ojas
Audio:
Lifespan: 1992-1997 Personnel:
Low Point: our final gig was attended by four people. Guitar Rig: Marshall JMP-1 MIDI preamp, Digitech IPS-33B Harmonizer, Mesa/Boogie 100-watt power amp (always cranked full up), ProCo Rat, Ibanez Artist or Fender Stratocaster Plus Ultra Story: A few months after starting school, I saw an ad for a new band forming. The ad was fairly typical for Berklee - "prog/jazz/rock" - but it added "folk" to the description. I'm not a folk music fan by any stretch, but it seemed to suggest that the music might have a more emotionally direct basis than the norm. I went to the audition and met the bassist and bandleader, a tall guy with long blond curls, and his drummer, a stringy guy with long straight black hair and a grace about him. The bassist was most interested in what kind of original material I could write, and I played him a few riffs I'd written for the occasion. He liked what he heard, and kept pressing me for more material. I finally dipped into my Landscape Paperweight catalog, with the disclaimer that I'd written this music five years hence, and played a noisy, strummy tune. He didn't like it much, and later that day I got a message on my voicemail that he thought I was a good player but that he "didn't like the old stuff I'd written". Whatever. That seemed to be the end of that, but a few days later I got a call from the drummer, Chris Clanin. He had found a bass player in one of his classes and wondered if I was interested in getting together to play. (Later, he'd tell me that it wasn't my playing that he liked so much, but that he had seen something in my eyes that said I'd experienced pain in my life, which he could relate to. I'm still not sure exactly what he saw, but I'm glad that he did.) I showed up in the rehearsal room with my semi-hollowbody Ibanez Artist and Roland JC-77 amp (a Berklee cliche), not sure what to expect. Andrew Johnson was a strong-looking fellow with a surfer haircut and a low-slung Fender. I started things off with the first riff I'd played for the "folk-prog" bassist, and Andrew and Chris immediately locked into it. I couldn't believe the power of their playing. We played around with a few more things, and agreed to meet up again. Andrew handed us each a cassette of his previous band, Transilience, to listen to in the meantime. Transilience had enjoyed a high degree of success in Washington, DC, bringing 300-person crowds to places like the 9:30 club. They were devastatingly original, and almost brash in their talents. They mixed the high-gain DC sound with the clashing harmony and indecipherable transitions of 20th century classical music, and surrealist lyrics. (The singer, Spookey Rueben, would later go on to sign with TVT records for a decent solo career). I was pretty intimidated, and sat down to write a few complex, off-kilter things to bring to the next rehearsal, in the hopes that my modest skills wouldn't be so apparent as if I tried to play along to something they wrote, and that they would be challenged simply in writing an accompaniment to my parts. This continued to be a driving motivation for the life of the band. I brought my riffs to our meeting, and they dug into them as at our first rehearsal. Andrew declared that he'd write an arrangement with the parts. Write an arrangement? I'd never even used the term "arrangement" before. To me, songwriting had always involved a verse hook, a chorus hook, a bridge, and perhaps a contrasting intro or outro. The next time we got together, Andy proceeded to show us his arrangement. It was unbelievably complicated...he'd written new parts to complement mine, parts which shifted tempo and meter and key and feel, sometimes only lasting a few seconds. The chalkboard looked like the playbook for a 25-member football team. Both Chris and I were a little mystified, but we gamely tried to play along and invent our own parts. We started to schedule regular rehearsals, and Andy and I would sometimes get together separately to work things out, in addition to constantly writing new parts. Andy became the de facto arranger, and he required so much material to work with that we needed to always be in writing mode. The "tunes", as they were, started to take shape and make sense, though they would often stretch eight minutes or more and necessitated a constant watch on the blackboard. It was a blast. They were easily the best musicians I'd ever played with, and among the most skilled I'd ever heard in my life. I often felt as if I was surfing along on top of their thunderous, polyrhythmic attack, sometimes playing only one chord while they churned out a thousand notes. It seemed like the only natural response, as it might have sounded like pure chaos (not that we were above that) if I was also playing fast, and the fact was, I really couldn't have kept up at their speed if I tried. I resisted buying a distortion pedal for a long time, until it became a point of argument. That, combined with my limited chops on the instrument, led to a point where they weren't sure I should continue with them. But I gave in and bought a Rat, and started to really hunker down and practice diligently, and it made the difference. When I bought a harmonizer, it seemed to really cement my role, as I could now create textures that went far beyond instrumental abilities. Through it all, there was the constant sense of challenge. The challenge to our skills, challenge of creating music with originality as the prime directive, challenge of keeping focus and making some sort of