Baron Karza
Let's get granular
“Baron Karza” is a song on the Weirdo Magnet album. It’s a personal favorite of mine. I like everything about it. Let’s start with the beat.
This one is anchored by a sample of a drum break from a song called “Let The Drums Speak” by The Fatback Band. The song is on the b-side of the “Yum, Yum” 45. I found a copy at Taz Records in Halifax sometime around 1993. I wasn’t the first to find this break and I wasn’t the first to use it. The Jungle Brothers used it for their song “Acknowledge Your Own History”, which came out in 1989. But I didn’t know what the Jungle Brothers’ source was at the time. This was a blind find for me. Whenever I had free time, I would go into Taz and look through the 45s. They had tons - a whole wall, organized by genre and alphabetically. I would pull one of the long boxes from the soul/funk section and flip through. If the internet existed in 1993, I wasn’t on it. So I was on my own to learn about records and find samples. The task was made harder due to the fact that Taz didn’t have a listening station. So I had to pick up on little cues and bits of information from the label of the record and take my chances. God, I wish I knew then what I know now. I bought the Fatback 45 based on the title of the b-side alone. “Let The Drums Speak”. I prayed that the title implied the promise of a drum break and when I got it home and played it, I found out it did as soon as I dropped the needle. I was so proud of the discovery. I wish I could describe the feeling I’d get when I hit on something like that back in the old days. It was kinda like sinking a 90-foot hail mary shot in basketball, I suppose. I still love that break. It has this off-kilter swing to it and the hi-hats have a metallic ring that makes it sound so hard.
So building the beat (a few years later), I started by looping the drums on the SP-1200. Next, I went looking for some kind of bass. I felt that the weird feel of the drum beat was going to be hard to couple, so I wanted a single note. This was the era of the filtered baseline as popularized by Da Beatminerz. So choosing to go that route, something possessed me to filter a tiny snatch from the intro of “Summer Madness” by Kool And The Gang. Weird choice, looking back, but it was working for me. I was catching a vibe. After that, I added a single keyboard note and a soft, three-note woodwind thing. I wish I could remember where those two samples came from but for the life of me, I can’t.
Once the beat was put together, it gave me a strong nostalgic feeling and I decided to go with the vibe and write about childhood memories. So let’s get into the lyrics a little bit.
When I consider the first line of the song now, it makes me kinda sad, in a way. “When I’m bored at certain times, I could sit all day and scratch but deep inside I know that I would much rather be playing catch…” Baseball - my first love - was slipping out of my life. Not only were my dreams of playing in the big leagues just about dead, I was missing something as simple as playing catch. I had moved into the city from my home town out in the country just a few years before and I didn’t have anyone to play with. A year or two after recording this song, I was missing playing catch so bad that I put out a call to the public on my collage radio show, asking if anyone would be willing to meet me in a park to throw the ball around for 30 minutes once a week or so. One guy did respond and we did indeed get out to toss a few times. Turned out, he was a guy I went to baseball school with years before.
“Getting punched in the face by my older cousin, Bert…”
Bert and I were joined at the hip when we were kids and we’re still very close. I always looked up to Bert because he was big and strong and tough and wise (still is). One year for Christmas - as a joke - my aunt Judy bought boxing gloves for Bert and his sister Michelle because they were always fighting. Bert subsequently set up boxing matches within our group of neighborhood friends. No one wanted to fight Bert because he was so big. But I didn’t want to look like a wimp in his eyes so one day - in Chris Coyle’s front yard - I took him on. I came at him with a flurry of ineffective body blows before he unleashed all hell in the form of an uppercut that caught me flush in the middle of the face and lifted me off the ground. No joke! I flew back three or four feet. My face exploded. Blood everywhere. After the initial shock wore off, we all had a good laugh about it. We were probably eight and ten years old at the time - something like that.
