Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar
INV160
Invisible Records
Lyrics
© Jared Louche
Music: More, Louche, Kermanj
TRACKLIST:
Suture
Codeine, Glue And You | download
Suicide Jag | download
Suture
Chemical Halo
Neurozone
Elephant Man
Suture
Rivet Head | download
Derailer
Suture
Summer Of Hate
Suture
Chemical Halo (Remix By Martin Atkins)
Suicide Jag (Remix By Mark Blasquez)
ALBUM NOTES:
This album was written over a period of a year-and-a-half after we got off the nine inch nails “now I’m nothing” tour in very early 91. We wrote a couple of songs for that tour, ‘Gas Mask’ and another one that escapes me, but we never used any of them and they’re forever lost. Dylan went through about five or six different apartments during the writing of the record, all of them cursed and weird, the one in my old neighborhood in Spanish Harlem actually burned down. He slunk all over the city and at one point lived on the water-front in the lee of the Brooklyn Bridge in a warehouse district in Brooklyn. He and the Egg Man (Mark Kermanj, our early drummer) lived there for all of four months in the bake of summer. It was a very weird time and there was a lot happening to us, but more on that some other time and some other where.
-Jared
Lyricsthe ‘don’t hate sex’ break is very fluid animal. though static on the record, I always changed what I would say throughout that whole section every night we played it, always shifting it and playing with the words and eliding them in and out of each other. That break is based on a slowed and slurred sample of a break in the Pixies song “this monkey’s gone to heaven” where Black Francis sings “if man is five, then the devil is six, then god is seven”. We lifted and mutated ‘devil is six’ and pitched it onto that break and I riffed on top of it, further obscuring Black Francis. Dylan liked the idea of it changing every time we played it and suggested a couple of the variations as well.
my fire's burning low
as my song grinds out on the radio,
i just want to move you slow and low
and shoot my eight ball in your corner pocket hole.
"life's a gas" or so it seems
you know i blow a fuse when you come in my dreams,
i've got this fear no kiss can cover
i know we need no help to hurt each other.
if 6 were 9 i'd lose my mind
i go crazy for you all of the time
please little motor-head don't you whine
there'll be some peace at the end of the line.
if six were nine
if six were nine,
demolition delicious devil-licious don't listen don’t live sick devil lives sick devil loves sick devil loves sex devil loves it don’t you love it don’t lip synch devil lovin’ don’t lock it unlock it unlucky don’t love sex don’t hate sex don’t you hate sex don’t hate sex
don't hate sex you don’t hate sex don’t hate sex-
like a shot of speedway methadrine
coming on like a hot-head machine
she's my only teenage dream-
if you know what I mean.feel so bad and broken
day in and day out,
confused and annoyed
it's all i find i think about,
the voices all around you
starting to make you blind,
12 o'clock tick tock
come on, baby, now it’s brain washing time.
morning will come and you’ll still be
trapped here in your cage,
I'll be gone, I'll be gone far away
the King is dead, long live the fucking King,
there used to be a time
when i'd do almost any single little thing for you.
i see you now
and my stomach's balled up in a knot.
i feel the cold knife blade of disgust
in my gut like a shot.
you can fuck me and i hate you,
you can hate me and i fuck you,
isn't that what this is all about?
the future's not all it's cracked up to be,
bloated in the daylight
dead eyes seldom see
your empire's in flames and
your kingdom's out of power
the Emperor’s dead and
on his grave are crushed one dozen
dead flowersthis one was written in the basement apartment that Dylan lived in on 8th street and Avenue B, just off of the park. It’s a stunning building, but the place he lived in was underground, like a bunker with tiny windows and stygian dark. A couple of other musicians lived there, but they really didn’t know what to make of our sound and couldn’t understand that we liked to listen back to trax we were working on at speaker-splintering volume, overandoverandoverandoverandover. We drove them out of there a lot. Paul, who owned the place, was working with a guy that was spectacularly unbalanced and menacing as hell. Paul came home one evening to find a 10 minute, ranting message from this nut job on his phone machine, a segment of which we lifted for the beginning of ‘Derailer’. The guy was about seven feet tall and wide as a truck, ex-Marine with an intense grudge. He meant, and could carry out, every word of it and I don’t really remember how it all got resolved, but I do remember a brick through a glass door at some point...
chemical halo burning bright
in a sodium haze,
all meaning is lost,
but this confusion remains.
