Wayne's Notes from the Boom-Box Experiments handouts

Upon his leaving the band, Ronald Jones, our former guitar player, I got the feeling was searching for some purer way of thinking. He had become increasingly paranoid and, I felt, he was looking for something simpler and more certain than life in a weird rock band. And without getting in to it too much, seemed to be getting into a sort of "new age" lifestyle. Some of his behavior, when he was in the band, while it seemed odd, I didn't think much of it. But since his leaving I thought, perhaps, and this is just my own speculation, could have been the beginning stages of schizophrenia.

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I remember a couple times while staying in the same hotel room together he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking someone was in the room with us. We'd turn on the lights and even look under the bed, but somehow I don't know if he was ever convinced that there was really no one there. Incidents like this, coupled with stories of him thinking he can "heal" people and, like I said earlier, an ever increasing paranoia, sometimes makes me think, though I know these things alone are no proof, maybe there is some underlying psychological cause for the way he has become... So anyway, it got me thinkin' about hearing voices in your head, and wondering if Ronald could hear things in his head...?? He always had an over sensitive awareness of sounds. Once while driving through some busy, city traffic, he was listening to different car horns all beeping and determining their pitch... Another time we were recording a song and he seemed bent on having a sound he was calling "mosquito wings" accompanying the rhythm track. To me it was and still is inaudible in the song, but I think he could always hear it clearly.

So this song, though not directly about Ronald, is about a man with a similar talent or affliction, depending on how you look at it, who, over the period of one summer, goes from being normal to schizophrenic. He finds he is more and more aware of the sounds around him. As he sits at his bedroom window watching the sunrise he hears every bird chirping, every insect buzzing. As the summer rolls on his sensitivity is exaggerated. He hears flowers growing, and even the sun itself rising.. By late August he is, like Ronald with the car horns, trying to determine which blade of grass is the loudest.

Wayne's side is made up of four competing rows of rhythms. Using birds in one row, insects in the next row, and the sun and flowers represented by a low and high choir all taking a breath at the same time in rows one and two. Steven's side, the grass side, is twenty harp players delicately plucking a different note chord in the major scale sequence only to be obliterated by twenty lawnmowers.

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