MOTEL CALIFORNIA

KARMA FOR KKK TO BURN / DOMINO DANCING

Text and photos by MARCUS MARÇAL, except the picture above (republished just by direct link). This text was originally written in December 2009 and photos were taken at São Pedro d'Aldeia. In this post I embedded an incidental soundtrack, with two versions for "Indians", just to illustrate the allegories...

I wrote 90% of "Motel California" riffs back in 1994-1995. It was in a particular moment I was listening a lot to Pantera and Filter's album "Short Bus". These riffs I used to play everytime I was really pissed off with anything in my life. I wrote them on a Strat model a relative of mine has bought for him and I used to play the instrument almost every stnd weekend of my youth, plenty of Rolling StoneD recs, when I used to visit my parents living in a small town - especially when there wasn't a great show or any kind of random event for me to watch in Rio by that time.

It was a song that should have appeared on a demo I had recorded myself by that time, but it took me some time to put the lyrics on paper, so I dropped it out for a little while. Once I showed these riffs to an old friend of mine, he cheered me up saying they kicked ass... Note that this guy was not the type who'd congratulate me for anything I do. But, to my surprise, he always talked about the expertise of a friend of ours who'd gone to live in Germany by the end of the eighties - by then he was already learning his first chords on the guitar... Anyway, he liked the song and agreed to visit me when I spent some time at my parents' home, in order for us to play some songs, and helped me have an idea of how some of the songs I wrote by that time should be played by a live band. This is something I'll never forget, especially because I hadn't expressed any kind of retribution when later I had the opportunity for doing so... But fuck it!



I used to play these riffs eventually for about fifteen years. I also tried to make a proper arrangement by the time I played with a band called Unabomber by 1999. We made a cool arrangement for the song with two guitars and drums, but the bassist couldn't keep pace on this tune and I didn't insist them for playing the song. Anyway, the band of that period shouldn't be either called Unabomber because it was in another vibe. But we made a lot of jams that drummer PC Stocc recorded on a cheap tape recorder and unfortunately just one song came to life, although the band's singer refused to write or sing anything 'cause he was dealing with delicate issues in his personal life. I even told him to exorcize his pain away by writing new stuff in a cathartic way, but he didn't like the idea of showing up to everybody all the crap he was dealing with at that time. I was not really feeling as part of that band either and was eager of us making new songs from the jams we were making, instead of simply replacing a friend of mine by playing all their heavy funky dissonant tunes. This guy left the band years earlier because he was arrested in possession of reggae records in a famous join#... Ops, in a famous point in a beach in Rio... He was in possession of a Mad Professor unauthorized autobiography, enchanted by seeing a famous brazillian actress with a small bikini on the sand, so he decided to start a fire and dance a Cid Guerreiro song, but got caught by some Poncherellos that thought he was a thief trying to rob the actress or anything like that. Oh, they weren't kind with his TV affairs' issues. His father-in-law was responsible for $aving him, but –in exchange– he and his girl were meant to break up. So he stopped eating food regularly, except by the fact he was working in a school of samba where he helped a carnavalesco man's allegories to take shape and got sick. He was hospitalized in coma for some days and almost died. So, when he left the hospital, the last thing he intended to do was think about making music, playing or anything with his old pals.



I started to play with these guys naturally. It simply happened because I was there and anyone could easily find me at most of the underground rock shows in Rio by that time. Some of them were thinking about playing with another guitar player, nowadays joining a girlie glitter band here in Brazil, but they called me and we started making some jams regularly during a short period of time. The drummer made his points to his pals and I was in the band. I especially had strong musical bonds with him and the other guitar player -he had THE VINTAGE GIBSON SG OF MY DREAMS- but later me and the drummer almost punched each other in a studio because of the noise of my cheap guitar, so I decided not to play with them anymore. We just agreed to record some stuff for a compilation some guys from the underground were preparing to release, but that was really a problem... The singer refused to sing the song, they didn't like the lyrics I'd written, so the drummer solved the question by writing the lyrics and sang himself on the record for the first time in his life. Ahahahah! Anyway, this song, called "Ora et Laborum", was released in 2000 in "Apocalipse 2000", a compilation of extremely urgent tunes released by an indie label.

