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Who Invited Roger
Released April 2002
The Making Of:
Q-Can you give us some insight into the lyrics?
John:
YOU DON’T DO IT FOR ME ANYMORE
This song was supposed to be an upbeat yet bitter rant about a break up, but it turned into a bizarre mixture of Clintons’ sayings. Here are some examples.
The “protégé ain’t runnin’ so well, oh well” refers to my wonderful 1993 Mazda Protégé that went tits up not too long ago.
“Ian’s got the Crown and the reeb belongs to Keehr,” means that Ian (former guitar player) is a Crown Royal drinker and “reeb” (beer spelled backwards) is what you’ll always find Keehr drinking.
When I sing the lyric, “I’ve got the cell phone with the radiation pressed against my head,” the immediate reply is from Josh in a French accent when we says, “HELLO.” To this day Keehr will still start talking at random times in a French accent. He’s strange indeed.
My favorite line in the song is, “tell me about the rules of hockey” and Keehr says through a megaphone, “Jim Carr here.” Jim Carr was a hockey announcer on the movie Slap Shot. Josh will often go into quoting that movie and when he does his Jim Carr impersonations, he drops me every time.
I used to play in The Blackwater Band as a guitarist/vocalist. The drummer’s nickname was “Dirt.” He had a saying that I still live by to this day. “When you’re done, QUIT.” When you’re done drinking, don’t force another drink down the chute. Quit. When you’re done rocking out for the night at 2am, quit. You get the picture. Thus if you’re done in a relationship, quit.
HIGHWAY
Crazy Jim and I were noticing how many people seemed to be sort of stationary in life while we were in college. They were partying a lot, not really putting any energy into dreams, but rather just sort of killing days at a time by drinking, going to college, flunking out of class, and generally just sort of learning how life was the hard way.
FOUR LEAF CLOVER
I wrote this song about my good friend Levi. In the early stages of our friendship, we were adjusting to the emotional demands of making music for a living. We had times where we butted heads and I thought he didn't take many of my ideas seriously. "You take me for the fool I'm trying not to be." I tried SO hard to be someone I wasn't, and thought I just had to "leave my faith to a four leaf clover," or more aptly put, leave my faith to luck (that I'd ever be in a band, make albums, live the "dream" of making music, etc). The lyric, "don't ask me what I'm forgetting, because I don't think I'm ready to know," was me admitting to myself that I was wrong and had forgotten to apologize.
I don't know if I ever told Levi this song was about him. The cat is out of the bag now! At least he'll know the "four leaf clover" part isn't because I'm always cocking off about being Irish...
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Another Crazy Jim invention! Jimmy and I used to work as casino attendants together while we were still at MSU. Whenever we’d work the same shift together, we always had a way of entertaining our gamblers as well as ourselves. One day Jimmy walked up to me at work and said, “we have to write a song that goes like this. DUH DUH friends with DUH DUH benefits.” On the DUH parts, he was using his fists to pound down the beat on a sink counter. We were getting people drinks while they were putting money into slot machines and Jimmy was pounding out the beat to a song in his head. The memory is pretty funny to me.
When we sat down to write the song, I started playing a slow, mellow riff that my dad and I had written. We had thought of the riff as a “hot day floating the river” type of riff, but Crazy Jim said, “speed that bitch up about 30bpm (beats per minute).” I sped it up, he started chanting his “DUH DUH friends with DUH DUH benefits” and it all sort of fit. It became a complete rock tune and to this day is one of my favorite songs to rock out on.
BALTIMORE
This song was going to be written about a road trip that our former guitar player and I took to Baltimore when we got lost, but it changed into an attention deficit disorder song when I played it for Crazy Jim. His bizarre imagination went wild and some crazy lyrics started cropping up. As it became more of a free verse type of dance song, my bitterness to being lost in B-town gave way to random lyrics like, "who's in charge here, the donut or the cop?" Honestly, who doesn't want to dance to lyrical brilliance like that?
ODDS ARE 3 TO 1
Crazy Jim was walking down a beach in Hawaii on a beautiful afternoon when a lady that could have been his grandma called out, "hey you, do you want to sit under this umbrella? I rented it for the whole day. It comes with free food and drinks, and I thought I could hang out here all day, but it's been a few hours and I'm bored to tears." Of course he took her up on her offer. He got piss drunk, then at 4:30pm a friend came up to him and asked if he wanted to go to a BBQ party at someone's house. His reply was, "sure, but I'm drunk. Actually, I'm beyond drunk, I'm buried!" The chances that his sober buddy was gonna drive his drunk ass home? Odds were 3 to 1.
