Sleeping with Demons

"Straight and True" album dissection, Part 3: SLEEPING WITH DEMONS
You can buy this song here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/straight-and-true/id370407821

The chorus of "Sleeping with Demons" was written by Dan O'Day, lead singer of the River City Rebels. I played bass guitar for the Rebels from Sept. 2008 - Sept. 2009. If any of you recall my previous blog entry which detailed my NYC ennui, then you should know that the Rebels were what broke me out of my torpor and, indirectly, made today's version of The Flood possible. I will elaborate.
The River City Rebels had always loomed somewhat large on my musical radar. When a band from Los Angeles or Seattle gets themselves a nice record contract, it is no big surprise or even a cause for celebration. Bands from these cities, where the music industry is ever-present and the potential of playing in front of a scout is very real, are signed all the time. (This scenario is, obviously, taking place before online networking became prevalent and made location obsolete.) Anyway, these metropolitan bands know how to write for a bigwig's ears, they know how to preen and strut for a bigwig's eye, and they know how to talk sweetly to a bigwig's ego. But when a band from, say, Vermont gets signed to a relatively big independent label, it is a different matter entirely. 5,000 kids languishing in jam spaces all over the State, futilely performing take after take of a song that nobody but their Mothers will hear, perk up their ears. Hope surges through the communities of disenfranchised and exhausted musicians. Demos are re-recorded with a renewed and ferocious vigor. This is, I imagine, what happened when the River City Rebels got signed to Victory Records in 2000. I dimly remember something similar happening to me. I was just starting my first band in the summer of 2000, and the Rebels signing to one of the bigger independent labels of the day suggested an auspicious atmosphere for such an endeavor. I got to see them opening for some of my favorite bands. They would bring big acts right to Vermont, and (on a few occassions) right to WARREN, my town of approximately 1,700 people. Because of them, I believe I encountered music with a more hopeful eye than someone in a similar backwoods environment may have. While other rural rockstars-to-be were sleeping with the demons of obscurity and isolation, I believed that my own place in the punk rock pantheon was something more than a pipe dream.
Cut to NYC. As I wrote in my blog entitled "The Beginning", I had somehow ended up waiting tables and flirting with the idea of abandoning music altogether. The absolute tedium of my job and the ceaseless scramble for rent was threatening to extinguish everything about my life that was artistically satisfying or even marginally enjoyable. In other words, I was absolutely fucking sick of everything that stood in between music and I. Enter Dan O'Day, tatooed, half-drunk, and looking like a slightly worn New York Dolls action figure. I had heard from my close friend Gavin Compton, ex-manager, roadie and Official Truck Stop Fight Starter, something of their travails since they last lived in Vermont. Their first three albums, which had adhered to a more or less generic punk rock format, were the ones that I had been acquainted with in my younger days. Apparently, the year that I went away to college in Montreal, they released an album that broke with the tenets of punk rock in a pretty drastic way. "Hate to be Loved", their fourth effort, was a glam influenced record that ended up garnering them a fair amount of attention. I later learned what a shot of adrenalin this was to everyone in the band. Slash, of Guns n' Roses fame (did I need to clarify that?), wore their t-shirt on stage and spoke about them in Rolling Stone magazine. They were playing to large crowds. They were, I'm assuming, almost drowning in semi- to highly attractive women. They felt the present inexorably marching toward a future filled with stardom and respect. Then something happened. Some people are of the opinion that what killed the Rebels momentum was Dan O'Day calling Tony Brummel, head of Victory Records, and telling him that his recent signings were shit. After all, he did promptly drop them from the label after this phone call, he kept the rights to their first four albums, and (obviously) he refrained from even the slightest advertisement of their music. Others think that it was the stalled release of their follow-up effort, "Keepsake of Luck", that finally burnt the bands wick to it's end. After miraculously securing an 80,000 dollar budget for the recording of said album, a legal battle with the producers led to a year-and-a-half delay of it's release. Once you hear this album, you will realize why this waiting period would be particularly catastrophic: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/keepsake-of-luck/id266625134
It is a remarkable fusion of the punk rock energy that got them signed in the first place and a vastly more mature and melodic musical palate. To know that your band is capable of such music, and to know that you might never be able to reap the album's benefits, could certainly slow the train of good energy and optimism that is crucial to any bands success. But whatever the reason, they had been stranded in obscurity for about four years at the time that I re-rencountered them. Subsequent tours had seen attendance steadily declining, and the band had even toyed with the idea of non-existence. So when Dan walked into my place of employment and asked me if I would like to join them on tour, mine was not the only sense of hope that needed rejuvenation. I joined the Rebels with the idea that my fading dreams of glory could be grafted onto their own dreams of rockstardom, and that together we could stop sleeping with the demons of self-doubt and lost youth and awake to fame and fortune.
