Prentious, however, is exactly what it was. I made the band do a "jam" every week in 2009 just so we'd have ideas, and potentially, should fortune ever smile upon us, old, "before they were famous" style tracks. I was inspired pretty heavily by Rivers Cuomo's "Alone" series of CD, which were a fascinating look at the songwriter's dense and interesting history. Every little song had a place in his story, and sometimes a story all its own. As a storyteller and songwriter, that pulled all the right chains in me. That's how Ask Me Next Week's "In the Basement Vol. 1" came to be.
It was actually pretty funny that I called it "Vol. 1," since at the time I'd assumed there'd be plenty more jams. As it turned out, the jam we did after I'd made the CD for "Vol. 1" was our last one. The band broke up in September 2009. You know, "creative differences." It seems like the go-to answer for breaking up a band, but I think that was a very honest way to put it without turning it into a 3 hour Lifetime drama...and believe me, there was certainly enough drama for that big of a TV special. If we took into account the band's four year history, we'd have a nice little miniseries.
We broke up at a seriously inopportune time too, a.ka. right in the middle of recording our seven song EP and coming off of our third show at a very nice place. That EP was pretty badass too, and to me it always seemed like the missing link between us and the rest of the world. It featured good quality recordings of several of our original songs, which was a far cry from the typical live records we ripped from my Dad's camera. If we'd thrown our other two or three original songs onto it, we'd have had a pretty nice first album going. I guess then we'd be totally legit.
The EP
It's really a joy to hear the songs you wrote come to life in a professional form, especially when the guy on the technical end of it digs everything you're doing (he was my father's age after all, and really could've scoffed at our pop punk sensibilities). To this day I recognize and respect that the songs are indeed well crafted and well-realized on the EP, and listening to it is always a trip through nostalgia land and what-if country. That thing was the whole product. From where I'm sitting I can take it off the shelf and look at the album art and the insert and the back of it, and laugh that I managed to spell my name wrong on the inside of it (this error was corrected on copies 3-25, of course god only knows where they are). It's a very real piece of work to me and after all these years I can listen to it as "music" instead of just "my music."
Of course, if I want to feel that effect ten times over, I go to "In the Basement Vol. 1." It never got a physical, handmade form, but it does have album art (seen above), and it does have 19 songs worth of pure, uncut, unedited, unabridged, unadulterated memory on it. That nostalgia? Multiplied. The What If scenario? Intensified over and over again. You see, these jams didn't follow the conventions of our "mainstream" originals. Jams were a wilder, more unpredictable breed, and in some respects much more awesome. One of the songs on "In the Basement" might feature me attempting to do Screamo vocals, another might have no vocals at all, and others will feature each of us taking jives at one another. No real Ask Me Next Week song had slap bass in it.
When I miss being in a band, this album makes me feel a whole lot worse about it. It's not that it's full of excellent jams that'd make the Chili Peppers bob their heads in approval. In truth, the majority of the tracks are plain awful, and that's if you can hear them past the quality issues. If I do sing on something that's not a beta version of an AMNW song, it will feature the best lyrics you've ever heard ("Blehleh la yeaah Nanana I won't do what you say"). Attempts to vary the music by anyone during in the jam will derail the awesomeness pretty quickly. We weren't always together, the four of us, and sometimes two minutes was painfully long (and a few of them went on for quite a bit longer).
So what's the appeal of any of this if it just serves to show off how amateur we were? Moments. Single moments. Maybe it was a single inflection on a note I was singing, or a little guitar riff someone played only once in an eight minute jam, but for a small second, everything just clicked and sparked. Those sparks could've lit fires (funny story: when AMNW reunited over the summer, there was almost an electrical fire in my basement during our first practice). But yeah, it's those little moments that make all of the other little disjointed and off kilter moments so worth it. There's something there in almost all of the jams and tracks. There the kind of thing that, in a few years, would have looked really really good.
It was pretty pretentious of me to save all this stuff, and it was probably bossy of me to force a jam on everyone a good few times in 2009, but I am so glad I did. The little moments I catch in these jams are a very unique kind of fun. It's not like listening to music that's either good or bad. It's listening for the things that came together naturally. It makes me imagine a band like a bunch of lines floating in space: when you're going through a complete song, all the lines run parallel and close to each other, then when you jam, the lines go off in all different waves, some intersecting here and there, and then golden moments when all four or five of the lines meet at one brief point before bouncing all over again.
Pretentious was just part of my style as a band frontman. Ask Me Next Week is a band that you can get into. I've got bootlegs on my old computer of certain concerts, and I have pretty much the whole show chronology on DVDs. There are something like 30 Photoshop files worth of album covers, 20 jams, a disc called "Ye Olde Ask Me Next Week: Steady As She Goes - Gurly on the Run," a mini biography booklet (I have all the pages as files on my computer), pro pictures, custom gig posters, t-shirts, pins, and 25 handmade EPs. That's why you shouldn't underestimate or undersell your local bands. They might have someone like me helming them, doing their damn well hardest to make everything look like a band that had already made it big. Let's face it, if we had been a big band, "In the Basement Vol. 1" would have been just like Rivers Cuomo's Alone series, and I was absolutely ready for it. That mythos that I worked so hard to create would not be as complete without "In the Basement," especially since it's actual music.
Now, it just wouldn't be effective if I let you go without an example of something from "In the Basement." And maybe just as well, since you're not getting anything from it. Nope, instead you're getting ALL of "In the Basement Vol. 2." It consisted of exactly one song. One long, expansive, crazy ass song. It's called "Blizter Jamb." It was named that because playing this son of a bitch gave me a nasty blister on my right index finger...though if I remember correctly, it formed about halfway through and I spent the rest of the song trying not to bust it open and get blood all over my bass. Listen for those little moments when the bass and rhythm guitar mess into a funky groove, when the drums slow down to leave em to it, or when the lead guitars that go on match what everyone else is doing to shift the song from an elevator jam to a Doorsy ride.
And, so that you can start your own personal collection of Ask Me Next Week stuff, here's a link to an album I put together this summer that brings together the EP in its entirety and several other live originals. The only price I ask is comments. Ask Me Next Week may be gone, but that doesn't make it not music.
(For you GDC folk, you can do it in my Music thread, called "Ask Me Next Week and Friends."
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