Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

The first time I ever played music in front of a crowd, it went about as badly as it could have possibly gone. I was playing with my first band, a jam band called IT, at legendary NYC venue CBGBs at one of their Sunday night showcases. As a huge fan of the CBGBs scene in the 70s and bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, I had hyped up the gig in my own head past the point of any realistic expectations. However, literally four measures into the first song, I popped a bass string for the first time in my life. I didn’t even realize what was happening at first; I’d never broken a bass string in almost ten years of playing. The string just kind of disappeared under my fingers. Once I put it together, I panicked, as I didn’t even know if I had extra strings and my gig bag wasn’t even onstage. I ran off the stage and frantically tried to find my gig bag in a sea of identical black gig bags. The band meanwhile, just started improving on the main riff of the song (an E blues). Eventually I did find it, and it had my extra strings. I put it on as fast as I could and got back onstage. The rest of the show (for me) was a mess, finding myself out of tune more than not. At one point while I was tuning, I couldn’t get it, and Nolan, the guitar player, had to come over and tune it for me. It was a pretty embarrassing spectacle, even more so given the stakes I’d given it, along with the fact I felt I’d let the band down. We didn’t get asked back, and were broken up less than two months later anyway. So by any standards, it was a disappointment.

Despite all the craziness however, it was unbelievably fun. We had a bunch of friends show up, smoked blunts in the basement, partied at the bar, and brought the whole circus back to Nolan’s Brooklyn apartment where we smoked and drank and played music all night. I had my acoustic bass there (I would end up moving in pretty soon, but am unsure if I was already in by that point) and we just spent the night jamming, reading poetry, smoking weed, and getting drunk. Any bad feelings from fucking up the gig were a million miles away. Everyone was having a blast. At one point, I started playing this bassline, based around an Am scale, just up and down. Kinda funky, kinda dirty. I looked over at our keyboard player, Daryl, and he was deep into a vibe, singing something. When I listened closer, I could make it out. “It hurts me… it hurts me more… it hurts me… it hurts me more…”

A few years later, when George and I jammed for the first time at his loft on North 6th street, we were mostly just improvising, feeling each other out. I was never the kind of guy that knew a lot of covers, so we were kind of wanting for material. At some point I busted this riff out and we worked on it. I had the lyrics – we’d never really turned it into a formal song, mostly because the band broke up, but I loved the riff/lyric combo, and it was easy to play & sing at the same time, so it was one piece that was always in my repertoire. So it was kind of natural that it would be a song. I always wanted to keep it fast and short, and real simple, some kind of cross between Violent Femmes and the Ramones. Two verses, a cello solo, a guitar solo, and a third verse and that was it. It clocks in at 2:22, but it always seemed long even at that.

I never liked the third verse. I couldn’t decide between the lyrics we eventually ended up with and my alternate version:

It hurts us, it hurts us more than them
It hurts us, oh, and it will ever end
It hurts us, oh it hurts us more than them
It hurts us, oh hurts us more than them

lost third verse

That would perhaps be more natural after “It hurts me more than you” and “It hurts you more than me”, the two lyrics that start the first two, but I think I was going for more of an edge at that point, and chose what you hear on the album. Reflecting back on it, it seems pretty clear that I chose poorly.

There’s not a lot to say about the recorded version. There’s a nice reverb on the cello, and I have some nice bass figures under the guitar solo. But it is what it is. And to my knowledge it’s maybe the only song from the IT era that survive in some official recorded form. I did solo acoustic versions of our songs “The Ballad of Bubbe and Zayde” and “Breath of Life” a handful of times, and I still know the basslines to most of the songs, including Nolan’s ” Pimpin’ “, the song on which my A string flew out from under my fingers at CBGBs all those years ago. But as a recorded song, it stands alone. I don’t think it was ever going to capture the manic raw energy of those Brooklyn years, but how could it? I mean, check out this completely spaced out version from a 1999 rehearsal:

Or the insane “Where the fuck am I?” energy from this version from the one time we played in Maine, at a place called The Wharf (4/24/2000 according to the tape):

Perhaps some things are best viewed from a distance.

Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

In 1998 I moved from Albany, NY, where I attended college, to NYC. The days that followed were completely magical. I’d fallen in love, formed a band, played live, was doing some of the best art of my life and had a tight crew of some of the best friends I’d ever had. Two whirlwind years later I was out, on my way to Maine, having run out of money and goodwill. I came back about 13 months later, but much had changed. A lot of those friends had left the city. When those that remained would get together, it was different, stressful. I was learning the hard way that when people changed they changed all the way, and that while the past might not be past, one could live in such a way that it effectively was. By the time Trousers formed in late 2002, my life looked pretty different. My girlfriend had left me, and I was now living by myself. One by one the friends that remained left the city, or moved on in their own way. I guess I was pretty lonely a lot of the time.

This song was inspired by a chance encounter, sometime in 2003, with an old friend from that era. We decided to get together for a drink one night and she ended up coming home with me. Our fling itself was pretty brief, fraught with old anxieties, resentments, and brought up a lot of unpleasant stuff on both sides. What brought us together was this feeling of having been discarded, and that kind of hopeless, frustrating, desperation is not exactly the kind of thing that makes for long, happy love affairs. It is kind of perfect for a rock song however.

The song started with the bass figure that I end the song with. I’d written that two note ringing figure on the acoustic bass I had, itself leftover from the pre-Maine days. But when the song was complete enough to bring to the band, it was clear that that riff wouldn’t work for the bulk of the song, as it made everything too busy. So I reworked the verses to be this kind of plodding E-string riff. Joey kept things real simple on guitar to contrast with the power chords on the verses. The final version features some of Becca’s best cello work; in retrospect, all her parts on all the songs were so tasteful and perfect. She had such a great ear for where to put her notes – you can hear this clearly on the “bridge” of this song, where her and Joey do a double-solo, weaving in and out of each other seamlessly.

The thing that made this song perfect, however, was George’s insistence on doing this four-on-the-floor figure in the chorus. We couldn’t really seem to make it work for anything but I remember this so clearly: one time in the middle of rehearsing it, when George was getting ready to do his thump-thump part, Joey and I stopped playing at the same time and then crashed back into it. It was so perfect, we all looked at each other like YES!! and it was done. One of those magical moments in the studio I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It must have been towards the end of the session because when we were wrapping up the next band (they were either called X the Owl or they were the refugees from when X the Owl broke up) came in and seemed even more excited about it than we were. “We were listening outside, that was great!” one of them said. It was one of those artistic moments where you just know you have something great. We worked the song into our live sets pretty quickly.

I have a pretty decent vocal performance here, though I don’t really remember it being that way. This was one of the songs I was having a real problem with, as it was at the higher end of my register and I had all those high note screams to do. But listening back it seems ok. There are decent rasps where I wanted them and was able to summon my best Gordon Gano impression for the last bit of the third verse. Lyrically I was extremely satisfied. At the time I considered it one of my better lyrical efforts even though ended up I literally going through a thesaurus looking for words related to “Leftover” and worked a bunch of them into the song: “retrieve” “salvage” “scrounging” etc. I think the song has a lot of power. There’s a great reverb on the cello, and Joey’s guitar soars on the outro. I don’t recall any specific conversations about the recording, but knowing that we all had pretty similar ideas about album track placement, we must have been super high on it, slotting it in the coveted “track #3” slot – where generally the best song is supposed to go.

As for the subject of the song, I’ve said enough, though she eventually did hear the song. She said it made her “sad”, but not much else. I probably felt pretty satisfied about that at the time, though I no longer try to evoke that emotion in people. There’s more than enough around already.