One of the perks of being a musician is hanging out with other musicians and trading stories of crazy things that happen on tour. I wrote Stilts based on the story of a musician I knew who told me about his first tour with a punk band and his introduction to cocaine. We'll call him Fred -- in case he wants to run for office some day.

Fred was practicing for an upcoming tour and still getting to know the guys in the band. One night after rehearsal they all went to a bar and Fred was invited to snort cocaine off of some house keys in the bathroom. He had never done coke before, so he wasn't quite sure what to expect. He had done psychedelic drugs, however, so he was expecting something pretty intense and wild. It wasn't until about an hour later that he realized that he had been high. He wasn't that impressed with the drug. He had spent the entire time talking about music gear with some other musicians and feeling like he was really incredibly cool and that everybody was dying to hear what he had to say about amplifiers. But Fred, being a punk musician, didn't really care about gear, and had very little knowledge about it - he was more of a "just plug in some piece of shit and make some music" kind of dude. (Punk Rock Don't Care, as MC Lars would say.) But as Fred explained to me, the thing that was so fascinating about cocaine was that it made him feel confident. It didn't take him on a wild journey or make his imagination take over, like other drugs; it just made him feel confident and interesting. He now understood why it was such a popular drug in showbiz circles, because there are times when you just don't feel up to performing or schmoozing, but have to.

As he was telling me this, I imagined being a director in the midst of some depressing personal drama and having to go on Jay Leno to promote a film I shot two years ago. And then I imagined how, in an attempt to live up to my responsibilities as a performer and promoter, I start doing cocaine to squelch my depression and to feel awesome about myself just long enough to talk about how awesome the film is, and eventually my life spirals out of control and I'm on the cover of tabloids. This little daydream gives me some sympathy for the pressure that comes with Hollywood success.

Back to Fred. Before the tour started, the band would rehearse in the afternoons and party at night. Fred met a waitress who was a friend of the band, and worked at a cool diner that tended to attract lots of musicians and hipsters. The manager of the diner was tight with the band as well and gave them all free food. Fred was flirting with this waitress and she was flirting back. She would join them at the bar after her shift and do cocaine with everybody. The bandmates, of course, egged him on, although they also teased him that this waitress had a bit of a reputation. It didn't really matter, though, because the tour started and they took off in a van. He doubted he would ever see her again.

A few weeks later, the waitress and a couple friends decided to take some days off and fly out to party with the band. The fact that she had flown out seemed like a pretty clear signal that it was ON. Fred came on pretty strong from the moment he saw her, and to his surprise she seemed a little conflicted. It turned out she had a boyfriend, was in the midst of some drama with him, and was seeking escape. Fred backed off.

Then out came the cocaine.

Once everyone else had gone to bed, Fred and the waitress were wide awake and flirting again, but there was nowhere to find privacy. They were already in the bathroom doing bumps so they stayed there. It was a bit awkward at first. They sat on the floor and told stories about high school. Her story was that she had gotten really drunk at some keg party in the woods and started giving blow jobs, and then the rest of her life pretty much changed because she could never live it down. She had been cast as a slut from that day forward and had never been able to shake the reputation. Guys would start assuming she was game and after a while she would just go along with it, since nobody would take her seriously anyway. Despite the drug haze, this admission of the truth came out and she started to get depressed just thinking about it. Fred was initially moved by the story and filled with sympathy. But it wasn't long before he got impatient. Then incredibly bored. Then horny again. It was the drugs.

He was flying pretty high at this point and she was just getting depressed thinking about past regrets. The evening wasn't turning out how he had hoped. With a renewed sense of seduction, he decided to take off all his clothes and take a bath, and he invited her to join him. She did, probably spurred on more by the drugs than real desire. And then he realized that he didn't really desire her either. And then they both remembered that they were in relationships, yet there they were, naked together in a bathtub, in a strange town, in a stranger's apartment, and he was laying on the seduction thick and cheesy, helping her replay the role of promiscuous party girl despite what she had told him.

That was the last time Fred did cocaine.

Rico Marcelli composed all of the music for this song, I just wrote the lyrics. The first draft we recorded was a little different:

She was a waitress at the only cool diner in town
She wasn't happy but she kept herself busy
with the wild nights, with men in her life, with family feuds,
with her late night friend who knew all the dudes
with powder and herb to lighten her moods.

She was a waitress at the only cool diner in town
She wasn't happy but she kept herself busy with an
accumulated unintended reputation
in a scene that was small and so she'd slept with them all
she met a beautiful boy at the bar
he'd never met her before
never heard about any of her
accumulated unintended reputation

I really wanted to add real drums so I brought in Sturgis Cunningham to play along with the tracks. Anand Nayak and I were discussing the track and he was distracted that the song changed from third person to first person (later lines like "Let's take a bath, I'll lather you up in foam") and second person (do you feel low?) and wondered what it would be like if I wrote it all as a dialogue between the two characters, so I gave that a try. The final lyrics are here. I changed some details, decided to make the the encounter take place at the female character's apartment, and decided to just go with the fantasy of a successful one night stand instead of trying to capture the subtleties of the girl and her past and the ambivalence that everyone felt in Fred's version of the story. That might be a mistake, as the song loses some emotional depth, but the chorus still refers to it obliquely. "Do you feel low?" kind of hints at it. But there's a lot of story left out. It just turned into a fantasy of supreme sexual confidence instead of a poignant take on drugs and escapism, and that's probably because, at the time that I wrote it, I was on the rebound and feeling emotionally guarded and in need of some fantasizing myself.

Does this song deserve to be on Underhill Downs? Is the song too silly, too inauthentic to be on a record that tends to have such weighty moods?

I have lots of friends who skip this track, to be sure.

But I wanted to put it on because, to me, it fits the theme of the record, which is all about "getting your nerve back" after a breakup. Stilts represents that phase where you're sad and want escape, where you put on airs to get sexual attention, where you're both needy and invulnerable, and kind of just playing around with people because nothing really counts, you're just rebounding. It represents a kind of phase in the process where you're kind of a dick. But an entertaining one.

May 5, 2010

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