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Dear John Francis,

Needless to say, I was scandalized when, in your zeal to talk about the issue burning in Duluth, you failed to realize that I was talking business when I posited that I had already composed and chosen my song for this, the first contribution to the Duluth Experiment, and perhaps did not even register that I was talking about something other than the actual book by our fellow Minnesotan, F. Scott Fitzgerald. (*see text exchange below.) Okay, scandalized is too strong a word. I was more like “whoa bro.” But anywho, let me talk about the song a bit.

This cut presents a fictional account of some fake bands that I was in before Faux Jean—before Whippoorwill and XYZ, even. I did the first improv of this song on September 7, 2017, as a voice memo on my iPhone, and then started putzing around with it in Garageband a week later. I have been on a wild DADGAD trip for a while now. I proudly name check all of these Twin Cities artists in this song:

1. Fixed Gears are for Jerks and Lesbians
2. The Replacements
3. Hüsker Dü
4. Prince
5. The Blue Up?
6. Steel Shank
7. Velma
8. Chromaphase
9. The Spectors
10. Trip Shakespeare
11. The Hang Ups
12. Rex Daisy
13. The Wonsers
14. Chatty Cathy Cathcart and the Catheter Catharsis
15. The Mediocre Gatsby

These are the lyrics:

1. My first band, 
   We weren’t bad
   We were not trying to reinvent the wheel
   We just wanted to make music
   That was fun to dance to
   At parties in basements, in garages
   That was fun to dance to
   And we called ourselves the Mediocre Gatsby
   And we had our own theme song
   And it went just like this:
2. The Mediocre Gatsby is coming to your town
   That’s right!
   The Mediocre Gatsby is living in your home town!
3. That’s how our theme song went!
4. And my next band, we were called
   Chatty Cathy Cathcart and the Catheter Catharsis
   We were pretty good
   We played around
   We played some parties
   And in the the Clown Lounge
   And people danced and they cheered
   In the Clown Lounge it felt weird
   (in a good way)
5. But Chatty Cathy Cathcart and the Catheter Catharsis
   Had to die, just like all bands must die
   Like Fixed Gears are for Jerks and Lesbians
   The ‘Mats and Hüsker Dü and Prince too
   And The Blue Up? And Steel Shank
   And Velma and Chromaphase
   And The Spectors (and Trip Shakespeare)
   And The Hang Ups (and Rex Daisy)
   And The Wonsers
   Now!
   It is time, to repeat the theme song, of my first band:
6. The Mediocre Gatsby is coming to your town
   That’s right!
   The Mediocre Gatsby is living in your home town!
7. Mediocre Gatsby!

 

So I got this far in tracking the song, and then I accidentally deleted the main file while hastily clearing out space on my hard drive to back up a freelance job that I have since completed. I’d made a few rough mixes of the tune over the next few fortnights, just to check levels, etc. And so the version that I uploaded to Bandcamp was one of these rough mixes, titled:

Mediocre Gatsby 11 9 test low master.wav

I exported it on November 9, testing it at a low output, to the end of putting it into Adobe Audition and screwing with the levels and EQ, but I did not get that far. This is just a direct export out of Garageband… I think. In future, I will be more careful.

The mediocrity that I am singing about has to do with ambition. It seems to me a lot of folks do not realize that ambition has negative connotations. In my case, it involved a burning desire to express my creativity on a public stage without having fully formed ideas to express. The first time I remember doing this was when I moved to Germany after college and busked on the streets there. I was fully in my Fabio Phase. One day, I went out to play guitar for an hour on the street and ended up playing “Sympathy for the Devil” for the entire hour, since nobody stopped to listen and it seemed like I could get away with it. At around the 55 minute mark, a plainclothes police officer shooed me away without a ticket— I was 25 Deutschmarks richer. (This was 1991.)

When I got home that evening to the communal Student Apartment where I lived, my Irish neighbor Dara approached and sang at me: “Matty, you cannot play “Sympathy for the Devil” for an entire hour like that! Therése and I were working in an office above where you played in the street today—with the windows opened— and we just about lost our minds listening to your “woo-hoos!” We know ya got other songs.”  I had exposed them to raw mediocrity, and it pained them.

A second mediocrity came about when my first Minneapolis group, Whippoorwill, disbanded. I immediately formed a new group, Steel Shank, and somehow managed to land a gig at the Uptown Bar before we had any songs to speak of. We had riffs and jams and snippets up the wazoo, but no real songs. Luckily, we had a nervous, youthful energy which helped us pull off this gig without offending anyone with our mediocrity.

Eventually, we got better. Matt Wilson of Trip Shakespeare took us under his wing and produced our first and only EP, Let The Bidding War Begin, which was then released on Washington DC label, BrittleStars, which was run by Will Eastman, former Whippoorwill member and current owner of the U Street Music Hall in DC.  That process made us better than mediocre.

As for the kerfluffle around Twain and Lee, I think it is fine to let some new voices in.

OX&C,

Matty

P.S. If you would like to listen to (and even consider purchasing this song), click >>> Mediocre.

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* text exchange referred to in first paragraph.

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  This is a screenshot of the exchange where I informed John Francis that I had a song related to the Duluth Experiment already recorded (albeit a rough mix, but alas) and ready to go.