THE LOWDOWN ON "THE LAUGH"

THE LOWDOWN ON “THE LAUGH”

Just thought I’d take up some more of your time (& mine) with the backstory on The League Of Existence’s latest musical offering, THE LAUGH OF GRAVE CONCERN, which was released in November via CDBaby, and is now available in “hard copy” form from the Squall & Scrawl website.

As seems to be the case with many of these musical projects, LOGC started off as something else and only very gradually became what it is. The seeds of this album, in fact, go back to the WEEN OF HALLO sessions in late 2012. On November 2nd of that year, the League began recording its seasonal classic at Night Train Studio in Westford, Mass. We had one guest musician, drummer Gary Gagnon, whom I had found through a Craigslist ad just a few days before. We really needed a drummer to make the music come together, and Gary’s willingness to have a go at it, with almost no prep at all, saved the day for the WEEN project. As a kind of warm-up exercise – a musical “getting acquainted” – one of the first things we did that night was record a long jam, which I figured could be used as background sound somewhere on the album. This was totally improvised , we didn’t even agree on a key to start with. We just rolled tape and everybody made sounds. When it came to an end almost 10 minutes later, I felt we had a very cool piece of music. It certainly was a blast playing it! The chemistry with Gary was definitely there. If time & money had allowed, I would have kept recording 10-minute jams there until the snow melted in the Spring.

Also on that track were Brian Farrell playing synthesizer, Jim McCusker on guitar, and Don Cogswell on bass. After the session, engineer Brent Godin sent me a copy of the rough mix of the jam, and even in that very unpolished state, I thought it was a trip. But I still hadn’t decided how it would fit on the WEEN album. Because it was recorded on All Souls Day, I referred to it as the All Souls Jam.

Two weeks later, November 16, the second WEEN session went down at Night Train. Among the several numbers recorded that night was another long jam, again totally adlibbed, lasting around 12 minutes. It was a different approach, however, as we had Jim McCusker doing a vocal recitation on top of the music. Double-G was back on drums and this time we also had Howlin’ Dave Ambrose with us, playing his theremin on this track. And Brent started a tradition (which, happily, continues to this day) of joining in on electric bass at the same time as engineering the production.

This jam, which I called 12 Minute Freakout, was subsequently edited to create three shorter pieces on WEEN: Crazy Neighbor, Halloween Advice, and Coffin Story. For each of these pieces, we took a minute or two of the original jam music, and layered portions of the McCusker narrative on top. So it was the same body of words & music, only whittled down into more concise, tightened-up arrangements. This worked great for the WEEN album, and since we had used only about 5 minutes of the jam, we still had a 7 Minute Freakout in the can for future use.

THE WEEN OF HALLOW was released in 2013. The League’s next major project was SGT. GIOTTO in 2016. (In between, my focus was on The Four Last Things’ OTHERWISE album.) The two leftover jam tracks remained in the vaults, but a new piece was soon added to the musical storehouse. Let me tell you about that.

In September 2015, Donald Cogswell hit the 6-figure mark. That is, he turned 60. His family put together a surprise party for him, and it was a huge bash at a rented hall in Tewksbury, with a DJ for entertainment. With the DJ setup in mind, I took some time to create several homemade karaoke tracks featuring old Federation classics, like Mold In My Coffee Cup, The Partying Season, and Snowman Rag. I figured if things got a little slow, we could break out those Golden Oldies and blow a few minds. Then, since I had my recording equipment out, I decided to throw together something new especially for the occasion, something experimental, avant-garde – what we always called, simply, “abstract.” But I started it off with a fairly normal Rock thing: slow, heavy chords…G...F#...D…B….and then after a minute or so…into the Bizarre. The whole thing stretched to about 26 minutes. I figured if it was REALLY slow on the karaoke front, we could have some kind of mad rave-up with that track.

On the night of the birthday party, September 12, a very surprised Don Cogswell walked into the Knights of Columbus Hall, saw what he had been duped into, and saluted the crowd with both middle fingers before proceeding to live it up like there was no 61. It was a great festivity, but as the night progressed, it became apparent there would be no LOE takeover of the karaoke zone; we squeezed in a couple of short tunes but that was it. No chance of dropping the 26-minute bombshell. So once again, I was left with something that deserved a hearing but would require further thought.

