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Authors: Solomon Deep

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BOOK: Oedipussy
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"We are 'The Dawn Ego.' Simple. Straight. It can be interpreted in many unique and thoughtful ways, and we can still use the Ouroboros as our symbol - the logo could be a circle and would perfectly fit on your bass drum."

Everyone nodded, and communicated their love for the idea. John didn't entirely enjoy the idea of defacing his drum head, but beside that it was a brilliant and clear admission that my army had joined me for the battle for our fates and survival. This was the future of our society, and my men were rallying behind me for the victory over what our otherwise poor futures may have held.

This was it.

Chapter 6

 

And so the journey of four men and the beautiful maiden began with a simple song. Every Saturday, they explored the musical world of their creation as a vanguard of sound.

I found myself working at the copy store three nights a week. I found myself sleeping with Jenny as many nights as I could get away with it - mother didn't say anything about the situation and rarely saw me off in the morning. I was on autopilot in school, completing work and handing it in as if it was an afterthought - but it was educationally sufficient.

I found everything was perfect and applicable and swimming-smooth. I was floating. I was soaring.

The first week I bought an eight track recorder and a stack of cassettes. I recorded the guitar track with my metronome, and the rest would be easily filled in and mixed down on Saturday during the following practice.

"Do you want me to get my camera and take your picture together at rehearsal tomorrow?" Jenny asked me on my bed as we listened to Pearl Jam's
Ten
for the thousandth time. It was already the end of the week, and we had spent all week sleeping, waking, school, work, sleeping, waking, school, recording, and over and over, through and through to now. 

"Really?"

"Yeah, I took that photography course. I have a camera and everything. I can use the darkroom at school."

"I didn't even think of that. Of course we'll need a picture!"

"...And I'll be the one to give it to you. Can I take your picture now? I have my camera in my bag."

She took out her big, boxy camera with the lens levelled at me like a gun.

"Just do your thing."

She started snapping, mostly me in profile looking at my notebook and working. The light in the room was dim, and the music continued while I scribbled my ideas. The intimacy of the moment was awkward, and I felt an embarrassing sense of vanity being so central to her attention.

She stood up and took me out of my room, down the stairs, and down the hallway. I put on my Carhartt jacket. We went outside.

The rows of houses in the neighborhood seemed depleted after the winter, and the air was still crisp in that manner that one couldn't truly be sure that the spring had arrived. I tried to make clouds in the air with my breath, even though I knew it was too warm. Or was it? I kept checking, shuffling my arms in my sleeves, shifting my hands in my pockets.

Jenny stood far away, fiddling with knobs, the film advance reel, and the lens as she snapped picture after picture.

I wanted this to be perfect, but didn't know what to do or how to stand. I acted like me, without much direction or care to act like anything.

"Let's go in – I’m freezing." Jenny walked toward the house ahead of me, cradling her instrument.

"Want me to make you a snack?"

"Yes! A snack and TV before we go back to our art!"

We travelled straight to the kitchen. I got the sticky white bread, the butter, and the Martian-yellow square cheese for making grilled cheese sandwiches.

"I don't want to bring it up, but how’s your mother?" I never wanted to press it, but at the same time there was a certain desire to show that I cared and wanted to be that thing in her life that was a possible respite, or even a lockbox for her emotional outpourings. I was the thing she needed most; just to be there.

"Still in the hospital." She stood with her hands behind her on the counter, looking at her feet. The camera was strapped around her neck, and the strap cradled her breasts as if to present them. Why was it in the most human times that the most animalistic passions arose?

I dropped the first sandwich onto the pan, sizzling lightly and filling the room with the aroma of cheap butter and flour. There’s something about the comfort of a crap grilled cheese sandwich that makes it the culinary nonpareil regardless of the ingredients. It was almost perfect because of the crap ingredients.

"I didn't want to tell you, but," she continued as I flipped the sandwich, bringing the golden crisp toast to the top to sear the opposite side, "dad was talking about separating from her and moving or something... He seems to be getting pretty sick of having to... deal... with mom."

