That was my advice in 2001.
I still think it’s a pretty good way to go about things, even though my outlook on life is less jaded than it was then, in my post-divorce mood.
Hey ho!
This is Native in our studio, Marmfington Farm, totally live. This was done in preparation of recording the And Then What album.
Hope you’re enjoying the weather, and not writing love letters to the one that got away. It almost goes without saying that love will leave you —
2001 is rightly remembered as a traumatic year. But, for Native, the year was traumatic long before September 11.
As Mat Hutt prepared a move to join his family in California, the band carried on in the only way we knew how to do – gigging, rehearsing, and writing songs for our upcoming album. In other words, we were a bit in denial.
All good, though, because we were at the peak of our powers, and with Chris Wyckoff now firmly established and entrenched on the keyboard bench and so much great new material flowing out of us, there just wasn’t any other way to handle the situation.
Our third studio album was the result, and what a fine album And Then What turned out to be.
Since it was meant to be a compendium of both new and older material that had not made it onto our earlier efforts, we found ourselves delving into our past. Today’s song is one that we revisited and refurbished with a spiffing new arrangement.
Since it was already on our first eponymously-titled album, it didn’t make the cut. Little did we know that this very fine rehearsal recording would end up going out to the world in an anthology such as this!
I like it much better than the album version, except I wish Catherine Russell was there with her breathtaking vocals.
All we could do, was keep on doing all we could do, and just let the days we had left –
In 2000, when we embarked on the Protools Highway to a planned double-cd set called And Then What, Michael Jaimes didn’t have any new songs.
We had his sublime instrumental, Jazzy Hippie, and his heartfelt Just Want To Love You on the proposed track list, but these tunes were from previous years (and early versions of them can be heard in this Nativology series).
Mike was an amazing tunesmith, but his real passion was arranging the songs Mat Hutt, John Wood, & I were so diligently pumping out. He would encourage us to create something unique, and then he’d apply his magic hot sauce, and heaping amounts of Leprechaun Fairy Dust, and generally go about elevating our music to unimagined higher levels.
Which was great, but he had stopped coming in with new material of his own, and this did bring him a bit of consternation.
Thereupon, he was delighted when I told him I’d written a little number especially for him to sing, and he was doubly-delighted when I said there would be no guitar solo.
The album was shaping up to be quite the elaborate affair, with epic songs all over the place, so my thought was to write one that would serve as a kind of cleansing of the palette after a longer, much more involved tune. And, we would do something we’d never done before – bypass the by now obligatory solo section.
I was very impressed with the simple pleasures and joy found in Mike’s Just Want To Love You, and had the feeling that my latest efforts were a bit on the dark and heavy side. So, I endeavored to lighten things up with a simple ode to things I liked – bagels with lox, films by Howard Hawks, and beds made of brass.
Still, nothing is ever that straightforward with my tunes, and there are ruminations on mortality and the inevitable collapse of all hope, but for the most part it was a light-hearted excursion, on a bright and sunny day.
My favorite lyric is one that Mike rewrote. Where I’d written, “… in a broken down bar downtown,” Mike switched it to, “… in a broken dive bar downtown.” A reference to his preferred uptown watering hole, The Dive Bar (which is still there – Matt Lyons and I had a couple of tall, frosty brews there just last week!).
The recording was remarkably easy, with few takes needed, and the accompaniment was fine – with a rollicking piano part by the effervescent Chris Wyckoff, spiffing slide guitar from Mike, and fun backing vocals, featuring Mat, Woody, and myself (a first!).
When Mike & I returned to the project in 2005, and finished it with the able partnership of Craig Randall, today’s featured offering needed no additional work. We got it down perfectly in the original sessions.
I think this tune is a little gem, and Mike’s performance hits just right mark every time I hear it – especially in this stripped-down alt mix. He sang it from the heart because he really believed that love is a lot like the best day of the week —
After a furious six months of writing, recording, and gigging – Mat Hutt joined his family in California, where they had already relocated, in June, 2001.
At the time, we didn’t see it as an end, but rather a new aspect of Native‘s trajectory. We continued working on our ambitious two-record set, with producer John Fitzwater, we continued to put out band newsletters, we had plans. We never considered ourselves ex-members of this extraordinary band, and we still don’t to this day.
To that end, Mat was working on new songs in the sunny climes of northern Cali. He sent us a tape that sounded promising, and we added it to the queue of tunes we intended to develop.
However, when Mat returned for a week to delve into the project in August, there was so much to do that we never got around to those tunes. Indeed, they have languished as lonely orphans in our vault – the least listened-to songs of our 10-year run.
Until now.
