The Lizard King

Capped off my first performance at CBGB's 313 Gallery with the following original song, The Lizard King.

The song itself is partly inspired by Jim Morrison and partly the product of chance. Each individual line –and the odd couplet– in the song once belonged to another song I'd written over the previous 20 years.

While sitting at my desk in 1998, waiting for inspiration to hit, I stared down at my feet, and among the scattered pages of lyrics I picked out a line here, a line there. It began as a lark, really. But the result was a unified composition which incredibly makes some kind of sense. I guess today we'd call it a mashup.

Also the product of synchronicity, the choruses each begin with an allusion to the Virgin Mary ('Dolores Our Lady of Sorrows', 'Lolita' and 'Ave Maria').

Somehow, it all just works.


The Lizard King
By Terry O’Gara
©1998

And so the lizard king will not return
And we will never know
And we will never learn
What never was will never be
I guess I was one of those that never did believe

In anything, in anything but myself
And I don’t want your help
I know all I need to know of love
And that’s enough
I want to feel the pain
I think it’s better this way

Dolores Our Lady of Sorrows
Was seen at a truck stop in Ohio
But you had to stand on the outside looking in
Well isn’t that typical, hypocritical
But we all gave up a hymn

Singing ‘Holy, Holy
Never let go of me’
And ‘Save me, save me’
From the fric and the frac
Oh if only I believed
In all of this crap

Lolita Our Lady of Toenails
Sits in the grass while I sip my cocktails
Shivinanda says sit still and focus
But I twitch like a hundred thousand locusts

Meanwhile a rock’n’roll angel eats her cocoa puffs in heaven
While a video camera swallows your every move
Desperately you search the house for meaning
While she sits alone in her room

Ave Maria Oh baby
Ave Maria my love
How is it everything we put our faith in
Couldn’t save us in the end

And so the lizard king will not return
And we will never know
And we will never learn
What never was will never be
I guess I was one of those that never did believe–

In anything.

Music = Life

Each moment is connected,
Each day part of an unfolding melody.
It begins with the cry of birth
And ends with a final gasp.
What happens in between,
I call music.


poetry

Electro Art Jams with Philharmonic Strings

When I finally assumed something approximating a degree of professional and technical studio competence I began to collaborate on a number of sonic art projects with both Chris Fosdick and Michael Sweet (both of them assistants and engineers to record producer and film composer, Jonathan Elias).

For a song I wrote, called ‘Return to Zero’, I asked Michael to record me singing from Studio A where I was making a phone call back studio B, where the mix was running. I always loved the thin sound of trebly mono. Must have something to do with growing up with Panasonic cassette decks. Sure, you could dispense with the phone system and simply EQ a normal vocal take that way, but would it be half as fun as routing a call across the county before it cycled back to you to catch on Analog tape? No.

Experimenting with inventive recording techniques taught me a lot about practical hands-on music production. And it was on these personal musical projects that I tried and tested out techniques, singers, and new musical talent before introducing them or the Creative Director or to the compositional staff, which I might do by way of a recommendation for a commercial job. 

How did this sound in practice? I once walked into a room full of clients and creatives wracking their minds how to fill a few seconds of black with audio, and nothing was working. But, “Hey, I was recording 24 Buddhist monks chanting last night, and it was kind of cool. Why don’t we try that!” Cut to award winning TV commercial on air 3 weeks later featuring 24 monks (1 singer, 23 overdubs) voicing ‘OM’.

In the process, I became acquainted with the talents of –and made friends with– many of the session musicians and singers that I would work with throughout the rest of my career. Valerie Wilson Morris of Val's Artist Management and Sandra Park Tremante who played violin at the New York Philharmonic were early supporters, and they also gave me good career advice along the way, too.

So, although the experimental songs and sonic landscapes I created over many long nights never evolved beyond demos, they did much to increase my technical ability and inform my aesthetic approach. Today when I listen to those recordings I feel the same thrill now I did then, when I stood next to amazing musicians and colleagues lending their talents to my work in order to help me grow and and get better at my craft. 

To name a few: Doug Hall’s Hammond B-3 and Fritz Doddy’s funky bass kicking off ‘Outer Space’; Alexander Lasarenko’s ambient piano intro at the top of ‘Never Going Back To Earth’, and his lush harmonies throughout ‘The Strangest Boy’; Sandy Park’s psycho pizzicato and Valerie’s ethereal vocals floating just under the stoic sentiment of ‘Return to Zero’. Chip Jenkins, Chris Fosdick, Eric Schermerhorn, Kerry Smith, Ben Sher and Alton Delano all provided amazing guitar work throughout my entire repertoire.

I had a real penchant for space age themes back then, but the music was also always flavored with the terrestrial world rhythms that had served as the soundtrack to my childhood spent overseas.

While Brian Eno may be a human touchstone for many electronic musicians today, Jonathan Elias’ pop aesthetics were skewed somewhere between Peter Gabriel and Trevor Horn, which were closer to my own sensibilities, as well.

In retrospect, I think Elias attracted people who shared a similar taste, that is, drawn to global and technological hybrids, of which I was certainly one by virtue of my penchant for using computers to mix tribal percussion with pop harmonies –and that was probably one reason that our mutual composition professor (Joel Chadabe) sent me knocking on Jonathan's door in the first place.

While the world of polished music production for broadcast may not have been quite in sync with the American grunge zeitgeist of the time, those years at Elias Arts proved to be a great personal opportunity to seek out and work with global trend setters in music from Brazil and Kenya to China and the Caribbean, and certainly more interesting than, you know, well, just about everything.