I couldn't bear to bring my eyes up from my task. This was both an enormous revelation and an uncertainty that came with the lack of factual information in what she was saying. Her mom was still in the hospital. Her dad was frustrated.

It was going to be ok, Todd.

A char scent sent my pan hand scrambling for the plate to unload the sandwich. It spun and tottered on the small plate, and Jenny put a hand out to steady it.

"Sorry," I responded, feeling helpless. I put the plate down, buttered some more bread, and she continued.

"It's not a real thing, but... I just thought I would tell you about it for when it comes up again." I dropped the bread and cheese into the pan. Sizzle. "It probably won't."

"You'll be coming with me and the band on tour and seeing the world, though, so we are all set," I replied. I wanted to save her.

"You're right! But what about college? What about what’s next for us. I don't even have a plan, but I know I have to have one. I applied to State, and the community college, and I did my SATs, and I have everything all lined up... but for nothing."

"Me too," flip the sandwich, "but you don't think that this is an option?"

She looked at me, and smiled, and shook her head back and forth as her hair danced around her face. She communicated so much in that one simple gesture. She was saying, 'you're crazy, but I love you so much' and 'you are a dreamer, but I love you so much,' and 'this is insane, but it just might work, and I love you so much.'

It also seemed like she was saying, 'you'll be playing music in your mom's basement for the rest of your life, and I really like playing around now, but this can't go on. I will find someone else and it will be glorious because even though I went to college I can pop out a few kids and live off of his salary and it will be a life of routine and repetition and it will all be wonderful. We will die and be buried next to one another on a green grassy knoll, and every year our grandchildren will plant blossoming geraniums and yawning lilies over our respective rotting corpses. We will be laying in the earth, facing the stars, only we won't know it because our hearts stopped beating decades earlier and the maggots had eaten our eyeballs out.'

"I love you, you know." There was sincerity in her voice, as well as the weight of all my imagined words in her face.

"I love you, too."

We walked into the living room with our sandwiches, and turned on the television. We landed on MTV. A song was playing, but the feed was immediately cut, and the spaceman appeared in a slate I had never seen before. Then, it cut to the spinning typewriter ball, then the N-E-W-S stamping on the screen.

Kurt Loder came on and began talking quickly.

"Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with an MTV News Special Report.

"The body of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain was found in a house in Seattle this morning, dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Police found..."

Our intimate moment turned stifling and claustrophobic. The words coming out of his mouth became a jumble of nothing, cotton balls speeding by with details and figures as our beloved figurehead was...what was the word he used? Dead?

I froze, connecting only with a supposed reality that played out in front of me; an alternate reality where the work of fate and a terrible series of events hung over us, and the weight of the moment, oh, the weight.

The special report cut out, and it was back to the music video. How? How could this happen? The regular feed? Music videos? What in the world was going on? Stay tuned for more, he might have said? A two hour special he might have said?

Our sandwiches remained hovering in the air, a bite taken out of them, and our arms were hovering crane-appendages.

We didn't move for hours. He was gone.

Chapter 7

 

The next day began with absolute drive and lack of sympathy. We seized every second, we started recording the rest of the tracks. This Saturday was entirely the point of the entirety of everything. We weren't sure when we would be called home, and we lived as if our final moments weren't wasted laying down tracks for our demo tape. Five songs. Electric resonance cemented our voices and sound to tape, forever.

John came early and jumped on the drum tracks. We did it over and over again until he replaced the metronome with an almost perfect time ragged beat. If he was too perfect it didn't sound right, and there was an art to good percussion.

The rest of the band arrived and unapologetically burned through our set as if it was already second nature. We attacked, and attacked, and drove, and recorded, and pushed through to the other side.

When everyone began to mention that they had to leave, I improvised a quick review of our work. I hooked the eight track to my guitar amplifier with an adapter, and we listened.

It was creative, pure, and amazing, and we listened with closed eyes as if this version of the truth was the absolute truth. There was something scratchy and magnetic about the recording - very garagey - the sound added to the definitive grunge elements of it appearing as though there wasn't even effort or time put into the work itself. We recorded it in my basement, after all, and the materials we had at our disposal were a few hundred dollars in equipment and some great music. That was all we needed.

