequently. The bassist was his senpai -- i.e. older than him in years, something like an older brother one must obey or else pay the price -- and so had the "right" (in Japanese culture) to do so; perhaps he even felt it his duty to do so in the context of being part of a band/unit, to call the drummer out when he felt that he was being lazy. This was, in a sense, for him, a "working" situation, and not just a bunch of friends hanging out and jamming for fun, and he made this clear from the very start.

One day, a mere three weeks into our little increasingly-tense trio experiment, and having played a number of shows already over a rather short timespan, the bassist flew into a rage at my apartment. This was just hours before the sound check for a show we had scheduled for that evening, at a live space where the drummer was in charge of the event’s regular booking (the show of which I speak turned out to be our last, by the bye). The bassist got so mad, apparently, because  the drummer had, for the second time that week, showed up a few minutes late to our pre-show "meeting" at my place. This, to him, was absolutely unacceptable, and so, having shouted at the drummer threateningly, eyes bulging, at one point he suddenly kicked my computer chair (which was, of course, on wheels) across the floor, where it crash-landed into the wall. I, of course, was not thrilled about this and flat-out told him to calm down, to sit down and chill for a bit, and not to kick my stuff around, but the drummer...his face showed pure terror, and when we both, later, told the bassist, after he had calmed down to the point where we thought it possible to at least communicate with him, without him again kicking or throwing anything within his reach, that it was over, that we would simply go back to doing the project as a duo as before, he fumed and said, “Well, I quit! Don't blame me for not having anyone to play bass for you tonight!! Your problem, not mine...” Although he did show up to play a very sloppy show with us, following the most awkward and tension-filled rehearsal I had ever before in my lifetime experienced, and which took place only about an hour before we were scheduled to go on stage, he had huffed and puffed during the entire set and even lashed out at the owner of the livehouse during our soundcheck. 

And so, that was that. Again. 

The second time “my band” had broken up in a period of less than three months.

I was on a roll now…

The very next day the drummer phones me up to say he has decided to quit as well, and that he will now concentrate on doing the trio with my ex-bandmates.

"Good luck to you," he says. "See ya."

The gecko had died, and so now, too, had its muse.

Now, I find that I am really, truly alone. 

Quite alone, indeed.

Another brief aside, and on a more personal note: 2016 was also the year I had separated from my wife. (This was why the drummer and I were able to record at my apartment without interruption, since by then I was living alone.) And so, well, though I am generally not exceedingly superstitious, Google-sensei’s suggestion that seeing a gecko would imply some "major life changes" had indeed turned out to be a rather accurate prediction, after all.

 Made of Thin Glass (PART 2 of 2 - continuation)

And so...

The problems basically started after the first couple of shows.

At some point, the guitarist seemed to decide (without announcing it to anyone, or maybe he told the others and not me, since the bass player would often relate to me things he'd told her in private, things that would have been rather helpful for me to have known about beforehand!) that he would arrange, or rearrange, all of my compositions in a fashion in which they ended up sounding as if they were, and had always been, his songs, or perhaps they ended up being the kinds of songs he had wanted to do in the band from the beginning, though they sounded nothing like my original demos in terms of atmosphere or style. Increasingly, over time, he started completely ignoring what I'd arranged, sometimes even changing the chords/chord structures, time signatures, etc., and "my songs" started sounding like '80s-esque hair rock anthems, or else prog rock-ish songs with long solos and lots of instrumental breaks. 

One reason he had perhaps felt so emboldened to freely and openly mangle my songs over time (I can only guess at the actual reason or reasons, but this is a hypothesis) was that, after our first couple of performances, people started to constantly gush and rave to me, as well as to the bassist and drummer, about how great the guitarist of my "new band" was. Once, even, someone who had watched us perform said to me right after the show, quite rudely, I'd thought, that I'd better practice guitar harder, since, as the lead singer of my own unit, I was no match for my guitarist’s "totally amazing" guitar-smithery. Undoubtedly he had caught wind of many of these comments, not to mention that the other members of the band continually praised his “brilliant” arrangements of my skeletal acoustic demos whenever he presented them to us during rehearsals. In other words, he had all of the outside encouragement he could ever have asked for or wanted.

