There is a place where people are the size of atoms. There is a place where atoms are the size of galaxies. There is a place where people get angry at others for only going the speed of light in the fast lane. There is a place where you can drink light. There is a place where everything is exactly the same as here except you have one more hair on your arm. There is a nine billion planet solar system. When you scratch your head civilizations are wiped out by the thousands. When you spit it will be written about in 50 billion years as “The Big Bang”. When you make a sandwich you set forces in motion that will annihilate the universe. There is a drug mined on the third moon of Ceti XI that turns a second into a millennium. It is used by the culture that mines it during orgasm. There is a being in the center of Star XBB-435435 that has a brain the size of 1,000,000,000 Earths. There is a place where time moves backwards and children are older than their parents and artists are by definition destructive. I’ve heard of a place in the Pleiades where there are more sexes than fish in the sea, and they mate only twice in their thousand-year life.

I know it’s crazy. But it’s real- so real.

“Space Rock Opera” was recorded at fiction’s rehearsal complex in the desert east of San Diego in the summer of 2000. fiction was Paul Cortois on vocals and drums, bob on vocals and bass and TJ Brinjak on vocals and guitar. The project was knocked out very much on the cheap in short order. fiction had been summarily fired by our manager, label, and anyone else by whom we could be fired for being too amazing.

Towards the end of the project drummer Paul Cortois fielded an offer from a notable up-and-coming band and announced his departure. fiction finished “Space Rock Opera” and broke up. This remarkable record remained out of the public’s ears until this moment. Enjoy “Space Rock Opera” by fiction.


DEEP DIVE FOR THE NON-FAINT OF HEART:



I can’t think of a proper metaphor for the band fiction and for how we presided over each little death of rock music and the attendant legacy business models that enabled it from 1963 to 1997 or thereabouts. It’s not Mephistopheles, it’s not Methuselah, it’s not quite Forrest Gump.. The legacy model for the art-and-commerce of the thing was always an uneasy catastrophe; this business attracts pieces of shit like nothing else. Perhaps the military industrial complex or big pharma attract bigger pieces of shit but the smaller ones that inhabited the music biz were altogether more pungent of aroma, more Blair Witch than Maleficent, small and easily purchased. In their heydey they literally murdered their charges. Hendrix, Badfinger, Kurt Cobain, Biggie, the list of the people who were murdered by the music business goes on and on and on. Like, actually murdered. It is often remarked in academic and historical circles that the most common form of accession in the Mideast of the Middle Ages was assassination. For my generation, the mantle has been passed in waves of suicide, murder and deaths of excess. Good times.

What I’m trying to express is that the music biz didn’t become a repugnant, evil cesspool in 2000. It was always a piece of shit. But by 2000 it had metastasized into A Piece Of Shit Registered Trademark. It was awesome to watch it twitch and encircle and ensnare. It was becoming what it is now, a completely alienated space of Serving The Algorithm.

I don’t know exactly when it was that my unfortunately stout heart finally broke over rock and roll. I know when it wasn’t: it wasn’t watching our first single take hold (#27, Gavin AC charts, September 1998) on terciary commercial radio, giving us a tiny little piece of real estate in the business that all we had to do to expand was work our asses off and sacrifice in ways unrelatable to the regular person. We drove circles around the country doing appearances at tiny AM stations in Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, all of the fucking places. And that’s when we learned about payola, we learned about “paper plays”, we learned about profligate bullshit and people who will debase themselves and their integrity for a boombox, a rare album, 50 bucks, a bag of weed. But we were big boys and we had no illusions. This was our Break and we were running with it. As 1998 lurched into 1999 and our second single did the rounds (#32 Gavin AC charts, February 1999) something was revealing itself to be very rotten in Denmark indeed. The Clinton FCC had deregulated mass media to a point were the radio stations to whom we had so expensively yet successfully ingratiated ourselves (along with our gifts of charisma and talent, it must be said) were dropping like flies. Calling them no longer put you in touch with a (conveniently corrupt but workable) human being but rather a Clear Channel menu.

Our last single died a death as the charting entities went from collecting playlists from radio stations to computerized monitoring to source their numbers. The brand of bullshit that had given us a fighting chance at a romance with the larger world was gone.


