The Dude Abides.
It's good knowing Pete Yorn's out there, takin' 'er easy for all
us sinners.
"A way out West there was a fella, fella I want to tell
you about, fella by the name of Lebowski. At least, that was the
handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use
for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself The Dude. Now,
Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
But then, there was a lot about The Dude that didn't make a
whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived,
likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place
s'durned innarestin'. They call Los Angeles the City of Angels.
I didn't find it to be that exactly, but I'll allow as there are
some nice folks there. 'Course, I can't say I seen London, and I
never been to France, and I ain't never seen no queen in her
damn undies as the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after
seeing Los Angeles and thisahere story I'm about to unfold-wal,
I guess I seen somethin' ever' bit as stupefyin' as ya'd see in
any a those other places, and in English too, so I can die with
a smile on my face without feelin' like the good Lord gypped me.
Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early
'90s_just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm ad the Eye-rackies.
I only mention it 'cause what's a hee-ro?-but sometimes there's
a man. And I'm talkin' about The Dude here-sometimes there's a
man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right
in there-and that's THe Dide, in Los Angeles."
- The Big Lebowski
Above all things, Pete Yorn is a dude. He is, in fact, a
dude's dude. Same as there's a man's man and a songwriter's
songwriter, Pete Yorn is a dude's dude. You can tell even before
he opens his mouth, which is when it becomes really obvious.
That hair, that denim jacket, those eyes-eyes that have searched
soulfully through the racks of a thousand Jersey convenience
stores for the perfect microwaveable burrito. He surfs. He lifts
weights. He shoots hoops. He does bongs. And, most importantly,
chicks dig him. Not just some chicks-all chicks. And he doesn't
even seem to care. That's why he's The Dude. That's what you
call him. That, or Duder. His Dudeness. Or El Duderino, if, you
know, you're not into the whole brevity thing. Now, when
something makes The Dude happy-and, really, The Dude has so many
things to be happy about these days-his voice raises an octave
and he cries out, "Sweet!" He says this with a slight drawl,
like a farmer calling a pig: soo-weet!
Right about now, things are pretty sweet for The Dude. Day I
Forgot, his new, big, slick, crunchy, grunge-retro album,
comes out tomorrow, and he's sitting in his dressing room
backstage at Letterman, munching on black licorice and
nipping at a Heineken, waiting to go on. He's wearing his
beloved denim jacket, which clings to him like Linus' security
blanket. He's having a homecoming moment as he sits with his old
college buds and his bandmates, watching Syracuse basketball
coach Jum Boeheim yuk it up with Letterman on the dressing-room
TV. You see, The Dude went to Syracuse. And, check it out,
before he went to Syracuse, back when he was a high-school bb-baller,
he went to Boeheim's basketball camp. At the time, he thought
Syracuse was so boring. He vowed he would never go there. His
dream was to go to Tulane. But The Dude's dad wasn't having it.
"I'm not lettin' you go to New Orleans, boy." The Dude says,
imitating his dad. Whenever eh impersonates his dad, he makes
him sound like a sheriff from Alabama instead of a dentist from
Montville, N.J.
So anyway, senior year of high school, The Dude and his mom are
driving up to Syracuse for an interview. They get a hotel room;
The Dude calls up a bud from his basketball-camp days, and they
go out to some frat parties and get wasted. When he gets back to
his hotel room, it's 3 a.m., which isn't good because he's got
an interview with the school's admissions officers in, like,
five hours. To make matters worse, he's lost his room key and
has to wake up his mom. She's pissed, like, F-word pissed.
"'Where the fuck were you?'" The Dude says, using the shrill
voice he always uses to imitate his mom. "Ma, this school
rocks!" he says, then promptly vomits all over the hotel room.
Long story short, The Dude aces the interview, gets accepted to
Syracuse, then a bunch of other stuff happens. Now he's playing
Letterman. Sweet!