Today’s selection finds Mat pondering the life of a simple local man he’d seen at a school crossing. Something about the man’s lonely existence must have clicked a button, because this is one of Mat’s most heart-felt lyrics.
Even in its nascent, never-to-be-fully-realized state, Mat really puts it across about what it must be like to be an —
Native‘s tunes are mostly about the usual song-type subjects – love, loss, hurting, joy, lying – we plowed those fields real good!
We never made the conscious decision to avoid politics, and issue-related subjects; writing from the heart is just how we roll. But, every great once in a while, Mat Hutt would take on a topical issue and address it in a song.
The first time was a little tune called I Am, which Mat wrote before Native officially constellated (and, in true Native perverseness, it appeared practically last on our records!).
The next one, by my count, came years later when he faced the issue of the harsh drug laws that have filled the prisons of America, and stigmatized even more folks, senselessly.
Writing the tune, Mat put himself in the place of someone who has just been put behind bars, and in so doing, he was able to feel that prisoner’s pain. The feeling he was left with was that this soul might have been imprisoned for only a few hours, but he or she has already lost something sacred – innocence.
And For What? There is absolutely no excuse for the extreme drug sentencing that has gone on for decades; that has saddled a generation with undeserved criminal records; that has crippled the courts and prisons; and has sapped a nation of something that same sacred innocence.
We were proud to play the tune, and it became a setlist favorite with great alacrity.
This song would be one of the last we recorded as a band. Indeed, Mat had relocated to the great state of California almost immediately thereafter. We were left with a great, but unfinished track. So………….
Mike Jaimes stepped up and did something quite amazing ; something that had never happened on any other Native recording – he wrote a horn arrangement!!
Mike’s dad – Oscar – was a horn arranger, and a deft musical talent, so it really should not have been so surprising when he did it – but, it was!
He contacted the super-talented trumpet-man, Richard Boulger, who was playing with The Allman Brothers at the time, and brought him in for a session – singing the parts he wanted Richard to play.
It was beautiful, and I was the only witness to this singular moment in Native history – basically the only time that Mike took charge of anything. But, he knew what he wanted, and it came off perfectly – all I had to do was fiddle with the knobs on the mixing board.
But, to hear those lovely horns with Richard playing all the parts, you have to go to our excellent record, And Then What. Today’s offering is the track the way it sounded when we ran that session – and it’s pretty excellent, too!
By the summer of 2000, with the Y2K fears long subsided and the long lazy days of summer having slowed New York City to a crawl – Native had put the finishing touches at converting its studio, Marmfington Farm, into a self-service recording studio.
One of the earliest tracks we used in the new-to-us format of ProTools, was a song I’d written that everybody seemed to really like. I remember the time between first bringing it in and when the band had perfected it was quite short. Although its Latin lilt was a bit outside of our style, it suited us to a tee, especially with Mat & Woody’s thrilling harmonies sailing over the top.
We were basically defined as a jam band, although we billed ourselves as “Funky Fried” and all manner of other hype-oriented genres, it really came down to songwriting first, and jamming second for us. Although, we were influenced greatly by The Grateful Dead, I think it’s safe to come out and say that our main influences were The Meters and The Beatles. In fact, I used to refer to the band as The Beaters.
This song was a watershed moment for me in another way — it’s my first mix.
Although, I had produced our second studio album, Exhale On Spring Street, I always trusted and relied on engineers to see to the details of mixing the music. Craig Randall had done a wonderful job on Exhale, and now we expected John Fitzwater to do the same. To that end, he engineered today’s offering beautifully, and would continue to do so throughout all the tracking that took place in the latter half of 2000, and onward to June 2001.
But, it was early days for the project and I wanted to get my hands wet. After I dried them off, I made a mix, and that’s what we’re going to hear today.
Please note that Mike Jaimes would not get around to cutting his lead guitar tracks, nor would Chris Wyckoff get to lay down his keyboard licks, until 2004. The reason for this will be covered in a future installment of this epistemological tome.
Until then, here is the splendor of our rough mix of a very polished tune —
Hey, hey! We’re back, and look – it’s 2015!
We’ve been working on this Nativology project for over two years, now. Hard to believe that when Dave Thomas cued up the four-track demo he and Mike Jaimes made in November 1992 that we’d have come through four volumes of rarities from our vaults!
But, hey, we’ve always been very productive, as evidenced by today’s offering.
When John Fitzwater undertook the production of the album that would come to be known as And Then What, his first act was to get our studio, Marmfington Farm, into the twenty-first century. Gone were the easily-mangled eight track cassettes that had been our mainstay for years. Computer-based recording was the wave, and we were going to ride that wave like raving ninja surfers!