i'm going to tear myself apart
if i can't get myself together,
and spread my pieces around like waste
and give my gift of stormy weather.
every time i move i feel like something's broken.
every time i laugh i feel like maybe i'm choking.
i know you'd laugh too,
but it's not the funny anymore.
i kissed the floor on my way down,
a match head burning out on the frozen ground.
i just want to thank every one of you
for all the things that you don't do,
for the stab in the back
for the kick in the face
for the pain in the neck
and all the shame and disgrace
for the spit in the eye
and all the things you say,
and all the head games you play.
for the agony and the parody
for the pain infliction and drug addiction,
you give them so much strength
when you show you're weak,
please don't rattle your chains
it's better when you're meek.
here comes another bad trip
another life of no sleep
another storm in the dark.
with the sky pouring down
every creature will drown.
this time there will be no Noah's Arc!
"see you in hell!"this was written in one of the stranger crash pads of Dylans. He was staying with a guy I used to call Gear who lived in an abandoned store front on 4th Street off Avenue B. the place was windowless, awash with motorcycle parts and engines and oil canisters and guitar amps and a sofa and piles of nameless metal shrapnel, cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. It was a bleak atmosphere and we wrote this song, ‘Derailer’ and ‘Elephant Man’ in that joint, each of them reflecting differently the cold sense of remove we felt there. Dylan’s room was tiny, doorless, ceiling-high with light-blinking gear and jammed right up against the sidewalk so we could hear the world roaring by right through the wall, inches from where he sat hunched over the deck programming. It wasn’t any kind of apartment, just two “bedrooms” and a front room/chop palace. The front door was like a dented steel wall that opened right into the front room. There really wasn’t any room to move, you sat on piles of boxes or machine parts or tried to clear space on the buried sofa. The lyrics just came through me one night as Dylan was working on the structure of the song and the lyrics feel stained by the atmosphere of disjointedness and veiled menace I always felt there. He wasn’t there long though we recorded some rough vocals there that I kind of like. We’ll release them at some point so you can taste that weird thing too, the after-burn of engine grease and high-altitude atmosphere.
you say you want to know what's going on
there's nothing happening in here,
there's someone moving on the other side,
but who it is is not too clear,
the mystery is
that there's this itch
that somehow you just can't scratch,
and somewhere
a blaze is burning
that wasn't started with a match.
you say you don't like the darkness
that's just the color that's around,
you say you want to end up real high,
so you don't have to touch the ground.
get down on your knees
if you want to touch the sky,
you want to see clearly now,
you better cover up your eyes.
voices are talking in the grid,
but i can't tell quite what they mean.
you tell me that this is how it goes,
but i think that that's a bit obscene.
you say there's no difference between us
the signal's the same
and that there's no real kink.
the slate's been wiped clean
and history won't repeat,
but that's never been the way that i think.
wear your anger proud and loud and deep,
that way i know what i can trust,
you grab at a hole
and a hollow kiss and
convince yourself that you will never rust.
i've got a wire in the back of my head, got a wire in the back of my head
get down on your knees
if you want to touch the sky,
you want to see clearly now
you better poke out your eyesmob voice lashes skin from bone
the monster attacked, the demon alone,
-hide your face-
broken flesh that lies within
trapped inside the demon skin,
-hide your face-
madness throwing evil glances
inside is where the horror dances,
-hide your face-
hatred's pliers tooth extracting
hostile environment discriminating.
-hide your face-
genetic downpour corrodes my spleen
so much less than what i seem,
i don't think you know,
you couldn't understand,
what it feels like
to be the Elephant Man.