“One day I got electrocuted ‘cuz of Steven Bradley…”
Steven Bradley lived next door to Bert. Steven’s dad was a police officer. Strict household. It seemed like Steven had it pretty rough and he turned into a bit of a bad seed (at least, he was in the eyes of some of the other neighborhood parents. I always liked him. I ran into him a few years back and we had some good laughs. Awesome guy.). Anyway - one day Steven was exploring in the woods as we often did and he found an ancient telephone. It was one of those big wooden boxes with the two brass bells and the crank and separate earpiece on a wire, like the one pictured below. Pretty amazing discovery actually! So, Steven found this old phone and lugged it down to Stephen LeBlanc’s house. Stephen lived right across the road from me. I wandered out of my house that afternoon and heard Steven and Stephen yelling and hollering across the way. I shouted over: “What’s going on over there?” Steven LeBlanc said, “Come take a look at this - it’s a magic telephone!” So I ran across the road and Steven launched into this whole spiel: “This is a magic telephone. All you have to do is hold onto these wires that are coming out of the back while I turn this crank and you can talk to anyone in the world you want”. How stupid are kids, right? But I believed it. So I said I wanted to talk to Gary Carter or Evel Knievel or Linda Carter or some such hero of the era and off we went. I pinched the raw ends of these two wires that were exposed after the thing had been torn off a wall untold decades ago. Then Steven went to town on the crank on the side of the box. Holy shit. It felt like my soul was being removed with a jackhammer. My whole body was seized as lightning jolted through it. Agony. We laughed our asses off.
“You could see me showing off and doing stunts cuz I could pop a wheelie…”
I was the wheelie king of Mt. Uniacke. For years, I had this red banana-seat bike. I probably rode more on one wheel than I did on two. One day, the challenge was for me to do a wheelie all the way from my house to the gas station, which was probably about a kilometer away. I did it easily. I probably could have made it all the way to the legion hall.
“The 6 Million Dollar Man was a show I used to like a lot
and what’s-his-name over there is still my favorite Micronaut…”
So, I was referring the titular Baron Karza but the stupid thing was, when I wrote and recorded this song, I couldn’t remember his name! It only came to me later and so rather than re-record the verse, I just named the song after him. Bert had the Baron Karza figure when we were kids and I was always quite jealous of that. I still have a few of my old Micronauts guys. I wonder if Bert still has Baron Karza. Somehow I doubt it. I’ll have to text him.
“… Every day, me and Drew Kennickle
Would choose our own adventure. No two were identical…”
Drew lived across the road from me - next to Steven LeBlanc. Drew had asthma. His dad was the school principal. Drew was really good at drawing. He read a lot and had good manners. He was a good influence. He had a bunch of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books, which were just about the greatest thing ever back in the day.
“Ass cheeks stinging from the connection of the wooden spoon…”
I got smacked with that wooden spoon so many times. One time, my mom broke one over my ass! It got to the point where if my sister and I were acting up, all my mom had to do was yank open the utensil drawer in the kitchen. The sound of everything shifting around in there was enough to settle us down.
“Playing hide and seek, I used to crawl into the tar pits. I’d
Be king of the hill and take you on a crazy carpet ride.
Tobogganing. Waxing that ass until the dough was gone
And then I’d knock on the neighbor’s door so I could mow the lawn…”
I love how weird these lines are. The first two have this dis-jointed structure that I used to use fairly frequently. I should bring that back. It was kinda like I was trying to hide the rhymes. The third line is total nonsense but it sounds good - still makes me laugh. I guess I was partly thinking about how we would wax our toboggans to make them go faster. But ‘until the dough was gone’? What did money have to do with any of this? It set up the ‘mow the lawn’ rhyme though. I mowed a lot of lawns in the neighborhood. The money I made went to baseball cards and rap tapes and bike parts. I still wince at the memory of David Bullen scolding me because I did a half-assed job of mowing his lawn once. It was a rush job. I had no excuses. I normally prided myself on my meticulousness.