Of course, I was still very much at the time a total beginner, technically and otherwise, when it came to the guitar, and I also had no experience arranging songs for an ensemble either; all of my songs were presented to the guitarist as basic acoustic demos with vocals, and I had depended on him to add the additional spice: the intros, the outros, the breaks, and those flashy, technical guitar solos, too... He, without question, had devoted years to learning fast "licks" and complicated chord structures, and he also, unlike myself at the time, could do basic song arrangements, recording them in LOGIC (before I knew the first thing about how to use it, though his mixes, frankly, did not sound very professional, either to me or to the other members, who agreed with my assessment privately; this is one reason we never attempted to record an album, or even any EPs or singles, as a band). It is therefore not difficult for me to now imagine how he must have viewed himself as an expert, the expert, or certainly at least the most knowledgeable and able member of our group, since the other two members knew nothing about "DAW," and as I was then primarily concentrated on learning to play the guitar and writing new songs for us, and wouldn't begin exploring the basics of recording and mixing (at first via GarageBand, later LOGIC) until some months later. 

Whatever the reason, or reasons, there was always one person -- and one person alone -- who was not pleased with the way the songs ended up being arranged, rehearsed, and, eventually, performed by the band. Can you guess who it was?

Let’s take the song "The Day I Cried” as an example of what I am talking about.

This was originally a slow, emotionally-sung, minor-chord gothic ballad I had written. In what became “our version,” a heavy rock riff the guitarist had apparently saved "for something" over the years -- this was how he had put it when he presented his new arrangement to us for the first time during a rehearsal -- was rather, I'd thought, haphazardly inserted, turning my melancholic dirge into an uptempo rocker. The emotion I had invested into the original could no longer be expressed vocally, and I had to practice hard to be able to do the chord changes as quickly as the guitarist had pushed them in the band arrangement of the song (wang-chung-wang-chung), not to mention that the acoustic sound I had wanted to emphasize in this piece had been electrified, the song essentially become a heavy metal/hard rock number…

Here’s another example.

"Box Man," in my original arrangement, was (and still is, in the versions I have since arranged and performed, both solo and with other projects) a funky, uptempo piece with lyrics inspired by Kobo Abe that instead became a showcase for our lead instrumentalist’s guitar riffing. The "Gecko version," as I'll call it here, had excessively long instrumental breaks, with a time change early on in the song reminiscent of the one that comes in the middle section of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," in which he and the other members could show off their chops, whilst I, during rehearsals, could have taken lengthy smoking breaks between singing my few vocal lines -- that is, had I been a smoker.*

*Actually, this was a running joke I made to the other band members when the guitarist wasn't around, as a way of expressing my dislike for the song's arrangement; I also, toward the end of our days as a barely-four member unit, began referring to his arrangements of my songs as his "remixes."

I was now unable even to hold my guitar when we performed “Box Man” on stage, as the chord progression I had created had been incinerated, and also since I could not play like Jake E. Lee on the acoustic (nor on the Telecaster, for that matter) to keep up with the parts he had made for it. And so, in rebellion, the one (and only) time we performed his slow-then-fast drop-tuned Iron Man-era Black Sabbath-meets-Court of the Crimson King-era KC arrangement of my originally shorter, funkier, in fact rather uptempo (!) and also vocal-centric (now guitar/bass/drum-centric) song together live -- a performance which was captured on video and posted to YouTube by an audience member, by the bye -- I picked up a large cardboard box from the side of the road on the way to the livehouse, carefully folded it up and stashed it backstage before the soundcheck (it was a surprise for both the guitarist -- who had missed soundcheck, due to his work schedule -- and the audience alike), and then sang (with mic in hand) onstage from inside the box, moving to and fro while inside of it during the intro, popping my head out of it during the short vocal sections, then retreating back inside during the longer instrumental sections whilst the band did their thing. (At one point I shook a tambourine, which had been my "instrument" when I was the vocalist for Chattering Man, influenced more by '90s Nine Inch Nails than by "Tambourine Man," for the record.) Though it is true that my little stunt evoked a lot of oohs and aahs from the audience, I was seething the entire time…inside of the box. It was hot in there, too, I can assure you, and not easy to sing in full voice either!

