The Story Of The Shoes! and Dr. Seuss's The Lorax

Note: this blog post is about the release of my first album It's the Shoes!  and my music video and single "Dr. Seuss's The Lorax."

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss was a story that was read to me as a young child nearly every night when I lived in California with my mother and my stepfather. By the time I was three years old, I had most of the book memorized, just from hearing my parents read it to me so many times. It got to be that I could just look at the page and know exactly what it said. When I was four, my parents moved me to Colorado, where I would spend the next eighteen years.

In seventh grade speech class, our biggest assignment was to memorize a story and present it to the class, acting out the parts and everything. I immediately remembered The Lorax from my childhood, and with a little refreshing, and slightly abridging the classic book, it all came back to me. I got the highest grade in the class, and the book stayed in the back of my mind through most of high school; that is, I never forgot all those words.

When I was eighteen, a senior at Durango High, I began to jam with Dustin Krupa: he was on acoustic bass, and I was on guitar, vocals, and occasionally the harmonica. I had already written a lot of songs by my senior year, songs that would eventually come to full fruition after I was done with school, and playing in a band with Dustin. Some of these songs were:

1. Secret
2. Killing the Ego
3. The Beautiful Angel
4. Trazodone
5. After The Love Is . . .

All of these songs I wrote before or at the age of eighteen. At the time, Dustin was seventeen years old. This was in 2005.

Dustin and I spent a lot of time together combining my lyrics with his amazingly fluid and foundational bass lines, and I was showing him songs that I had worked out already, and he’d come up with bass parts. Dustin, who I called D, was kind of a musical genius on the bass. We would ditch class and get stoned and work out all these songs, and one time we ditched English class and drove to Silverton, Colorado, which is a tiny mountain town with hardly anyone there. We smoked some weed, and I got way too high and paranoid for a while, and then D and I started playing on the street as it was getting dark. Suddenly, a guy came out of a brewery and asked if we wanted to come in and jam. D and I agreed, and this older guy, probably in his mid thirties, took out his djembe and really started grooving with one of Dustin’s bass lines. The man’s name was Austin, he was a stoic dude who had a really solid percussion technique unlike anything I’d ever seen or heard. I really got into the jam too, and just like that, we were playing a song that would later be called “Turn Me On.” Austin gave D and I some tequila, and we played music all night with him, drinking and smoking bud. It was very organic, beautiful, natural. That night, we formed The Shoes!

The Shoes! was a band name that I had toyed around with in high school. I added the exclamation point so it could be a little more definitive and exciting. After school, I ran away from home so I could drink and do drugs and write and play music and get famous. I was a punk at the time: I had a mohawk, my clothes were tattered and torn and filthy, and I was living in this trashy little trailer with a bunch of people, sleeping on the floor. It was cool at the time, because I was free and it was wild, but I really didn’t have any direction other than the music and the poetry that I was writing. I knew that it would all work out somehow, but things never really go according to plan.

D and I were putting together a lot of songs, and Austin would jam out with us, and we’d show him songs like “Little Girl,” “The New One,” “Secret,” etc. The song that meant the most to me was called “Pac Man Blues.” The music came to me when we were playing a house party in New Mexico, just two chords that we jammed on indefinitely, and it really moved me. The lyrics were put together with the song later on, taking parts from poems that I had written, one called Pac Man Blues, and the other called The Surgeon. And then in the middle, I just made up some Jim Morrison sounding shit about drowning the sea and a girl taking my hand and etc.

Now back to The Lorax: I started messing around with the three chords that would eventually make up the entire song of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, just C, G, and D. At first, I wanted to put the music to a Shel Silverstein poem that was all about doing a lot of drugs, and this guy goes on a journey to a cave, and I really don’t remember much more about it. So while I was trying to figure out this poem to put with the song, I remembered The Lorax, and it was perfect. It came together so nicely, and like I said I had never forgotten all those words. The song was easy for me, but it was impressive and unique to recite an entire Dr. Seuss book by heart, all put to original music.

The Shoes! would play at coffee shops and at bars, playing songs like Pac Man Blues and Turn Me On, and Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, with Austin on his djembe. It sounded good. Later, we jammed with Austin in Silverton again, and he had his drum set, so we amped up and I showed the guys some electric songs I had written like “Set Me Free,” “Trazodone,” and “Killing The Ego,” which was a hip hop experiment. Also, we could play some of the acoustic songs electrically and give them a whole different sound.

Austin knew a guy named Greg who owned a theatre in Farmington, New Mexico, called the Totah Theatre. It was this glorious spacious theatre, and we went there to jam once, and Greg really liked us, and he offered to record our set. So, D would drive us both to Farmington, where we’d set up on this beautiful stage and play these songs acoustically with Austin, all mic’d up, and it was so much fun. The theatre made us sound so good, like natural warmth and reverb, and the vibe was so chill, just us playing in this massive empty concert theatre. We’d all three go out for breaks and smoke weed or drink, and D and I would smoke cigarettes, and then we’d go back in all stoned and a little buzzed and record some more. The acoustic set was finished in a night, and we had done Pac Man Blues, Turn Me On, Little Girl, Dig This, Secret, The New One (which D wrote and I improvised on), and I did two solo songs: “The Beautiful Angel,” and “After The Love Is . . . ” Then, we recorded the Lorax. It was improvised mostly by D and Austin, going off of my cues. We ran through it once, and then recorded it all in one take. Pretty fucking good, man.