Now cut to Lebanon, NH. I had just moved into their 3-bedroom apartment for a quick 3-week preparation for tour. We were learning 25+ songs at breakneck speed, and the days filled with live music blaring in our living room were a welcome relief from the drudgery of my city life. One day, before we left to embark upon our month-and-a-half tour of the USA, Dan came to me with a song.
"Patrick you little bitch," he said "I've been trying to write a verse for this for about four years now. I've never been able to do it. See if you can come up with anything".
In his underwear, with a scarf, a Florida Marlins hat and a Ziggy Stardust shirt on (just to give you a full picture of the scene), he sang this for me: "Sleeping with demons in the still of the night/ With the radio on/ Will break the heart of this man/ This cold hearted man".
A very simple chorus, but I saw it as a challenge. I took it with me on tour. I worked on it while rolling through Cleveland, OH. I sat in the van outside of a Tacoma, WA venue and strummed it on a battered old acoustic guitar. I sat on a couch, profoundly intoxicated, in Pasadena, CA and pushed out mad streams of lyrics that would eventually be thrown away. I hadn't made any progress by the end of the tour, and was still scratching away at it while sitting at a hotel room desk in Indianapolis, where I had gone to spend my winter break. Nothing in particular was sticking, but I wasn't too worried about it. When the proper subject matter and melody came, it would be apparent. All I had to do was wait.
Most of the time, songs that you write don't "come true" in any real sense of the phrase. They are invented scenarios. What's more, they are idealizations of your life and of your mind, and a perfect rendering of how you would act and how you would think if you weren't constantly thinking about your shitty job and your hangnails. However, "Sleeping with Demons" has proved to be a prophetic song for me.
I eventually got the proper subject matter for this song in about February of '09. I was living with the Rebels in their apartment in Lebanon, NH, and working on writing their next album with them. I could not shake the need to complete "Sleeping with Demons", though. So, one night, I was driving around with my roommate and his friend. They were looking for some sort of illegal substance, and I was lying down across the backseat watching the powerlines shoot by. I thought that I was writing about them. I imagined them being secretly in love, making plans to quit their jobs and run away to the big city with each other, where "they've got diners open all night/ And they've got dresses so frilly and white". In an absolute torrent of creative activity, I finished the song before we got back to the house. I recorded it sparsely, just a few vocal layers and acoustic guitar, and played it back. Something about it absolutely glowed. I had never been so satisfied with a song I had written, and it seemed like I had finally broken away from my two default settings (trite cliche or pretentious wordiness) and created something original. But, I was in the Rebels. There was an album to be made. Maybe "Sleeping with Demons" would have to sit on the shelf for a long, long time.
But here is where the prophecy comes into play. I began playing it out at open mic events around Lebanon. People responded to this song like crazy. I can truly say that it is the genesis of the "Straight and True" album, in that the cheers it drew from the thin but enthusiastic bar crowds made me long for my own band. As I said, the Rebels are responsible for the current version of The Flood in that they outlined for me exactly what I did not want to do: play bass in the corner of the stage and stifle my burning need to mash words and sounds together. The same demons of obscurity and isolation that the Rebels had helped me forget as a young country boy began to resurface. I realized that what had been so significant to me about the Rebels initial success, way back in 2000, was the idea that I could do it too. I needed to have my own success, experience my own crushing defeat, and render all of these emotions artistically on my own. It was pointless to try to graft my dreams onto those of the Rebels. So I began to construct the rest of the album. "Lonely Wyoming" was born, "Sweet Janeen" was born, "Passionate Man" came raging forth. And, like "Sleeping with Demons" describes, I eventually rode "through the backroads at night" and arrived at my childhood home. I was going to start my own band, I told myself. So I did. And now that I am actually making the move back to NYC, this song makes me think that my mind knows what needs to happen even if everyday Patrick doesn't. My mind set out what was to occur months and months before it happened, documenting my need to escape before I consciously recognized it. Only now am I realizing this song's prescience. Because, to further the notion of "Sleeping with Demons" as prophecy, a girl has entered the picture. Neither of us have seen enough of this big old world, so I'm going to shine my headlights through her window. We will feel the car purr 'til the warm city lights shine on us.
So, to finish, thank you Mr. O'Day. For this chorus, for a year of solid rock n' roll apprenticeship, and for eventually leading me to The Flood.