bill boll news & musings

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Jordan got me hooked on the reality show “Kitchen Nightmares.”  Each episode, chef Gordon Ramsay visits a struggling restaurant, pretends to be nauseated by every dish he samples, and orchestrates a complete makeover of the menu and decor.  While all the episodes follow the same format and story arc, there are minor variations.  Sometimes, Chef Ramsay primarily blames the owner’s lackadaisical attitude for the decline.  Other times, it’s an incompetent chef.  Either way, he spends most of the show berating people in dramatic, foul-mouthed tirades:  “Don’t you have any self-respect?!?  Don’t you take any fucking pride in your work?!?  This tastes like dog vomit!!!  How dare call yourself a restaurateur!!!  Are you that fucking stupid?!?”

Eventually, his drill sergeant act pays off as the attitudes change.   The owners, chefs and staff find renewed vigor as their patrons express their delight with the new menu and decor.  Hopeful that he’s turned the place around, Gordon  leaves them and exclaims (to the TV viewing audience), “What a week!”

Yes, that pretty much sums it up.  So why did I find this show so mesmerizing as to devote nine or ten hours of my life to it?  I wasn’t sure while I was actually absorbing it, but after a few days of reflection, I think I understand the show’s appeal.  Once you’ve seen enough episodes, you know exactly what Gordon is going to say and do.  And it’s always the same.  It’s all about commitment to the obvious: hard work, cleanliness, attention to detail, etc.  With surprisingly little imagination, you can start to hear Gordon Ramsay’s tirades in your own mind, berating you for not getting up early enough, not washing the dishes, not paying the bills as they arrive.  “Are you fucking blind?!?  Can’t you see your yard is ass-deep in oak leaves?!?”

In short, Gordon Ramsay can very easily become your superego personified.  Obviously, obsessively tidy, neurotic workaholic perfectionists would have a different take on “Kitchen Nightmares.”  But for people on the opposite end of the spectrum, the show is like a pep talk or a self-improvement book.  It says, “Your problems are all of your own making, and you can solve them very simply through dedication and hard work.” 

Believe it or not, some people need this kind of stimulus to get anywhere.  I know this guy (I won’t say his name because I don’t want to embarrass him, but his initials are B. B.) who has an almost pathological aversion to certain tasks necessary for the smooth functioning of his personal finances and household upkeep.  He doesn’t seem to understand the root of his aversion, but the effects of procrastination and avoidance clearly diminish the overall quality of his life.  For someone like him, having a little Gordon Ramsay in his head is probably a step in the right direction. 

Yesterday, Jordan introduced me to another show in the same vein, “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover.”  Substitute cutting hair for serving food, and the shows are identical:  A successful entrepreneur with dyed blond hair and a funny accent yells at struggling business owners to get their heads out of their asses and step up to the plate. 

In my mind, they could be a tag team.

I’ve been writing songs for decades, and until recently, I’ve almost never been asked about the meaning of a particular song.  The few times it has happened, I’ve always discovered that the interest was sparked by a particularly provocative lyric–it was never about the song as a whole.  This all changed when I burned a handful of CD’s of “Neverland” to get input from a few valued friends.  For some reason, people seemed to be very curious about “Sweet Wet Metal.”  Well, just so I don’t have to repeat it another time, here’s the whole story….

Many many years ago, I had an intense crush on a girl who was in my circle of friends.  I was around her frequently and got to know her quite well, but never acted on my desires for a number of reasons.  One peculiar thing about her was her odor–a very distinctive metallic odor.  It wasn’t pleasing but it wasn’t offensive either.  Sometimes it was faint and other times overpowering.  I could often tell where she had been hours before, just by her lingering scent trail.

Later, I developed a crush on another girl I met in college.  She had the exact same odor.  At some point, I learned that both girls were taking medication for depression.  I put two and two together and concluded that the antidepressants caused the odor.  Over time, I encountered more and more women with the same metallic scent.  I wondered about them and when I had the opportunity, I would try to draw the information out of them.  More often than not, I was right.  They were on antidepressants.

A little over a year ago, I came into work and found my workplace reeking of it.  I asked my coworkers and found out that one of our show producers had come into the office a few hours earlier to drop off some tapes.  I sniffed the tapes and sure enough, it was her.  The weird thing was, I realized that I was excited.  Aroused.  Not sexually, but romantically, I guess you could say.  I didn’t know anything about this show producer except what she smelled like, and, well, you get the picture.

For the next few days, the smell lingered in the office, and it always produced the same effect in me.  I realized that I’d associated a handful of super-appealing girls with their scent (yes, there were others)–and disturbingly, I’d become Pavlov’s dog.  I had to come to terms with the fact that I’ve always harbored an affinity for bipolar women.  I’d known for years that I fall hard for the “wrong” type of girls, like lesbians and clowns.  (No, I’m not kidding about clowns.)  But this was different.  There was, or is, something about the personalities of manic depressive girls that draws me towards them.  Does this mean that I share this condition?  My guess is that, if I really pursued it diligently, I could probably get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at a subclinical level.  But what’s the point?  I deal fine.

When I was putting “Neverland” together, I felt that something was missing.  The album is about accepting adulthood belatedly, and all of the self-revelations associated with that.  It seemed appropriate to include this particular self-revelation.  For the first time, I actually did some research on said olfactory phenomenon, and found surprisingly little.  I did find one blog comment, though, that hit the nail on the head.  The guy described the smell of manic depression as resembling “freshly cut wet metal.”  I combined that with other descriptions of the “sweet metallic smell,” and I had my title.

