Jason Frangos

Music

Home Recordings (1999-2008)

Blue Green (1999-2002)

Cornelius (1995-1999)

Halcion (1992-1995)

Willard Moan (1988-1992)

HEROES

Home Recordings

These are some songs I wrote and recorded in my bedroom over the past few years.

Eleanor (lyrics)
I wrote this for my niece in December of 2001. I had just finished my first semester back in school after having been away for over ten years.

Bye bye (lyrics)
Another song for Eleanor I wrote for Christmas 2002.

January (lyrics)
New one I wrote in Jan 2008.

Tuned out (lyrics)
I wrote and recorded this in January 2007 halfway through my 3rd year of medical school.

Leave (lyrics)
Wrote this in 1999 after my band split up. The recording has two parallel ukelele parts and a cello part I put on later.

Unconditional (lyrics)
I wrote this song in the spring of 2002 and recorded it in my bedroom on West End Ave. I was listening to a lot of Gene Clark at the time, especially his song "Here without you". This song has an alternative tuning (G tuned down to E).

Behind the world (lyrics)
I think I wrote this sometime in 2000.

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Rock Bands

Blue Green

This is the band I had with my good friends Kevin Mazzarelli (lead guit), Jason Connolly (bass) and Bob D'amico (drums). Trevor DeClercq played bass in an early incarnation of the band and Matt Focht (Bright eyes & Head of Femur) was the drummer for our first couple of gigs. It was my first time being the "lead singer" and I really miss playing with those guys. I loved this band because my participation in it was for fun and for free and I didn't spend a lot of time trying to get signed again. We played many many shows and we recorded quite a bit. We made an EP and wound up selling most of them during the last tour we did during my spring break in 2002. It was a great trip- we opened up for the Frogs in Madison Wisconsin, played dives in Toledo and Buffalo and had a great time in Detroit. We also stayed at the world's seediest motel somewhere in Ontario.

Kevin is now the lead guitarist in the band Unlove. Bob plays drums in The Firey Furnaces. Jason Connolly owns a bar called "Fresh Salt" down by the old Fulton fish market.

Decide (lyrics)
I wrote this in the fall of 2000. I was trying to decide what to do with my life in every way. Recorded by Steve Revitte in upstate NY

A/B (lyrics)
I wrote this at my friend David's apartment in Potrero Hill in San Francisco during a trip there in November of 2001. His living room had a great view and I spent an afternoon watching the fog roll in and blanket the mission district. This song is about walking around with the dread of running into someone you really don't want to see. Trevor Declercq (who graciously hosts this website) played the most inspired bass on this track. Kevin and I made the cool electronic sounds in the begining with a memory man and some wierd device Radiohead had apparently once used. Steve Revitte engineered it at RPM studios in NYC. I think this was the first lead vocal I ever recorded.

That's what it's like to be alive (lyrics)
Recorded by the great Steve Revitte at my family's house in upstate NY. The line about the "lost highway" is definitely not a reference to the TV show (which I've never seen).

Wake up (lyrics)
I wrote this in 2000. I recorded the vocals at home and I think I disturbed the neighbors when I sang it.

Lies (lyrics)
This song was recorded with the great Martin Bisi who recorded (among other great albums) Sonic Youth's album "Evol". We tracked and mixed at his studio in Brooklyn which is in an old converted civil war armory. Martin recorded some of the early Halcion stuff in the early 90s.

Dedication (lyrics)
 I was mixing sound for the Strokes at a gig in Philly one Saturday in the spring of 2001 and Liam and Noel Gallagher (Oasis) came by to out the band. I had driven down on my own that day and on my way back to NYC after the gig, driving past the Pine Barrens at night, this song just sort of happened in my head.