sense even while creating 12-minute suites. It almost felt like a game to present a baffling riff in 17/16 or something and see what the other two could possibly play to complement it. We decided to try to add a singer to the mix, as the music was still ostensibly "rock" and we thought a vocal would provide a reference point to draw the arrangements together. We created an ad which listed something like 200 bands and composers we liked and pasted it up around town. Our first respondent was a female singer who sang opera in her spare time. Though we liked the idea of someone with operatic abilities, she didn't quite seem to understand the complexity of the arrangements. Jonathan LaMaster was the next one to show up. Jonathan was a handsome ex-fratboy who had a deep interest in complicated, noisy music. He was immediately enthusiastic, had a decent vocal range, and his ability to play violin seemed promising, too. After much private discussion among the three of us, we invited him to join, after the first audition. Jonathan started writing lyrics for our growing body of work, sometimes with contributions from Andrew and myself. Chris and Andrew were both studying engineering at Berklee, and were able to swing us free recording sessions (often in the painful 2 a.m. - 6 a.m. slot), so we started to record a demo. Sessions were a challenge, as the arrangements were so lengthy and complicated that making it all the way through without errors was tough, and the student engineers would get quickly frazzled trying to make sense of the sections we'd ask them to rewind to. There was also the issue of sounds; I was using the harmonizer extensively, Chris had a DrumKat MIDI controller and rack of sound modules in addition to his large kit, and Andrew eventually bought a MIDI bass preamp with a lot of built-in effects. John had a fairly straightforward guitar setup, relying a lot on the Big Muff fuzz, but would sometimes play violin too. Eventually we got a demo together and started to play locally. Though we attracted a few die-hard fans, mainly from Berklee, most people reacted to us with confusion and impatience. We asked a lot of a crowd, with the tremendously long songs, high volume and occasional "noise" or "chaos" sections. Jonathan would sometimes push us to include a shorter, catchier tune to warm things up and draw people in a bit, but we were obstinate about ignoring such considerations. In the spring after my first year at Berklee, we decided to look for a place to live together, to facilitate rehearsal and songwriting. We found something in the Brookline neighborhood, with two bedrooms on the first floor and two in the basement. Chris and I ended up with the basement rooms, possibly because I was a pushover and because Chris needed the biggest room available for his huge mattress, extensive book collection and piles of clothes (he preferred to buy rather than wash). There was an open area in the basement between our bedrooms that served as an ideal practice space. Thus was born the Ojas house. We quickly assumed roles; Jonathan had a 40-hour a week job and was the "responsible" one who took care of bills, Andrew seemed to usually disappear with a girl behind his closed bedroom door, Chris cranked up the heat in his room to 75 degrees and would meditate there among Alex Grey posters and heaps of clothing, and I was the housekeeper who cleaned the stove and made granola and would bring home bags of food from the Berklee cafeteria each night. We rehearsed when the mood struck, much to the consternation of our upstairs neighbors, argued extensively over religion and philosophy, and held the occasional nudist party. It was, in short, the quintessential band household. (One of my favorite memories of Chris from this time was his habit of boiling spaghetti, dumping Ragu sauce over it, eating half and stowing the remnants in the fridge, still in the pot with a fork protruding for easy access.) Jonathan was from Iowa, Chris was from Indiana, and both had a number of contacts back home. We started discussing a summer tour to the Midwest, as it seemed like the trip could pay for itself and would be good experience for us. We lined up about eight shows and hit the road in Jonathan's enormous wheelchair-accessible van. We pulled out from Brookline, waving to our various girlfriends, and got just past the corner at the end of our block when the towering stack of amps and guitars stowed in the back fell completely over. After a good half hour of repacking involving a greater consideration of inertia, we set out once more, with Gary, Indiana as the first stop. Our show in Gary was at an amazing art space that Chris had helped create. It was an old theater that now had a vegetarian cafe and gallery space in addition to the stage area. We had the whole evening to ourselves, and we planned a massive two-set list of songs to get through. The second set was planned to begin with Chris, solo, playing an electronic & acoustic solo, joined by John on violin, then Andrew, then finally me. I waited backstage for my cue, which was a certain repeated figure by Andrew, but unfortunately couldn't hear anything except Chris's bloops, beeps and crashes, so I figured Andrew hadn't started yet, though in reality the three of them had been furiously improvising together for several minutes, and were starting to achieve redundancy. One of them finally had to yell "Daryl!" into a mic to get me to come up, a little sheepish, and launch into the first song of the set. After Indiana was a whole slew of