R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck once mused to an interviewer that
people would be surprised how far you can get in the music
business by simply showing up for your appointments. The Dude
always shows up. Even though he makes it look easy, The Dude
works hard. Hell, he toured for 18 months straight to nudge his
eminently likable debut, musicforthemorningafter, to
gold-selling status. He's always worked hard at music, going all
the way back to the time he was nine and his brother taught him
how to play drums on a righty kit, even though The Dude's a
lefty. By the time he was 13, he was playing drums and singing
in a Replacements cover band called the Cheese. For its big
debut, the Cheese was set to perform at the high-school talent
show. With an eye for the obvious, even back then, The Dude had
'em work up a version of the Mats' "Talent Show." During the
dress rehearsal, members of one of the other bands, Backgammon
For Troubled Youth (which is quite possibly the worst band name
in the history of amateur rock), liked what they heard and
approached The Dude afterward about sitting in on vocals when
they performed "Rockin' In The Free World" at the talent show. A
Neil cover? Sweet!
The rest of the Cheese weren't quite as excited about the idea,
and needless to say, they were even less so when Backgammon For
Troubled Youth took first prize. But, you know, whatever. All
was forgiven when The Dude would "borrow" his mom's car for a
little joyriding and everybody would pile in. Until the day he
got caught.
"I was hanging out with five of my buds," says The Dude. "I had
been slowly experimenting with taking the car out-I backed over
my friend's foot once-and that night I felt extra ballsy. I
ordered a pizza at the best pizza place ever-I really love
pizza-this place in Parsippany, Nino's Pizzaria on Route 46, and
the didn't deliver. I was like, 'I've been driving around the
neighborhood, I'm gonna go get this pizza.' We get in the car,
and 'Stairway To Heaven' comes on. I delt a little foreboding,
but whatever, so we start driving. And then it starts snowing. I
got pulled over. Cop comes up to window and says, 'Licenseregistrationplease."
I say, 'I left it at home.'
He looks at me and says, 'How old are you, son?'
I go, 'Uh, 17?'
He goes, 'How old are you, son?'
'Fiftee-'
'How old are you, boy?'
'Fourteen."
Cop turns around and says to his partner, 'We got another one of
these.' I guess they caught a lot of kids stealing their
parents' cars that night."
When The Dude got out of jail, his mom was pretty mad. Like,
F-word mad.
Fast-forward a few years to freshman year at Syracuse. It's
1992, and The Dude is living in the dorms, jamming on an
acoustic guitar with his buds, staying up all night playing
Nintendo, smoking bongs and spinning records by Echo & The
Bunnymen, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Stone Roses, Smiths, Ride and
lots and lots of R.E.M. The Dude had been a heavy-duty R.E.M.
fan since back in the day, when his brother made him get in the
car and listen to "Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars)," like, super
loud. "I remember I was blown away by the way it started real
quiet and lo-fi, then got really big and loud," says The Dude.
"I did the same thing with my first album. I thought it would be
cool."
Freshman year was, as The Dude recalls, "a very emotional time."
He had just broken up with his high school sweetheart, his first
and, to this day, only love. He felt so guilty for turning his
parents into empty nesters, he wrote papers about it. "I
remember thinking it was the end of an era, that things would
never be the same," he says. He wrote, like, 200 songs that
year. He had just one rule for songwriting: the Five Minute
Role. If he couldn't finish writing a song in five minutes, it
wasn't worth finishing.
After a lot of beer bongs and soul searching - then more beer
bongs - The Dude discovered two things that would dramatically
impact his songwriting: He loved Bruce Springsteen and hated
Leonard Cohen. "One of my frat brothers was Adam Cohen,
Leonard's son," The Dude recalls. "My buds were like, 'That
guy's dad is this awesome singer, check it out.' He gave me one
of his dad's later discs. I hated it, wound up throwing it out
the car window."
