Liar, Liar House on Fire

The Castles

I found this piece earlier today, while looking through the archives. I hadn't put it up anywhere before, and the piece is quite long, and is my attempt at a fictional piece of music journalism.

And it struck me all of a sudden, like a flash from above, that all of my idols were in their own way insane, cast out from the inclusive rings like those nestled in the inner circles of ripples, wandering out from inside the inner circles of power, wealth and influence.

Was it my own goal then, to ferret out who were the leaders, were they just the outsiders?

Did they not see that the roles had been reversed, switched somehow while the lights were out?

We were certainly taught that from an early age, and I think that’s why we ended up doing what we did when we did it.

Our parents certainly didn’t think us capable of changing the world. And I realize, as I sit here with this drink in hand talking to you at the bar were about to play tonight that they wouldn’t have agreed even if they were still alive. They would have found the whole thing foolish, this rock and roll business.

So in a way, when Derrick and I rebelled, it was for a cause that we thought was ultimately that thing that was worth dying for, that of ultimate creativity.

We're talking to the leader of the Castles, a media powerhouse that grabbed hold of the attention of the rock world in 2005, with the release of what is sure to be the album of 2005 and the first novel, which has been commissioned into a film by Focus Features, as the documentary of a fictional rock star which mirrors lead singer Thad Thompson and his brother Derrick.

In the pages of The Guardian takes Control, Thad and Derrick inject many of the daily insights of their lives spent in an critically-acclaimed yet not financially solvent rock band, chronicling the daily sojourn from city to city while holding down a day job.

A major turning point for the band was the recent deaths of both their mother and father within a four-month period last September.

We sat with Thad on the occasion of the Castles sold out gig at the Forum last February.

There really wasn’t a venue for us, so we created one.

Early 1980’s, West Columbia, SC

Thad and Derrick grew up just across the river from the budding metropolis and state capitol, Columbia, South Carolina.

Thad: Growing up in a place like West Columbia in the 1980s wasn’t the sort of place we wanted to grow up. Our father was a Classical Studies Professor who didn’t what his two sons exposed to the pretension of academia. So we lived just outside the city, so Derrick and I could both experience a rural upbringing. It was bullshit, really, because we were sneaking off to all of these shows from the college local bands in Columbia, and we knew all the bouncers names by the time we were 17.

We were always taught to have our own fun, away from the tempting specter of the television.

Thad remembers his mother bringing one home that shed won at the church raffle.

She just came in with this TV, a black and white one that probably only received three channels when you had the piece of plastic wedged inside of it just so. And my dad comes home from work, and both Derrick and I glued to it, watching Spiderman, or some crap, and my dad rips it from the wall, and asks us to follow him. He hacked it to pieces and asked us to make it into something useful and write about it.

We filled it full of Carolina Red Clay; you know the stuff that covers every inch of the state. And when the rains came, it turned into this crazy red pool of mud that we called the holy pit, like it was our little Egypt to make little Sphinxes inside of it, then we’d cover it up and leave the glass pane over it, preserving it until the next door neighbors found it and blew it to shreds with bottle rockets.

So was it what you would call an idyllic childhood, from certain perspectives, it certainly could appear that way?

It was but we didn’t realize it at the time. Like we always thought everyone made their own fun, but then, as we got older and we went to school, we discovered that all the other kids watched TV all the time, like that was all they did.

But at the time we wanted to be normal. I wish I could lie to you and say, “well yeah, it was ideal, because we wanted to create so it was distraction free” that’s not to say we didn’t like the privacy and in the end it was for the best, but at the time it was horrible, we just wanted to watch TV and fuck around like other kids.

While we’re on the subject of your childhood, you seem to focus much of the bulk of your material on the darkening image of your parents.

It was a lot of pressure, and there were a lot of changes that hit us all at once. But we used this primarily as a way to get further into the music. It was all we knew how to do, so we delved further into it, not knowing anything else.

Having your brother there, I mean that’s whats important when you go through something like this, you have your brother right there to bounce ideas off of.