shows in Iowa. We stayed in a lot of friends' floors and ate a lot of friends' food, and had a lot of friends come to see us play in college towns. Hairy Mary's, in Des Moines, was a great club, and we played excellently and seemed to actually connect with a large portion of the audience, including the headlining band, Stick. It may have been our most successful gig ever. At Gabe's Oasis, in Iowa City, we played two sets, and while the first was a little lax, the second had some brilliant moments and some members of the audience actually approached the stage to get closer to us (a real rarity). During a solo, I could somehow feel the literal connection between us onstage and these audience members; it felt like Ojas. I remember pulling into Chicago shortly before our show there and having to come up with the money for a phone bill, which had to be postmarked that day or we'd lose our service. None of us had much more than a few dollars for food, so Jonathan had to cover the rest of our lazy asses, which was typical. Though we'd driven eleven hours for the show, we were rewarded only with a set by the locals "Butt Gravy", who left the place after their set, taking all eight of their friends (who made up the entire audience) with them. We played to literally no one except the bartender in the next room. After our return to Boston, we played local shows for the rest of the year, recording occasionally, and took one more out-of-state trip, to Virginia near DC where Andrew hailed from. We opened for the great Babe the Blue Ox (who seemed to hate us) and generally mystified the meager crowd, though they began showing some interest after Jonathan let out a blood-curdling scream during the middle of one number. Sometime after that road trip, I started to feel dissatisfied with the band in its current state. The original three of us often talked about the fact that Jonathan wasn't as musically knowledgeable as the rest of us; it seemed that his vocal melodies and violin playing didn't contribute as much as we'd have liked. I was also growing a bit resentful, I think, of his desire to play guitar, as I took up plenty of space with all my effects and preferred to be in charge of that department. I also missed the feeling that Andrew, Chris and I had when it was just us, where we felt capable of doing anything we wanted and had absolutely no boundaries. Finally, Jonathan's musical opinions didn't often fit with mine, and though we bonded over Midwestern rock like Bob Mould and Arcwelder, I just didn't feel the connection with him that I did with the other two. Over Christmas, everyone else went home while I stayed in Boston, had a brief but powerful fling and generally did a lot of self-examination. I came to the conclusion that I cared deeply about the band, but just wasn't happy with Jonathan as a part of it anymore. I let Andrew and Chris know about this when they returned, and while they were surprised, they didn't fight my opinion. They just said that I had to be the one to raise the point. Jonathan returned and we called a band meeting. He was full of ideas about where to go next as a band, but I cut him short and laid out a little speech that I'd been writing for a while. I told him that I didn't feel the connection with him, musically or personally, and I that I didn't want to continue in the band with him. Of course, this absolutely came out of left field for him, and he didn't know what to say. Finally, he managed to say that, well, then the choice is up to Andrew and Chris about who to stay with. They indicated, with a lot of apology and while indicating that it was clearly me who had the problems with him, that they'd stick with me. Jonathan bolted to his girlfriend's house, and I bolted to mine. I felt really bad - I mean, he was a bandmate, a housemate, and a friend - and I'd basically told him that I didn't want him in my life. But I knew that it's what I wanted. In two weeks, he'd moved out and we replaced his place in the house with an Italian guy who cooked us some delicious meals. I didn't see Jonathan much again in Boston, but we met up years later, when his band was playing at the side stage of the Knitting Factory in New York, and I'd stopped by the club to see Marc Ribot. He told me that he didn't bear me ill will, which I really appreciated. Jonathan would go on to play with Saturnalia and Cul de Sac, becoming very active in the East Coast improv/noise scene. Back as a trio, we weren't quite sure how to proceed. We loved playing together, and wanted vocals, but weren't at all sure about auditioning anyone new. We went ahead and booked a show as a trio in the Berklee cafeteria, where student bands would play each week. We brought on a few guest musicians, and dressed up for the show, something we hadn't really tried before. Chris and I both wore skirts, and Andrew attached a helium balloon to each one of his dreadlocks, giving him the look of a clown Hydra. It was a great show and we were reported to have created the loudest sound ever heard there. Some time after the show, as we kept kicking ideas around for how best to continue, I told the fellows that I wanted to "audition" as vocalist. I wrote a few lyrics and tried to sing them over our cacophony, but I knew it wasn't working and we didn't discuss it afterward. