"Public Enemy sample"
We love this sample so much that even though I don't think we'll ever be cool enough to actually say it, we had to include it here. If y'all really like to rock the funky beats. Awesome. Also this whole album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, is a huge inspiration. (see; Show 'Em Watcha Got). The Bomb Squad's use of samples are what we wish our record could have sounded like. (MC)
The (No) Apologies Project - Pusherman
When we first started the band our guru Reverend Johnson was trying to come up with a song for us to cover and this was one of the many ideas he came up with. This is the one we chose but he has since changed his mind about it and won't permit us to play it live. We recorded it during the Deconstruct the Dancefloor sessions but didn't think it fit on that album or on the six band split CD we did so we've been saving it for a rainy day. The double tracked vocal was actually an accident, it's two different takes mixed together but it totally made the song so we kept it. There was also some controversy when we first chose to cover it because the lyrics contain the words "nigga" and "bitches". I don't really feel comfortable using those words but I felt even less comfortable about censoring somebody else's art, so we opted to keep the original lyrics. (MC)
Nuderections - I Really Hate To Cornhole
(notes forthcoming)
Bob Crosby - Big Noise From Winetka
So one day I was watching Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery and fell in love with the song that's playing during the scene when Diane Keaton sneaks into their neighbor's apartment for the first time. I figured out how to play the main riff on an acoustic guitar then took the movie and the riff over to Jeff's apartment and told him that we had to write a song around it. We searched the internet forever trying to find the name of the song and after exhaustive research discovered the song was called Big Noise From Winetka by Bob Crosby. (That's Bing's little brother). At the same time I had been reading a Talking Heads biography and was struck by this story about David Byrne wandering around these suburbs called Bolton Hill and looking in the windows at the inhabitants. David's girlfriend at the time would scold him: "Shh, don't laugh. This is normal life." (MC)
When Patrik first showed up at my apartment with an armful of records, videos and CDs, I knew we were in for a caffeine-addled romp through musical history and novelty. The strangest part of Normal Life is how it truly culminated the night's various readings, viewings and listenings. Also, this was really the first I helped co-wrote lyrics. Patrik sat at the keyboard and we bounced ideas back and forth about what defines a normal life, what are the concerns of the truly mediocre, and what gender-based chores were still remain unquestioned and sometimes defended even by the staunchest "socially-conscious freedom fighter." (36)
ESL - Aquaintance of Friends
I wrote this song my first semester at Orange Coast College during one the many hard-to-get-used-to solitary breaks between classes. This was on ESL's split CD with Shamus O'niel that came out in 1999. We rode the wave of a high-school fan-base until they all graduated and moved on to other things. This was my attempt at digesting the terrible time I had in high school. I was still very angry about the whole thing and still very vengeful. Being my first semester at "college," or at least this new high school with ashtrays, I was falling in love with academia and began using metaphor and psychology references...a trend that would ultimately divide ESL and spawn the academically-entreched No Apologies Project. (Is that pretentious enough for you?) (36)
The story of how I met Jeff is too long to really capture here, it will have to be published someday as a book like The Day John Met Paul, but I'll try to sum it up. I met Jeff in an anthropology class at OCC and saw that he had an ESL button on. I was sure that they were some hip cool band that I should know about and so I went home and looked up all I could about them. Not only did I realize that I did indeed have an ESL song on a comp that I had never really listened to and that they were fucking great, but I realized that Jeff was in the band. So I spent the whole semester trying to casually drop in that I too was in a band and also going to as many ESL shows as I could. (MC)
NWA sample
In nineteen ninety-motherfuckin-one-1 I was 9 years old but thanks to a babysitter who had two teenage sons I was being raised on a steady diet of NWA. I stole this intro to the song "Always Into Somethin' " twice; the "takin out all you commercialized ass brothers" for the intro to the demo version of Dance Floor Demigods and then 199motherfuckin1 became "two thousand motherfuckin 3, no apologies back up in this motherfucker" on the bridge of the album version.
