The Vacant Lot

Twenty years ago when I was trying to learn how to play guitar and get up the nerve to have the audacity of even thinking about getting a band together, there were exactly two terms that were meant to be derogatory: "punk" and "garage." Both loosely meant you couldn't play, you were a shitty musician and you were a joke. Which was fine with me, because I was all three. Then, after a few years, I found myself in Oxford MS, and you could not play music live without adding the word "punk" to your style. Everything was cowpunk, psychobillypunk; if you were reading your poems at Square Books your flier listed you as "Spoken Word Punk."

A few years later I'm in Brooklyn, NY and every band there is seemed to feel the need of lending itself "street cred" by claiming to be "garage." EVERY fucking band felt the need to be a "garage band." If it was some uber-hipster band playing some secret house party on Bedford Avenue at 4am, I can promise you they classified themselves as a "garage band," no matter what the actual music was, or how much money they had in their trust fund.

And then today I was sent a song by a friend of some friend of a friend, and 10 seconds in I know it's "garage rock 101 by the numbers," except I know this person isnt some "scrappy!" bunch of kids, it's totally somebody who has calculated what he thinks to be cool, and "dum-dum garage rock" is what is "cool." In actuality, the song is no better than any demo I laid down by myself on a shitty 4-track back in 1999 in a kitchen right after I had moved to Brooklyn. Sorry, but that's true.

When I moved here, there was a local band that I fucking loved, and they were a true garage band. They rocked, they were in Williamsburg before anyone had ever of it, and they were the perfect combination of the Sonics meets the Ramones meets the Beach Boys. Yeah they had their 2-minute rockers, but they also stretched things out with songs like Dee Dee Said, or Blue My Mind. They didn't sit around going "hey, we're a garage band, aren't we cool?" Anyway, all of this has been one long excuse to lay out a bunch of Vacant Lot songs here. I fucking loved that band.

Good as Gone

I Won't Say I'm Sorry

Take Her Place

Nothing More or Less

Loyola

Blue, My Mind

Something to Believe In

Dee Dee Said

Do It Tomorrow

That's All