I saw myself in motion pictures
Standing in the melting snow
If you believe in hallucinations
I'll give you some place to go

Return to, return to zero
I don't know, I don't know
If I can... 


Y'know, I'm just one man...

Return to Zero
(C)1994 by Terry O'Gara

The Silicon Chips

In the ninth grade, in Chapel Hill, circa 1979, during what has been called a Golden Age of Music In North Carolina, I started a band called The Silicon Chips. The Chips were a middle school punk band, whose name was a direct homage to The Boomtown Rats single, 'I Don't Like Mondays'. There were punk rock bands in North Carolina before the Chips, notably The Psuedes (which featured Sara Romweber), The Secret Service, Th' Cigarettes, the X-Teens and the Durham Dots –but the age range for those bands' members were mostly college kids or older, and not many of my peers even knew who they were. In fact, there didn't seem to be any Triangle bands under the age of 18, and certainly none tapped into the emerging new wave.

It was a pre-MTV era, when the three primary flavors of American popular music were Rock, Country and Disco. Everything else was relegated to late night new music transmissions from Chapel Hill's 89.3 FM, WXYC. I no sooner admitted my fascination with David Bowie one day at school than to instantly learn that mere admission to being a fan of any European act, especially a gender bending drag queen, charted me somewhere off-center a graph measuring normalcy. But it was into this venue that the Silicon Chips were born, and to other newly minted Triangle teen agers, we must have seemed downright bent combining rockabilly with European flavored, sexually ambiguous rock'n'roll.

The Silicon Chips were, in fact, an international band.

My songwriting partner and our deft lead guitarist Tony Scott,  was an American, as was our pseudonymous drummer, Zeke, and our pianist, Kevin. But our bassist, Lars Mage, was Danish, and our rhythm guitarist was a German kid named Klauss. I was myself fresh from two years in Mallorca, and a childhood in Puerto Rico before that. Needless to say, being out of the loop, I didn't quite understand yet that American kids didn't generally like The Sex Pistols and Giorgio Moroder, much less both at the same time. So, like refugees in small town, somehow we found each other, and together we formed a rockabilly flavored, Euro tinged, Socially conscious, New York Dolled up Jr. Highschool punk rock band. Not only were we determined to challenge small town American pubescents with our idea of Avante-garde music, but I was absolutely certain we were The Next Big Thing.

To that effort, The Silicon Chips performed our one and only show  at the 1980 Guy B. Phillips talent show, lighting up the beginning of each act with one original song: 'Ann', and 'Radio Men' (Scott/O'Gara).

'Ann' was written about (and for) three different girls actually –all of them named 'Ann'–and none of which I had the courage to speak to, but any one of which I thought would have made the perfect girlfriend. Hello, ladies, available rock star here, for the taking. Only thirteen; get me before the rehab and groupies show up. Didn't happen, though.

She's into being flexible
Keeps her freedom
It's tedious ecstacy
But it feels good

Oooh Ann–

Other performers that evening included two amazing drummers that would both go on to have notable careers: Rob Ladd and Martin Levi. In high school Rob would become a founding member of The Pressure Boys and then after that, go on to  play on Alanis Morissette's international hit album, Jagged Little Pill.  Marvin Levi became drummer for the way-ahead-of-their time band, The Veldt.

Anyway, after that gig, that was it. I would like to say that if you saw the Behind the Music documentary, you would already know by now that between the excesses of hedonism, failed relationships, band tensions, internal litigation and Tony constantly bringing his design school girlfriend to rehearsal, that we finally just decided to split our millions and call it quits. But of course it didn't happen that way.

Tony's parents, who were college professors, simply re-located to where, I never found out. One day he was there, and the next he was gone, like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix.

Kevin, also, left town, returning to Wisconsin.

Didn't either of their parents understand what they had on their hands? Apparently not.

So, like every legendary band, we lived fast and died young –with out the speed or death part, of course.

For about ten years thereafter, all through the eighties, the Chips recordings increasingly sounded dated to me. But then punk came back repackaged as Seattle Grunge and when it did, it went wildly mainstream. And all of a sudden the Chips, too, sounded positively contemporary. In fact, I pretty much convinced myself that Nirvana stole our thunder.

In my head, I still have conversations that run like this:

"Dude, U2 is cool, but I wish you could have seen the Chips live."
"It's amazing how their music influenced just about everyone. It's like even the name of the band was prescient. Are any of the band members still alive?" 
"Well, just a rumor, but I read in Rolling Stone that O'Gara is living the Irie life in a shack in Jamaica, and Tony Scott writes movie reviews under another name for some Indy press."

Without a band to front, or another collaborator with whom I shared such artistically combustible chemistry, I bought a MiniMoog and began my high school reinvention as a solo electronic music artist. Indeed, when Tony left town forced me to stop thinking myself as only a lyricist and to get my own musical chops in order. While contemporaries like Dexter Romweber appeared as Flat Duo Jets and Michael Rank's ragged-around-the-edges Snatches of Pink came on the scene, I called myself Teri O. and performed with a microcomputer and a Radio Shack TRS-80. I think Teri O. probably sounded a lot like Brian Ferry by way of Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill.

In 1985 I also left Chapel Hill, finally landing in New York City, where I ended up producing music for TV commercials, radio and newly emerging interactive media.

This Silicon Chips had long fizzled but Mommy's little rocker had finally grown up and figured out how to fit into America.