The Worst Music Ever – Uber Troll, Part 1

Hello Manifestites! So here it is. I’ve alluded to this once or twice in the blog here, and several times to some of you either on RGP, email, or IM, and I’ve finally gathered enough information to start posting what will be a very long story posted in several blog entries. I call it the Uber Troll, but of course also contains the Worst Music In the World ™. I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy! I will warn you that this will start out very slowly. There’s a lot of explaining to do and background information to get out of the way before I can dive right in to the emails. For those who complain that I write too much, go surf for some porn or something, and spare the comments.

As I’ve stated in the past, I’m a musician, and have been working on putting a band together off and on between various injuries and surgeries. About 5 years ago I met my good friend and drummer Pogo, and we started working on putting together a band. For nearly 2 years we auditioned guitarists and vocalists (I’m a bassist), and had various levels of success with a few different people. We recorded everything, and thus the losers file was born, which was a collage of the worst of the worst. We went through all sorts of different musicians, from the really good to the really bad, and everything in between. Using the local musician’s classified board on Milwaukeerocks.com, we must have talked to 50 different people during that time. Outside of music my life was crazy. I had recently moved into a new house, my oldest daughter was 4, and my youngest was about 6 months old. I barely had time for the music as it was, but still tried to get something going. All that leads up to…

…one day in late 2003, I saw an interesting ad. I don’t have a copy of it, but the title was something like “Virtuoso Art Rock Musicians Wanted.” The ad was very vague, didn’t describe what style of music the person was looking for, what the instrumentation was, or anything specific at all. So I fired off an email late at night that was very simple: “Hi, can you tell me more about what exactly this is? Thanks.” I received an email reply the next day from the person I will call Paul asking me to call him because it was too much to write, and he left his phone number.

Here’s where I’m hopefully not going to lose my readers, if you’ve gotten this far. The problem is, if I give out this guy’s real name, or any of his quirks, email signatures or anything, he will very easily be able to search out these posts, and I’d rather him not know it was me behind what I ended up doing. I’m going to have to alter some of the emails to take out specifics, so I hope the humor of it all isn’t lost. I will say that this guy trademarks everything. I mean everything. His band name is trademarked, his email signature tagline is trademarked, his music writing style is trademarked. Everything. His band name is E eye E. (It’s actually the letter E, then the letter I, then the letter E, but if I type it out like I did, he can’t search it easily). Oh yeah, and don’t forget the trademark symbol ™. Ok so now that we have that background, let me move forward in the story.

Well, as anyone with kids knows, time can slip by real quick. With a 6 month old and a 4 year old, the evenings after work fly by, and pretty soon it’s 10pm, and finally time to get something done and go to bed. I’m not the kind of person to want to call anyone else after 9pm because I think it’s rude, so trying to get a phone call in during the week was proving nearly impossible. So I emailed him back: “Hi Paul, things have been busy and I haven’t had a chance to call. What’s the best time for you to talk? Thanks.” He replied back “Evenings are fine, Adam. Again, contact information is listed below. If I could be so bold, contact made as soon as possible would be appreciated. Thanks, Adam.” (I’m Adam btw). Ok, well, similar to what has happened with this blog, things got in the way at the time, and calling him just wasn’t a priority for me. At the same time we hooked up with a guitarist that we ended up working with for several months, so I wasn’t all that interested in trying to chase down a guy who I still had no clue what he was all about. A few weeks later I get the email below. Now, what’s odd about this is that he sent it to my home email address, but copied in a work email address for a company I was no longer with. The only way he would have found that email address is to google my name. Nice, another damn stalker.

Hello Adam:

Not to sound too bold but I need to expedite getting this group up and running and I need to know if you are interested in speaking with me regarding the bass player slot. You and I have had several emails back and forth but I need more proactive movement on this situation. If you are interested in discussing this, please email me back with a specific time and date when you will call me. Otherwise, email me your telephone number and a time and date and I will call you. If you are no longer interested, please email me back stating such so that I do not continue to follow up on a dead lead.

Please advise as soon as possible.

Thanks.

Umm, ok. A pushy stalker. Great. So I get a little irritated at him, and of course I’m at work and don’t want to call him from there. Then again, I get irritated with people who can’t take a few minutes to write up an email with some thoughts in it, and always reach for the phone for any little piece of communication. Since I still have no clue what the hell this guy is even looking for, I fire off this email, looking for more information:

Paul, first off, I'm not sure why you sent an email to Century Insurance, as I haven't been an employee there since March of this year.

I apologize for not calling, but myself, wife, and 2 kids have been passing around a cold for the last few weeks, and by the time I get home, get everyone fed and in bed, and take care of household matters, it's well past 10pm, and I don't think you'd appreciate a call that late.

As far as being interested, I don't even really know what this is about, since the ad was vague and you weren't able to give details via email. I *should* have some time tonight to call, but before I do, could you please answer a few questions for me:

- In a nutshell, what is this project? Is it a project band, a backing band for a theatric event, a backing band for a solo artist, or something else? Basically what would you tell someone who asks what "Virtuoso Art Rock" is?

- What are the immediate and future goals for this project as far as rehearsals, gigs, recordings, etc.?

- What are the ages and instrumentation of the members of this project?

- Do you have anything recorded that I could listen to for an idea of the style of music involved?

I think the answers to these questions will give me a better idea of my interest level in what you have going on. I would call you during the day today, but I have meetings for pretty much the rest of the day beginning in about 5 minutes.

Thanks for your time, and have a great day!

Adam

Seems reasonable, right? I’ve already put way more time in with this guy than I should have, because I have this nagging feeling that it’s going to be a colossal waste of time (a few blog entries later you’ll realize how ironic this statement is), but what the hell, it’s only an email, and his response should at least give me some information about what he’s doing to see if I’d be interested in discussing things further. Or will it?

