I lived in an area of San Francisco bounded by Russian Hill and Nob Hill, next to North Beach, a nice spot with views of Alcatraz and Coit Tower. By 1989 I was exploring every other part of town on my motorcycle, seeking out bars in the Mission, rehearsing the band in a wretched basement in the Tenderloin, and checking out places and happenings in the Haight and Western Addition, as well as crashing parties in mansions in Pacific Heights. I was a fresh-faced skinny kid in a jean jacket, raising little suspicion as a strange interloper waltzing into a party well underway. That felt safer than sitting around a table with people doing drugs or even hard liquor.

One adventure I took on was being an extra for the TV show Midnight Caller, set in SF. I didn’t know I’d be there all day and all night, mostly standing around. They stuck a beret on me and had me sketching on a pad for a shot in Ghirardelli Square. Another scene had me standing around in a crowd outside a brick building. It was the 80s- everything was a little slower, fewer cars on the street. I was broke, yuppies dressed like lawyers, everyone else dressed like Bill Cosby. Entertainment industry personalities, as always, were glamorous and the presentation futuristic, the hair was big and awful, the clothes were drooping and loose, and no one had a cellphone. I haven’t looked, but I’m sure I do not appear anywhere on camera. When they called for “action,” I was giving it my best.

Another extra on the set was a lady that ended up my friend for the day. I got her phone number, and we started seeing each other now and again. She lived on a sketchy street in SOMA, where the buildings were not up to code, probably cottages thrown together quickly after the 1906 earthquake. She was married, and her husband was abusive and violent. I was just young and dumb enough not to run straight away from that situation.

One day I rode out to Golden Gate Park, where she was taking her horse riding lessons, English style. The riding gear and the horse is a striking if not cliched image, which stuck in my mind. I was writing about anything on my mind at the time, trying to learn how to put together songs. In the basement, Flying Color obliged my request to play the repeating riff that makes up “Ride Away.” We jammed on that dirge for a spell, and it wasn’t long before I left the group. The rest of the song came afterward.

Walk into his empty life to save him, and you’ll have to trade him for your own
Put your happiness at stake for his sake, and it’s your mistake you’ll have to live with
Watch them ride away

If challenged to deconstruct my lyrics, I see that whenever I’m pointing at someone else in song, the idea makes just as much sense directed toward myself.  A good design works well no matter which way you plug it in or pick it up.

Piano: Khoi Huynh; Bass: Pete Straus; Drums: Derek Ritchie; The other stuff: CvS

"On The Run" - Chris von Sneidern, all instruments and vocals.
​Released 1991 Mastromonia Records MVS-001, available here

When I wrote the song, I’d never heard the phrase, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” or seen the motivational posters from WWII Britain. The message I was putting out there was to an estranged girlfriend who took up with my bass player in 1992. I did not keep calm. My abject suffering made it into a few songs around that time. It doesn’t seem that big a deal now, strangely.

At this point in my home productions, I didn’t collaborate or have a drummer yet. I spent a day programming the drum part playing keys on a synth, a very tedious process of mapping out the song section by pressing buttons on a menu display. If it takes six hours to do something, it must be good! The track is simple, with added bass, an electric guitar, and my trusty 12-string double tracked.

​When recording, I don’t clone sections or copy and paste performances. If a song has six choruses of backing vocals, I sing them all so each is unique. On this production, I had to build up several vocal parts on another tape, and copy them onto the master. This gave me an opportunity to make an exception and do the hard part just once and paste it into each place I needed.  The timing was hit or miss, and it’s not perfect.  I threw in one extra toward the fade out as well.

I was very excited about this when I finished it. A friend worked at Rhino Records, and she encouraged me to send a demo. Armed with this new gem, I sent a cassette to her in Los Angeles and waited for the call back. Some weeks later, I called my friend. She said, “I played it for Gary, but why did you put the same song three times on the tape?”

“Because it’s so good!” I said. You want to hear it more than once, I figured.  And why only use up 3 minutes on a 45 minute tape, and a bunch of other great reasons. That didn’t go over too well. Did it figure into the reason I was not included in the Rhino Poptopia power pop collection a few years later?  “The CD has 18 tracks, we can’t put this cvs song on three times in a row, no way.”

I was planning on going to a Barbara Manning show one evening, and before I got out the door, I had come up with the bones of this song. I got into it deeper, and decided I was not going out at all. I finished the song, which was originally in the key of A, maybe on a detuned guitar. Either way, the song was moved a whole step down G. Well, the chorus is in Bb maybe. And the verse is C major? It’s possible it changes keys throughout. Definitely not in A in any case.

