FLAT EARTH SOCIETYFlat Earth Society is Dimentia 13’s pop album. It was 1989 and I had been making Dimentia 13 records for five years. Two years before the first Dimentia 13 release I’d been a member of the hardcore punk band Zero Defex who had also been on a few compilation albums. After seven years in the music business at age 25 I had yet to be able to earn anything close to a living wage and I was getting desperate. It’s amazing how old you can feel at 25.
In spite of being known as a hardcore punk guy in Zero Defex and a psychedelic dude in Dimentia 13, I had always been interested in pure pop music for its own sake. In those days I wrote songs constantly. When preparing the Dimentia 13 records I tended to pick the most psychedelic pieces from among the dozens of demos I made each year. Or else I’d dress up the pop songs I wrote in psychedelic clothing, adding vintage Farfisa organs or Mellotrons or fuzztone guitars to disguise the goofball pop songs underneath. Which is what most of the original psychedelic bands of the Sixties did anyway.
By the late 80s a lot of vaguely psychedelic and overtly Sixties inspired bands were selling records and getting noticed by the emerging “alternative” scene — bands like REM, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, The Stone Roses, and a boatload of others now long since forgotten. I wanted a piece of that action. So I decided to tone down those elements I felt were tying Dimentia 13 to the narrow confines of garage/psych revival scene. There would be no Mellotrons or Farfisa organs, no sitars or backwards tapes, the fuzztone guitars would take on a more contemporary sound, and I would admit musical influences and lyrical references from after 1967.
I also worked out a new guitar sound I was particularly proud of. I bought a giant red hollow bodied Eko guitar, made in Italy in the late Sixties and plugged it into both a bass and a guitar amp at the same time, added some vintage spring reverb and turned it up to seventeen. In the studio it sounded amazing. Unfortunately that sound didn’t transfer well to tape. You get a hint of how awesome it was on the James Bond theme-inspired riffing of album’s first song Can This Be True Love but elsewhere it gets lost.
The band on this album was me on lead vocals and lead guitar, Jeff Lisk on drums, Joe Nofziger on bass, and Louanne Varholick on vocals and keyboards. Jeff was a hot shit drummer in Chicago at the time. He was very good and he knew it. His playing on the record is really sharp and precise, but it's a little too clean for my tastes these days. Joe had been my best friend since seventh grade and kindly drove all the way up to Milwaukee from Columbus, Ohio to play on the album. Louanne had been the bassist on the previous album, Disturb The Air. But she was a better keyboard player and singer so I had her do what she did best instead of being hampered with the bass, which she was never all that enthusiastic about. The musicianship on this album is far tighter and more professional than on the previous Dimentia 13 records.
I hoped the resulting album would help me break out of the tight bound confines of the pysch genre and maybe even make some money. In the end, though, it didn’t sell any better than the previous Dimentia 13 records. In fact, it did a little worse than the albums that came before. In the end, it was the final album I put out on Midnight Records.
It took me a long time to start liking this album again. At the time of its release I thought it was great. But when it met with poor sales and critical indifference I started looking at it as a failure, a reminder of a bad time in my life and a misguided attempt to sell out and be commercial. Nowadays I can listen to it and enjoy it, but for years I couldn’t.
These days I sometimes play a couple songs from this album when I give talks about my books. Buddha Was A Good Ol' Boy always gets a laugh and God Pt. III, which I also play at speaking gigs sometimes, is a prototype for some of the topics I write about these days. In fact the lyrics on most of the album are really philosophical and very much inspired by the Zen training I’d been going through for close to a decade by then.
Here to tempt you into buying the album are two tracks that I had intended to include as bonus tracks on the download. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I think I just spaced out and forgot to send them to the people at Smog Veil Records who arranged the download. The good news is that you now can have them absolutely free of charge. Hopefully they will act like the first taste of crack a dealer gives you and make you need to buy the rest.
SKULL SHINING
This instrumental was meant to be a bonus track on the original CD release. But it never made it on there and I don’t remember why. It’s based on a riff I once heard the Meat Puppets play. It’s also the most overtly psychedelic song recorded during the album sessions. So maybe that’s why it was left off. I like it a lot now and if I could I would make this the first song on the album.