And so, perhaps you can surmise what began to happen to the relationship between myself and the other three members of my beloved reptilian band over a relatively short span of time? Our interpersonal problems were exacerbated also by the fact that the other two members tended to agree with the guitarist at our "meetings" about most things, and so overturned my suggestions and opinions about the songs’ arrangements, our live setlists, the artwork for flyers, etc., time and time again. Not only this, but the guitarist was ever tight-lipped around me, only expressing himself openly to the others when I wasn't around, so I tended to hear his opinions about things, and about me, "second hand," either from the bassist or from the drummer privately, both of whom were generally always in agreement with him when it came to the band, tending to show their unanimity whenever we were all four together. This made me feel that my position as a member of my own band, and as the so-called “band leader,” which was what the bassist always used to call me (I began increasingly to resent this appellation, as it seemed perversely euphemistic, a sort of repeated slap in the face), more and more tenuous.

There was one significant instance I shall never forget, however, when the drummer and bassist had readily agreed with me, albeit only outside of earshot of the guitarist.

I had created a vocal melody line for one of the guitarist's then-new demos on which, for the first time, he had unexpectedly added "bell sounds" to indicate how he had wanted me to sing it melodically. (Before he had left it up to me to determine the vocal melody lines along with the lyrics, which I always wrote and sang in English.) As it felt totally unnatural and wrong to me when trying to do it his way, I ignored the bells (and for whom they were tolling) and came up with my own melody for the instrumental song, just as I had always done before, and always with everyone's full approval. When I shared the result with him and the others in the usual fashion this time, however, he was outraged, saying that I had ignored his suggestions and therefore did not "respect (him) as a songwriter." 

After the other two members insisted I give it another shot, apparently because they just wanted to "keep the peace," I reluctantly but sincerely tried to redo the demo "his way," following the awkward bell sounds like Hansel trying to follow a trail of crumbs through a dark forest. Once again, it came out totally unnatural, awkward, the lyrics having to be almost completely rewritten (also rather awkwardly) to fit into the pattern he insisted I follow, as if trying to complete a "connect the dots" diagram that would only result in a bunch of incoherent scribbles. I did finish it somehow, though I myself was not very fond of the results, and eventually presented it to everyone. Well...this "new version" -- and I had stuck rather rigorously to the constrictions he had so strongly set for it, had honestly done the best I could with it, though it still felt totally wrong to me -- was met with quiet nods and a sort of, "Ahh, mm, I see..." look of thinly-veiled disappointment on the faces of the other members, though I don't actually remember exactly what the guitarist's reaction was. I think he maybe said something like "Let me think about it some more," or something vaguely along these lines...

In any case, afterwards no one again mentioned the song/demo during rehearsals or meetings, no one suggested we try the second version (nor the first, for that matter), and I certainly wasn't about to bring it up again either, since by then I couldn’t have cared less about the damn song if the author of it didn't like the first version I had offered and wasn't even willing to realize that it was more natural than the "bell demo" style version he had insisted on, not to mention that his bandmates liked the first version better, too, and that he was acting like a stubborn ass (donkey’s ass). The drummer, in particular, had been very fond of the first version I had proffered, and expressed to me in private (as well as to the bassist) on more than one occasion -- and always with a look of utter disappointment on his face -- that he wished we could try playing the vocal version together the way it had originally been presented. All I could do was shrug and tell him to discuss it with the songwriter, the one I had apparently "disrespected" by so presumptuously messing with his awkward tinkling melody line without first getting his approval.

