Strapped on air tanks. Dove overboard...
I was reading the news in 2007 and there was an article about a fisherman in Indonesia that caught a weird fish. Curious, I spent a few hours reading websites about this fish. The fish itself, the coelacanth, was fascinating in its own right. Some of their fins have bony stalks almost like legs (they are related to lungfish.) They have an electroreceptive device called a rostral organ in the front of the skull. Their 'spine' is weird, their kidneys are weird, their heart is weird, their brain is weird. Their skin is oily. They don't lay eggs! They give birth to 'pups.' Go on your own research digression! Read the wiki.
But what really got me hooked (cough cough) was Pieter Venter's website. Venter, a deep sea diver, was driven like Captain Ahab to photograph this beast alive in its natural habitat, no matter the cost.
In October 2000, 374 feet down, he saw some weird fish.
"...a reflecting eye led me to investigate and I was surprised to see three weird, freaky looking motionless fish hovering under an overhang at 106m, which I believed to be the elusive coelacanth."
On a later dive in November 2000, his team succeeded in filming a coelacanth, but a diver died.
"we were back armed with cameras... but, tragically, we lost our friend Dennis. The loss and find of the first filming of coelacanths by SCUBA divers in their natural habitat was covered in the Divestyle January/February 2001. On the one side is the excitement and consequences of our discovery and on the other the tragic accident of Dennis and its consequences. Through all this we organised a further expedition for May 2001."
Is it just me, or is this a really odd way to write about the death of a friend? I mean, sure, the website is about the hunt for the coelacanth, not a personal blog, but damn! This is how it reads to me:
"We did it! We did it! In case any of you are still wondering, we did it, and we did it FIRST! Check the journal, bitches! Damn straight. Oh yeah, Dennis died. Bummer, that. Onward science! Can't wait to go back."
They started training for a May 2001 dive and another diver died.
"While still coming to grips with Dennis’ accident, the sudden unexplained loss of Erna was a hard reality to deal with and I [thought] to call the expedition off. The press also had a field day calling it the “Curse of the Coelacanth." After we learned that it was a freak accident resulting from a heart condition, we decided to go ahead... Despite explanations for both Dennis and Erna’s accidents, I sensed a cloud hanging over the team, which is not good for our stress levels."
This guy was hell bent on documenting that fish! Damn press, mocking his expedition. And so annoying that all that death was affecting everyone's stress levels, too.
There was constant danger. Nobody else died, but there were close calls. On one dive Venter himself almost died when a weighted shot line came loose from the buoy and started dragging him down to the depths. He didn't notice because he was busy filming. Lucky for him, another diver saved him.
There was also the danger of getting bitten.
"Timm and I, after a search of 3 minutes, found a massive female coelacanth, probably 2m, lurking inside a cave. She was fearless, rather curious and approached Timm head-on while he filmed it, I kept my distance thinking of the 3cm predator teeth and the cranial hinge allowing it to open wide and suck its prey into its mouth, imagine the news headlines."
Imagine the news headlines? The press was always in this guys mind.
So I started condensing this story into a song. It's a compelling story, all I really had to do was trim down the facts, but I also wanted to capture what I saw as Venter's motivation: recognition. This was not a man who was just enjoying an intense and dangerous adventure. He wanted to plant his flag on the moon!
During the terrorism-alert years of Bush II, I had written a song titled "Burning Rubber" that used the same music for the verse but had totally different lyrics.
Bounce
like a ball and burst into flame
Spoon until morning, drift into dreams
Try to hold onto joy as your mind prepares
Afraid of a suitcase bomb somewhere
Better off when you believed in the game
Before it blew up in your face and left you ashamed
Of your old complaints and desire
To set the world on fire
Now you're seeing someone new
Some friend of Michael's
But there never was room for two
On your motorcycle
Never look back, never regret
Is the wind in my face why my eyes are so wet?
Burning rubber
That song wasn't working so I kept some of the musical ideas but threw out the lyrics and melody and started over from scratch. My first draft chorus was this incredibly wimpy section where I sang "coelacanth... how did you survive" in a pretty voice.
There still is a cool vibe to that demo, and the part at the end works much better than it does in the final album version, but that old chorus is awful.
During the time I was working on this song, I met Joe Bennett while watching the 2006 world cup in a bar in Brooklyn. Joe and his brother Robin, in addition to having started the UK band Goldrush, also throw a music festival in the UK every summer called Truck. This year they are starting an American counterpart: Truck Music Festival in America. It's not far from Woodstock, NY and will take place April 30 - May 2. I'm going to be playing, with my new band. Get tickets soon, before they sell out.
It was a happy accident to meet such a distinguished musician by chance, especially one with such compatible taste. I invited him to play at the Grand Lake Folk Festival the next summer, where we debuted Coelacanth (the old version) in our set. Joe invited me to play at the Truck Festival in the UK but after I arrived it was cancelled due to flooding, so I ended up getting drunk on box wine, biting someone who tried to stab me, sleeping in a stranger's tent, and later forming an impromptu a capella group in the bathtub at Mark Gardener's house (of the band Ride.) That story is encapsulated in the song How I Allegedly Bit A Man in Glouchestershire, which I have not recorded yet.
But Joe deserves special mention for saving my life while I was in the UK, which made it possible to finish my album. In my drunken state, I might've unhinged my massive jaws and swallowed someone whole. Imagine the headlines.
It wasn't until after I had already recorded Coelacanth at Slaughterhouse Studio, with Sturgis on drums, that I was able to envision a new chorus and bridge, so I scrapped that recording. But I was running out of time and money, so I had to record it all hastily myself in Dan Thiel and Tevah Platt's attic. The new bridge is probably influenced by all the Fujiya and Miyagi I was listening to then. Dan played the drums, and James Walton, another MC Frontalot sideman,played keyboard on the bridge. Joe happened to be state-side at the perfect moment and recorded harmony.
I didn't have any expensive plug-ins for my music recording program, and i only had a few good mics, so my capabilities were limited - you can tell by how different Point of No Return and Coelacanth sound from tracks like Caught Off Guard. I did what I could. Dan Cantor managed to fit in a few hours of attention to help me get the vocals a little bit more tolerable (they were bone dry and a little out of tune.)
Then I suddenly panicked because I realized I had recorded
"Freckled like white stars in the sky / With armor and nine fins"
but I wasn't actually certain how many fins there really were. I found a website that said nine, but several that said eight. Oh no! If I was inaccurate about one of the fish's stats it would undermine the whole song. That's like a song about a platypus that talks about its teeth. Unforgiveable.
The problem comes down to defining what counts as a fin. The tail of the coelacanth is triple-lobed and kind of split into two parts, so you could count it as one or two or even three fins. Also, there's a single fin on the lower side of the fish, near the tail, that I might have assumed was part of a pair, since the other two fins closer to the head come in pairs. Stupid weird-ass fish. Joe was already back in the UK and wouldn't be able to re-sing the word eight. I sang the word "eight" for both of us, but it sounded really obvious and bad when Joe's voice suddenly turned into mine for one word, so that didn't work. I emailed my "eight" to Dan Cantor who had the mix at the time, and he didn't think it mattered much, but I was insistent. "I don't care if it sounds weird, just lower Joe's part relative to mine and make sure I'm singing eight, not nine!" Listen closely, and I'm sure you'll notice.
Mar 2, 2010
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