A little funny note: D and I were on a little bit of mushrooms when we recorded the acoustic set, and I didn’t have any glasses or contacts in, because I didn’t have any money to buy glasses at the time, so I was blind and tripping a little bit the whole set. It made us sound better, I think. I couldn’t imagine recording any other way at the time.

The next night we did an electric set, and recorded early versions of “Trazodone,” “Killing The Ego,” and “Set Me Free.” I had shown D the notes to Trazodone only minutes before we recorded it, so that’s why there’s a few bass flubs in the song. We were much more comfortable playing acoustically, but it was great to get that side of our music on the album too. So now, we had a twelve track album to our name. I decided to call it “It’s The Shoes!”

D and I manufactured two hundred albums or so in his parent’s attic; we’d go to Staples and buy a “make your own cd” kit and put them together while we drank and smoked and I took pills. Dustin’s parents were totally supportive of our music, and even paid Greg for recording us, just so we were square with him. I love D’s parents. My sort-of-girlfriend Chandra did all the cover art for the album on photoshop, and it looked really nice. Now we had a product to sell at our shows, although I’d end up getting fucked up and giving a lot of cds away, especially to pretty girls.

The problem with Austin was that he was so damn unreliable; sometimes he would just disappear off of the radar and we couldn’t get a hold of him at all. D and I would have to play shows just us two, which wasn’t bad, but it was nicer with Austin to groove off of. Eventually, I had to kick him out of the band, which hurt. I really loved Austin; he was the only drummer that I really cared about.

I still remember this one time with him, on Christmas Eve. I had driven to visit Austin in Silverton, all high and little buzzed, and we stayed up all night talking about music and life. We smoked a little bud, and Austin had all this wine. We ended up going through a few bottles, and I went to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, Austin was standing right by the door with a black top hat on, kind of dancing, and the look on his face with his glasses on makes me laugh even when I’m writing this.

Austin is a Leo, and I am too, so sometimes we’d fight about stupid shit. Another problem was that Austin was so much older than D and I; he was like thirty four and we were only kids, wanting to get high and play music and be all famous. It hurt to have to kick Austin out of the Shoes! because he was an original Shoe, and no one could really replace him.

Eventually, D and I kept jamming and writing new songs, and we met this kid named Nick who was a killer drummer. But Nick didn’t play djembe, so he started learning it for our acoustic sets, but it never sounded very good. We were much more of an electric band now, so we changed our names to Strange New Shoes (I thought of that name), and recorded a full length professional album in Durango, Colorado. We had written a lot of new songs, and we revamped many of the old songs from “It’s The Shoes!” album. The new album was called “Dig This.” It’s still available on itunes and amazon and iheartradio and all that.

The biggest problem with Strange New Shoes was that we were way too cocky, or at least I was. I felt like the whole world owed us some kind of recognition and that we were already famous, although we were only well known in town. So, Nick wanted us to move to Boulder so we could start playing in the city, and D and I moved with him to his parent’s house. This was the biggest mistake that would eventually cost us the band and end my musical relationship with Dustin Krupa. In Boulder, D and I set up shows everywhere, sometimes we were playing four or five shows a week. Only no one knew who were, so we’d be playing five shows a week to empty bars and theaters, and getting all pissed off and fucked up because it wasn’t working out like we thought it should. D and I were drinking way too much during this time, and we didn’t have jobs, because we were set on this music thing. But in retrospect, we just ended up ripping off Nick’s parents and drinking ourselves stupid for a year. I was twenty one, D was twenty, and so was Nick. Finally, things came to a head with Nick and I. To be honest, I never really liked him all that much, although he was (and still is, I’m sure) an incredibly talented and passionate drummer. I never should have continued to work so closely with someone that I couldn’t stand. D got two DUIs in the course of a month, which was really bad, so he moved back to Durango, and I stayed in Boulder for a week or so, and then went back to Durango too, where I was totally broke and pretty much homeless. There, I tried to patch things up with D, telling him that we could start over, that we could keep The Shoes! going. But he looked at me and told me: “Move on without me, dude. Don’t depend on me anymore.” That really hurt.

I ended up moving back to California, where I started my own solo career, playing different instruments and only allowing other musicians to play with me as “projects,” not as a band. I have not played in a band since I lost The Shoes! My life in California has been well documented on my website, and my past, from age eighteen to twenty eight, is part of a pseudo-memoir l I’m working out called “A Tragedy Of Youth.” The book has A LOT OF DRUGS.

After I finally started getting my shit together at age twenty eight, I started getting into sound recording and film editing, so I was able to make a music video for my song called Surf Zombies! It was through this project that I was able to get the fundamental knowledge and techniques to take on a project as intense as Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. The Lorax took me over a month, probably twenty to thirty hours all together, and I think that this is the strongest, most unique project I’ve ever done. I’d like to thank my good friend Ali Adhami, who showed me how to use the Final Cut Pro X software, and teaching me how to work with different methods of film downloads. This project has been something I’ve wanted to do for years and years now, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to realize some of these goals. Now I can look forward to releasing the long awaited album “It’s The Shoes!” online. This is the first time any of these songs have been available to anyone outside of our close friends and early fans, and now when you listen to the album, you can know the story behind it all.

Thanks for reading.

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