THREE MEN AND A COMPUTER (2007)
Liner notes by Scott Stanfield

By the time John Talbird moved to Brooklyn in 2004, vacating the Prairie Psycho drum chair, Mike Catron, our original drummer, had returned from Japan. So, we had our next drummer right away. To adopt the nomenclature of Shakespeare’s history plays, it was Mike the First, Part Two.

Over the next two years, up to late autumn 2006, we practiced with Mike and played probably seven or eight shows, but did no recording. Musically, there was some strain. Mike’s background is in jazz, and he liked to devise drum parts that challenged him: tricky kick drum patterns, complex fills. (Check out the kick drum on “Hurricane Coming Down the Wire,” from The Story of Mike and his Pants, for an illustration.) The first instinct of Larry, Noel, and I had always been to take things straight to the garage. Consequently, we had a situation comparable to Neal Peart sitting in with Crazy Horse. As I said, there was some strain. So, by late autumn 2006, it looked like Prairie Psycho was going to wind down.

About this time, thanks to an old college friend, Mark Butterman, I had discovered Garageband, recording my song demos on the computer rather than the 4-track cassette recorder that had served me so well since 1987. I was going to keep on writing songs, obviously; just as obviously, I liked the idea of having Larry and Noel do guitar parts. So, over 2007, Prairie Psycho morphed into a studio-only outfit, with Garageband loops functioning as our “drummer.” Hence the title of this collection.

Three Men and a Computer is a one-off in several respects. It’s the only Prairie Psycho album without a real drummer, for one thing. It is also the only one mainly recorded by me; I was the only one of us, at that point, with a working knowledge of Garageband, and the whole thing was recorded on my home computer. As a consequence, Three Men and a Computer is the only Prairie Psycho album with much overdubbing. Any time I felt like it, I could add a piano, or an organ, or a harmony vocal… so I did.

The songs and arrangements on all the other albums were developed in practice and performance, and the recordings closely reflect how we sounded live. On Three Men, though, not only do we have lots of elements that we could not have done live (e.g., the keyboards), but the recording in some cases is the one and only time we ever played the song (and we weren’t even playing simultaneously). A few of these songs we had played or would later play at shows, but only “Damn Straight,” “Birdsong Coming through the Fog,” and “Can You Forgive Her?” were ever setlist regulars. Several—“Apostate Messiah,” “When Nature Attacks,” “Til Death Do Us Part,” “Shit on Toast,” and “Salmonella”—we did not do in a show even once, so far as I can recall.

I like the way Three Men and a Computer turned out, but all three of us badly missed playing together. We experimented with playing with a drum machine, which was not very satisfactory. A friend, Mike Flowers, who had played drums in middle school, offered to help us out, but he had not been behind a kit for quite a while, and things were slow to jell. That was the reign of Mike the Second, we could say. In the summer of 2008, we met and held the coronation of John the Third.

Tracks:

“Damn Straight.” I wrote this in about half an hour. It is so rudimentary that I don’t think I even wrote out the chords for Larry and Noel. It was always fun to play live, I must say. Why I wrote about moonshiners (first verse) and the Cold War (fourth verse) in the same song I no longer recall. The mandolin and the piano are typical of the extra touches to be found on Three Men.

“Swim with Moses.” Music by Noel, lyrics by me. A continuation of the redneck theme with the reference to the gunrack.

“Day of Silence.” Written by Larry, on the occasion of an event our Pride Alliance held on campus. On the “Day of Silence,” queer students were silent all day long as a way of dramatizing the way they felt silenced, or ignored, or just not acknowledged by the university. There was usually a gathering at the day’s end for food, music, talk, and so on, and Larry and I performed the song there on acoustic guitars—I think that’s the only time we ever played it. ALSO: amazing background vocals by Mary and Patty Hawk.

“Go on Home to Yoko Ono.” Written by me. Yoko Ono has always seemed like a classic example of artistic integrity, to me. She took a lot of abuse, but stayed true to her vision. This song is about some campus controversies that I thought could be best addressed by going back to our vision, our first principles—hence, we had to go on home to Yoko Ono.

“Apostate Messiah.” Me again. The title refers to someone losing faith in the very movement they kicked off, or being irritated at being taken for a savior. “I’m not the savior! Think for yourselves!”—that sort of thing. Dylan in 1967, say.

The circumstances of Three Men allowed us to draw on some skill sets we did not ordinarily take advantage of, like Larry’s finger-picking here; note also his lyrical double-tracked solo. Noel demonstrates one of his particular gifts—holding way back for the verses, then coming on with some transforming muscle on the chorus.

“When Nature Attacks.” Also one of mine. I would say it’s a memory of puberty—one of those occasions when it feels your own body is assaulting you.

“Birdsong Coming through the Fog.” Also one of mine, and one of my favorites. I like to dedicate this one to my wife, Barb.

“Til Death Do Us Part.” Music by Noel, who also had the concept for the lyrics, which I devised according to his scenario. The speaker is in a pew in an evangelical church, pondering the fact that divorce is forbidden to members of his religion, but contemplating with satisfaction the teaching that all earthly bonds are dissolved in heaven. All he has to do is wait.

“Can You Forgive Her?” is by me, and is based on the Anthony Trollope novel of the same name. One of the few Three Men songs that smoked live.

“Shit on Toast.” Is also by me, trying to channel the feel of the Faces. It’s about a friend, gifted in many ways, intelligent, funny, capable, who for mysterious reasons was having the damnedest time getting his life together. “Endings and beginnings are easy for me, but the middles are kinda hard.”

“Losing the Map.” Also by me, trying to fathom white privilege.

“Salmonella.” Also by me—a return to the redneck imagery, but darker than “Damn Straight.” An old friend of mine who had looked into the killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—the three murdered civil rights activists whose story is behind the film Mississippi Burning—told me that the murderers had taken the trouble to dig a separate grave for the Chaney, the African-American victim, some distance away from and facing a different direction than the common grave that held Schwerner and Goodman. In other words, the killers were so fanatically committed to segregation, it had so profound a grip on their psyches, that they took the time and trouble to dig two separate graves when it obviously was in their best interests to finish fast and get the hell out of there. This song is about having that kind of disease in your soul.

Larry couldn’t make it to the session at which we were going to add the guitar solo. I tried to talk Noel into it, but he was resisting. “Why don’t you do it?” he finally said. So this is the only Prairie Psycho recording with a guitar solo by me, which accounts for a certain, um, roughness.

“Kalimba.” Larry came back from a trip to Africa with kalimbas for all of us. This shape-shifting instrumental was the result. It has its moments, I think.