The thing that really got to me about the whole thing, to be honest, was not that we didn't end up doing the song that I had taken the time to work out a melody and lyrics for (I actually didn't particularly like the song in the first place, but I always did put my all into making the vocal arrangements for his songs -- our songs -- the best I could, as I was still nominally the "leader" of the band, and as I would be singing them during rehearsals as well as live); it was that neither the drummer nor the bassist had the guts to tell the guitarist that they liked my version better, which is why we ended up not doing the song in the end at all. If the drummer, in particular, loved the first version so much, why couldn't he just say so directly to the guitarist? Why couldn't the bass player? Or, if not that, then why not do so at a meeting, with all four members present? Power in numbers, right? Majority wins, no? Heck, why not take a vote on it, as they essentially always did with the arrangements of my songs all of the time?* How about rock-paper-scissors instead, maybe, to ensure complete and total fairness?** No way...I wasn't going to be the one to do it, because then it would be assumed that I was being egotistical, as he had already accused me of "disrespecting" him "as a songwriter." I no longer cared about the song at all after this incident, but the experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

*My suggestions for the arrangements of my own songs were invariably always shot down by the other three. And indeed, we did end up doing his arrangement of "Box Man," which I hated more than any of the other arrangements I also disliked, yet still put up with, and I expressed this rather openly (and strongly) on any number of occasions during our rehearsals and meetings. Could it have been, I wonder, that the street here was a bit one-way after all, perhaps?

**石拳、両拳、雀拳 or "Janken" (ジャンケン) is often used in Japan to determine who goes first or last in a match, who has to do something everyone else either wants or doesn't want to do, etc. It's a bit like flipping a coin, or "letting chance decide" when the members of a group cannot work out how to do things in any other way. How the game works is simple: If you open your fingers into "scissors" and your partner holds out a straight hand, or "paper," then scissors wins, since scissors "cut" the paper. But "paper" wins over "rock" (a fist), since paper will "envelop" it, and "rock" over "scissors," since a rock can smash the scissors, but scissors cannot cut through stone. Perhaps had I realized at the time that this might have been an effective, democratic, non-violent option, we could have resolved some of our larger disagreements about song arrangements, whose flyer design to use for promoting our shows, which songs to put into our setlists and which to cut, etc. this way. Am I being ironic here? Do lizards sometimes have love affairs with toadstools?

"The Day I Cried" was sped up in the guitarist's rock arrangement because, apparently, my version was "too slow and depressing," as the members had so kindly explained to me when I questioned why my song had become an uptempo, '80s-sounding rock number, and so, eventually, was "Never Change," another of my songs that we'd earlier done in a different, more moderate-tempo arrangement, one that was much closer to the original feel I had wanted in terms of how the song might be approached as an ensemble, and which, I felt, therefore, did not need to be “fixed." In the case of “Never Change,” the guitarist apparently suddenly decided on his own one day -- or perhaps one evening after his day-job ended and he was at home, fondling his guitar in front of his amplifier -- to come up with a new “alternate” arrangement of my song, one he'd also decided -- without ever asking me what I thought about it -- we would now perform this “alternate” way during all future rehearsals and shows, a decision/action he took, let me say again, on his own, the other members only too-thrilled to jump on board with his idea, since they never questioned his arrangements or ability to “improve” my songs. This, essentially, made clear to me his intention not only to destroy any future arrangements of any future songs I might write and propose to him/the unit, but also that he could and would all but too-gladly take the ones he'd already arranged, and that we had already practiced and performed together, and further toy around with them so that they ended up sounding more like retro electric hair-rock with longer guitar solos and instrumental breaks.

And so, well, yes. Did you not see this coming...?

The band finally splintered in the summer of 2016, our last show followed by an emotional shouting match between myself and the bassist a couple of blocks down the street from the venue where we had performed earlier that night, the bassist promptly running back to tell the other two members (as well as all of our other guests/friends who were in attendance; I heard about this after-the-fact from an “insider source”) what a horrible person I was, setting the rumor mill spinning and ensuring that "my band" would come to a rather messy end. And so, that was that.

Or was it?