But when Mom died, and the whole period of time that led up to that, I think we would have been lost if it weren’t for the presence of the other, without him, I wouldn’t be here now.

Like on “fading out”, that was one of those songs that happened right in the middle of that. There was a moment, I was standing in the doorway, trying to come up with the next lyric, and I looked out the window for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised at how much color was stripped out of view out of the window, and I stood back a bit, and wondered how long had it been since I just stared out the window, and how my mom’s death affected the way I viewed something as simple as a sunset.

Thad goes quiet her for awhile, staring at the menu posted above the bar. He’s quiet for awhile as my line of questioning changes to his writing technique, and how he comes up with the ideas in his first novel, and how was the collaborative process in doing so.

The way it goes is once you have a set amount of freedom to do creatively what you want to do, the rest of it is just pure planning. My brother and I have worked exclusively with each other over the past twenty years or so, and the process has become automatic to the point where its almost like breathing, we don’t think much about it, but we have always been this way, gentle in our ability to create, its ingrained into who we are.

It’s like when we were working on the novel, and we wrote the whole thing in our tiny apartment in Williamsburg, that’s in Brooklyn. And we wrote it in shifts, on this old typewriter my granddad used to write for the New York Post on, and it was such a great way of doing it, one writing while the other edited. One would edit what the other just wrote and then we’d switch places.

The whole process is similar to the way we write songs, brainstorming with ideas and melody.

I’ll read you a sample from The Guardian Takes Control

If you took everything that has ever been said to you with a grain of salt you wouldn’t believe in anything. Think about it, put the book down, walk away from this idea and think it over for awhile.

While you are in the bathtub, think back to that first heartbreak, when your heart felt bruised for the first time. Think about that far away feeling you had to inhabit in order to sustain your own happiness.

Now imagine if you lived every day of your life this way. Imagine what would happen if you put off the inevitable reality long enough to seriously jeopardize your own idea of reality. What if that concept were re-defined to a point where ‘reality’ didn’t really exist at all.

Now take yourself back fifteen years into the more idyllic times of your life, think back to where life becomes fuzzy, where memory and melody blend together and you cant recall if it actually happened to you or if you dreamt it all along. This is the realm that I inhabited at the Reynolds Boy School in 1980, the summer after my parents split up and four months before my father drifted back into my life. Think about this long and hard. Think about the earliest pencil hallway smell of your earliest school memory. Then add a few years to that. Because at eight years old, I could remember everything about that place, including the silence I would turn into music whenever the nurses feet rapt in unison to the machinations of the system, clacking confident and continuous.

The summer of 1980 is still fresh in my mind, the tears in my eyes looking out on the flooded streets of Brooklyn. Overcast day, so hot and humid it commanded the rain to pellet down upon us in little needles that stung my eyes when they pressed hard on my light blue blazer and sternly informed me where I was going.

So if you look at that and try to pick out what is fact and what is fiction, youll go crazy. I’ve weaved enough in there to examine in my own head that summer. But distance, time and family have a way of distorting the image, especially after that disastrous summer in rehab when I was fourteen.

And so, in what seemed like lifetimes ago, there existed a time in your mind where the familial break was so intense that warranted a certain hazing over certain events that resulted in an eventual break from reality itself. When you couldn’t distinguish the two anymore, they sent you away, six years after being sent away the first time.

But this time, it was harder. And standing outside of the cathedral like clinic on that chilly Rochester morning meant that you spent the night crying, your skin still humming from the car ride, you faced the stoic faces, and the admitted glances of degradation the way a convicted man walks the last mile after a lifetime of difficult miles.

They were kind to you in ways that noone was up to this point, the nurses sternly disapproved of your behavior, most certainly, but they took you in when no one believed in you, not after what you had done.

Your father upon coming home from another date, angry and drunk found you in bed, asleep with one of his own bottles, cradling it despite the vomit that trickled out of your mouth, as you tried to laugh it off, but howled with tears when you woke up and felt sore all over. You did this nightly, and would rise and shower before your father came home. But when he returned home that one night to a son cradling his last whiskey bottle, well that was when he had enough.