Adam:

I can answer all of your questions and get my questions answered much more expeditiously (for both of us) by a simple telephone conversation rather than me trying to write a book via email, and then trying to write a book via email for everyone else that calls or responds to the advertisement. There are more than just one or two people responding.

I sent an email to Century because I did a web search on '' to find your home page and came up with some IT questions via a newsgroup that you had submitted apparently when you were at Century...these threads had your Century email address.

I also work day job in IT, have for almost 20 years, am a Manager, Project Manager, Project Leader, and hands-on Network Infrastructure Engineer. So we have that in common.

You can call me pretty much any time. I get up at 5A and usually don't retire 'til at least midnite. 10P in the evening is no problem. If I am not here, leave your number and I will return your call. Or, rather, once again, email me with a specific time and date tht we can coordinate a call. To me, this is the best way.

Thanks, Adam.

What the fuck? Did this guy just write me a 4 paragraph email explaining why he couldn’t spend time writing to explain what his band/music/whatever the fuck is? That pissed me off. I was done with him. So I fired this off:

Paul, I guess if you're willing to take 4 paragraphs to tell me how you can't email me to even tell me what the band is about, I'm not the person you're looking for. Good luck in your search. Thanks.

I mean really. People like that piss me off. It’s obvious the guy can articulate himself in an email, so there has to be another reason why he wants me on the phone rather than just telling me what the hell his whole band virtuoso art rock or whatever the hell is. Oh look, he’s a hothead too:

Adam:

I guess that's the same as me chasing you for more than an entire month just to get you to respond to a response you sent you me. Your ridiculous email rhetoric bantering back and forth might amuse you but it certainly is not appreciated by myself. I don't know what your problem is but you STILL have not picked up a phone and dialed my number. I am amazed at the number of people in Milwaukee that talk a talk but cannot crawl a crawl much less walk the walk. And after offers from Atlantic Records and Nashville I am still amazed that I cannot get anyone to take their own music careers seriously. Good luck yourself, Adam. You're going to need it. Please do not communicate with me again. I don't appreciate people who waste my time.

Well a big old LOL at that, especially the wasting his time part, but you'll have to wait for parts 2 3 and however many else there will be to understand why. Now, during this whole time I’ve been copying Pogo in on the emails, and sending him the replies. Pogo is a bit more forgiving than I am, and not as quick to brush off the idiots, and decided to call him. They had a 45 minute phone conversation where Paul dodged every single question Pogo tried asking. He kept talking about 70’s progressive rock, and how a song is written using whatever the fuck circle theory is, and this and that. Pogo finally got him to give up some of his music, and some information about the band. I’m going to use tinyurl here to mask his web page in case he searches the web for links to his own page (who knows, the guy is a fucking nutcase), but these links are legit. First, a little bit of information about “E eye E”. This will give away the guy’s full name, but since it’s buried in the link in a PDF file, that’s ok:

http://tinyurl.com/2jhyj8 (PDF File)

Next is the song that will become famous throughout this blog series, the Kworbane Stone. I purposely spelled it incorrectly so that he can’t search it. Now, please resist the urge to browse around the site and listen to other songs. I will only say that for now, please stick to these two links, and the rest will make sense as more blog entries regarding this show up, along with more links. For your listening “enjoyment”:

http://tinyurl.com/3ykqqm (MP3 File)

Yeah. That’s what I said when I heard it. I replied to Pogo’s email to me. Note that I mention 4 tracks here, but for now we’ll stick with the Kworbane Stone. The rest are equally as horrible, trust me:

Here's exactly what Atlantic records did:

Track 1: 30 seconds in, everyone in the room stares at each other without making a word. Someone hits next track.

Track 2: Hysterical laughter. After about 45 seconds the strongest-willed person in the room manages to hit the next track before passing out.

Track 3: Someone wakes up, says "was that someone coughing on the track???"

Track 4: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

45 minutes later everyone wakes up to hear the same thing coming out of the CD player. They take the CD, break it into 3 million pieces, write Paul a letter that says "please, don't ever do that to us again", and everyone goes out for multiple shots of whatever makes the pain go away.

I mean really. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??!?!??! You don't know how much I want to email him now. But...I'm sure it's that I just don't understand the music because it's so intellectually superior. I'm not sure what it was. It might have been "post-modern power production", or the "neo-classical american art rock". It might have been the "weaving provocative multi-layered musical threads into an orchestrated tapestry".

Or, it's really the fact that it just simply sounds like the worst artistic wanna be hippy moronic intellectual wussie elitiest contrived crap that I've ever heard in my life. What's worse is you can tell these guys have musical talent. Well, the musicians. The singer makes Brad sound appealing .

Ok, I'm done now. I only have one bottle of vicodin left, and that's not enough to make this pain go away, so I'm going to have to try and sleep it off. :)

Adam

Then I couldn’t help myself, and fired this email off to our friend Paul:

Dear Paul:

After reviewing as much of your music as I was able to take, I have come to the conclusion that my daughter might be a better fit for what you're looking for than I would be. However, in order for her to comply with your circle theory, you'll need to add an "IO" to the end of your "E eye E" trademark.

She's 4 years old, so she may be a bit advanced for what you are looking for, but she does well with others that aren't quite at her level yet.

Best of luck with it, and I look forward to the Atlantic Records release.

Sincerely,

Adam

So there we have it. The end of part 1. About 6 months later after the guitarist we worked with for a few months flaked out on us, we posted another ad, “drummer and bassist available.” I received a two word email from Paul stating “call me.” I replied something like “haven’t we been through this already? I’ve heard your music, remember? No thanks, not interested.” And that was it. Or was it?

Stay tuned later this week for part 2.

Yours Donkily,

Morphy