Hated you so long
Kevin and I wrote this song together. I actually recorded this in my bedroom with my acoustic guitar and my drum machine. For some reason I think the drums sound cool (and real). Probaby from 1999

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Cornelius

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. - Hunter S. Thompson"

This is the band I started with a friend from college. This photo was taken in Katz's deli by a girl named Eve Prime. In spirit the partnership had actually begun back in 1991 when Paul and I were at Columbia together. After a failed attempt to get something going down in Austin Texas (with our good friend David Soloff) we didn't do much for a few years.

Back in NYC, I was busy playing bass in Halcion and every once in a while we would meet to write songs and play a bit. In 1995 I quit Halcion, Paul quit the band he had been playing in, and we decided we would really give it a go for the first time. I remember we were standing on the corner of Lafayette and 4th street listening to the Afghan Whigs' "Gentlemen" LP on a walkman and we agreed at that moment that we had what it took to make a record like that. We started as an acoustic duo (I played guitar and sang harmony while he sang lead). Our first gig was at the Continental Club and our second gig was at the CBGB Pizza Parlor. We finally got a decent drummer (after suffering through many bad ones) and after making an album on our own at Shelter Island Sound on 21st street (with help from Aaron Keane and Ray Martin) and submitting it for an ASCAP showcase, we got a call from Nigel Harrison. He was the former bassist for Blondie who also happened to be an A&R guy for Interscope. Meeting Harrison made us realize we really could actually get signed. Many months passed, we got a lawyer and wound up playing many nerve wracking but exciting showcases in our basement practice space for the heads of what seemed like most of the major labels.

Eventually we signed a record deal with Sony/550 Music, the same label our friend David Poe was on. We made a record with Ted Nicely (who produced the first few Fugazi records and some Shudder to Think albums) and then promptly disintigrated. It was a long and brutally painful saga and I'll spare you the gory details. Stay tuned for the E true hollywood story-there's definitely one in the making...

Most of these tracks (except for Mexican Table Service) were recorded by Carl Glanville between November 1998 and March 1999 at the Magic Shop in NYC. The album was mixed by Chris Lord-Alge at Image studios in LA. The band changed names several times for different reasons. We signed to Sony under the name "Triple Eight" (named after the Triple Eight Palace in Chinatown, apparently where the Dalai Lama goes for lunch when he's in town). The band was dropped from Sony in 2000 and the record was released independently under the band name "Rivington" (location of our old practice space) and the title "Happy on a sliding scale".

Guard
This was intended to be the first track on our first record. It was written by Paul and features me trying to play a guitar solo that emulates something off the Guided by Voices album "Mag earwhig". I always loved to play this song live..

Mexican Table Service
Recorded at a studio out near the Delaware Water gap in 1996 by the emminent Ray Martin. This was the A side of our first and only vinyl 45" single (b/w "David"). I think we were very influenced by Nirvana's "In Utero".

Indecision
Another great song by Paul. I almost had a meltdown trying to sing the background part (I didn't succeed). I played the main guitar part on my Taylor 510 acoustic. I wrote the bridge and arranged the string idea which Jane Scarpantoni fleshed out. I also played the organ which was a key part of the original 4 track demo.

wait there's more
First song we ever wrote together. It was concieved in my bedroom on 38 1/2 street in Austin.

may
Another collaboration between Paul and me. This song is in kind of a wacky tuning- sort of a cross between a Keith Richards open G tuning and a Lee Ranaldo (Theresa's sound world) tuning.


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Halcion


Yes my hair was blond. This band was the tormented love child of the brilliant team of Dorit Chrysler and Chad Swanberg.  Dave Soloff and I responded to a very strange ad in the village voice looking for a rhythm section that could appreciate both Scriabin and My Bloody Valentine. I played bass in this band for 3 years and quit just before we were about to go on tour with Marylin Manson. Back in the day, I wanted really badly to be in a glossy fanzine and with this band I got my wish many times over. Dave left after a year and was replaced by Clem Waldman (UI, Blue Man Group, Wisdom Tooth) and Clem was later replaced by Dave Barcow (who had made a few records with the band White Trash).

Yellow
A side of Twitcher 45" single Yellow b/w Messy Marvin. Martin Bisi recorded this. Very dark.

