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about

MUSHMOUTH

Inspiration and composition:

Television: The Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was great after-school viewing. It had lots of Bill Cosby voices, cool theme music, decent moral lessons, and at the end they got together and jammed all in a junkyard band! They even said “damn” and “bastard” once during the scared straight episode. One character spoke in a garbled Ubbi Dubbi dialect and his name was “Mushmouth”. Later in life, at my worst moments when I tried to play fast passages on the guitar it sounded like Mushmouth talking, so I titled this song at a reminder to myself to kubeep prubactubicubing dubammubit [keep practicing, dammit].

Need I mention the influence of The Godfather of Soul, The Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk,The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother Number One, Mr. Dynamite, The Godfather of Funk, Mr Please Please Please… Jammmmmmmes Browwwwwn!? I play along with so much James Brown just to try to absorb a few little droplets of his sweaty soul spirit. The groove of “Gonna Have A Funky Good Time” is the backbone of this tune.

Meanwhile, over in composition land: Like in many other songs I’ve written, “Mushmouth” came very directly from material I was practicing at the time. There were four concepts I was working on. In the A sections, the melody is the end result of an experiment with a pentatonic scale with the intervals 1 b3 4 b5 b7. At first I was practicing a straightforward 4 note sequence, which really started to sound propulsive when I played the 4 note sequence in triplets. (I used the same concept of 4 note sequencing in triplets also in “Everyone I Know”.) This phrase sounded great as a “stop” with an added finishing phrase played into the C7 groove.

Where to go next, but down to the bVI area? The second idea I was fooling with was mixing a pentatonic scale with random open strings, something my teacher Rick Peckham once mentioned to me. This morphed into the B section phrase which takes notes from G triad available as open strings and notes from the Bb minor pentatonic… very fun to play on guitar! A decoy return to the A section follows, ending with yet another concept expressed in the song’s sixteenth note ending. This is (yet again) another 4 note pentatonic phrase. The top of the line is doubled in the bass and just falls down in a blues cliche (5, b5, 4, b3), but the rest of the sequence slides into other pentatonic scales which share those pitches… C- to B- to D- to Eb- would be one way of looking at it. The phrase became the punctuation mark used to end our solos, and in the middle of the song a marker for Robby and Marlon to change grooves if they wished.

For the studio recording I created “Intrusive Solo Section”, so called because I was concerned it might sound force-fit onto the rest of the song. I am a huge fan of George Van Eps and his work with triads on guitar (too scared to move to Volumes 2 and 3 yet). Triads in three keys with a stepwise melody was the fourth concept I was practicing. With a nod to the kicks on “Payback”, I wrote triads descending in C-, left 4 bars for drums, then ascending in C-, then another 4 bar break. I expanded this concept by adding bars and keys, so the second phrase descends and ascends from C- to Ab-, and the third phrase from C- to Ab- to E-. Also fun on guitar!

credits

from View 3 (Live 9​/​17​/​13), released September 20, 2013

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Kenosha Kid Athens, Georgia

The melodies are haunting, the grooves are devastating, and for nearly two decades the band expertly serves jazz purists, indie-rock hipsters, and funk loving jam fans alike.

October Book to be released in 2022, an epic three-part K.Kid collection with a dreamlike abundance of musical sorcery... moments of lyrical melodic hooks, textural bliss, and pure rock-band glory.
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