Stand

Somebody

Sleep

Looking for Light

Hurricane

Birthdays

It was a big house. There were many rooms and lots of space and quite frankly that was all we saw at first. There was plenty of room for us to live there and for the band to rehearse and record.

It was not a perfect house. It was owned by a slum landlord who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the place. It was dirty, the basement flooded when it rained, the plumbing sucked and the wiring was substandard. There were uninvited four, six, and eight-legged residents, none of whom bothered to help with the bills. Previous human tenants had left huge piles of hoarded junk behind: newspapers, bricks, catalogs, melted Tupperware, broken lamps, a non-functioning freezer loaded with ancient rotten meat. . . . The list went on and on.

There were parties at the house. There were girlfriends who came and went. There were roommates who were asked to leave. There was an angry cat named Mary. There were problems with city authorities over the grass that we failed to cut one summer. We didn’t have jobs or wives or house notes and other than making music we had few responsibilities.

FireplaceThere also was a fireplace. It was a great cavernous fireplace that had not seen a chimney sweep in many years. The inside of it was caked with soot and probably posed a serious safety risk. We didn’t care. Winters in the drafty old house could be cold and we burned a lot of wood in the fireplace. When we ran out of wood we started to burn other things, things that should not be burned in the fireplace of a funky old run-down house. We incinerated plastic bottles, throw rugs, golf clubs (not recommended, very dangerous) and anything else that we did not see an immediate need for. We burned things that popped and exploded and gave off great noises and strange colors. It was exciting and scary and we had the time of our lives. But we felt the need to continue, to escalate, to go beyond in our burning.

A desk came next, a very large desk. Every 20 minutes we’d push this huge thing deeper into the blaze. We burned the whole damn thing that night and almost destroyed the house in the process. Other furniture followed: end tables, benches, plastic lawn chairs, shelving units, you name it. With every piece we burned, with every pop and sputter and spark we laughed. We laughed until our sides ached and our faces were sore.
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