“Skin the cat. Pull the plug. Build a fort. Tighten wires
On my braces. For a while, I was into lighting fires…”
I had braces when I was 12 or so. Every time I went in for an appointment to get them tightened, they would be all busted up and the orthodontist would have to replace bits and glew them back on.
Bert and I went through a pyro phase. Lots of kids do, right? It didn’t get out of hand. We didn’t burn houses or buildings or anything. We’d just build campfire-type-fires and throw different objects into it. It ended when we threw a bunch of aerosol cans and assorted household chemicals into a fire we made on the field behind the school. It created a very loud explosion that scared us straight. We’re lucky we didn’t blind ourselves.
“Look into my swollen eyes. I’m sure you would have seen the grief
I had a mustache and acne, plus a space between my teeth…”
I’m referring - or course - to my adolescent years here. This song doesn’t document events in chronological order. The timeline jumps all over the place. If I re-wrote the song today, I’d probably fix that and come out with a worse song… But it’s the truth. My awkward phase was very awkward. I remember the day we received our packages of school photos when I was in seventh grade. I opened mine and cried - right there in the classroom in front of everybody. How embarrassing. And I was too old to be crying at that point - age 12 or 13. My teacher tried to console me which made things worse because it drew more attention to me. That day probably scarred me for good. To this day, I hate getting my photo taken and it probably ties back to then. Ugh. There’s a song on the No Children album that I posted on Bandcamp last week that kinda touches on this area. I wrote the song “So Gross” after feeling inspired by an artist whose work celebrates her least flattering sides and moments. Her worked helped me but I’m still all fucked up.
“I ran into a foxy fox that liked to wear her hair in braids…”
The third verse of the song breaks from the theme of the first two. I think it’s the least interesting. I should have just stuck with the childhood stuff. It’s more about getting older and faking confidence or whatever. The foxy-fox I refer to is my ex-girlfriend, Megan. She and I are still in touch. A few years back she was involved in a terrible car accident - collision with a dump truck. She was severely injured. She’s lucky to have survived it. They weren’t sure if she’d walk again. Her recovery was long and difficult. Good ol’ Meg. The song “Providence” on Weirdo Magnet is about her too.
So, all-in-all, I really like the lyrics of this song. They’re silly. There’s sort of a melancholy sweetness to them. There’s some interesting stuff going on technically. The performance is pretty good. It’s a lo-fi recording - done on the old Tascam cassette four-track. The finishing touch is the turntable work and to my mind, it’s the most interesting part of the song.
The scratching is weird, right? It kinda doesn’t make sense. It’s not locked in with the beat at all and that’s very much by design. I wanted to cuts to sound naive to fit in with the theme of the song. I wanted it to sound like a toddler did it, basically. I remember trying to just scratch in a sloppy way at first but it wasn’t giving me the effect that I wanted. So in the end, I recorded them without listening to the beat at all! I just recorded some random scribblings and then laid them over the breaks/chorus parts. But I was unable to fully commit to the idea and insisted - out of insecurity, I suppose - to add one little ‘legit’ scratch right at the end of the song. And this is were something incredible happened. I ACCIDENTALLY - pulled off my first flare scratch. I remember thinking, ‘whoa, that sounded dope’. But it just came out of a wild moment. I didn’t do it on purpose and I couldn’t figure out how I did it afterwards. I’m not talking about the scratch of the ‘ahh’ sound you hear near the end. That was whatever. It was a funky little moment with the sound I’m cutting through the whole song. It happens at the 4:37 mark. When I mixed the song, I dropped the beat there so it could be heard clearly. I was so psyched. It wasn’t until a few years later that I figured out how to do it intentionally but I probably couldn’t replicate that scratch today if I tried.
So that’s it. “Baron Karza”. A lot going on in that one. I’m thinking I’ll break down “Sebutone Def” next. Until then…