COOKIE JAR
I love Alice in Chains, and I used to be fascinated with the fact that their lead singer was constantly fighting addiction to heroin. His hand was constantly "in the cookie jar." He "needed something beautiful," but could never seem to find it.
When I first played this song for the guys, Levi had set up his electronic “v-drums” in the living room. These drums are simply rubber pads that produce a drum or symbol sound when they’re hit. Levi loved the song right away and wanted to “jam out” to it, so we cranked up the speakers and jammed away. Levi was going CRAZY hitting the crap out of these rubber pads, but they didn’t make any noise except for the synthesized sounds that were coming out of the speakers. (As a guitarist, it’s more fun to jam out to real drums because they have such powerful energy. Those rubber pads didn’t have any.) The scene was pretty comical. We all make fun of each other for how we used to look, act, play, etc when we were young and green. Levi’s v-drums were straight up funny, let me tell you.
GRINNELL
The first time I ever went backpacking in Glacier Park was with Crazy Jim and several stoned friends. Being the sober, naive person I was, I believed our buddy who was high as shit when he said, "we don't need a permit and we can camp anywhere we want." That night, we hiked to Grinnell Lake and camped on cliff over looking the lake. It was magnificent. The next morning, Forest Ranger Bob came up to us and informed us that we were illegally camping. He made us pack up our tents and led us back to the road where a law enforcement officer wrote us each 100 dollar citations.
The lyrics, "you left me, for a stranger Bob" was a play on the words "Forest Ranger Bob." Also, the lyric "here I am breaking down" was in reference to breaking down my tent. I loved the double entendre of breaking down crying.
I can't begin to convey what an incredibly magical night that was for me. I was the only sober person amongst my stoned friends, but I still felt like there was something simply magical about that place. Grinnell lake inspired me so much that I eventually learned about the Montana Wilderness Association and have been a member for many years now.
BIRTHDAY SUIT
When you're with someone who complains but isn't involved in what they complain about, it gets hard to take them seriously. I heard a quote once that was something along the lines of, "the non-doer is always the nay-sayer whom is the loudest yet easiest to ignore." Birthday suit is all about someone complaining about something, only God knows what, but rather than tell them to shut it, you tell them, "if you get frisky you can find me floating down the river in my birthday suit, and you can join me if you want to!" A little nudity might change their tune a bit, eh?
On a separate note, I apologize to anyone who has floated the Madison River with us and had to see us without clothing.
THAT’S ONE
A friend, whom we shall call HERO, was in Portland, Oregon with his buddies. While eating at a burger joint, the table full of girls next to him struck up a conversation with them. "You boys are from Montana? You're partying with us tonight!" As the night wore on, the single guys and girls started to dance a little closer, have a few more drinks, and ultimately, HERO ditched his buddies as a girl walked him to her apartment through the pouring rain.
HERO is standing soaking wet in a living room at the base of some stairs on which the girl who brought him home says, "give me a minute to put on something more dry and comfortable." The lyrics, "I'm done, I'm done and gone, gone all the way" are a reference to how piss drunk he was! A few minutes later, she calls him up to her room. He comes into her room to see she's wearing a pretty sexy nightie! HERO walks over to her bed, and decides he'll strip down to something more comfortable too! As he goes to drop his pants, he accidentally hooks his boxers and finds himself "hanging out." Here's where all hell breaks loose.
The gal has thin netting that drapes from a hook in the ceiling all the way around her bed. HERO, having lost his balance, falls sideways into this thin netting while trying to pull his boxers back up. He gets caught up "like a fish in a net," thrashing around on the floor, trying to get his boxers up! Apparently there was sheet rock that tore down from the ceiling that now covered her bed as well as the floor. When he got out of the net, she basically was pissed, upset, and asked HERO to "go ahead and leave."
The song is basically sang to himself in the mirror. The line, "I can't believe I caught you with him" is a pretty risqué reference to catching his pants around his ankles while his "buddy" is sort of flopping around. The song is best summed up as an opportunity lost. "Of all the dumber things you've done, that's one."
FAN OF THE BEAN
I was writing a song one afternoon, sipping on coffee, when my good friend Kyle Chenoweth came over. I offered him a cup o' joe, and his reply was, "no thanks, I'm not a fan of the bean." It was the brilliant lyric I was looking for.
The lyric, "there stereo's pumping out the BNL mix" is a reference to Bare Naked Ladies, one of my all time favorite bands. Also, my old man always used to say, "pull out the whopping stick" when he wished me well at football games. It was nice to throw those shout outs to the band as well as my pops!
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