Lafayette Afro Rock Band - Darkest Light
Public Enemy - Show 'Em Watcha Got
Back to It Takes A Nation Of Millions again. I don't remember exactly why but somehow I got the idea that we should steal this saxophone part for a song. The Public Enemy song was the inspiration but then I went back and found the original song that Public Enemy sampled from. This is why I have always defended sampling in hip hop as an art form and defend the kind of "live sampling" that we do. I would never have heard of the Lafayette Afro Rock Band if it hadn't been for Public Enemy. And I'm hoping there are some people out there who might never have heard of them who can hear it here for the first time.(MC)
All Patrik had was this riff that I had heard before from Public Enemy. I think he was just so excited we had found a saxophone that he really wanted to use it somehow. I played the riff over and over on my bass at home and ultimately came up with a song that used the Lafayette riff as a springboard. I reintroduced the riff as the chorus and modulated it a few steps downs. Geek out! PS...the bass fill on No Apologies #1 was stolen from Magnificent Seven by The Clash...just for the record. (36)
former friend - Autumn Springs: A Retrospective
(notes forthcoming)
Ohio Players - Skin Tight
For my birthday Patrik bought be Hip-O!'s Funk Box. It's four CDs of the choicest uncut funk. Patrik basically gave me the gift with the stipulation that I find new material to steal...so once I had listened to the whole thing a few times through I decided that Skin Tight was definitely a bass riff I wanted to lift. I logged on to the internet *gasp* and found the tabs. I played through it till I knew it and then set upon trying to change it up and make a No Apologies riff. Using the same springboard method as on Darkest Light/No Apologies #1, I came up with All Up in my Cubicle to match the lyrics chock-full of corporate-culture double entendres. (36)
The Percival Lowell Redemption Society - Reggae Beat #6
Back to that awkward early-college era...I was obsessed with the Beat poets, especially Ginsberg (in fact I still have a poster-sized copy of Howl, Pt. 1 on my bathroom wall). I listen back to this and hear some obvious Ginsberg overtones - and you can definitely hear that overarching bitterness I was feeling towards a world that said I had to actually work for a living. The Percival Lowell Redemption Society was mostly a four-track band with one exception. We did actually perform once at A Room with a Brew dressed in matching olive-green jumpsuits, our heads throughoughly covered in Saran-Wrap. (With mouth holes to breath and sing.) Guitar on this song was played by the genius Matt Virden. (36)
The Jam - Start!
I was actually listening to a lot more In the City than this later-era Jam when we first started No Apologies, but the Jam has always been, along with the Clash, one of the types of bands I wished I were in. Once when I was in Guitar Center buying a new bass head, I was playing Start! and a guy with a real thick English accent asked me, "Is that Start! by the Jam? Or Taxman?" I laughed... good question. Oh yeah, the main riff on this song was stolen for the Sound Mind/Body chorus. (36)
The Conniption Fits - Would It Be Alright?

This is kind of embarrassing to listen back to now (although not as embarrassing as some things even further back) but this was the band I was in when I met Jeff and this was the band I was in that first played at Electra, so if it wasn't for the Conniption Fits there might not be a No Apologies Project. You can't really understand the words, partly because I'm just screaming them, partly because this was recorded on a cheap four-track and partly because the feedback on my guitar is so insanely loud, but if you're interested this was my first and probably last love song. It was about a girl I dated in the fall of 2001 (kind of a post-911-love-song) who lived in a room under the stairs.(MC)

When this dude with a Social Distortion button from my anthropology class asked me to buy a ticket for his show at Chain Reaction, I wasn't sure if I should go. And when he described it as, "early 80's punk," I was even more apprehensive, but he seemed like a cool guy and I wanted to help him sell some of those tickets so Chain Reaction didn't fleece this poor young punk band. So I bought two tickets. At this point in history, the Conniption Fits were a two-man band...but with so much energy and moxy and raw, unadulturated insanity that they blew me away. It wasn't just that I wasn't expecting much, it was the way patrik referenced all the records that I listened to and no one else cared about. I tried to explain how much I liked it to the dude I came to the show with... "It was great! It was brilliant...like this totally raw and art-damaged approach to New Wave." Dude I'm with goes, "They didn't sound like Devo at all." Then I shut up because he was obviously retarded. Conniption Fits were the best band in Orange County before they got a bass player and turned into a horrible post-goth metal punk project...Hahaha! No, seriously. (36)
The Chronic sample
The Chronic is probably one of my top five favorite records of all time. The beats, the flows, the skits and the samples are all just fucking classic. We may not necessarily sound like Dr Dre but The Chronic is such a huge influence that I had to at least give it a name drop.