I scanned their faces, a satiated glow radiating as my ears drank the music and my eyes bobbed from face to face. The music was a stone dropped in a glassy lake. Ripples of enjoyment echoed through us, and we knew it would resonate on.

"So what’s next?" Steve approached the project as a passenger on this train. We didn't mind. He was a great bassist.

"Jenny takes our picture before you go. She develops them, I make a press pack, and we start finding gigs."

"Do we have enough stuff?" Kurt, the practical.

"Does it matter if we start small?"

Their heads all bobbed in agreement.

We went outside, and Jenny snapped pictures as we posed and moved around in the back yard and the street. The whole thing took another ten minutes, and the guys were able to pack up and leave very quickly. They left one by one, but John continued to drag.

"What are you doing today?" I asked.

"Nothing, just hanging around."

"Let’s do something - help me put together the press kits. We can design some stuff and head over to the Kinkos and print everything out - get everything ready to go."

"Cool with me!"

We headed up to my bedroom and started dubbing on my tape deck. I showed him how to do it - the tape deck had a double speed feature, so the twenty-three minute tape took only about twelve minutes each tape.

"So, did you see the news?" I asked. I flipped through some old encyclopedias.

"News?"

"Cobain."

"No."

I tried to remain calm. Perspective was everything in a situation such as this. But was it possible that the drummer for my band was completely out of touch with the business we were in? Were we opening a new church, and one of our priests wasn't aware of our worshipped deity?

Why weren't people crying in the streets? We should be laying down palm fronds as the casket of the once and future king of rock was brought through the streets and worshipped! Or visited in the capitol, lying in state for the masses to pass under a perpetually burning American flag! Something!

"He killed himself - apparently earlier this week -some electrician found his body yesterday. I don't know what to do." I made a motion making a gun out of my fingers and holding it to my chin. I whispered 'pow.' I have no idea why I did it.

"Was he a relative of yours?"

"No, it's just, the thing of it. He was king."

John nodded, seeming to undermine the seriousness of the information I was giving him. I was surprised - some cultural black hole existed behind his eyes.

"Could you trace around this?" I handed him a paper sleeve for a tape case, and he drew his pencil around it on a piece of copier paper, and included lines for the fold marks.

I found an illustration of the Ouroboros and cut it out of one of the encyclopedias we never used. It was the perfect size for our application on the front of the tape. I found some other illustrations: a twisty dragon and Saint George that matched the diameter of the Ouroboros. The head didn't match, but we found two images that we cut up like a Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation - and it even ended up matching my original idea of the 'President's Member' in a way... With a little paste and attention with a hobby knife, we had an image of a dragon Richard Nixon eating a snake Ronald Reagan eating a dragon Richard Nixon and on and on forever. John illustrated some designs around it, and we cut out letters from some old magazines to make up the track names and titles. We called it "The Dawn Ego, OedEPus Demo" with a play on the initials for 'Extended Play' albums.

We switched gears and moved to the computer to type up some copy for the press kit.

"What do you think this stuff normally says? What do we include?"

"No idea."

As the leader, I thought it was my responsibility to take executive action, making my thinking out loud seem a lot more like a solid plan than it really was.

"Here is what I think - one double sided paper with biographies and a little bit of information about the band. We can print a bunch of stickers out and these tape covers at the Kinko's, and then send that along with the tapes. Tape, stickers, one pager, -oh! and a photo once Jenny has that buttoned up. When did she say that would be?"

John nodded. "She was going to do it Monday at school, right?"

"Yes - awesome. I can bring these around as soon as Monday afternoon!"

The computer booted up and I entered 'wperfect.exe' to get into the word processor. As the cursor blinked, we looked at each other and it was apparent we were lost.

We had to lie. We lied our asses off to make it sound like we had much more control and an idea about who we were than even we knew. We typed a fabrication and a fantasy. We knew what we were doing, at least it seemed like we did.