When I first started recording music in my house, I would spend a whole day programming machine drums, looking at a one-line LCD display on a MIDI keyboard. The final result, after all that work, was not so great. “Open Wide” was the first song I recorded with Bennett playing his drums. My friend Aaron Gregory showed me some basic tips on where to place the three microphones I had.

This song was completed but had no bass guitar, unlike every other demo I worked up. Months after I’d finished it, I’d met Pete Straus. He came in, played bass and sang a bit on the last verse, then had an idea for a big cymbal crash before the final chorus. There were no open tracks, so he hit the cymbal while I mixed the song. I had him isolated with headphones behind a door next to the furnace. We got through the whole song and when the big moment came, he messed up. The second try was the one.

With music, I have always done everything myself, after spending endless hours teaching myself how to do it. There is a personal satisfaction in knowing how to do it all, but I can’t deny my music is generally better when I let people contribute to it.

Open Wide!

“Lines” is a song written when I lived on Ord Street in San Francisco. I had one of those homemade additions as my living quarters, about 300 square feet of space where I also had a separate room I used as my studio. The bedroom had three mattresses stacked up for luxury; a closet divided that area from another that served as my records and stereo room. I acquired a walnut table that I used as a dedicated songwriting desk. 

I kept the desk clear of things. Only small pieces of paper and a pencil were allowed near it. I’d sit with a guitar and that system worked pretty well. The paper was usually expired handbills for shows, 4-up on a page, with blank space on the back. In the ‘90s in SF there were plenty to be had; I’d grab a stack at the record store. Some bands splurged for the heavier cardstock. The small pieces of paper were good for writing bits of verses, lyric ideas, and they could be moved around on the table. And being small, they didn’t “count as much” - I could set aside the weaker ideas but still write them down. Then I’d transcribe the jumbled mess to a spiral notebook.

I’d started “Lines” at the desk, and then brought my notebook to the beach one day. My friend Dale was surfing and I tagged along. He braved the waves at Kelly’s Cove, and I thought about my roommate- the keen, chatty one. He was a nice enough guy but got all jacked up on coffee then would talk your ear off and follow you if you walked away. I worked on the song for a half an hour and then Dale reappeared on the sand, which was good because he once broke his neck while surfing.

“Lines” was in the pile of tunes I had demoed and was ready for the second junket to NYC. We recorded 11 songs in five days. I thank those guys every time I get the chance- Dave Amels, Dennis Diken, Pete Straus, Joe McGinty...and Gene Holder, who recorded it and let us use his guitars. I played a ‘63 Strat for the basic tracks, and Gene then casually offered up his ‘59 Les Paul to use for the solos. The guitar played itself. It looked like Peter Green’s flametop with a not-quite-completely faded sunburst. The jack plug was being held on with some masking tape. I plugged that guitar into a tweed 3x10 Bandmaster that belonged to Richard Lloyd. It all sounded pretty good.

The solo for “Lines” was doubled with a Clavioline, a keyboard that Dave brought in. The keys are miniature, and it’s tricky to play, in that if you want vibrato, you wiggle the whole keyboard side to side as you press the keys. It has a cutting, rich, haunting sound that blended with the guitar.

I put a drum machine on the last verse, and when we went to mix the song Gene heard it and said, “Oh, don’t put a drum machine on there, that’s something Let’s Active would do.” He changed his mind and turned it up.

After the album came out, a fan wrote a long rambling letter that posed this question:  “Ask any of your friends: do they have any idea of what the hell you're trying to say?” He wanted to know exactly what the songs meant, all the way back to my first album. “Enunciate,” he demanded. “Your music teases.” “Don't say “‘tween”.”

I have recently started playing this song again. The lyrics in “Lines” are probably what drove him to the brink, as they boomerang his own frustration:

Take give, learn live, both sides try to win
If you can't do without the best, suggest the worst within

My road trip with Paul Collins in the fall of 1990 led us from town to town, surviving on the kindness of strangers and whatever else we were willing to spend along the way. He was moving out from San Francisco, I was traveling light and tagging along. We worked up a set of our songs, and we’d trot out our act for anyone willing to listen. Paul is a bit of hustler, a mover and shaker, and he’d get us in front of people. We opened a show for Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore in Austin, we sang at Thanksgiving in Houston, and nearly wore out our welcome in New Orleans. We drove around like this for a month.