The Dud never liked Springsteen when he was growing up in New
Jersey; quite literally, it hit a little too close to home. As
anybody who's ever been there can attest, Jersey is a lot more
exotic from a distance. Besides, the Boss was going through his
pumped-up, headband-wearing' Born In The U.S.A. phase.
But in college, on of The Dude's buds told him to, like, check
out the early stuff. "He was like, 'Dude, do a giant bong hit,
turn out all the lights and lay down on the floor and listen to
a song called 'New York City Serenade,'" says The Dude. "I was
like, 'That sounds cool.' After that, I got into all that early
stuff.
Despite all the jamming and songwriting, The Dude only did two
proper gigs while he was in college. THe first time was in a
bar, and it was no big deal. But the second time, well, he had
somehow gotten roped into performing at another talent contest.
It was for a good cause, all the proceeds went to charity, so
he's like, "Fine, whatever." And guess what? The Dude won first
prize. Sweet! "I was like, 'I might as well go for it now,'" he
says. "I don't want to be past my prime wondering what if."
After graduating in 1996, The Dude relocated to California and
moved in with his brothers - Kevin and Rick - who were climbing
their way up the Hollywood ladder. After eight hard years spent
taking down gang bangers for the Los Angeles district attorney's
office. Kevin had turned to entertainment law. His first
celebrity client was Benicio Del Toro. Rick had start ed working
for CAA, a powerful Hollywood talent agency, and he got The Dude
a job counting concert tickets. It seems like there were always
movie stars hanging out at Casa Yorn. Matt Dillon was a frequent
overnight guest; he turned The Dude on to Guided By Voices'
Alien Lanes. One day, The Dude came home to find Jim Carrey
sitting on the couch, smoking a joint. Sweet!
Though The Dude had two entertainment-industry insiders as
brothers, breaking into the music biz was slow going for him. "I
was like, 'I'm gonna get signed within a year,'" he says. Four
years later, The Dude still didn't have a record deal. He had a
couple of near misses. He had recorded an album with producer
Don Fleming (Sonic Youth, Screaming Trees, Hole) for a label
that Daniel Lanois was trying to put together, but the deal fell
through and the record got shelved. So he went back to his day
job, working as a production assistant for Danny DeVito's Jersey
Films. ("I thought it was fitting because I was from Jersey,"
says The Dude.) He continued gigging (mostly at Largo, ground
zero of L.A.'s singer/songwriter scene) and sending out demo
tapes to labels. Finally, in 1999, Columbia took the bait and
signed The Dude. Sweet!
Things only got sweeter when the Farrelly Brothers asked him to
score Me, Myself & Irene, which he worked on concurrently
with musicforthemorningafter. Columbia pretty much left
The Dude alone while he worked on the album with his bud R. Walt
Vincent in a "shitty neighborhood" in Van Nuys. "No air
condition," says The Dude. "It was like a hundred degrees in
there." The Dude took his time, and a year later, in May 2000,
he finished his debut. Like The Dude himself,
musicforthemorningafter is a lovable hunk of unshaven folk
rock, with a strummy heart wrapped in denim vulnerability and
the nostalgic ghost of '80s college radio: the Smiths' brittle
sob stories, R.E.M.'s kidzu jangle, high-toned Joy Division bass
lines. Columbia sat on the record for a year, and The Dude was
getting antsy. He was starting to think he was getting the
shaft. "In the end, it worked out for me," he says. "The label
wasn't worried about the Internet, and they gave copies to
everyone. And slowly, this grassroots support for the album
grew. It started in the art department, and eventually everyone
at the label was excited about the record." Sweet!
Columbia used the same slow-build
approach to market the album. musicforthemorningafter was
released in March 2001 to light fanfare and very modest sales.
But The Dude kept plugging away, opening up for anyone who would
have him. Semisonic. The Hours, Sunny Day Real Estate. Bands
that have long since eaten his dust. MTV2 started playing the
video for "Life On A Chain," and suddenly everybody wanted a
piece of The Dude. For 18 months straight, he stayed out on the
road.