Introducing

 

The Dawn Ego

 

The newest grunge band out of the up and coming scene of the original rockers in Twin Falls, Idah
o
[really?
]
, the origins of grunge are unmistakable in the sound of this brash and driven group of young men who have been recording before grunge was even a thought - as early as 1988 with their first single to hit the college radio circui
t
[since we were 13?
]
. Playing small venues, their high energy show seems like they are going to lose it at any momen
t
[where small venues equaled basement, and lose control equaled the fact that we had no idea what we were doing
]
.

 

The band is currently looking toward new market
s
[any markets
]
to bring their energetic and wholly original grunge soun
d
[not really
]
to any new audience across the nation, and would like to perform at your venue at no cos
t
[or to just get any gig anywhere
]
.

 

Simply listen to their demo EP and decide for yourself. There is no doubt, however, that this in-demand group will be booked for years to come in only a few short week
s
[define booked?
]
.

 

The Dawn Ego is...

 

Todd Keefe - Rhythm Guitar and Songwriter

Native to the Twin Falls Grunge scen
e
[the founder of the Twin Falls grunge scene? What grunge scene? This grunge scene!
]
, Keefe founded The Dawn Ego after his other projects The President's Member and JFKFC made huge gains around the United State
s
[too many president-related images? Maybe it is a theme in my work
]
opening in major tour venues in all major citie
s
[white lie
]
. This marks his first foray as leading man, exploring his own themes in his work and leading a team for the first time.

 

Kurt Lobel - Lead Guitar

Kurt joins The Dawn Ego after playing guitar for a major touring pop act. His creative control over the featured elements of all of the Dawn Ego's songs brings out haunting and expressive melody of the modern grunge movement. He studied wit
h
[can we just make up names, here, assuming the reader will think they are real people?
]
Bryan Cosgrove, Butundi Oblundi, and Carmen Santiag
o
[too much?
]
to build his global and intelligent stylings. Official selection of Fender Guitar
s
[his selection of his Fender Guitar when he bought it is somewhat official to him
]
.

 

Steve Harvester - Bass Guitar

Steve is the newest addition to the band, coming from a classical training in Jazz bas
s
[whatever that means
]
to join the rhythm section that hums below the striking driving sound of the band as a backbone tha
t
[mention some famous people!
]
is heavily influenced by Jack Bruce and Les Claypool.

 

John Xiong - Percussion

 

"Wait, stop. I want to change my name."

"Why?"

"It's too... Vietnamese."

"It's cool."

"Eh."

"What if we change it to X?"

"Like, Johnny X!"

It was decided.

"What do we type?"

"Just make some stuff up like you have been. I like this."

 

Johnny X - Percussion

Johnny X comes from a long line of professionally trained percussionists who studied with Avedi
s
['But I didn't.' 'White lie, we just don't have to say which Avedis!'
]
and came up with his original hammer-styl
e
['what?' 'I don't know - don't worry about it, sounds more official.'
]
that remains a striking contrast to many bass performers of the common era.

 

To book The Dawn Ego for the concert your customers will never forget, leave a message for Carly at...

"That's your mom?"

"I know, I'll just tell her I put our number on there and I'll be the one to call them back."

"Oh."

We wrapped up copying eight tapes and printed out the letter with the dot-matrix printer in my bedroom slamming ink digits into the paper. There was something grungy in itself that we were using a barely antiquated printer - so I kept the guiding hole edges on the paper to see if we could use it on the press kit. I tossed the tapes, the copy for the band, some sharpies, the encyclopedia and cut-up magazines, the tape cover, and everything else into a box.

"To Kinkos?" I asked.

"To Kinkos!"

When we got to the store, we cut and pasted, copied and zoomed and disintegrated our artwork, and print onto glossy cardstock. We stuck, folded, taped, and assembled. We used the design of the tape cover to make a letterhead, stickers, and decals for the tapes. When we finished, we had enough to make up eight press kits, minus the photo of the band. With my employee discount (both of the official variety and the variety of the one that my blue-oxford-shirted friend behind the counter added by accidentally leaving a few of the copies off of the order and returning a wink), it only came to eight dollars.

BOOK: Oedipussy
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