Dude. It was the summer before my freshman year and Dre fizz-ucked me up for lizz-ife. Word. (36)
Theme From Turbo Outrun
I couldn't sleep for weeks. I began the habit of watching the new He-Man series on Cartoon Network every weekday at 6 AM. But did I let it stop there? Of course not. I searched the internet for all the vintage He-Man images I could find trying to jog the memories of my childhood. I stumbled upon a game for the Commodore 64 and then went about finding a c64 emulator. But what I ultimately found was the ultimate caché of Commodore 64 theme songs and an old fashioned SID player. I burned a CD of the entire musical library from Turbo Outrun...including level starts and deaths (game overs). Later on, when we were blocked on how to make Redefine Your Paradigm work we listened back to this song and interpolated some parts into the pre-verse and verse. (36)
So one Wednesday night after band practice I was having a conversation with Electra curator/volunteer extraordinaire Michelle about perceptual expectancy and people who are so wrapped up in what they believe in that they refuse to see the world outside their own narrow views. Since I just happened to know a few people just like that I decided it was a perfect subject for a song. I did some research, wrote down a whole page full of random terms and phrases and then pieced them together under the heading Redefine Your Paradigm. The only problem was the song was really slow and kind of boring. After playing it once, we shelved the song until we could find a way to save it. Then Jeff brought me the Turbo Outrun CD and based on a digitized Led Zeppelin rip off and a little Run!!-inspired rockin out we gave the song a total makeover. (MC)
Parrot World - I'm A Good Little Doggie
(notes forthcoming)
Skin Rabblers - Spinning Lies
Skin Rabblers was a four-track band that started on the Kinko's sales floor. Rob G. had asked me to bring back some skin rabblers from El Conejo where I was going for lunch. Of course they don't have skin rabblers at a mexican food place, as I soon found out. Anyhow, the name stuck and when Rob and I decided to start a conceptual-improv band we took it as our moniker. We got together every Sunday night after work and recorded at least one song. So there's actually about an album's worth of this avant-garde free improv project. I stifled most of the musical discoveries Rob and I stumbled upon and trudged on in a mediocre pop-punk band for a few more years before I found an appropriate avenue for new musical expression in No Apologies. (36)
Chain Reaction - Dance Freak
This song was on a free compilation from Urban Outfitters called Uptown Sounds. There is a part in the opening where it's just a tambourine shaking and then this great funky guitar part drops in. I wanted to write a song that opened with a tambourine and hand claps and I wanted desperately for it to be as funky as Dance Freak. I'm not sure if I quite got there but if you listen to the song that later became 1-800-POLITICS hopefully you can hear what I was trying to do. (MC)
James Brown sample
When we were working out the song that would become 1-800-POLITICS we needed a way to get from the intro to the first verse and a 1-2-3-4 count off just didn't seem right. So I suggested yelling out an inocuous phrase, like what James Brown yelled at the beginning of Get On The Good Foot. The only problem was I didn't really know what he was saying. After listening to it a million times I finally decided he was saying "get power to people, get power now hit me". We sinced learned he actually says "que pasa people, que pasa hit me" but my misinterpretation made the album. (MC)
ESL - Albatross On A Chain
This song got buried by an onslaught of hastily-written filler songs on ESL's final (and debut) full-length. I still think this is a great anthem for the modern wage-slave and you can see the exploration of new narratives, metaphors and English-professor-approved literary allusions. Dave wrote the music in an attempt to be Propaghandi without actually learning any new guitar techniques...'cus learning is hard. I wrote the lyrics in an inspired flurry after waking up and vividly recalling a dream where I stood on a soap-box in a park and addressed enraptured throngs. On my morning drive drive to work I could still recall verbatim the speech I was giving. I wrote down all I could remember and this song came out of it. (The first verse is almost directly from the dream-speech). (36)
Continuing the Patrik and Jeff saga brings us to the Showcase Theatre in Corona in 2001. ESL were playing a Battle of the Bands and I had trekked out by myself to be in the front row. The first song they played that night was one I had never heard before and was an experience something like hearing the Misfits for the first time over the phone in 9th grade. From the point Jeff finished the song yelling 'albatross on a chain', until they broke up in 2002, I was a dorky drooling fan boy for ESL (even enough so to get credited as 'the one true believer' in the Horseshoes and Handgrenades liner notes). And then, like a moment out of a Mark Wahlberg movie, I actually got to start a band with the singer of my favorite band. We've always talked about how buried Albatross got on the ESL CD and how it deserved better placement. So here it is, some long overdue justice. (MC)