"We were having dun with it, just watching it build," he says.
"I remember Christmas 2001, we sold 17,000 copies in one week."
The rooms got bigger. The crowds got bigger. The gossip papers
were linking him with Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder, the
ultimate sign of alt-rock ascendancy. One night, he was playing
in Seattle at the Crocodile, the rock club owned by Peter Buck's
wife. The R.E.M. guitarist came out for the show and afterward
went up to The Dude and told him he loved his song "Just
Another." The Dude told Buck that Columbia wanted him to record
a more revved-up, radio-ready version of "Strange Condition."
(The Dude always abides.) Would Buck consider playing on it?
"Love to," said Buck. Sweet!
This is a typical day in the
life of The Dude in Los Angeles: He gets up, not too early, but
when he does, he appreciates it. Maybe he goes for a run.
Two-and-a-half, maybe three miles. Then it's time for breakfast,
which is usually scrambled eggs and lox at his favorite diner,
Early World, near his home in Brentwood. Then maybe he'll surf
the net and log on to the message boards on his Web site. He
uses the screen name Lou Reed, but all the regulars know it's
him. Or maybe he'll play some Yahoo! gin or backgammon against a
friend, for money. Right now, he's up 30 bucks. Sweet!
Then maybe he'll boogaloo over to Poquito Mas or Baja Fresh and
get a burrito. Never could get a decent burrito back in Jersey.
They were always wet. The Dude hates that. Or maybe he'll go
surfing or just do a few curls. The Dude looks skinny in photos,
but he's got biceps. "I don't even lift much, like maybe once a
week," The Dude figures, "and my friends are like, 'Dude, you're
bustin' out!'"
And then maybe he'll visit his grampa. He's 94, and every moment
is precious. The Dude loves the guy. Straight off the boat from
Poland in 1919, he built a life for the Yorns in the New World
with his bare hands. Sold vacuum cleaners during the Depression,
then he was a mechanic. Had his own garage. And then he was a
baker. Had his own bakery. Put his kid through dental school.
Grampa worked hard, man. He gets a shoutout on the new
album. "Old man in the kitchen/I think he's part of me," The
Dude sings on "All At Once."
Or maybe he'll go bowling with Rick or Kevin. "I just hope I'm
lucky enough to grow old with my brothers," says The Dude. Maybe
he'll hang out with his mom and pop. Or maybe he'll go over to a
buddy's house and watch The Big Lebowski. "Pretty much
simple shit, ya know?" says The Dude. The only thing he won't be
doing, however, is nothing. The Dude is like a shark--he's gotta
keep moving or he sinks to the bottom. Always been like that.
Used to get sent home from Hebrew school for being too hyper. He
doesn't get to services too much these days, but the basic
tenets of the faith he was raised in still seem pretty solid to
The Dude: "Be a good person, treat people well, have respect for
everything, don't wish ill of people even if they aren't so
nice."
The Dude seems like a walk-between-the-raindrops kind of
guy--and in the time I spent with him, I saw or heard nothing to
make me think otherwise-but just like you and me, The Dude's got
stress. Like, under pressure, from within and without. You see,
there are people-his family and his record company-that are
looking out for The Dude and they have big plans for him, plans
that were set into motion long ago. "My dad had it planned all
along," says The Dude. "He encouraged Kevin to move out to
California, Rich would follow and then he could move mom out
there and retire. It worked."
The Yorns are tight-dynasty tight. And The Dude's brother
Rick-who taught him how to play drums, who showed him R.E.M.,
who even played in The Dude's band when he first moved to Los
Angeles-he's got plans for him, too. Make him big, like, Ben
Affleck big. And why not? The Dude's got the look. He's got
tunes, good hair, he works hard, chicks dig him. Sweet!
I mean, you really have to make an effort not to like The Dude.
And some do. There's a lot of bitter talk going around the biz.