I recorded my first draft of the lyrics to a piano-based arrangement reminiscent of early 70’s Lou Reed.  To heighten the effect, I added a cowbell just like “Vicious,” the opener on Lou Reed’s “Transformer” album.  The arrangement worked fine, but the lyrics fell flat.  They sounded too pat.  I rewrote the lyrics, taking out most of the rhyme scheme, and it worked much better. 

Songwriting tip:  If you REALLY want people to hear the lyrics, make them NOT rhyme.  It sounds much more sincere.

I found this beauty in my basement studio this morning.  Its legs spanned a circle a little less than the diameter of a Campbell soup can.  Jordan sprayed it with hairspray until it was disoriented, and then I coaxed it into a jar for observation. 

My best guess is that it’s some species of Wolf spider, but there are over a hundred of them and this doesn’t look exactly like any of the several hundred “mugshots” I’ve seen on Google images yet.  It would be nice to know….

My grandfather on my dad’s side was a soap maker.  Actually, he did a lot of weird things.  As far as I know, he made most of his money as an exterminator.  He was a home chemist whose basement closely resembled grandpa’s laboratory in “The Munsters.”  When I was young, he occasionally gave us bags of his home-made soap in irregular, grey-brown chunks.  I didn’t think much of it, and certainly never gave it a thought as a hobby.

But my skin is very sensitive to synthetics, and I’ve gotten nasty rashes from commercial detergent bars.  (Most “soaps” sold today are not  real soap–they’re made from synthetic detergents.  This is why they’re now called “body bars” or “bath bars” or “deodorant bars” instead of simply “soap.”)  For many years, I’ve only been able to use Ivory, Kirk’s, and mildly scented glycerin soaps for bathing.  Recently, I’ve become intrigued by those super-expensive all-natural soaps that started popping up in boutiques and department store cosmetics departments over the past decade.  They typically cost between ten and twenty dollars a pound, and have the odor and appearance of delicious confections.  I almost bought some once, then realized that for the same money, I could make ten times the amount in my own kitchen.

There’s really not much to it.  Soap is the product of a chemical reaction between lye, oil and water.  If you mix them together in the right way, you get soap.  Different oils result in different properties; and the most appealing soaps (those with good cleansing power that lather, bubble and moisturize) are usually made with some combination of coconut, olive and palm oils.  Essential oils provide the scent–lavender oil being so ubiquitous that’s it’s perceived as the smell of pure soap–and other additives lend additional properties like exfoliating and whatnot.

All of my additives come from my food pantry:  Cocoa powder, coffee, orange peel, oatmeal, seaweed, green tea.  I figure that if I can eat it, it’s probably safe to bathe in.  So far, I’ve gotten amazing results with little effort.  Soap making, unlike a lot of activities, does not have a steep learning curve.

If this sounds appealing, go for it!  There are a lot of Internet resources that will tell you everything you need to know to start making your own soaps.  Just keep in mind that lye is a highly dangerous substance that must be handled very cautiously.  Remember that scene in “Fight Club” when Brad Pitt gives Ed Norton a gruesome lye burn?  That’s no Hollywood hyperbole.

Yesterday, I finally sent my CD to the replication house.  I probably should have felt a tremendous relief, but it was a nerve-racking experience instead.  After working on the album for five years–with the luxury of no deadline to consider and the artistic predilection to endlessly second-guess myself–holding onto it had become a routine.  Were the vocals consistent across tracks?  Did the song order make sense?  Was the artwork too pretentious?  There was always something that could be improved.  But ultimately, all I was doing was putting off completion indefinitely. 

My wake-up call came just over a year ago when one of my oldest and closest friends unexpectedly died.  George had just finished making a movie with Kevin Spacey and the two of them were doing the festival circuit to great reviews.  He’d just messaged me about it on Facebook a week earlier, reminding me that he was coming into town.  I was really looking forward to seeing him.  Instead, I found myself standing weak-kneed in a Los Angeles cathedral surrounded by his family and friends, feeling very vulnerable.  My wife–who was divorcing me without explanation–had moved herself and my two daughters out of my house only a few months before; and the girl who subsequently saved my life disappeared from it just as abruptly and magically as she’d appeared.  I felt very cold and sweaty and blurry, I think I must have been going into shock from the sheer grief of all the loss I’d sustained.  I remember shaking, I remember hugging Sue (George’s widow) and sobbing, and worrying that I’d gotten snot in her hair, and I remember Doug driving me away with the radio blaring “My Woman from Tokyo.”  And then, a voice inside my head was telling me, in that struggling tone that’s become cliche, “Must….  Finish….  Album…!”

That night, our high school group (the Splicers–look us up on the IMDB!) got together at Chris’ house in Echo Park to do the whole Big Chill thing.  Later, Chris voiced essentially the same sentiment to me, wondering aloud what would happen to all his unfinished music if he were to drop dead.  I found it very telling that it was his foremost thought.  Then I realized it had been mine too.

When I got back to St. Louis, the whole album sounded different to me.  I got rid of the tracks that suddenly seemed quaint and/or irrelevant, changed the track order and recorded two new songs that gave the whole work a slightly different perspective.  I spent most of the spring and summer trying to master the CD myself.  (OK, I’m a bit of a control freak.)  After a dozen successive approximations and a lot time spent reading the mastering forum on Gearsluts.com, I concluded that 1) no one should ever master their own material; and 2) nothing that’s really important should be mastered on a PC.  I ended up taking the CD down to Ardent Studios in Memphis, where Larry Nix and his son Kevin did an awesome job mastering it.

Now I’m just waiting for the finished product to arrive at my doorstep.  There is a little relief, in that I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But the nerve-racking fact is, the era of tweaking and waffling is over.  This album is as good as it’s ever going to get.