Unrequested Liner Notes to an Obscure Punk Album from 2006
~1700 words of notes on an album by my band The Algernon Gordon Effect from the last years of the Bush Era.
The first and only album I ever recorded was in the waning months of my adolescence. I was 18 and on the way to 19 and felt too old to want to be in high school anymore. I needed to go out and do something; I would go to college and not the full-time workforce, unlike the other half of my town that would never go to college. They would never see the point. They might go for a year or two. Rarely they returned later and got an Associate’s or even a Bachelor’s. The people I worked with at the grocery store were often precariously or intermittently students or had been. Usually the managers were the least likely to have any higher education; maybe they didn’t care or expect things to be that radically different from how it’d always been in their families and were fine being at the top of the working class, or even petit bourgeois, like me in my future college-educated destiny. During these waning months I finished up high school and then spent the summer sneaking around to smoke and go to shows, working at the grocery store, looking at the Internet on our dial up AOL-Mac setup in the family basement, and putting as much free time as I could into my first and only real band, The Algernon Gordon Effect. Being in a band that was trying to record music and play shows was a different kind of social experience than I had had in school or on sports teams or in church choir. What I want to do with this journal is try to remember stuff about each song from our one self-published album and through that tell you about the 6 or so months this band spent together in 2006.
“Intro”
The opening song to the album was called “Intro”, I know for sure, and it was influenced by emo pop bands we liked like All-American Rejects and Death Cab for Cutie, as well as more post-punk-style bands like Talking Heads and Arcade Fire, which I realize are from totally different generations, but if you know what I mean then why did you think to point that out?
Paranoia is the vibe I’m going for, which is the vibe I had then as I snuck around to smoke weed, which wouldn’t be legal there for another 18 years. Little did I know, a lot of people in Ohio were smoking weed, and those people had children, and so on, and weed wasn’t as illicit as it seemed to my naive brain. The intro song features my oldest friend Ian Stroud – who I met when I was like 3 or something and still know today – playing keyboard with the organ effect. He was undoubtedly the most talented musician in the band and he joined the three of us about halfway through our journey.
“Butterfly Propaganda”
The first proper tune we wrote, “Butterfly Propaganda” was developed from some noodling around by Bob Dorff, our guitarist and the one who asked me to come jam at what was one of the first jam sessions of the band The Algernon Gordon Effect, which came from the idea of people going from dumb to smart to dumb again as seen in tragic form in the kids novel Flowers for Algernon.
It sounded really awful, to be honest, and my vocals that I came up with over it were just following the exact notes Bob was playing, and except for a few bridge transitions with a little spice, just followed the guitar completely as well on the bass I was playing. David D’Altorio was the drummer and he and Bob had been in a ska band that never took off but had a cool name called Darwin’s Pinto, and at first we were rivals with them on Myspace but then later at the high school Battle of the Bands they came out and supported us and started a mosh pit that got things going. We also covered “Ohio” by Neil Young, “Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan, and “Fight for Your Right to Party” by the Beastie Boys at the Battle of the Bands.
Our set had real crowd activity and I remember getting upset with the teacher supervisor because we had the most crowd participation in our show but didn’t win because some popular kids had their friends all come and vote for them and then leave early. But they didn’t have a mosh pit. The Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Beastie Boys covers didn’t make it onto the album, which had all originals. The lyrics to ‘Butterfly Propaganda” were written while I sat watching an Air Force recruiter sit at his table in our high school cafeteria. I didn’t think the military should be recruiting on high school or college campuses. I thought we should also have government-funded school-to-work service opportunities, like the military, in engineering, teaching, social work, healthcare, parks, transportation, civil service, foreign service, et al., but instead the “only” or “best” route out for a lot of kids ends up being the military, and I just wonder what it would be like it we were offering public service routes for young people in every sector that needs them, not just the military. So the lyrics were a pretty lame metaphor (Butterflies were the air force, the recruiter was a propagandist, etc.). Not my greatest writing.
“Plans and Cancellations”
Next up on the album was “Plans and Cancellations” which was basically written as an overly sincere emo song about heartbreak for a heart that never really got loved in the first place. I wrote the song and then Dave came up with drums and Bob did this octave thing on guitar over my bass line that was inspired by Dave’s brother Darren, who played in a much more successful emo band called Baby Bear; he came up with the octave idea just jamming with us for a few minutes. This was one of the songs on the album that I am still somewhat proud to have created. It was definitely just a Weezer rip off, which is okay because they were basically my favorite band at that time (close with blink-182 and Something Corporate and Pink Floyd).
