Solo guys and band guys.

I'm a band guy, and in 1982 I was a band guy about to make a solo record. It's a paradox I learned to live with but never quite resolved.

One of the books I had read was a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway called Men Without Women. The stories were about bullfighters and soldiers and boxers and the relationship between identity and profession in the context of changing circumstance. Well it's hard to sum up but I felt if Ernie had written it in the 60's or 70's it would have had a chapter about a rock band so I used it.

I wanted to write about politics. The interaction of people and power. Who has the power? Why? What does it mean? How much of the government is endorsed by the governed? Is the social contract Rousseau talked about being honored? Who or what controls our destinies? How much of a choice do we really have in that process?

This album's subject would be the Individual in the five album plan I outlined that would include: the Individual, the Family, the State, the Economy, and Religion. Religion would complete the circle, returning to the individual but this time from the inside out. The theme would be who am I? Who are we? What happened to those of us who grew up in the 60's? Was all that idealism just talk?

I would talk about what little I knew, the questions I had, my past, my ethnic background, my wife, my fears, etc. Some general stuff that would introduce Little Steven but also represent a kind of everyman that had reached a point in life where he was asking questions about himself and reconsidering the world around him.

Musically I decided to go back to the sound I had created with the Jukes. 60's Rhythm & Blues based rock with a five-piece horn section. I didn't continue the artistic process I had started with them in a logical, linear fashion, which would have meant starting up where "Hearts of Stone" left off. Instead I went back to a rootsier, less produced sound. I don't know exactly why but I thought the less produced the record was, the more open and honest it would be. The more naked and confessional, the more direct the route to discovering and revealing my own identity.

So being a bit of an extremist in those days I recorded the whole album live in one day. I put the band in a semi-circle, used the studio monitors that hung from the ceiling instead of headphones, and let it happen. Horns blowing into the drums, monitors blasting the whole mix back into all the microphones, I didn't care.

It worked pretty good actually. We came back the next day and did the whole album again to see if we'd get better takes and I think we may have used one or two. I then spent a couple months messing around mostly to make sure I idiotically spent every penny of the record budget. I put the acoustic on a couple of songs and mandolin and slide on "Princess." I also redid a couple of vocals but I can't remember which ones and I can't tell from listening to it, and I added a solo or two.

If I had it to do over again I would double some guitars and vocals. Most of the album is one live rhythm guitar! But it holds up pretty good and is an honest representation of where I was at that day.

Lyin' In A Bed Of Fire  (lyrics; audio)

I had to start with a song that would not only set up this album but set up all five of the albums to come. Every first song of every album would lay out the main theme of that record, but this one had to lay out the main theme of my life!

The song essentially addresses all of us 60's people who were going to change the world. What happened? Where did we all go? Did we all simply get exhausted by living through the rapidly evolving events of the extraordinary renaissance that was the 60's or what? The song ultimately suggests that the birth of consciousness opened a lot of new doors that we now take for granted. While we got preoccupied with the business of growing up, various forces co-opted and diluted a lot of the revolutionary ideas we had, rendering them a harmless part of the status quo. In other words, some of the doors we'd opened have been quietly closed again.

Two other ideas that I will revisit often are touched on here also. One is a general frustration with leadership in general and the suggestion that we assume a bit more of that role ourselves in the general shaping of our own destinies. The other is the ongoing struggle with time. Partly because I feel I've wasted so much of it, but more the metaphysical goal of living in the moment and conquering the very concept of time. I was speaking to and about myself here and the key emotion, anger — self-directed more often than not — would drive a large part of my work to come.

Musically it's traditional, orthodox me. A rock song with horns. That is Felix Cavaliere on the organ and Dino Danelli on the drums both from one of my favorite groups of all time, the Rascals. The guitar solo would be the only rock solo and one of the few of any kind on the record. It would be the songs and ideas that mattered to me for the next seven years or so, not the guitar.

Jean Beauvoir played bass on this one and sang all the harmony parts. He and Dino would be members of my band for the next three years.

This song would set up the context of learning and talking about small p politics that would become my obsession and that my next four albums would explore.

Little Steven
© 2000, www.littlesteven.com