“Tangerine”

This was the first song I ever wrote. It’s safe to say that I used this song as a vehicle to channel my feelings towards three disparate, but vexing issues in my life: 1. Just having been fired from Atomic Coffee in Moorhead, Minnesota (the smell of burning is just the smell of history repeating itself. Ignore it and please read on). I locked up the store early one night to prevent a friend from driving home drunk. I’ll never make that mistake again. I guess. 2. My inexplicable loathing of Bil Keane’s long-running comic panel “Family Circus.” The soy-based ink wasted on that lobotomy of a strip could have been used for something far more useful, like feeding the criminally insane (apologies to Keith Dunton, who is, as we all know now, criminally insane). 3. A conversation/dare/experiment with my lovely girlfriend at the time (who is and has been my third and first wife [in that order]) regarding the differences of and aphrodisiacal qualities to oranges, clementines, tangelos, and – yes – tangerines.

I received fan mail regarding this song. One of our regular show attendees lost her virginity to this song on a camping trip to the Okefenokee Swamp. I was not present. Like most of the songs off of our first album, I wrote this one while pedaling around the Fargo-Moorhead area on my bitchin’ Schwin.

“Geeks on Bikes”

My grandmother used to use dried blood on her garden to keep the deer from eating her annuals. The smell of dried blood is a mellow, yet acrid odor that is distinctive. The first movie I ever saw in which blood is spilled was the peerless “Watership Down.” When I first saw that scene the scent of dried blood hit me like a bridge truck. If you haven’t seen “Watership Down” or read Richard Adams’s novel of the same name, go do it right now. I’ll wait.

Go on.

OK. So I was riding my bike on Broadway in Fargo one spring day (and spring is no finer anywhere than Fargo, I would add) and I detected the scent of dried blood wafting from somebody’s garden. I pedaled to the nearest video store (Premiere Video -- an entity that nearly destroyed my credit due to a misunderstanding about the return date of “Murial’s Wedding”) and rented “Watership Down.”

Upon this viewing, I realized that Art Garfunkel had provided the soundtrack. When the movie was over, I found my Simon & Garfunkel “Live at Central Park” CD and had to listen to that one song (I’m horrible with song names) that starts off with “The first thing I remember…” and has a relentless Latin horn line. I listened to it over and over. And over and over. And I desperately wanted to write a song like that one. So I tried, except that my song is about riding my bitchin’ Schwin to the DQ in Moorhead (where the prices are cheaper and the acne-riddled teen making my Mr. Misty Freeze with blue raspberry and chocolate soft serve doesn’t give me any lip). So take that Paul Simon.

On a side note, has anyone ever been to the Rock &/or Roll Museum in the Land of Cleves? Keyboardist/Jurist Mike Lyford and his wife, Red Sonja, took my wife and I there once – many moons ago. There was an exhibit there that showed original lyrics. It was fascinating. There was the hotel stationary on which John Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields” as well as napkins and shreds of ephemera that other legends had penned immortal words upon. Nearly all of the samples looked as if they had been scribbled hastily with sprawling, arching lines of words and little ink explosions where something hadn’t worked out. But not Paul Simon’s. His lyrics were written on perfectly preserved yellow legal pad paper without a trace of hesitation – like he’s recording the voice of the whirlwind. Showoff. For the record, I write all of my song lyrics on grains of basmati rice with a tungsten stylus no thicker than a human hair, which I can project forth from the pupil of my eye. That’s where I store it.

So. Anyway: dried blood.

There’s more to it, but it’s not as interesting as my fascination with Paul Simon and how he stole Edie Brickell (my second wife) from our steamy Fargo love bungalow. My car, Amazing Larry, had died that summer and I was spending most of my time riding between Fargo and the Italian restaurant in Dilworth attached to the Howard Johnson’s called Paisano’s where I worked. Amazing Larry was named for a character in “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” probably the second best coming-of-age movie in the English language. The best, of course, is “Watership Down.”

“Toob Igto’s Inn”

This is a drum solo by Joe Papke. We had a typographical error in the liner notes resulting in this looking like a song that is about a Himaleyan Sherpa bed & breakfast place. The title refers to an incident that took place the first time we played Hettinger, North Dakota, home of Greg Dewhirst (saxophonist/Mohican fertility god). Poor Joe wanted to be bad, but sometimes one’s physiology prevents one from engaging in peccadillos.