My heart didn’t break when we signed with the first, fledgling online music subscription model record label, Spin Records, in 2000 and they “liquidated” and absconded in the night with all our records. We had lots of Cordon Bleu chef-prepared lunches in their boardrooms with their execs, exiles from DreamWorks and Sony and RCA and all of ‘em. They filled us with the usual bullshit and promises and then the dot com bubble burst and the next day that beautiful corporate building in Carlsbad with its fiber network and its dozens of servers was stripped down to the fucking pipes. I couldn’t figure out why they took our records, though. It amused more than angered.

My heart didn’t break when our last personnel change loomed and we and our manager and our label and our distributor and our radio promoter all fired each other in an impressive circular firing squad. I loved it, it was funny. I refer to it as “The Night Of The Thousand Nickels”. TJ used to surmise that the breaks we got in the Industry were less about our excellence and more about someone’s uncle saving someone else’s uncle’s life in ‘Nam. I think there’s always a fair dose of that.

When our last drummer Paul Courtois joined in 2000 my heart experienced a reprieve that made the final break all the harder. It felt so seditious to proceed so confidently after what felt like the entire music industry taking a huge shit on us. We finally had a chance to plot our own course and man, we were UP about it. Paul was amazing, a breath of fresh air and his playing was sparse and POWERFUL. The one record that we did for Spin in early 2000, “the eerie blue martian sunset” was recorded in challenging conditions on broken crap and it was AMAZING. We basically performed our stage show and then span back for vocals and solos and that was it. We recorded our rhythm tracks live, pre-mixed to stereo. We were that good. It was reviewed in the primo entertainment rag The Reader by a music writer who had the distinction of introducing the Sex Pistols at Winterland. I forget his name (Richard Meltzer –ed.). The thrust of his review was how the record smelled like cigarettes which is fantastic.

Then came The Space Rock Opera.

The best thing about the final lineup of fiction, aside from rocking like a flaming chariot, was that we awed. We created strong feelings. We were “that innovative band”. It was then that we began to commit the unforgivable sin of conquering Los Angeles. This had been the one thing that was verboten under the old regime of Suits. It was Too Much Work. And now Hollywood, Santa Monica and The Strip could finally be our playground. People liked us, and because people liked us we were able to play decent nights in decent rooms. And when people saw us they remembered us. We slept on Santa Monica Beach or on living room floors in Reseda. We were The Doors in 1966. It was a wonderful time.

It was around this time that the third-form music writers began sniffing around and we began to experience the “who are your influences?” type of music writers. It’s possible we came up with the Space Rock Opera to amuse ourselves during boring interviews and of course it took on a life of its own. The biggest inspiration was the simple decision to turn the red herring gold and actually record a space rock opera. Why? Because it was the most absurd thing that could happen.

Song titles, an esthetic, a space religion, a Flash Gordon future but everything’s broken, threadbare, small. You see, it was our experience wrapped in a surreal little metaphor that was somehow huge and agreeably tawdry at the same time. And then the songs were there, and then we set up at our rehearsal complex in the desert west of San Diego with our stage sound system and mics and tape (yes, tape) and knocked out the Space Rock Opera in maybe a couple of weeks. We did a lot of very strange things but the thought of another making-of makes me choke. Even if it’s MY making-of. But the foundation of the record was the ensemble playing and singing. We used our concert PA and our space to create power and depth. TJ’s guitar was orchestral, some of the most intentional stuff I’ve ever heard, very arranged, very stripped-down. Bass for me in this period was simply about locking with Paul’s kick drum and judiciously Jamerson-ing the odd empty space with an unusual syncopation. Paul was manic but very, very tight and a little eccentric. He hit really hard and he copped to how I was trying to lock in with him and we had an unusual right-foot-left-hand chemistry.

Aside from vocals, some doubling, some lead guitar and all the little strangenesses we didn’t go in for much overdubbing. We were at the stage where our trio-ness was one of the best things about us and the space gave everyone a chance to make the contributions they wanted to make: Paul was about being tight and powerful, TJ was about writing and playing very next level guitar and I was just trying to give Paul’s kick drum a note.

We did do a fair amount of weirdifying. Robot voices, strange loops, a bicycle wheel through distortion sidechained from the vocal compressor (“Iapetus IV” lead vocal). The failed concepts were the best of all because they were funny and we kept them all in.

And blah blah blah, I’m sick of writing and no one will read this anyway. If you see this you get a free copy.