So I kept playing my stuff at home eventually without having the idea of anything that could be sung on those guitar harmonies. As I would never hear the arrangements played with them later (OK, it was really nothing so fuckin' special), so I kept working on an old arrangement of mine. I used to call this song in the early days as "Misanthropus Erectus", but later I'd have changed the lyrics over and over many times since then, so I almost named it as "Poeta em Linha Reta", as a homage to the portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and to its musical version made by Arrigo Barnabé. I even tried to play this song with the guys that played with me in my band Andaluz Aurora, but the drummer had so much difficulty to learn the beats and I was never satisfied with the bass line. For a while, I thought it wouldn't be possible to make this song "happen". So when I started to write new stuff for my band in 2005, that would be part of our "second conceptual album" - OH -, I finally started to find the heart of the song protected in an inner "electrical storm"...



I had this poem I was thinking of writing for so long and, through a sleepless night in 2005, I wrote the lyrics after watching a National Geographic or Discovery Channel TV show. I wrote the first verses by midnight and finished all the stuff by the morning. Wrote the poem thinking about many things: John Fante’s novel "Ask the Dust", the NatGeo/DC TV show, SOAD’s song "Lost In Hollywood" reference to Hackensack and the subliminal context of Eagles' "Hotel California" lyrics... I also remembered of an ancient tale from the north coast of State of Rio de Janeiro's oral tradition that one so-called so far civilized "descendent of an ancient indian tribe" of cannibals called GoytaKzes once told me, when we were listening to a shellac version of "Uprising", from Bob Marley, about the geographic aspects of the city where I was living for sometime in the eighties and the nineties, regarding to a hypothetical indian curse to that place. He told me that the ancient mates of "his" extinct tribe used to say that the city would be submerged by the sea sometime in a remote future and the only thing that would be intact was the highest mountain top, in according to what he called "The Curse of the Rested Indian". I started to laugh immediately for a little while, in explicit disrespect, until I noticed that the guy was talking seriously in his own way. And when I got home I saw the "indians' nose" by my window, one of the first things me and me family saw when we got there in the middle of the eighties. The beauty of that almost lost paradise I saw when I was a kid today was devoured by greed regarding to oil extraction and the consequent pollution related to "progress". So I blended my poem with the indian genocide references of Kubrick's movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel "The Shining" – sorry! I didn’t read the book – in a way I could make a textual allegory of those matters National Geographic/Disc Channel was showing me on that sleepless night... Terra em Transe?



...

My band doesn't exist anymore. We started playing in 2002, I think so, and jammed a lot of some cool sounds that will never be heard by anyone in this world once again, as the really best of us playing was made of jam sessions never recorded. We had only three official recording sessions, but I blew the mixes. Only nowadays I feel a little more confortable to deal with audio softwares in my cheap personal computer. So as I'm not living in Rio nowadays as my old pals do up to now, I decided to do all the stuff by my own self. I will play all the instruments and write all the new stuff and later I'll write more lines about it... I don’t have any idea of when I will finish this work, but I'll enjoy a lot doing this, especially because it's made of many ideas that only exist in my head. I recorded AWESOME DRUMS in an "egocentric" 10-minutes "self-jam". So if I don't put this stuff on tape, maybe I won't remember of them later... Then I'll do it my own way, with my indigent equipment and computer. But I think that it will inspire me to remake properly on audio softwares all the sounds that I'd once recorded one day... Who knows?



The text above is totally fictional, OK? You know what I mean... LIFE IS STRANGER THAN THE MOST SURREAL FICTION!


MOTEL CALIFORNIA by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 2.5 Brasil License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 3 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 2.5 Brasil License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 2 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 2.5 Brasil License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 33 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 2.5 Brasil License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 9 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 2.5 Brasil License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 9 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 2 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.



MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 33 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA - FOTO 3 by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.


MOTEL CALIFORNIA by MARCUS MARÇAL is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Vedada a Criação de Obras Derivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos License.
Based on a work at osomdamusica2.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mailto:marcus.marcal@uol.com.br.