Cheap Time – S/T – New LP

The initial idea for Cheap Time came from Redd Kross’ bassist Steve McDonald, who had come to Nashville to produce Be Your Own Pet’s debut album. Steve saw me playing drums and singing with Rat Traps at a house show, and afterwards, he told me that I needed to play guitar and front my own band. Later that summer, I received similar encouragement from Jay Reatard, who wanted to have a serious talk with me in the parking lot of The Buccaneer after The Fatals/Rat Traps show. Jay’s whole pitch to me that night was about thinking bigger than just continuing to replicate the music he made in the 90s, making 4-track cassette recordings that would only ever sell 500 copies. Jay told me he believed I had more talent and commercial potential than Rat Traps or my One Man Band. I needed to do something new.

I began writing the first Cheap Time songs on the last Rat Traps tour in May 2006, starting with “Spoiled Brat,” an ode to Jamin and Jonas from Be Your Own Pet, who were the first rich kids I ever met. It ended up being the A-Side of our first 45. At the time, I was dating BYOP’s singer Jemina Abegg, and it was decided early on that she would play bass in whatever this new group turned out to be. After Rat Traps broke up that summer, I left on tour with Be Your Own Pet a few days later, continuing to write new songs on hotel stationery along the way.

BYOP’s tour ended in LA with a show opening for Redd Kross at the Disney Concert Hall. That evening, Monty Buckles took us upstairs and introduced us to Larry Hardy from In The Red Records, whom I was very excited to meet. Larry was wearing the coolest Elvis t-shirt I’d ever seen, flanked by his companions Jimmy Hole and Terri Wahl. I quickly told Larry about the new band Jemina and I were forming that was going to sound like Pussy Galore meets Smoke Seven era Redd Kross. Larry said those were two of his favorite bands, and he couldn’t wait to hear what we came up with.

Back in Tennessee a couple of days later, Jemina and I drove to my parents' house in Henderson on July 5th, 2006, and laid down the first batch of Cheap Time recordings. We quickly assembled some CD-Rs of our demo with a collage of photos my sister Kristi took of us in the attic bedroom where we had recorded. The first person we gave one to was Be Your Own Pet’s bassist, Nathan Vasquez, while he was eating Thai food with his mother on White Bridge Rd. I had played all the drums on our recordings, but Nathan offered to join our new band as our live drummer based on the artwork of our CD-R alone. He said it looked like a combination of Animorphs meets Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff.

Over the next year, we played 14 shows with this original lineup of the band, mostly in Memphis and Nashville, along with a few gigs in Florida and Texas. In early 2007, after being turned down by David Katznelson at Birdman Records, I wrote to Larry Hardy, and he agreed to release Cheap Time’s debut LP on In The Red. It felt like a dream come true. ITR was easily the best indie label going at that time with all the coolest bands. Larry immediately suggested that we should come to California in July to record at the Distillery with Mike McHugh, where the Black Lips had just done their album Let It Bloom. When we gave Nathan the great news later that night at a party, he was excited until he found out the recording dates were in July. He already had a tour booked with his other band Deluxin’. Nathan was chill and pretty cool about it, though and it turned out not to be that big of a deal. Jon Sewell was at the same party that night, and we asked him to be our new drummer. Jon was the reason Jemina and I met in the first place, and he was probably our closest mutual friend at the time. Jon’s a Mensa-level genius, but his highest pursuit in life is to party. He jumped at the opportunity to join a band that was going to be on the same label as his favorite band, Lost Sounds.

Before this second lineup of Cheap Time could make it to California to record, we had one more change in personnel. While Be Your Own Pet was on tour in May 2007, opening for the Arctic Monkeys, I was back in Nashville working on a fresh batch of 4-track recordings for a new project called Peoploids. When Jemina got home from tour, she broke up with me and wanted me to move out immediately, suggesting that I move in with Jon Sewell. A week later, after rehearsals and another photo shoot with her dad, Jemina quit Cheap Time. Our dates at the Distillery were only a little over a month away, and we had no idea who our new bassist would be.

Initially, Alix Brown pitched herself to replace Jemina on bass. Alix had just broken up with Jay Reatard, and she was looking to join a new band after Angry Angles. I drove down to Memphis to discuss the situation with her at The Buccaneer. Alix seemed fairly serious about joining. She didn’t have a car, but she offered to take the bus to Nashville once a week to rehearse with us. Jon Sewell was really rooting for Alix to join the band, but I thought Stephen Braren would be our best choice. Stephen had grown up with Jon, and they had played in different bands together over the years, so they had a rich history and a deep musical connection of their own. Stephen had also mixed my recent Peoploid recordings, and we had already been talking about playing together in some capacity before Jemina quit.