Real catty, sorority-sister, hair-pulling bullshit. His brothers
used their cloud to get him where he is, they say. And there's
some truth in that. But it isn't what people think. It's not
like The Dude got off the plane in Hollywood and his brothers
picked him up and drove him to the spotlight. "I wish it worked
like that, because we love Pete and I wish I had that much
power," says Kevin Yorn. "Pete did this all on his own. People
who think we pulled strings for him don't understand how the
music business works. Music either stands on its own or it
falls."
"You know what it is?" asks R. Walt Vincent, the man behind the
recording console on musicforthemorningafter and Day I
Forgot. "A fuckload of jealousy by not-so-successful
artists. And I hope it makes them feel better. You might be able
to buy an opportunity to get your music heard by people, but you
can't make them like your songs."
When the Yorn brothers arrived in Los Angeles, they couldn't
afford furniture. It would be years before Matt Dillon and Jim
Carrey started showing up. "I remember my brothers both slept on
the same futon for, like, a year," says The Dude, who spent four
times that long trying to get a record deal. And when he did get
his shot, he worked his ass off. Tour for a year and a half
without interruption? He's there. Smile for a camera? Cheese.
In-stores? Not a problem. A Farrelly Brothers movie score?
Sweet!
About a year ago, it came time for The Dud to make another
album, so he started recording again with Vincent. The Dude
wanted to rock out more. No more loops, no more '80s drum
machines, no more holding back on the vocals the way Vincent got
him to do on musicforthemorningafter, because, like, The
Dude was feelin' these songs. And when The Dude is feelin' it,
he yarls--which is fast becoming the mullet of vocal styles.
"When I first met Pete, he sang much more, um, testosterone
rock," says Vincent. "My girlfriend teases him about singing
like Eddie Vedder. He thinks it's a huge compliment."
They had about eight songs in the can by August, when word
suddenly came down from on high that the record was coming out
right before Christmas, so it had to be finished in a month. By
the time they were done, there were some 20 songs to pick from.
The Columbia brass didn't wasn't a singer/songwriter record,
they wanted a rock record. They were ready to push the button,
to drop the big dime--AT&T even wanted a piece of the tour--but
they needed something they could sell to the KROQ kids. This was
album two, The Dude's last chance to establish himself as a rock
artist. Another quirky, romantic, singer/songwriter album would
lock him in the triple-A ghetto and throw away the key. If he
lost some of his original fan base with this record, the
thinking went, he could always get them back on the third
record. "We did a lot of blistering guitar rock, and there were
a few slower, tug-at-your-heart songs," says Vincent. "There was
lot of pressure. You could feel the commercial elements saying,
'Give us something we can shoot to the moon,' and the fans were
saying, 'Don't sell out.' And the elements that wanted this
record to rock a little more won out." Andy Wallace, the guy who
made Nirvana sound so cherry, was brought in to give it that
patina of compressed sizzle that radio loves.
The problem with Day I Forgot is it makes you do
something no second album should: It makes you miss the first
album. On musicforthemorningafter, you might be able to
hear The Dude's record collection in his songs, but you could
also hear The Dude. Day I Forgot isn't a bad album, it's
just not a very good album--and I still think he has it in him
to make a great one. The early reviews have been polite,
purchased or downright dismissive. Rolling Stone gave it
a two-star review that could be summed up in one word: blah. Not
that The Dude cares. "You know, somebody told me a long time ago
that if you are going to believe the good reviews, you have to
believe the bad ones," he says. "So I just stopped reading
them." No biggie: The Dude's not much of a reader, anyway. And
besides, reviews don't really matter--at this point, he's
critic-proof. The first week out of the gate
musicforthemorningafter sold 2,000 copies. Day I Forgot
sold 73,000. Sweet!
Well, that's pretty much the story of The Dude in Los Angeles.
He loves his parents, his brothers are powerful insiders, his
record company wants him to sell a lot of albums and AT&T wants
him to sell a lot of phones. Whatever. It could be worse. The
Dude knows this. He's always known this.
That's why The Dude abides.
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