A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

This song was the spawn of another of my old bands’ fuckaround alter-ego bands. This time the band was Early Warning, and the alter ego band was The Guys Who Wear Black Too Much. (I’ll tell the story behind that one later - let’s stick with the song for now, because it’s a long story…) Now, as I’ve mentioned before, all of the songs on the Misogyny EP are for specific women, whether singly or in groups. This song, though, is unique in that it was written right during the breakup, and as a very specific reaction to it. I don’t necessarily think this is the right forum to vent about this [woman], but some of the background is necessary to the story of the song, so it’s warranted.

The players: Dave (drummer-Early Warning, guitarist-TGWWBTM), Frank (guitarist-EW, drummer-TGWWBTM), Chris (guitarist/singer-EW, bassist-TGWWBTM), me (bassist-EW, guitarist/vocalist-TGWWBTM), Beth (Dave’s girlfriend), Jill (The [woman] in question - friend of Beth, ex-girlfriend of Chris, and soon-to-be-ex of mine - I should have learned from his mistake), Kevin (frat brother of Dave, friend to all of us).

The timeframe: February 1992.

Beth and Dave had been going out since October 91 (they hooked up during that year’s world series). Jill knew Chris the previous summer but they broke up a couple of months before Beth and Dave hooked up. Early Warning had been together since October 1991, and February was when we finally started playing gigs.

In December, Jill started hanging out with Beth as she hung out with us, and we had other friends who would hang out with us but don’t really figure into the story. Between just idle nights here and there and parties for events like New Year’s, Jill wormed her way into our circle. This was particularly disconcerting for Chris, who of course used to go out with her months before. It was even worse when she started showing an interest in me - and me, in my desperate youth, rationalized away Chris’ discomfort just in hopes of getting some. Some friend I am. But I digress.

In February, towards the end of the month, [she] started freaking out on me, claiming I was ‘smothering her’ (and while I had been guilty of that before and since, I barely even saw Jill, so suffice it to say her claims were bullshit). It culminated with me following her around a party one night just trying to get her to even TALK to me, then her losing it on me and claiming she needed her space. This AFTER she specifically wormed her social life into hanging out with Beth and all of us guys in the band. [].

Anyway, [she] dumped me, but STILL insisted on being able to hang out with Beth - that is, to keep hanging out with us in the band. AND insist that I be okay with it, or else not only would SHE quit supporting the band, but she’d get Beth to stop too. And BETH told me the same thing. Dave, wisely, stayed out of it. (Even after I remarked, in regards to Beth, “That’s 180 pounds of support we don’t need…” - he was a much better friend to me than I was to Chris…)

And I fumed.

But I was also productive. Thanks to a phrase I’d never heard before and my magical powers.

Kevin noticed very soon thereafter that Jill’s ass was getting fat. Well, it had always been a bit well-padded, but nothing obscene. Certainly no J-lo flabfest. Just a bit of extra mud-flap, in the immortal words of David St. Hubbins. Kevin insisted, though, that he’d seen her around campus and noticed she was getting fatter.

This is what I have found by empirical evidence to be the “Vignati Curse”. EVERY [woman] who ever dumped me ended up getting fat after they dumped me. Every single one of them. I’m not shitting you. I’ve seen them - I know. And friends who have seen them before and after will back me up on this. But at the time I didn’t know it, because I was still early on in my history of victimization at the hands of the fairer sex….

So, anyway, a month or so later we’re all out bowling (me, Kevin, Frank, Chris) at the Student Center at Georgia Tech when we see Jill walk by with her new boyfriend. And I get a look at her ass - and I swear to fucking satan it looked like she was trying to steal a pair of bowling balls in her jeans. It was fucking HUGE! So I just bust out laughing. So does everyone else. Then Kevin mentions the nickname of Charles Barkley, thinking it was appropriate - “The Round Mound of Rebound”.

Put in a pot, mix, and stir - and when I got home that night I sat down with my pen and a steno pad:

You're always claiming that you're so confused
About the reasons why you're so abused
Just slap your thigh and ride the wave
Away from me to some abandoned cave

The Round Mound of Rebound
You deserve to die
You putrid cow....ski!
We could race horses around your thighs

You play the prima donna, you're never wrong
But you look like you chewed your cud too long
When we were making out, I couldn't even bunt
Lucky for me, who wants your ugly smelly cunt

The Round Mound of Rebound
You deserve to die
You fat fuckin' cow....ski!
With Gargantuan Hips and Thunder Thighs

You're a cunt, you're a whore
And now you're also size 74
You look like a big pile of shit
I'm lucky as hell I never licked your clit

The Round Mound of Rebound
You deserve to die
You putrid cow....ski!
We could race horses around your thighs

I show the lyrics to Dave, and he gets some ideas, and so at the next band practice, when we switch to fuck around as TGWWBTM, he starts doing this slow crunch riff, and thus the music was born. Pretty much as you hear it now, except that we added that ‘pounding’ post-chorus thing where we all shout “Bitch, Whore, Slut”, and doing the stop at the end of the second verse where I rattle off that Dice-inspired rant about her privates. Much as Dave liked Beth, he never liked Jill so he was right there with me in writing the song, and of course Chris was into it. Frank didn’t care - he liked anything that was funny.

The solos were a bit freeform while TGWWBTM played the song, but when Steve and I recorded it in 1995 I solidified the final arrangement of the song. I even stole the solo he used as the outro for when I recorded it for Misogyny. Paul always kinda liked this song too, because there was a lot of that pounding post-chorus, and he had girl troubles of his own.

(If you’re wondering about the “-SKI!” thing, it’s like this - Jill’s last name was one of those long, laborious Polish mouthfuls that is spelled almost completely differently from the way it’s pronounced. Anyway, the proper pronounciation sounds a bit like ‘petracowski’, and from there, if you’re in second grade or have just been dumped by a bitch, it’s not a big leap to ‘putrid cow ski’.)

(Another post that required massive clean-up, and a song that probably should. It’s sophomoric both musically and lyrically, but I still love it, again, because it really captured what I was feeling. It’s strange how that happens sometimes.

I remember one literature class where an assignment was to come up with three poems to bring to class for in-class discussion and review of themes, etc. I put a lot of work into two I was really happy with, but was pressed for time for the third. I quickly just settled on writing a hate poem to one of my ex-girlfriends called “The Best Revenge”, kinda based on the idea of the old adage - ‘the best revenge is living well’. Well, for this poem, I didn’t try anything fancy for rhyme scheme or rhythm, and I think I was almost juvenile in how much cruel and hateful imagery I put into it. I just ripped it out in about a half-hour and thought it was not that great and would get shredded. But, somehow, everyone in my class thought it was the best of the three I wrote - by far.

The only thing I could surmise is that I was mad, and I let that emotion get into it. I think the same thing happened here. It’s something I should keep in mind in the future.)