The first person I played the Peoploid recordings for was Steve McDonald while we were parked at the Sonic Drive-In on Franklin Pike. Steve was ecstatic that these were the best songs he’d heard from me and that they should be on the next Cheap Time album. I was still dead set on having them be part of a new project, since we still had so many old Cheap Time songs to record for our debut. After I posted a couple Peoploid songs on a MySpace page, I got a phone call from Larry Hardy freaking out about how good they were. Someone else had sent them to him to hear, and he was going to contact Peoploids to offer them a record deal until he realized it was me. He was already making an album with me in a few weeks, so he demanded I re-record all of the Peoploids material for Cheap Time’s debut album.

After a couple of weeks of rehearsing, the new third lineup of Cheap Time flew out to LA to meet up with Monty Buckles’ band, The Lamps, along with opener Haunted George for a short West Coast tour. This new version of Cheap Time had only played two practice shows together before our first tour, and things started off very rocky with the first show in Vancouver. Stephen Braren couldn’t get across the border due to previous DUIs, leaving Jon and me to play as a duo. As we headed back down the coast, we started to get our act together, and we were as ready as we’d ever be once we got to Costa Mesa to record.

In Nashville, we were used to either home studios in our bedrooms or professional facilities where major label projects were executed. None of us were prepared for The Distillery, which looked more like a cluttered junk shop than a recording studio. We bunkered down for the next four days, eating and sleeping there the whole time with the owner/engineer Mike McHugh. Stephen Braren really stepped up and was very helpful throughout the entire process, but Jon Sewell was totally checked out after he finished his drum parts early on. Jon spent the majority of the sessions laying on the couch watching season 4 of The Simpsons on DVD.

Larry only came to the studio the last night we were there for the final mixing. Larry was annoyed we hadn’t recorded all of the Peoploid material like he had requested and demanded that we set back up and record “Ginger Snap” before we finished mixing that night. I wasn’t very happy with the finished product once we were done. None of the performances or the quality of the recordings sounded as strong as the original 4-track versions of the material. It was definitely the album Larry Hardy wanted though; he was very pleased with how everything turned out in the end.

We finished the first Cheap Time album in early August 2007, but it wasn’t released until late April 2008. Those eight months felt like an eternity at the time. After Jemina quit, her dad Jimmy Abegg called me and offered to take photos of the new lineup. Jimmy ended up taking the photo we used for the front cover of the album at his studio on Dickerson Pike. We ended up using an above-the-waist shot because I didn’t want Jon’s blue shorts in the frame. We also had to airbrush out Jon’s Black Oak Arkansas t-shirt in an attempt to give the album a more timeless look. When the album got reviewed in Vice magazine, all they wrote about was Stephen Braren’s choker, which I never saw him wear after that review. Along with taking the photos, Jimmy Abegg also did the album layout and design for us, which was a double homage to both Hubble Bubble and Moby Grape’s debut albums.

Jay Reatard mastered the album in January 2008. There were some issues with digital clipping which required the tapes to be re-transferred and caused more delays. Unlike other albums I’ve made, I didn’t feel like the mastering process helped improve the overall sound quality, but it didn’t seem to matter to general listeners. The self-titled debut from Cheap Time is probably still the best-selling and most popular album I’ve ever been involved with. It’s an album that opened a lot of doors and gave me so many great opportunities, but it’s always frustrated me how bad it sounds to my ears.

Most of the album’s success can probably be attributed to the inclusion of the obscure cover song, “People Talk.” Goner Records got a huge stack of the old 45 by The End, an 80s teenage new wave band from Corinth, MS, that featured Jack Yarber and Jimbo Mathis. I knew that song was a hit the first time I heard it, and I regret not buying a couple more $1.99 copies of that 7” from Goner. After the Cheap Time version came out, the original single became an expensive collectors item. Jack Yarber told me he bought a stack of Spin Magazines to give to his family whenever a write-up about our cover version was featured in an issue.

After the album dropped, we did two tours opening for Jay Reatard in the spring and summer of 2008. There are so many wild stories from that period that I wrote a whole unpublished book about my on-the-road adventures with Jay, which will hopefully see the light of day in the future. It was an amazing time to be alive and tour with someone as real and inspiring as Jay Reatard. I got very lucky in my early 20s.