former friend - AM Drive
(notes forthcoming)
"Are we recording this?" sample
The voices in this sample belong to Justin and Dylan, my former band mates in the Conniption Fits. It might not be funny to anyone who didn't know Justin but five minutes into trying to record our four track demo him asking "are we recording this? on the four track?" makes me laugh every time I hear it. (MC)
Knocturnal - Musik
Very early on in no apologies I was listening to an EP by this west coast rapper Knocturnal like nonstop. You might remember this single if you were listening to Power or the Beat a lot two years ago. At first I wasn't planning on stealing anything for No Apologies because it was before we really got into the idea of freely interpolating other songs; all I was trying to do was figure out how to play the bass line of this song. But I just couldn't figure it out. (I'm not that good at the guitar so that makes it harder to steal stuff.) But my jumbled interpretation of Musik (which actually samples an old Wings song) became the verse, and the same riff backwards became the chorus, of Dance Floor Demigods. (MC)
I Feel So Pixelated - Something About Quagmires and Ruts
Remember that CD of Turbo Outrun music from the Commodore 64... well, Patrik called me up the very afternoon I had compiled that CD and asked if I wanted to come along to other side of Orange County to pick up his girlfriend from work at South Coast Plaza. As we drove along the 5-55 Carpool Interchange I looked down at all the cars and ahead at this single-lane overpass arching over the freeway. With these visuals and Turbo Outrun blaring on the stereo, I remarked to Patrik, "I feel so pixelated." And a whole new concept for a four-track band was born. This particular track is an homage to Something About Vampires and Sluts. Look it up! (36)
The Conniption Fits - Orange County's Burning
Another Conniption Fits song from the same four-track session. It's kind of significant because the title and some of the lyrics are a play on the Clash song 'London's Burning'. Even back then I was stealing stuff and calling it art. (MC)
Not only did Patrik sub-out London for Orange County, he makes references to "driving 90 miles per hour down Harbor Blvd." and perhaps inadvertently steals from Guns on the Roof. The word I used to describe Conniption Fits was "brilliant," and I'm sticking with that! (36)
Jelly Roll Morton - I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say
Dukes of Dixieland - Black Bottom Stomp
Alright so here's the real truth about "Black Bottom Stomp Swing" for the first time. It was not written about Jelly Roll Morton. I know, I know, I've been lying to you all this time. i had actually never heard of Jelly Roll Morton when I wrote it. The story starts, as a lot of our songs seem to, in Jeff's apartment. Jeff has a huge wall size poster of an extensive jazz family tree. It's got everyone who's everyone in jazz and how they're linked. One of the entries was for an old Louis Armstrong band called the Black Bottom Stompers. I just liked the way those words sounded so I wrote a sort of meaningless rhyme based on them to go with an instrumental song we had that had kind of a swing feel. Then I was in a bookstore and I came across a book called Black Bottom Stomp, which of course I had to buy. That's where I first read that Black Bottom Stomp was a song by a guy named Jelly Roll Morton. I read all about Jelly Roll and bought some of his records and was so inspired by his life and his music that I decided to just tell people I wrote a song about him. (MC)
I have a poster with a lot of Jazz musicians names and how they are stylistically related. I stole it while working at Kinko's. That was a good day. (36)
Skin Rabblers - Lyrics
This was the track we dubbed "our hit single." The lyrics were written by Rob and sung by me in a closet in a Laguna Niguel onto my four-track. As I recall I got off work earlier than Rob that Sunday and came home and recorded the drum/rhythm track. This track makes good use of a Skin Rabbler's patented instrument which consisted of a 36" cardboard tube from the lamination machine, a stretched piece of laminent over one end of the tube, and microphone crammed up into the tube like a gerbil in Richard Gere. This little device allowed a great amount of control over feedback and well and a unique snare-like tone that augmented the keyboard-supplied drum samples. "As far as I can see it I'm as blind as a bat." (36)
"Straight Outta Compton" sample
If you hadn't noticed I really like NWA.