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but Andrew then decided to try his hand. He went into the studio and laid down some tracks on top of our instrumental recordings, and lo and behold, he had an AMAZING voice. A huge range, nice tone, vibrato, pitch, everything, combined with his natural gift for writing completely messed-up harmonies and melodies. It was exactly what we needed, right in our own backyard, as it were. We both took immediately to writing lyrics, which I loved to do and hadn't much indulged since high school. With Andrew as a true singer, I found a place for myself vocally as a kind of foil, shouting or speaking things and occasionally throwing in a melody. The first track we completed together, "5000 lbs of Unfinished Laundry", was a watershed, showing that we could make voices work equally on a level with the rest of the music. We left behind most of the songs we'd created with Jonathan and began writing as a threesome again, but based on our own lyrics and vocal ideas. We had to move out of the Ojas house that summer and into a new place that we shared with a co-worker of mine, that had no rehearsal space at all. We were tired of the Boston music scene, and the Boston winter the previous year had been especially vicious and had lasted well into May. I think we also felt like matching our new start as a band with another change. We decided to move out of the area, and San Francisco came up as an option. Some good bands we knew had come out of there (Faith No More, Thinking Fellers, Residents, Melvins), and it was a sure thing that the climate would be better. Chris and Andrew flew out that fall, and I followed behind, hitchhiking. It took us a while to get adjusted to the new city, but we finally got a rehearsal space and started practicing and writing again. We started playing whatever shows we could scrape up, usually Mondays or Tuesday at the Cocodrie (the old Mabuhay Gardens) or the Stork Club in Oakland. We began to get more serious about incorporating costume into our live shows. We put together white hard hats with working light bulbs sticking out of the top to use during a certain piece. Once, I rented a mermaid outfit to wear, and Andrew nailed a pair of Doc Martens to a pair of upturned buckets, sprayed the whole thing gold, and wore a tuxedo to go with it, in tribute (believe it or not) to a particular song. When we got lazy, I would simply wear a housemaid dress, or a full Boy Scout uniform, or we'd put on blank, expressionless Botoh-like masks. After our first year rehearsing in San Francisco, we honored an agreement we'd made with Chris and found a space in San Mateo, in Marin County where Chris lived. It was a long bus ride for Andrew and I, so sometimes we'd both ride on his massive red motorcycle across the Golden Gate bridge, the guitars on our backs pulling us backwards even as I leaned forward, my helmet knocking his with each gust of wind. Our space was in a dusty enclave called Hun Sound, notable for being Sammy Hagar's rehearsal spot of choice. There was an amazing collection of promo shots from full-hairspray 80's metal bands tacked up around the office; it was never clear if their presence was intended ironically or not. We shared a space with a Marin band called Flannelhed, who were nice guys and classic heshers. Our spot was a loft which had been built above their well-established digs, which necessitated a perilous ascent up a ladder (especially tricky with a 4 x 12 cabinet in tow). I think in this space we really came into our own. We rehearsed twice a week without fail, always working on more material. Shows were infrequent, and always on Tuesdays at the same old Stork or Cocodrie, though we did play the Hotel Utah and Starry Plough once each (both times, receiving compliments from the staff in addition to the sympathetic admission that we were really too loud for their small spaces and couldn't play there again). We began to record again, first at a small digital studio in Marin, then at a friend's Pro Tools setup, and finally on DAT by ourselves in the space itself. Though we tried to find kinship with other bands, there was simply nobody else like us. Bands like Idiot Flesh seemed to be in our genre, but their Burning Man/circus sideshow aesthetic really came from a different place than our full-bore, high-tech, blindingly complicated art music.** We had no money (not even a vehicle among us - many times we'd take a station wagon cab to a gig, then another one back again), no decent clubs that would book us, a tiny fan base, and no idea how to do any better. After five years as a band, we started to doubt ourselves musically, even revisiting old arrangements to chop out whole sections in an effort to make them more understandable to the listener. In some ways, I think this was the beginning of the end. Finally, in the spring of 1997, Andrew took a gig as a bassist on a European tour with another band. This time apart left us each with time to think about things, and when he returned, we realized that we'd simply run out of energy, and called it quits. It seems that the indie rock community began to get more interested in complicated music in the late nineties, which could have helped us find an audience. I also wish the Net would have been more accessible when the band was alive, I think that would have helped us find other musical oddballs and given us more of a sense of belonging.
My biggest regret is that our accomplishments were never really recognized. I think the band will always be one of the most original, artistically successful, and absolutely uncompromised things I've ever been a part of. I'm extremely proud of what we did.
Some fractal links:
Wikipedia entry on fractals.
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