“Liberation Hop”
Next up after that was “Liberation Hop” which was my attempt at writing a hardcore punk song in the vein of Minor Threat or one of those bands. But, as I think again, I think Bob wrote the guitar part and I added the bass and vocals on top of it. So it wasn’t actually my attempt at Minor Threat, I don’t think…and I don’t know what Bob was thinking…
The lyrics express general angst and political dissent and the song was meant to generate pits when we were playing live.
“Foray Into the Psycho Ward”
After that, we had “Foray Into the Psycho Ward”, which again featured Ian on keyboard, this time playing with a jangly piano effect. This was my attempt to write a blues rock song like the Black Keys, who were not yet massively popular outside of Akron like they are today. Bob came up with a cool guitar lick and Dave was starting to come into his own on the drums.
It has a blues feel and a punk feel and the lyrics comment on how one can be judged insane for standing up against certain things in our society although upon examination one mind find such societal norms to themselves be “insane.” [Side note: I would spend time in an actual mental ward about a year after I wrote this song. You can read a fictional depiction in my novel Walls.]
“The Moustache and the Horn”
Next up was “The Moustache and the Horn” which was about how devilish authoritarian figures can arise from rebellious origins because of the way we treat rebellious adolescents. Ian played trumpet on this one and it was hard for me to play the bass line and sing, so I played guitar and Bob played bass. This was our attempt at a ska song and it definitely fits the definition, tonally or stylistically or whatever. I forget who wrote this. I think maybe Bob.
“We Put the Excess in Success”
Along with “Plans and Cancellations”, my personal favorite was the next song, “We Put the Excess in Success”, which was my attempt to sound like NoFX, who was my one of my favorite punk bands at that time and whose album The Decline was my favorite album at that time. I wrote the bass and guitar parts.
The lyrics are generic left-wing critiques of American politics and economy. I remember Bob was a libertarian at the time and Dave was a conservative and they thought the lyrics were dumb but let me use them anyway. I’m pretty sure both of them became Marxist or otherwise leftist later on.
“Lost”
“Lost” is what I think we called the next song and I didn’t write it. I think Dave wrote it. This was the only song I didn’t sing on. Ian sang. Unlike my raspy punk voice, he sang perfect pitch and everything.
“Larry’s Bar”
Next was a song called “Larry’s Bar” that had no vocals at all and was our attempt at making it like a progressive rock song or something. I was really into the bands Pink Floyd and Yes at the time. I remember Darren told Dave that we should have cut it from the album. I think Ian played bass and Bob and I both played guitar, and I think we both noodled around a lot and called it soloing. We named the song after Dave’s stepfather who had a permanent keg of beer and a little bar stand that said “Larry’s Bar” in the basement near where we would jam.
“In the Clouds”
The last song on the album was “In the Clouds” and this was my attempt at writing an album-ending ballad like Weezer’s “Only in Dreams.”
It was about me imagining getting away from it all and being my own person someday. I should have read Sartre sooner and then I would have realized we’re only as free as we allow ourselves to be in any given situation. Facticity vs. Transcendence. This song was also one of my personal favorites on the album. At the very end it went silent for a while and then I worked in some Winnie the Pooh cassette tape samples that I had found in my closet. We put these together on an album, burned like 100 or 200 copies or something onto CDs, none of which I have anymore, played a bunch of shows, screenprinted t-shirts, and then Bob and I went away to college in mid-August and the band was basically done. We played again the next summer a little bit but never relit our fire we had had in those months from March to August 2006. I remember getting mad at Bob as the band ended about how he had other priorities and some of our shows were sloppy and looking back it’s one of those experiences I wish I could have just lived in the moment instead of needing it to make me famous or successful or whatever other albatross I was chasing. I played in other bands over the years, mainly just jamming and home recording, with only two other shows ever performed live that I took part in. After I finished writing these notes and adding the songs to this document, my memory was correct. I remembered all the songs and their order on the album. I’m glad I have these memories. I tried to look up one of the venues, Orange Street, we would play and couldn’t find almost any info on it other than some AI “research” that indicated there did use to be an emo-punk venue of the same name at the same spot, and there’s a YouTube video or two, and some brief comments on a blog, but otherwise it’s basically disappeared from history, just like our band. I still wonder about this every time I drive past it on North Main Street through Akron.
The Cleveland we would play shows in seemed desolate and now is “revitalized.” If you happened to read all of this and weren’t satisfied with my lack of any significant takeaways from this all aside from pure nostalgic bliss, don’t worry because I don’t plan to write anymore posts that deal with my sloppy punk music from almost two decades ago.