I released a cassette tape called Treated and Released after completing Welcome Love (see chapters 15 and 16). It was similar to the two tapes I had recorded years before (see chapter 8). There were some new songs, older material that didn’t make it on the prior CD and a few public domain numbers. The songs I was writing weren’t bad but the whole process was becoming stale and predictable. Part of this may have been due to the nearly complete apathy that my work received in the general public but it was also rooted in how my writing style had evolved.
Listening to the tape, it became clear to me that something was wrong and my first thought was to take a break from writing for a while; either that or keep working in hopes that the feel might return. After doing a little of both, I decided to approach the next set of songs in a different manner. The new material needed to be stripped down to a more basic form. Both Welcome Love and Treated and Released contained tunes that were too wordy and too long. The idea I came up with was to perform solo but to write as if I were coming up with songs for a Rock & Roll band. Short, succinct numbers, mostly on the uptempo side, without a lot of excess.
Once the concept was worked out, the songs began to take shape quickly. It was as if I had tapped into a huge well of undiscovered material. Rarely do I write more than a couple of songs a week and, often, a month will go by before a new tune appears. In this case, there were times when three or four songs came together simultaneously. The material stayed in line with the somber mood of the period but it was much more cutting in a darkly humorous kind of way. Limiting myself to songs that averaged around 3 minutes in length forced me to be somewhat disciplined and yet, the creative spontaneity that I felt was lacking had returned.
The songs covered a wide variety of subject matter and were written in an equally wide variety of musical styles. There were Rock & Roll numbers, Country tunes, Folk/Americana songs, Bluesy material, a couple of Popish songs and even a tolerable murder ballad. It was as if all the searching I was doing for those old public domain songs and standards had begun to pay off. In retrospect, though my intention was to return to the basics, I now regret not having a band at the time because the diversity of the material could have been fully developed with the addition of a few more musicians. On the other hand, not having a band forced me to write tunes that were stylistically varied in order to hold the listener’s attention from cut to cut. Often, limitations can produce more interesting results than having an abundance of options to choose from.
While the music and storylines may have jumped around quite a bit, thematically, most of the songs tended to be about women. This had always been true of my writing but it was never more so than on this record. Consequently, I called the CD Girl On Girl and it never dawned on me that this might be interpreted as a play on Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde. Turning porn slang for lesbian sex in on itself while still exploiting the provocative nature of the original term fit perfectly with the feel of the CD. The title was played up visually by using two mudflap girl silhouettes on top of each other for the CD art.
Mudflap Girl on Girls
The sleeve itself was designed with stills I shot of a scene from Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway. Peckinpah had a flair for showing the most brutal side of male-female relationships. This scene features a character flaunting her unfaithfulness in front of her husband, who has been tied to a chair in the hotel room she is sharing with her thug boyfriend. This too, seemed a fitting visual for the CD’s tone of love and life gone wrong.
Creatively, I would not again be on this kind of roll until six years later when writing material for the Dead Rails CD and then again four years after that, while working on what turned into the Kenwood Towne Center/Mauled recordings. Girl On Girl was easily the best music I had ever made, up to that point. In part, I liked it because of its defiant tone. After being consistently ignored by both the public and fellow musicians, it felt good to come up with work that made all the slights irrelevant. The fact that, upon its initial release, it garnered the same lack of attention was not surprising.
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© 2014 by Maurice Mattei
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