We’re all faceless
If you can see
These bodies are cages
You’ve got to agree
Words are hypnosis
They leave us behind
Always failing
What’s in my mind
Fake an interest in what you say
Words don’t matter anyway
Guess I’ll lock myself away
It’s takin’ my mind away
You’re wasting time now
Telling me what you’ve seen
It’ll never add up to
The places that you’ve been
Nothing has happened
There’s nothing ahead
This is all you are now
Everything else lies dormant
Fake an interest in what you say
It just don’t matter anyway
Guess I’ll lock myself away
It’s takin’ my mind away
They don’t mean anything but
What you assign to them
You’re so confined to them
Do you remember what you’ve seen?
Did they ever tell you you were wrong?
Do you remember all the lies?
Do you really think they’ll ever stop?
This lie is useless
This lie is real
It’s what you know, it’s what you are
It’s all you know how to feel
You life is worthless
You cease to be
All you remember
Is what they agreed upon
Why don’t you tell me what you know?
You’re everything that you’ve been told
Why don’t you just buy back your soul
You’re everything that you’ve been told
So far away
This is one of the first songs I wrote after Chronic Jaywalker had picked up Steve as the fourth member of the band. This would have been around ’93, and at the time I was reading a lot of Robert Anton Wilson and Carlos Castaneda type stuff that my brother was recommending, so this one is about what’s real and what isn’t. This song is my attempt to get across the concept that when we try to share experience and knowledge through words, we are limited by the words we have available to describe things with, and therefore we never fully share an experience or idea with somebody. Words are only worth the meaning that one assigns to them, and we assign different meanings to the same word from person to person. I was also trying to get across the concept that these bodies are just vessels that allow our souls to have the human experience, and while our souls are capable of having profound experiences within these bodies, we are limited by words and expressions, at best art, to share these epiphanies, and does anybody really “get” it?
I came up with a simple chord progression that I could sing the words over. The plan was to take this simple framework to band practice and everybody would come up with their own riffs or lines to fit with the chords and it would be a complete song in no time. So as I’m showing them the new song I’m just banging away on these two chords and singing over them and the guys were quickly bored just playing these two chords back and forth. I was telling them they need to come up with something else to do over these chords, forgetting for a second there that I’m the only one with any kind of formal training and/or knowledge of what notes we could make riffs and such out of. So I said “Steve why don’t you do something like this…” and I came up with this riff that was based on notes of the chords with a little descending thing happening throughout, (you can never go wrong with a descending thing), and Brian was immediately interested in doing the same thing on the bass.
This was also about the same time that Chronic Jaywalker adopted a “none of us are singers so let’s not try to sing” kinda rule. Lord knows I tried to sneak it in here and there anyway, but for this one, the bark like a dog yelling thing that was getting to be all the rage would work, especially now that we had this heavy descending riff thing going. It was early ’95 before we finally finished our CD, engineered by Ray who was also working with Loudmouth at the time, and went on to have a pretty significant part in getting Disturbed up and running. I have to say Ray made us sound pretty heavy given the crappy equipment and lack of chops we brought to the table. We sent in a CD to Q101 hoping to get something played on the local music showcase. The guys were worried that Q101 would play the song Martyr, a clear case of my trying to sing over a borderline pretty chord progression, and then people wouldn’t realize how heavy we were. I was actually writing a letter to someone while listening to the local music showcase and writing “wouldn’t it be something if they played us”, when Carla Leonardo said we were coming up after this song, and I had one full song to call everyone I knew in Chicago and tell them to turn the radio on. She chose About the Authors, and even played the crazy sample intro, and after it was over she said “rough and raw, the sound of Chronic Jaywalker!” Darn that was exciting.
So what is that crazy sample intro you ask? One of our earliest shows was at Club Stodola on the north side, and we happened to have a video camera. There was a hallway heading back to the bathroom and our “back stage room” (a storage closet). Steve was following the singer for the other band playing that night with the camera as a banged his shoulder into one wall and then the other (if you’ve seen Altered States you remember this bit) and the ceiling tiles started falling down from the ceiling, so what you here is Lenny and Steve’s camped up reaction to the ceiling caving in.