Messy Marvin
the B side. The sound is a little early 90s CBGB scumcore

Bend Down
Another "progressive" headbanger. Dorit (who is austrian) wrote the words about some crazy witch that captures people in a trunk.(?)

With the Biology of No Importance
An homage to platonic passion. Pretty sublime guitar chords on this one.


Willard Moan


Willard Moan was the first original rock band I played in and the first band I ever wrote songs for. I have fond memories of the long hours we spent jamming and collaborating in the basement of a certain brownstone on 113th street- really some of the happiest times in my life. When I got to college, the electric bass was my main instrument (In the long run, I wound up playing bass in two out of the four bands I played in- I switched to guitar when I formed Cornelius). I was first introduced to Bowman Hastie (vocals) and Dave Soloff (drums) by a friend from highschool just a few weeks into my freshman year at Columbia.

It was 1988 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers "Uplift Mofo Party Plan" was our inspiration. At first I think our music was heavily influenced by the early Chillipeppers, the Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime", and Frank Zappa's "One Size Fits all". But Bowman's vocals were something completely different and totally original. He was also an absolute hurricaine on stage. Around the time of our last recording, I was listening to alot of Jane's Addiction and you can hear it in some of the songs. After a few weeks of false starts with a mostly no-show guitarist, we were thankfully introduced to the great Josh Weisberg who was going to school at NYU. We started practicing like fiends and wrote a huge number of songs very quickly. I think the first song I ever wrote the music for was "Omnivore". We played many sweat-soaked shows and opened many shows for bands like HR (Bad Brains), Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller, Yo La Tengo, the Dreyer Brothers and Dreamspeak. In 1990, Dave Graham (one of our classmates at Columbia) signed Blues Traveller and started his own management company in NYC called "Music Unlimited". He tried to help us out business-wise but not much came of it. In 1991, our classmate Christina Wayne was interning at Rolling Stone and managed to get us a spot in a "Ten best college bands" article (Peewee Herman was the cover story).

We made three recordings during our time as a band. The first was recorded in our practice space sometime during the spring of 1989 by a friend of ours. The second two were engineered by James Kavoussi (of the band Fly Ashtray) at his studio in Soho which was called "Toxic Shock". The second recording was done sometime in 90/91 and the last was recorded in the fall of 1991. We continued to play shows through the spring of 1992 at places like Nightengales, the 712 club and the WestEnd. That summer Dave and I moved to Austin, Tx to try to start a band (with Paul from Cornelius) and Bowman went on to form Whizzy and later, Dreamkillers. Bowman now releases records under the name MC Extra Cheese aka Red Lobster. In case you're wondering, the real-life Willard Moan was one of Bowman's high school teachers back in Oregon. In addition to our original material we also played a number of covers including the often requested Black Sabbath's "Wizard" and Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker".


Red shirt extra
From our '91 demo. Did you ever wonder what happened to those "red shirt extras" on the original star trek series? The beamed down but they never beamed back up.

Stone Cold Willard Moan
 The rousing eponymous crowd pleaser, also from the 91 demo.

BBQ
My brother always said we evoked "Mulligan Stew", the band featured in fourth grade movies that would sing about the four food groups. I must admit that here's something satifsfying about listening to (and performing) songs about food. This track was one of the tracks from our 2nd recording effort.

Omnivore
Also known as "Omnivore lord", this was our first big hit (relatively speaking).

Rentacop
"i went to dagostino 'cos i needed some milk sportin' my fila (feeler) cos i got the silk". Another one of our early songs.

Corn off the cob
This song has one of my favorite lines:"Stevie Nicks is in the house, 1970s sleek silk blouse". From the 2nd recording session.

Instrumental
Last thing we ever recorded as a band. I think we cut this from scratch because we had a few minutes of studio time left. One of my favorite tracks.



Yale Med 2nd Year show band




contact: jason.frangos@yale.edu


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