In the following days and weeks, having quickly written and recorded a new song, "Fragile Reptile," about the dissolution of my band, primarily as a way to process just what the hell had happened after that last show (note that, although the guitarist had already by then expressed to us that he had decided to leave the band and form his own instrumental unit eventually, the ending had come more swiftly and “violently” than any of us had expected), I begin (shifting back to present tense now) focusing more and more on my own acoustic solo performances, which already I had been doing “on the side” while we had still been together as a four-piece unit, having learned from my previous band experience that, if I wanted to do something, to get something done, I had to do it by myself and not depend on or wait for anyone else. I also start playing the electric Telecaster solo live, sometimes with distortion and using a drum machine I had purchased to accompany myself sans drummer. Additionally, I start learning how to make my own home recordings sound better, how to add programmed drums and other, additional sounds or instrumentation to the acoustic and vocals I’d been recording and later re-recording at home. Eventually, I would use these elements, sans guitar and voice, as backing tracks, run through an iPad Mini, in lieu of the drum machine.

And here, then, is the tail of the tale, or at least a (dis)section of it...

Several weeks after the band split up I discover "through the grapevine” (or the “sour grapevine,” perhaps -- as not even my drummer, with whom I was still at this time collaborating in a separate unit [as I will discuss in the next section of the essay] has the nerve to tell me about it, saying, when I learn of it via another channel, quite sheepishly, "You know, I didn't want to hurt your feelings...") that the remaining three members -- i.e. the guitarist, the bassist, and also the aforementioned drummer himself -- have reformed as a trio, sans me, sans vocals, even, doing the guitarist's original songs as instrumentals, which was apparently what he'd really wanted to do in the first place, to have “his own band” where he was the legitimate “leader” and could focus on his own instrumental compositions without need of a pesky, complaining, non-Japanese vocalist who couldn’t play guitar like a rock star or even do a single solo, who wrote too-dark songs, used chords that weren’t specified on the standard "rock" chord chart, who refused to learn to write songs in a more "J-pop" style of songwriting (he once told me, point blank: "You should learn how to write Japanese pop songs. It's for your own good!), and who was (me) at times moody and outspoken and difficult. Now, he (the guitarist) had two willing “yes-yes” instrumentalists to aid him in his mission. Good for him/them! I had thought to myself at the time. Now they have their own band. I'm free of it! I'm released...

Sour grapes, indeed.

The truth be told, I was extremely heartbroken and depressed by this news, feeling that I had been betrayed, even backstabbed, to put it more bluntly. This was the proverbial rubbing of salt in my wounds, especially since they had even tried to hide it from me at first, the three members I had introduced to each other with the intention -- though obviously it was to have been a collaboration, and that compromise and mutual respect would also need to be a necessary part of the equation from the get-go -- that this band or unit or project would essentially be, in theory, at least, “my band/project/concept” rather than, again, in theory, “the guitarist’s band/project/concept,” but that this was exactly how things had turned out in the end… 

Or, well, this was how I had viewed it at the time, through the lens of my own fragile emotions, as fragile as the band itself had been, ultimately, as I had not yet at that time developed either the maturity or the ability to take a few steps back and reflect on my own rather poor behavior at times, should I focus the laser on myself now for a moment, so many years later, with a much cooler head (and, too, a hopefully more balanced, if not completely objective, perspective). Indeed I had, in retrospect, overreacted to many things I should have calmly considered instead, taken some deep breaths before speaking or getting overheated, kept my own ego in check a bit and maybe even have walked away from the situation much earlier on, before things got so out of control, my frustration and feelings of drifting further outside of the circle I had myself initially formed growing exponentially stronger with each subsequent rehearsal and performance. Much conflict would have been averted had I not overreacted so much; that much is for sure. The band, for a time, really devoured me from the inside, both while I was in it and also for at least a year or more afterwards, particularly when I could see, via friends' SNS feeds (all of the members blocked me on FB, and many of their closest friends followed suit, as well, but there were still some "friends of friends" with whom I was still connected for a time afterwards, and news travels oh-so-quickly...) that the other three were performing in their fine feline unit at livehouses around town, at outdoor summer festivals, and so forth, and also that the people who had at first started coming to our shows to check out my new band -- many having known me as the “vocalist for CM” -- were now following them, but had “abandoned” me and my solo or collaborative activities...

It was not an easy time for me. I wrote a lot of songs to try and deal with my unresolved feelings, resentment, regret, and anger during the end of 2016 and through 2017. It was another of life’s difficult, but important, lessons to be learned.

And there were more such lessons to come. 

Many more.

They were waiting, in fact, just around the corner...