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Scott: The Intro part of the song was literally the first thing original thing I hashed out on my first bass, before I had an amp. I was looking around the fret board for "2-note chords"... things I could do with more than one string at a time, having really no concept of a chord. The sounds rang out from this un-amped, hollow-body McCartney-type bass, and I thought "that sounds like a Sonic Youth sound. Is this all they are doing?"
I found all the 2-note-chords I could find on the fret board, and I jammed them all together into a little "acoustic" riff-thing that I thought could be the intro to a song. I was thinking about the way Metallica's "Fight Fire With Fire" started with a classical guitar thing before moving right into the thrash zone. I figured I could do this with a punk song. Once I came up with the Deadman parts, I put this intro in front of it and the song was done.
The drum machine had 49 drum samples on it, and most of them were boring as hell. My two favorite sounds were the gated snare and gated kick, as they sounded the more aggressive, unnatural, and industrial. I detuned each and made a drum loop out of it. I loved the pattern and jammed with it over and over, just enjoying the beat and playing what came to mind.
The body of the song is the simplest thing in the world but I fucking loved it. I had quickly realized that the main riff of AC-DC's "Back In Black" was just 3 open notes, and if they could do it, so could I. The second riff was just a small piece of the intro passage, which tied all the parts together perfectly.
Where I got the idea that I could perform the song by myself is beyond me, but it worked, and I have been doing that kind of thing ever since to some degree. I suppose I had played it over and over and worked it all out before bringing it to rehearsal. I had envisioned Deron and Amy playing feedback or some kind of noise during the song, but neither was comfortable with that kind of improvising as I recall, and I was really OK with playing this one alone. They thought it sounded good "as is", and I agreed. It was the only song that I really thought it made sense to play solo. For "Pools" or anything else at the time, playing solo was not the original intention.
Heavily influenced by several passages on Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising, which is the only Sonic youth album I ever really liked. I was even chant-talking like Thurston Moore, whether or not I realized it.
At that age I had a lot of thoughts, fears, or fixations related to annihilation running through my head. One such recurring image was of being hit by a large truck, so I wrote about it.
This aesthetic - the distorted interval "half chords" played on bass, solo, with or without drum machine - it really stuck. It is the activity that has brought me the most creative enjoyment throughout my entire life, and it started here, 20 years ago, with the first song I wrote on a bass. That makes this song very significant to me.
Deron: Really loved this bass part. Remember sitting at home learning it myself. Another great drum part too.
Amy: A heroic bass line that belongs in the annals of punk history. This was also the one place on the demo where that "blanket of intense reservation" in our sound, as Scott puts it, was completely stripped. It was raw anger, and extremely poignant for that. Perhaps it represents best what he originally intended for The Comedian to sound like. The feedback at the end is classic. Scott's background as a drummer shines through in the subtle touches of his drum programming here, too. I agree that the gated kick and snare were the best samples on the Alesis: my dad had a slightly different model, and those were the ones I played with.
While Sonic Youth influenced the bass line and vocals, the song structure and drum loop always reminded me a lot of Big Black's "Kerosene."
As in the first run-through of the lyrics, "Truck wasn't hurt, truck was a Dodge…" was supposed to come after "You should've seen his back, man, you should've seen his legs" in the second run-through, instead of closing the song. My dad felt it was fine as is, and it was onto the next track. But the screaming vocal climax, followed by the resigned utterance at the end, works.
This is definitely most like Scott's more recent bass playing, only much slower.
ReplyDeleteThese days I think Dodge would have accepted this as viral marketing.