The SGT. GIOTTO sessions began in May 2016, with material for The Four Last Things’ UNFATHOM’D TIDE being recorded concurrently. At the July 12 date, I took the opportunity to lay down guitar/drums tracks with Gary for a few “loose ends” ideas, including the G-F#-D-B thing. A week later, I brought in overdubs taken from the abstract sections of the original 26-minute piece and Brent assembled them around the guitar/drums tracks. By this point I had already decided on the subject matter for this piece and had tentatively named it Flash Gordon. I knew it would be the centerpiece of yet another project, which was now being referred to as the THIRD ALBUM. At an August session, Flash was edited into a somewhat coherent structure, and in October the multitracks for All Souls Jam and 7 Minute Freakout were also moved into the 3RD ALBUM file folder. These were then set aside while Giotto and Poe were finalized and Winter hibernation set in.

Come June 2017, it was studio time again, and I was back at Night Train starting up a new Four Last Things project, as well as putting the puzzle of the 3RD ALBUM together. Brian Farrell had signed on to help me with Flash while Cogswell and McCusker picked up the lyric torches for All Souls Jam and 7 Minute Freakout respectively. In the latter cases, we dipped back to a homemade CD from 2008, and a program called Mutation Verse, which had consisted of poems by the individual LOE members, read over various musical backgrounds – a definite precursor to the recitation segments of the LOE studio CDs.

From Cogswell’s poetry on Mutation Verse was selected a patchwork of stream-of-consciousness surrealism, typified by images such as, “The acorn from Moby Dick is hanging by the first day” and “Telephones in a parade playing trombones wearing hats.” The first portion, though, came from an interesting Cogswell effort on Mutation Verse in which he slowly recited one word at a time over the musical background. On the 2008 program, we called it Words; for the 3RD ALBUM, the entire piece was finally titled Words For All Souls.

The McCusker lyrics came partly from Mutation Verse – the first section, beginning “When Mussolini was killed, the Lowell Sun published pictures of his corpse” – and partly from a 2005 poem called Observance, beginning “The dead once made lemonade and drove bread trucks through their brains.” Together, the two halves made a whole, a somber meditation on mortality so very typical of the League’s outlook on life. Layering these lyrics on top of the 7 Minute Freakout music resulted in the album-closer, Observance.

Compared to the remaining track, Words For All Souls and Observance were two pieces of cake to put together in the studio. The vocals, recorded in home studio by the two authors, were fairly easy to slot into the accompanying musical bedrocks, which then required only a modicum of editing. But the third member of the triumvirate – which was eventually entitled Zarkov Has Conquered Space - was chopped, twisted, massaged, and man-handled for several sessions before assuming final form.

By June 15, Brian Farrell was beginning to send me his textual contributions to Zarkov. Although it was not part of the original plan, the lyrics of Zarkov wound up being divided distinctly among the three “abstract” music sections which are sandwiched between the four more traditional “Rock” sections. The portions with lyrical content correspond to the three classic movie serials: Flash Gordon (1936), Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (1938), and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Brian’s lengthy and often tongue-in-cheek set of Cliff notes to FG’s Trip To Mars filled the second abstract section, while the lyrics I wrote correlated with the storylines covered in the first and last sections.

A number of people participated in the vocal recitations. Gary got a chance to step from behind the drumkit and in front of the microphone for the Flash speech beginning “I battle the Tigron in the Catacombs,” in Abstract 1, and the speech about the Rock men in Abstract 3. The Rock men voices themselves were manipulations of some Cogswell outtakes from Words For All Souls. Some of the odds and ends, including the recurring “E-gyptian statue” part, were done spur of the moment by a trio of studio hands (Brent Godin, Bobby Briggs, and Bret Battaglia). Brian handled all the vocals in Abstract 2 and can also be heard on keyboards throughout that section.

Most of the Zarkov vocals had been recorded by the end of August, but the arranging and editing of the musical structure continued restlessly through the Summer and Fall. There were two sessions apiece in June, August, October and November. Early on, I overdubbed the lead guitar themes and ad-lib solos for each of the four “Rock” sections. At the single September session, I added a home-recorded arrangement of Franz Liszt’s “Les Preludes,” a classic orchestra work which had featured prominently in the soundtrack of the last Flash Gordon movie serial. With slow and gradual revision, Zarkov took shape with a running time of over 21 minutes. Final mixing and mastering for it, Words, and Observance, took place at Night Train on November 10, 2017.

I searched my archives for suitable cover art, and after not finding any suitable paintings or drawings, decided to go with a photo snapped at the Peabody-Essex Museum a few years ago, capturing Jim McCusker taking a break on a bench in front of some Winslow Homer seascapes.

It took until just before the album was sent for pressing to settle on a title. Some months earlier, I had overheard my daughters Rose and Maggie goofing around in their usual manner together, and at one point Maggie said, “This is the laugh of grave concern.” I’m still not sure what she meant exactly, but the statement seemed sardonic, wry, and humorous all at once, and I finally decided it would fit very well with the music at hand, so I called the album THE LAUGH OF GRAVE CONCERN.