Miracle Legion was playing the Georgia Theater in Athens for their Christmas show, we hung around outside during soundcheck. Paul overheard someone saying the opening band cancelled, and he had us on the bill within minutes. School was out of session, it was a pretty quiet and cold night. The theater is a legendary venue, we marveled at it and took our place on the stage for a short set.

I met a young lady at the show, we chatted and flirted away the evening. However, at the end of the night, like it usually is with traveling musicians, it’s time to “get back in the van” and disappear forever. We had one of those hugs that lasted long enough to shift your weight around in order to keep balance, so that it turns into a little dance. I retreated to Paul’s VW Jetta and we were off.  I suppose anything that might have followed wouldn’t have been as good as the hug.

The snow was starting to fall as it was getting into December, so Paul was itching to get up to New York, his ultimate destination. Our crawl across the states turned into a Cannonball Run in reverse. We arrived at night, crashed at his mom’s classic West Village “bricks on the wall” apartment and thus began our very own Odd Couple episode that lasted through May. 

I visited family over the holidays in Syracuse and watched a lot of late night TV. There was a show about a tall ship festival and the voiceover said, “...as these old ships gather up twilight for one last waltz.” I stole that line and wrote the rest.

Anytime I write a song, there is a building of momentum, a time to make my case as I look at the page. I gather up what I know, and start threading together the surrounding ideas from what I believe.  Same goes for this blog. I don’t want to bore you, but it might get long. Today, not so much!

I used to write everything down in those cheap spiral notebooks. I prefer wide-ruled, because if I get excited, there’s room for big words. I have a filing cabinet full of Mead “1 subject” notebooks. Of course there was never one subject covered in a notebook, although each one would be given a name, like “Black 1997,” or “Green 2000.”  If I was feeling particularly wild, I made up fanciful names like “Nougat 1998,” “Champ 1999,” and “Hog 2001.” 

These days I use recycled printer paper cut in half sheets for writing stuff down. The smaller page size suits my non-committal creative moments and late-night household inspirations. I might otherwise fill a legal pad with a wish list I could never check off.

I carried “Red 1995” with me to Mick’s Lounge in SF alone one night to watch a band called The Green Things. I have found myself at times writing songs while other music is happening in the background, with a guitar or not. It doesn’t pull me in or distract me; it’s a bias noise that actually helps me concentrate. I had my face in the notebook for most of their set. I remember watching a little bit, and I recall writing the line, “have some fun with absurdity, man!”

This song sat around awhile, until I chose songs to record in New York for Wood + Wire. I naively suggested a “Dylan” feel for the band, and Dennis the drummer played the beat to “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine” — imagine it — before settling on what we have. Good thing I didn’t play a harmonica. What I hear now that reminds me of a Bob Dylan record is the band getting tripped up by my unpredictable chord changes. The vocal and the acoustic guitar were recorded at the same time, which doesn’t happen as often as you’d assume. I like the piano.

“The End” gets requested often enough to keep it an active song. Have I made my case? This is the end.

This song has stayed in my set, on and off, for a long time. It only has one stop, it’s not too fast, the chords are easy enough, and it’s not too long. It features the tried-and-true IV-III-vi chord movement I’ve been trotting out since I wrote “Somedays.”

The original recording, featured on Sight & Sound, is a lo-fi recording despite trying to make it Hi-Fi. My studio at the time consisted of a TEAC reel-to-reel 4-track, some stage mics, a 6-channel mixer, and a portable DAT machine.  I’d fill up the tracks on the tape, bounce it to the DAT and make another set of overdubs on fresh tape along to that DAT mix. It was such a chore to record yourself at home, and there was no punching in; you had to know your part and play it correctly all the way through. This was a band track, so all three of us needed to play it right at the same time to get a good take.  All before the tape ran out or before the police came responding to a noise complaint. 

For “Walking Endlessly,” the liner notes from Sight & Sound read:  “Nearly axed from the album by an overzealous A&R staff, this recording was an attempt to bring to life the sound of a Chris Isaak type band fronted by an angst-ridden Glen Campbell, thinking too much about Tanya Tucker.”

Fast forward to 2020: For my live cast, who better to capture the “Chris Isaak type band” than Prairie Prince, the drummer from Isaak’s biggest hit, “Wicked Game.” The story is that they recorded that song well over a hundred times to find the groove.  I was on a deadline, so I had him play my song just one and a half times.

