Golden Gram
Very Nearly, Almost Carefree
Sep 5, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Shawn Biggs
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Diddle-Oh
original version appears on Master of None
Growing up "alternative" in Texas, I had to hate country music. It boomed from cars like hyphy in West Oakland. It was always around. I knew there was good country out there, I just couldn't be bothered to look up from my Depeche mode tapes.
Eventually, I got around to it and then realized I'd grown up with a lot of the good stuff. Johnny Cash, the Carter family, Hank Williams... And there will always be a special place in my heart for Roger Miller. He had a knack for singing made up words.
doo wacka doo indeed.
My father used to joke about the folks in our town, saying "Oh sure, I like all kinds of music. Country AND western!"
"diddle iddle oh" and the melody popped into my head one afternoon at the kitchen table. I ran to my room and got the structure down. The events of the next two weeks filled in the verses. I like it when it happens that way.
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Last Week
original version appears on Master of None
On a Rogue Wave tour in December 2005, I woke up in a room I was sharing with my bandmate, Evan Farrell, at the Hotel Congress with a melody in my head. I got my guitar and laptop out and got a rough sketch down before heading out for breakfast. My mom had called me twice which was unusual. I called her back to find out that my father had just been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Evan and I went and ate chicken fried steaks in silence at Grill diner. I awoke that morning in such blissful ignorance. One could never know that within two years both Evan and my father would be gone. That's life. That melody ended up being a song called "parents", but the thoughts of hearing the news that morning informed this one. I feel like those two are companions, to each other and to me. I had the sentiment, but the song didn't come until I was watching Snowblink play a few months later at Adobe Books in San Francisco. I borrowed a bit of the chord progression from Daniela's "Don't Dusk Me, (Baby) and those feelings from that hotel room found a place to live.
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Mad Is Sad
original version appears on Master of None
I was at the SFMOMA for Anselm Kiefer's Heaven and Earth exhibition in January 2007 when I saw his piece titled "for Robert Fludd: the secret life of plants". He dedicated it to Fludd and his theory that each plant on Earth had its celestial equivalent in the form of a star. It got me thinking and humming, and I realized it fit with the fingerpicked lick I had come up with recently that was looking for some words. It was a folky song for a good while after that, but I always heard more rhythm in it, so one day I attacked it with a Juno 106 synth and a Rhythm Ace drum machine to see what would happen.
It's one of the few songs I like to play with a backing track.
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New Bounce
unreleased
Sometimes these bouncy ones just pop right out of me. Like Diddle-Oh and a few others. They are all fairly similar, but I don't mind because they aren't labored. I thought this would be an instrumental until a relationship conversation spawned the chorus. Here it is all folky, but I imagine it being more reggae sounding with a band at some point. I should get in touch with Floating Action. We'll see how that goes. Also, I was able to get a Star Wars reference in there, which is always nice.
Gram LeBron had about an hour to get ready for this here recording session. It was early in the morning on the last day we were hunkered down in San Francisco for a little taping spree at the end of February. He was on stand-by and when a cancellation came in late the night before, just before our morning coffee, we called him up and he trucked over to see us, at the Studio Paradiso, just down the block from the bar where Dashiell Hammett drank hard and wrote his classic "The Maltese Falcon," which just so happens to also house the grill that makes the finest hamburgers in America. LeBron, who has spent many years as a guitarist in Bay Area band Rogue Wave as well as about a hundred other projects (many of his MySpace friends are of other bands and their profile photos feature him in many with an arm around the shoulders of someone), may have had to brush some sleepers from his eyes as he tuned up his guitar and hacked out the frogginess in his throat, but then again, he's a man who lives for making music so there's a chance that he sleep sings and sleep strums. As you can plainly hear, this recording doesn't sound as if it were laid to tape pre-breakfast or mid-breakfast as it was - the pastries in the bakery around the corner were still hot or relatively lukewarm and none of the coffee had been given any chance of kicking in and doing any damage yet. The streets were still not yet hosed down to remove the urine and odors of the many homeless residents in the neighborhood, huddling under awnings and overhangs. Hell, LeBron may have even offered to pick the doughnuts and coffee up for us, but our memories don't serve all that well so many months further on. Golden Gram, the solo name that LeBron does the majority of his recordings under, is music that takes so many parts from the man himself - a guy with a ready smile and a fetching, sweet personality - and parts from the front moniker of "golden," with the bulk of the thoughts in regards to it going to imaging a grape growing on the vine in super, fast-forward time lapse photography so it seems as if the skin of the reddish-purple fruit were actually filling with sunlight, like a water balloon. The same could go for oranges, but not so much strawberries or apples. The shape just doesn't work the same way. It's not "golden" enough. So, his music sounds like grapes and oranges expanding via sunshine as if he's caught something in a bottle, actually bottled a secret ingredient or intangible and is using it for the benefit of many. What he's captured in that bottle, which he lifts the top of to give free whiffs of as they do the sweet-smelling, fermenting corn mash at the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee, is of an unknown compound, but what it seems to involve is the overriding belief that we're here to impart good. Bad days are only bad if they're spent lonely, otherwise, with others, they later become parts of jokes and ribbing. Sadness can break spirits and make one shudder cold, but it doesn't have to last long. LeBron makes a point - with his cheery leanings and his falsetto-ed voice that sounds like the toothy grin he wears like a birthmark that's not going anywhere - to give of himself in an unselfish way with his writing and coaxes out the harder to arrive at questions/answers (the back slash is there because sometimes the answers are the questions and vice versa) in a way that makes them easier to look at. He sings, "Does everyone on Earth get another start in heaven/That's a real hard question/Real hard to say/Real hard to say" on "New Bounce" and there's no real knowing what he wants the answer to be but, everyone knows that he's got no choice as the question will just tumble out there into the superfluous air not striking anything, almost carefree.
Golden Gram Official Site
Golden Gram MySpace Page
Cedar Fever Records