TELL ME WHERE SHE’S GONE
This is probably the most overtly pop song recorded for the album. Again, I don’t recall why it was dropped. In fact, I didn’t even remember recording it for the album until I found it on a cassette about a year ago. I remember thinking at the time I wrote the song that it had the potential to become a college radio hit. So why would I have left it off the record? Who knows? Anyway, I was especially proud of ripping off one of the riffs from the 70s prog rock masterpiece Hocus Pocus by the Dutch band Focus in the middle section.
MOTHThis was the final album I recorded as Dimentia 13 for Midnight Records. It was never released by them, though, because I had a huge argument with the record label. I felt like I deserved to be treated better. In retrospect they treated me pretty fairly. It’s just that they were never very open with me about what they were doing. Whatever.
I remember trying to correct some of the mistakes I’d made on Flat Earth Society with this record. I was no longer so obsessed with making a contemporary sounding album. So some of the overtly psychedelic sounds I’d eliminated on Flat Earth Society are allowed to return. The result is a much more balanced album. It’s still more of a pop album than the early Dimentia 13 records. But it’s truer to what I really wanted to hear.
Because of the disputes with Midnight Records, this album was never really finished. I made a mix that I submitted to Midnight. But it was awful. I was trying to recapture the sound that Glen Rehse had created when he produced the Disturb The Air album. But I didn’t really know how he accomplished it. So I just overloaded every track with reverb and echo until the whole thing sounded like it had been recorded in a cave. It was a murky depressing sound and for years I thought of this as a murky depressing album.
Then late in 2009 when I was cleaning out some old boxes I came across a cassette of rough mixes for the album. These were created as reference mixes to guide in making the final mixes later. I told the engineer to simply make all of the tracks we recorded audible and not add any effects. When I listened to these again I discovered that the album itself was not murky and depressing at all. It was just all that reverb and shit I added on later.
For the currently available download version, I used these rough mixes and ran them through a digital mixing system to bring out some of the nuances. The only song on which I used the mix I had considered “final” back in 1991 was Anjalina. The rest are rough mixes.
The band on this album was the live version of Dimentia 13 as it existed in 1991. I sang lead vocals and tortured the guitars. Joe Nofziger, my best friend since seventh grade plays bass and sings backing vocals, and Steve McKee, once the drummer of my favorite Akron-based punk band The F-Models plays drums.
The lyrics are a kind of autobiographical rock opera about my return to Akron after three years in Chicago. But that would have been such an incredibly mundane subject for a rock opera that I never let anyone know that’s what it was. The Pamela Song is about a girl I dated in Akron. The Calico Girl in the song of that name is someone I left behind in Chicago. That same girl is also the subject of Panther.
Anjalina isn’t about a girl at all, but is about my friend Jim Bradler who had died a few years before very suddenly when he was only 25 years old. The song lists off a whole string of phrases he used to say, like “give me her number.”
Precious One is my attempt at writing a Badfinger song. But I was too embarrassed to use the original heart-on-my-sleeve romantic lyrics I’d written and instead wrote a bunch of psychedelic sounding nonsense. Love Song '73 was my attempt to write the kind of song The Partridge Family might have played in 1973. Again it’s about someone I knew. Walk Like An Insect contains my poor attempt to do a rap about the then-current state of the country. Another Song About Heaven is a parody of the band Warrant, who were huge at the time. The reason I wrote a Warrant parody is because Joe had been in a band called Blu whose drummer Steve Chamberlin had moved to California and joined Warrant. We’d both been friends with Steve and were kind of amazed by this.
Honey I'm Your Ghost was an attempt to write a Cramps song. Lux Interior was from Akron. Smash Your Head was about the frustrations of trying to make it in the music business. Somehow all of this stuff related to Akron and what was happening in my life there at the time.
I still really like this album. I know it sounds egotistical to give your own record a glowing review. But I was trying to write and record songs that I personally liked. So, of course I’m gonna like them! But I feel like this is a happy, upbeat album even though some of the specific subject matter is not. It’s an album about fighting the good fight even when you feel like you’re probably going to lose in the end.
Here is my favorite song from the MOTH LP, available for free on this here blog to hopefully make you feel guilty enough to buy the rest:
Anjalina