madness burns a ragged hole
into the core of the demon soul,
the meek will never inherit the earth
they'll be beaten and bandaged and
drugged and fucked up and cursed
-hide your face-
mob voices lashes skin from bone
the monster attacked the demon alone-
-hide your face!-
the meek will never inherit the earth
they'll be beaten and bandaged and
drugged out fucked up and cursed-
-hide your face-
help me i'm the elephant man!the basic body of this song was written by the Egg Man/Mark when he and Dylan were living in Brooklyn for five seconds. It was one of the hottest summers, drenched, no air conditioning, just the thick stench of the East River everywhere and the two of them living in this little box with no food and no money. That was the summer of eating dog food. The Egg Man wanted to write something that would really just be a mindless juggernaut of crushing power. I forget where he stole the sampled scree in the choruses, but he really turned me on with that noise in the end. He kept saying he was going out of his head, every three seconds, all summer long! I didn’t have lyrics for it until we were in Trax and tightening up the song. Egg and I were doing poppers underneath the mixing desk while Critter was working and he turned to me, his face melted-long like wax, and said, veeery slowly; “wow, everything just turned to drool” and the song wrote itself to me right there, coming out of me suddenly like blood from a really deep wound. I wanted it to be pretty obscure, and it is, but it’s a “trapped in a fucked-up situation” riff, be it drugs, love, hate, poverty or or or. A lot of the lyrics are segments of phrases that I snared that night or chops of things that we were saying all of the time: “your whole life is out of key!”. I was so tired and burned out when I recorded the vox that I almost passed out yelling the choruses. Critter suggested that Geno, who was just working there at the time, go in and stand behind me in case I pitched over backwards again. He did. I didn’t, mostly. I can still feel the warmth of his hands on my back when I listen to this song…strange.
shooting blanks, relentless, pitchblade,
microwave and the old collision
out of order
everything just turns to drool
=AND WHITE-HOT INDECISION=
the pages burn
the stomach churns
the cycle turns
=LOSE YOUR PEACE
LOSE YOUR MIND=
crack the eggshell to escape
the total trauma suicide deadline
Going Out of My Head!
lying on your back in the dark
listening to the hum of the machine
tricked up wound up wound up
trying to break your dreams
the Watcher Seeker hunting out with a hungry eye
=THE DESTROYER NEEDS TO FEED=
it's hard to find the door,
the lock, when your whole life is out of key
Going Out of My Head!
want to slip that needle in
want to smell those fumes again
want to beat those skins again
but there's something wrong
there's something wrong
Going Out of My Head!the chorus really exemplifies the way we felt about life in those days. So much poison, and it all seemed like the right thing to do, all of the time, and a lot of the time it was too. So much of it felt like heaven, slick along the tongue, hitting the back of the skull, naked and drenched in sweat, laughing, crying, coming, screaming, passing out, waking up and doing it all all over again.
did you feel it, that electric high?
i saw that sugar sparkling hit your eye
did you feel it in your blood like lead?
i saw that bullet shooting up and hit the back of your head
this poison feels like heaven
like every bad thing that i want to do
she wears her bruised skin a little bit too tight
she wants to go out like a sun burning much bright
shoot out the moon and the stars in the dead of the night
suck up the air and go out without a fight
this poison tastes like heaven to me
feel good, feel good, blow your mind, slow down,
make love, get sucked in and fall down,
go blank and black out
feed me now because i'm hungry and lazy
you better lock me up before i hurt you
cause i feel a little crazy
there's an Oblivion King stands beside my bed
outside the door inside the hole inside my head
this poison feels like heaven.
like every bad thing that i want to do
let me do it to you-----
"we don't care if you’re too young,
just come upstairs to the sensorium"
(inscribed in the original Burn Out booklet.)
“we don’t care how old you are
just come hang out at the Hydrogen Bar”
(used on posters for the tour we did with Skrew in 93)there seemed to be a big hippy revival going on when we were writing Burn Out and it was really pissing me off, Blind Fucking Melon vomit. The whole sentiment was that everything will be cool if we all just “get together”, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. It seemed like a way of copping out of any responsibility and people are apathetic enough as it is. It seemed like the biggest, government sponsored con ever. I love this one because it falls into total chaos at the end, the noise building up and further and further obscuring the actual song and playing that thing live was a great way to end a show, often the gear would take a real beating as well which is always a gas!
something bitter this way comes
the shaking earth's unstable and coming undone
conquer and decimate
tell me what have you won
raise your flag on the wasteland
tell me what have you done
let's kill the light and bring down the night
let your chaos rage (we’re getting down) in the Summer of Hate,
it's the Summer of Hate
kneel and kiss the hand you cannot bite
turn a blind eye, fed an obvious lie
drinking Misperception and thinking that we don't see.
the knife blade thinks that it's time you learned how to bleed.
We’re gonna do it,
it's the Summer of Hate
the Master ruled with an iron glove.
your greatest trick was the Summer of Love,
but you've grown fat, secure, sedate,
and we don't think that our anger is about to abate
and if you think you're safe
then you're a little too late
cause we've come to kill you in the Summer of Hate
let’s kill the light..
watch your children in the Summer of Hate!
Hate!
Hate!