Your younger brother was still asleep and at the age when the toxic thing elders do, whether it be the vagaries of sexual activity and masturbation, or the silent confessions of addiction, are oblivious and are gauzed over like so many broken families in the neighborhood.

Again, its all bullshit, isn’t it? You read into it what you want to read, here’s another bit I like.

Standing outside, in the numbing cold, a red axe stubbornly buried into a tree stump. Your father yelled at you only a few minutes ago, and your hands are raw and cold in the backyard without any gloves. You finally manage to get the axe out and chop the first piece, but on the second slab of wood you miss the chunk of wood and fall forward onto the spine of the axe, chipping your tooth. You feel the warm blood on your hands as if warmed by something more benign. Drops of blood begin to form on the snow and stump below you, looking up into the grey sky for answers, you want to crawl inside the warmth of the neighbors home, and you dream of having them as your parents, so kind are they to the neighbor boy, about your age.

Excerpt from "Love and Other Aquatic Creatures"

I sat in that cottage for hours, on the hard bed in the sparse room with only a picture of the Outer Banks, a long empty coastline that looks like the tail end of nowhere. Looking out at the creek, I studied every eddy, every rush and wash of water, spilling over the creek as it eventually did flood. The process was not unlike watching my own life come unglued from a distant vantage point, watching it slide off out of its container, like the love that came from her that caused me to drive way, like it always did.

Excerpt from "Errant times at the Java House"

“We’ve got enough to worry about around here without you going ape shit on me!”

He held the room’s attention, and its accompanying patrons, who ducked out under the covers of responsibility on that Friday, just stepped out for a quick coffee. They are all paused, mid-sentence, with biscotti in hand, ruby glasses perched over craned noses. Eyes locked at each other.

What have I been doing?

Where have I been since the last time?

Rifling through papers on my desk, listening to the shift in the room when I answered an unknown question. Reflecting on the nature of vehicles and physics at 6:45 in the morning. Attempting cross country skiing, and finding the balance in it.

The writing has continued at a glacial pace, with work leaning towards the autobiographical. So much navel-staring and contemplation. Waiting for the snap of spring, waiting out the last of the rains in May and early June, until I hit that one day of June 16, when the school doors swing open, and Alice Cooper's "School's out for summer" can be heard in every Camaro peeling out of the parking lot.

Thinking back a bit, to back when I was the age of some of my students when I try to figure out why certain students won't follow through. They get so close, 75% of the way through and then fade out, disappearing on the last day of class, never to be seen again.

Driftless in the open sea, tormented by some unknown faction, parental, animal or mineral.

Light in the morning on the way into work, feeling lighter, breathing easier.

Coming home to a home, and not an under-furnished apartment.

Shaving and noticing the grey-white silvery hairs march onward, gaining new ground each day, garrisons multiplying and dividing.

Watching older friends change patterns, set fire to objects, throw out shirts eaten away by battery acid.

At work, the beginning of the last term, the last run around the track before we let out a colossal collective sigh, and turn towards the sun, climbing higher up the hills on our bicycles, rushing down and tasting the dewey summer air, like we never left high school.

The Light in the House

Standing on the edge of the property, at two in the morning I wonder why that light is on, and why its the color of a million shameless nights.

I stop at this spot in the middle of the night, restless sleep drove me here, pushing away the branches in the yard not mowed since late summer, and I stare at that house.

I wonder if anyone is awake, and if they are, what are they thinking? Do they walk the four foot space in front of the window, a shadow oscillating like a airgun target a fairground, taunting onlookers, begging them to look, to question why is there a figure in the window at two in the morning?

And why do you look, why aren't you asleep with the rest of the world? Is this distant rendezvous pure coincdence, a dream that sticks with you the rest of the next day, with the window shade up the next morning, the house dark during the day and at night a beacon of question, a curiosity that will never be resolved, but in dreams, when the shade rises up, and we look into the horrors of our days.