Liberty St.

One morning in May of 1997 I awoke to the phone ringing off the hook. It was Mark calling-"Hey, I found a place for us to live!" I hadnt recalled our conversation about even living together, let alone me moving out of my parents house. I was just getting use to my bedroom again and three square meals a day. But that was Mark for you. He always had some new project to work on and usually they required insane amounts of time and effort. He said that aunt Irene was sick and that she had to move in with his aunt Erica. They made a deal that if we cleaned the house out and painted inside, we could live there rent free. He didnt even give me time to think twice about it. He picked me up 20 minutes later and we were off to 114 Liberty street to look at the house.After Grandma T. died, aunt Irene had become a total recluse. She developed a severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and started collecting anything she could get her hands on. I pictured the inside of the house the way it was the last time I had been there. Spotless and well kept. But when grandma died, the house keeper hit the road and Irene was on her own. One day she just stopped cleaning, or maybe she never started. We walked up the driveway to the front steps. All of the memories were coming back to me about playing music in the basement and just the smell outside the house made me think of grandma T. But when we entered the house, all of that was quickly erased. I couldnt believe my eyes. Irene had filled the entire house from wall to wall, floor to ceiling with random stuff. Junk mostly, and garbage.There were trails leading from the kitchen to the bathroom to a space on the couch big enough for one person to sit on. There were ash trays overflowing with cigarette butts, dirty tissues thrown about. Stacks of news papers and magazines. Piles of dirty laundry. Small plastic shopping bags full of miscellaneous items. Empty cans of cat food. Stacks of old phone books. A huge box of cheap greeting cards. Old video tapes and beta tapes. Paperback books and records that looked like they had been through a flood. Appliances, broken VCRs , broken stereo equipment. Bags full of empty soda cans. Old toys, sports equipment and board games galore. Tin cans full of nails, nuts and bolts and auto parts. Dead flashlights. Broken furniture. You name it, it was probably in that house. We opened the door to one bedrooms and the entire room was packed with clothes. Packed solid, right up to the door so that when we opened it, the clothes became a wall flush with the door frame. When we emptied out the clothes we discovered a smell coming from one of the bedrooms that was surely something dead. A squirrel had somehow found his way into the house and made a home in the dresser, where it perished.Upon investigating the kitchen we found a box of cereal on top of the refrigerator that had been there since we were 12 years old, and discovered a set of Christmas lights...in the microwave. Mark was ready to start cleaning the place out. He didnt realize that this was going to become a full time job.We started out the next day filling garbage bags full of junk. But the bags were getting expensive and it became impractical. We made separate piles of miscellaneous items that we called “bins“. We had a bin for wicker baskets and one for purses. It took up the entire living room...a bin for shoes and one for telephones. We emptied one room into another, getting nowhere fast. Goodwill received huge donations of stuff during the first week. But they too were running out of storage room, and turned us away. Marks dad ended up renting a huge dumpster that took up almost the entire drive way. We just through everything out from that point on. Stuff that people could have used. We entertained the idea of a yard sale, but that would require twice as much time organizing, and pricing items. We also thought maybe we would just let people come and take what they wanted, but we didnt want anyone taking something that wasnt intended to go. We worked day and night. There was no point in getting real jobs. We figured that would just slow us down and living rent free would make up for not having jobs. And it did for a while. It took us the entire month of June, working 12 hours a day or more, just to get the house emptied out. To this day I have not worked so hard in my life. During the time we had been getting the house ready to move in we were listening to a lot of oldies on the radio. On the day we started painting, I bought the new album Being There by a band I had never heard of called Wilco. I became obsessed with the CD and it was a huge influence. I had been writing little bits and pieces of songs and music since I returned from Ohio. I was still making up stuff that sounded somewhere in between the Beatles, punk ock, and Americana although I still wasnt sure what that meant exactly. Mark and I started coming up with ideas one night to record a full length album.. When we got settled into the house, we recruited our old friend Dana Owens to play bass, called the band Boy Wonder, and started recording in earnest. Using two four-track recorders and a computer would allow us to record and edit onto tape and then add infinite overdubs. We turned the house into a makeshift studio and lived around the equipment, often times moving a cymbal stand out of the way to watch television. Once again we were pulling all-nighters doing take after take, drinking caffeine, and going to bed at sun rise, all summer long. We had friends over round the clock. Jeremy Golembiewski, Paul and Matt Toliusis, Isaac Rzonca, Dan Anderer, Juanita Davis, Becky , Laura, Joe Burke, Joe Diprima, and Brad Winkleman. Most of the time they would just sit there and watch us make music. Sometimes they would get in on the recording process, pushing the record button on the machine, or contributing to a clap track. Mark and I took turns playing guitar, bass and drums. We shared one microphone to sing harmonies and would spend hours just perfecting one backing vocal track. It was like someone had turned on the faucet, and the creativity just poured out. In addition to the songs, we made hours of sound effects recordings, including the sound of our cat Sammie and the music box that went on forever and ever (just when you thought it was running outit would start playing again slower and slower). We ended up recording lots of conversations- and we talked about everything, not just the songs -absolutely everything. Dana didnt stick around to work on the recordings to often, he usually just played his bass parts and left. He didnt really want to have anything more to do with it than that. One night Joe was there and during one of our breaks he hypnotized us. We ended up at Big Boy and Joe had me screaming at the top of my lungs for a refill.We recorded Falling Feeling, two versions of Massieville Rd. Song, The No Incident, Spinning Pennies, Thats What I Know, Starshine, My Philosophy, and a version of the Beatles tune Tomorrow Never Knows. I also made some demos of a song called Stupid Promise. We ended up mixing four of the songs and making them into a demo tape which we sold at a couple of shows. We mostly gave the tapes away. But we did the whole project ourselves and to me thats what mattered most. We did a lot of bonding during that time. It was a magical summer. I loved living in that house and making those recordings.
It was one of the best times of my life.