Sadly, we were not ninjas or surfers, and our relationship with technology was pretty much the same one the Frankenstein monster had with fire.
Fire bad!!
To ease the sitch, Fitz wisely led us through some sessions that were not meant for release, but were aimed at allaying our primitive fears, and getting the ninja-thing happening.
So, the new ProTools set-up’s maiden voyage culminated in today’s tune – a classic Grateful Dead song playfully reworked by Mat Hutt. (Note: Version 1, performed by Mike at the same session, appeared on Nativology Vol. 2)
In and waaaaaay out of the garden he goes —
Please excuse our absence these past two weeks. Our archivist/Curator, the famously infamous Dave Thomas (aka, davenative) allowed his personal projects to intrude into our airspace. But, the standoff has been rectified, corporal punishment has been applied, and now restitution to all offended parties is being administered, via ear canal.
Journey back with us now, as we remember that innocent yesteryear – 2000 a.d., the year Native began seriously planning an epic album – And Then What.
In addition to all the great new songs we’d been working on, we knew we had a large catalogue of tunes that had slipped through the cracks, and had not made it to our earlier albums.
Going through all the old tapes laying around Marmfington Farm, John Fitzwater, our producer and soul brother, came upon the 1995 recording of today’s offered morsel of musical remuneration – a song of great concision (it is barely 3 minutes long) written by Michael Jaimes.
At the gigs, the song was always used as a breather in our otherwise hard-jamming setlists, and it became a well-loved tune by every one of us.
We had recorded an updated version on the same, original tape sometime in the intervening five years since the first was done. This version was slower, more direct, and even more heartfelt – something that did not seem possible.
Fitz made a fresh mix of it for us to listen to, and it quickly became a priority for the new album. We carried out the assignment of re-recording it with alacrity, but in all honesty, we never matched the easy grace of this version.
So, here you go. The subject is love – and, as you’ll hear, Mike had it by the truckload.
Just Want To Love You (Version 2)
All I can say about the lyrical content of today’s previously unheard offering, submitted for your approval, is that it was written in the tumultuous early days of 2001.
We were broke, and had been fighting, a bit
We’d worked out our respective beefs, though, and grew up quite a lot in the process. The new collaborations took on a renewed sense of exuberance and passion.
Problem is — we were still broke.
Another important thing to remember is where we were, as a country, in that period. No one lives in a fishbowl, and we were becoming more aware of what was going on. The new songs conveyed a hopeful, but concerned point of view, written by a person dealing with the onset of a new era, both economically, and politically.
George W. Bush had just entered the Oval Office and, almost immediately, there were reports of secret meetings with heads of energy industries.
We were not activists on any front, at that point, and we had never taken any political stand, as a group. But, being interested in the environment was a common bond between us, and we all started to get more informed about what was going on, and being set into policy, by a group that seemed to be the beneficiaries of said policy – who got to write it!
Those classified meetings eventually were made public, and we now know that our worst fears were not only met, but it was much worse than anyone could have dreamt — the plans for an Iraq invasion were being drawn.
Even without that knowledge, the portents were deeply unsettling, and it led to many of us becoming much more activist in our personal lives. But, in Mat’s humble hippie head, in the fallow days of 2001, the focus of his lyric was all about coping with daily life, with all these brand new unknowns that lay ahead.
After 8 years of pretty much glorious escapades, the first year of the new century had ended rather acrimoniously for Native. There were problems between Mat & myself, and looking back after all this time, I can see it objectively, and say that:
1) Mat’s beefs with me were completely legitimate.
2) My beefs with Mat were completely legitimate.
3) The two sets of beef had nothing to do with each other.
4) We were both a couple of big babies, and it damaged morale in the band.
But, we soldiered on into 2001, and somehow Mat & I worked through our differences, and our collaborations started clicking, the band breathed a sigh of relief, and there was great rejoicing.
We kicked off the year with a fresh round of rehearsals to work on all the new material we had, with Fitz at the studio controls – located clear across on the other side of the loft from the live room!
He was still working out the fine points of using the digital recording software – ProTools, and was loving every moment of it, except for the lack of ventilation or oxygen in my room, where the recording console was set up.
Amidst a general air of friviolity in the occasion, Mike suddenly goes bang into the wonderful Grateful Dead song that is this week’s submission for your approval. And, damn if we didn’t jump in and hang on for a perfectly splendid rendition!
As I listen to it, I marvel at how good we were, and *gosh-a-mighty* Mike was just the most talented guy in the world!
Added bonus – It’s kinda good to see how things can go if you work through your struggles.
Surely, we had grown stronger for having learned how to —
Native 