JON'S LYRICS Herein will reside, once I'm done transcribing paper notes, the entire catalog of the lyrics I've written. This ain't poetry. By my definition, lyrics and poetry are two separate beasts, because lyrics sort of need to be written to a melody, whereas poetry (free verse excepted, natch) should subscribe to some sort of meter. And a lot of it is crap. Over the years, I've tweaked here and there, mostly to trim away some literary immaturity and replace it with better imagery -- or merely to get rid of a passage that just embarrassed the hell out of me. But mostly... it's at least the essential skeleton and muscle of the original work, with only a change in skin tone. Through my 1987 work, each piece was written with a particular band setup in mind: Travesty - my first band. Picture long hair and spandex. I traded vocals and played bass; we had no use for keyboards, because it was 1981 and by god we were gonna rock out. Later on, though, I always tended to have keyboards in my head when writing, and later bands would incorporate them onto these older tunes if they were salvagable. Spectrum - I'd forgotten about this "project" until I reached the 1984 pile and started going through it. In '84, I'd started writing things with a little more of a progressive tint to them. Travesty, after three years of playing backyard parties and the like, was on its last legs, and I had bigger ideas. Some of this stuff did end up getting done in slightly different form by Ice Ice, but I file it here in the interest of truth, justice, and the American way. Ice Ice - my second band, more serious on the musicianship, but a little hamstrung by image. Chris, my best friend at the time, who was a dead ringer for Nick Rhodes, was the vocalist. I always hated the name because, well... Duran Duran, Talk Talk, The The, Ice Ice? I was again pounding the four-string, and tinkering with keyboards. I didn't really realize until I was going through the lyrics themselves how few songs I'd actually written for this band. (Chris wrote a good chunk of the Ice Ice lyrics, and since this is a compilation of MY lyrics, well...) Most of what later became known as The Canada Tapes was written for Ice Ice, and therefore I'd include it here, except I didn't write any of it except a song entitled "Communication," which I can't find the words to anywhere and can't remember. Canada - this band almost existed. Chris and I wanted to do something really serious, and more progressive, but it never happened. False Charm - this band never existed, but I wanted it to. It was going to be me working without Chris, on something a little harder, yet still in the progressive vein. It was, essentially, going to be what Dream Theater later became, if I'd been able to gather the people -- but in this instance, I wasn't going to lay hands on an instrument except for occasional fills. Post 1987, almost everything would fit the False Charm profile. I was still playing after Ice Ice, and the bands I was in would occasionally use my older material, and sometimes we'd even work out one of the Canada or False Charm tunes. I got out of it in 1988, and as a result, the bulk of this archive is prior to that.