Next came the internet file back and forth boogie, getting friends to play on the track from their homes- no more or less work than coordinating a Zoom call for your whole family. The band from last week’s live cast is back together- Pete, Tom, Dave, and Prairie. 

The lyrics, written when I was 23, describe what sounds like a jumping off point rather than a long journey.  “I don’t think I can brave another mile,” and “I can’t get out.” Oh, I think you can. 

​Live from Tape Vault Studio 10-02-2020

Drums - Prairie Prince; Organ - Dave Amels; Bass - Peter Straus; Guitars - Tom Ayres; 
​Vocals/Guitar - Chris von Sneidern

And check out the original:

It’s hard to enjoy one’s own recordings. I check in periodically, listening to one of my albums, ostensibly to understand “what the hell happened.” I get about five songs in and then stop. I feel as if the music is sitting in front of me rather than it taking me on a journey. Hopefully you have better luck with them!

The fact I don’t “get off” on the experience of listening to my own albums is probably common among musicians. Lately I’ve had to relearn songs I hadn’t played in public for a long time, if ever. I’ve rediscovered a few new favorites. I am proud of my records more or less.  However, the point is that I would rather listen to something else.

What is it about other people’s music that feels so much better to me? Why do people get more excited about the cover songs at a show? My first assumption would be that my songs aren’t as good as other people’s.  And that might be true, but that can’t be the whole reason. It’s the emotional connection to the song that matters, and I imagine that when you launch into a song people really know, they’re hearing the original record in their mind playing along with you.  In that space, a magic trick happens. By the same token, if someone is butchering the song they’ve triggered you to recall, you can feel offended.

Every month I have an hour-long show to play for a hospital audience, and I choose a good dose of known covers to add to my CvS repertoire. Last month I dug up "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum, a band whose name I never understood. Their version cuts off abruptly, even though it’s plenty long!  It’s been a hit, used in films, and recorded by many. The lyrics were “mysterious,” (they lost me at fandango) but I knew the tune. And that organ part has always captivated me. I looked it up and found two extra verses- one I added, but I left out the other lyrics about cardboard. I like this song.

Drummer Prairie Prince was working in my studio recently, and so we did a couple songs for the camera. We played “Whiter Shade” live, once, without any fuss. I’ve learned how to play with PP over time.  I know to stay out of the way of his fills with my guitar and don’t fight him on the tempo, like some dog on a leash. I sent it to Dave Amels to put on the essential organ part, and Pete Straus did his bass guitar at home. It was not labored over and I actually put more time into editing the video.

Of my recordings, I like the ones I made with other people on them. I prefer hearing the ones that I didn’t fiddle with endlessly. And of course, the equipment — how fancy the mic or guitar is — has yet to make a big difference on the final result.

So I share this as a single release this week for your entertainment. I can listen to this! Am I enjoying hearing my friends playing? Or is it the magic of cover songs?

​Looking back on the breakup songs I’ve written, the sad aspect now is to consider the passing of those youthful years. Granted, I don’t want to have to do it all again, but it sure looks sweet looking back. Performing these songs gives me a chance to revisit the lyrics and really see what I was feeling and what I was denying to myself with the word play.

The premise of the song in the chorus section is that I am moving on with my life’s focus and leaving behind someone overly sentimental- “you can keep your picture book,” - yet the whole time I am creating a sentimental paean to our entire relationship. 

These days I like the chords to this song. It changes key with every verse couplet. Around the time of writing this song, I used a lot of chromatic movement in the melody that employed major to minor chord changes rather than a completely different chord. Those changes often imply key change or mode change and while I don’t completely know what I’m doing, I know how it sounds. It’s not that I’m good at finding my way around, I’m just not afraid of getting lost.  

On the demo I played the main instrumental figure on guitar with a Leslie speaker. When it came to making the album in New York, we used a harpsichord. There’s one note on its keyboard that didn’t always work, so there’s a rest where there might have been a note. I remember we used a Coles ribbon mic on it instead of a condenser mic, and it’s much duller sounding. Those harpsichords, they’re so bright. 

The mix, like most on Wood + Wire, is heavily compressed on the Pye limiters, so the bass, the harpsichord, my voice, are all squashed together like pressing your face against a screen door to talk to your cousin.

The last lines of the song make more sense now than before-
“Like any photograph, see back in time so easily
I wrote a paragraph on what I think, but never see”