Sly and the Family Stone - M'Lady
Liana, Patrik and I all compiled tapes of bands we wanted to sound like/be influenced by, and Patrik put this as one of the first songs on his tape for the No Apologies Project. There are a lot of songs out there that celebrate the various body parts or sexual abilities of women but I couldn't think of any that celebrate a women's mind. The line, "Oh what a face, oh what a gorgeous mind," was the prompt for the lyrics to Sound Mind/Body and I kept the phrase "gorgeous mind" for the chorus. (36)
I can't remember when I first started liking Sly and the Family Stone and I can't exactly remember the point in my career in a garage punk band that I decided I wanted to be in a band that sounded like Sly and the Family Stone. But I do remember that in the summer of 2002 ESL broke up and Jeff asked me if I wanted to start a band and I agreed only under the condition that it sound like Sly and the Family Stone. It kind of mutated from there, but this band was definitely the starting point.(MC)
Bud Hilker's Bonga - ¿Quien Tiere Tamales?
(notes forthcoming)
Café Tacuba - Dejate Caer
I saw this video on Spanish MTV and didn't really like the song that much but loved the piano part in it. God bless the wonders of free internet downloading. So I took the song into practice and we tried to figure out what we could do with the riff. We didn't quite duplicate it but what we came up with turned into the basis for Redefine Your Paradigm. (MC)
Pizzicato 5 - Sophisticated Catchy
(notes forthcoming)
Civil Unrest - Homophobic Piece of Shit
Wow, if Conniption Fits was embarrassing, this is almost painful to listen to. Civil Unrest was the band I was in all through high school. We started our freshman year wanting to sound like Black Flag and by our senior year we were all crusty vegan peace punks trying to sound like obscure Swedish grindcore bands who recorded in their basements. Most of the things we wrote and screamed about I don't really believe in anymore, but I managed to find one song that we wrote that I can still stand behind. In sentiment at least. (MC)
John Coltrane - Mr PC
I actually have a book with all of Trane's solos from Giant Steps transcribed into musical notation. I stole the main riff and then went phrase by phrase along with music through the solo transcription and stole a bridge and chorus for Literal Interpretations (are not to be trusted). Trane bursts through the phrases like they're nothing but it took me forever to play it on the bass...and it speaks volumes to Coltrane's genius that we could write a whole song by stealing about 8-bars out of an over-132-bar solo. (36)
We don't play Literal Interpretations live anymore because people (including some ex-members of the band) kept misinterpreting the lyrics (which is ironic since the key is right in the title). But this is my very favorite song to play live. It makes me feel talented 'cuz it's a really hard riff (hard for me at least, like I said I'm not that good). (MC)
Quite Satellite - Gone After Yesterday
I was emo before emo came in, yo! I'm telling you...I saw Get Up Kids at Koo's cafe... I know all the words to Promise Ring's Nothing Feels Good album... I still bust out the Cap'n Jazz anthology CDs every now and then. In fact I was so certain that this emo-thing was gonna hit big that I started a band with one of my coworkers and some of his friends. This is the result. Rachael wrote the words and melodies. Who knows what could've happened if I wasn't such a little bitch and some of the members in the band had a little more talent. Our highest moment was when we opened for the Get Up Kids at Che Cafe... but even then our second guitarist couldn't make it 'cus it was a school night. I think that just about sums it up. (36)
E-40 - Automatic
If you haven't heard of E-40 you need to run out right now and buy the record this song is on. He's the most inventive, creative rapper ever. This is one of those songs that I listened to a million times a day when it first came out and every few weeks I still get the urge to pull out and listen to again. For that reason alone I might have included it on the mix tape, but also if you listen closely you might be able to pick out that the main keyboard riff of Black Bottom Stomp Swing was what came out when I was trying to figure out how to play this song. (MC)
The (No) Apologies Project - Same Old Song (live)
This came from one of our really early shows. It was actually recorded by Mark before he was in the band. This is how we used to play the song; very fast and Contortions-esque. It got slowed down a bit when we recorded it. The riff is taken from the same pattern as "Funky Town" by Lipps, Inc. which you can hear me playing before we start the song. The lyrics were originally written about Avril Lavigne but are more about prefabrication in pop music in general. (MC)