The Blood Arm 'Lie Lover Lie' album

When Nathaniel was eighteen years old, he read an article in the newspaper about a man who had his arm cut off in a Stones-Beatles debate gone horribly awry. In a quote, the amputee said nothing of his severed limb, he merely reasserted that his cutter had poor taste in music. The young reader clipped this story out of the paper and pressed it under his mattress for safekeeping. The one-armed man had moved him. Nathaniel admired his passion. 'To lose an arm,' he thought. 'How about that.' Nathaniel, too, was a man of passion. He believed in love at first-sight, cried at weddings, and pummeled those who spoke ill of his mother. He believed some music was worth losing limbs over.

'I will start a band,' he whispered to himself the night he found the article, petting it through his mattress. 'I will start a band worthy of the one-armed man,' he breathed. 'The Blood Arm.'

The Blood Arm, for years, existed as a fragment of Nathaniel's passion. He could play the piano, sure, but it was a band of his passion. He would murmur the name when he cried, pant it while making love, hum it while listening to a favorite record, and it was always musical.

'The Blood Arm.' He'd sing it.

Singing was his strong suit, in fact. Karaoke bars throughout the neighborhoods of Los Angeles would reserve seats for him, allow him to cut in line. He refused to use his given name, instead going by the initials T-B-A. Then one fateful night, after a particularly delectable performance of the Zombies' 'Time of the Season,' the fragment of Nathaniel's passion multiplied.

'This scotch has sand in it,' said Nathaniel to no one in particular, sticking his fingers in his drink as he strutted off stage, well aware he had floored everyone present with his song.

'What' You want to start a band'' asked Zebastian, sitting within earshot, sweating from the heat of Nathaniel's performance. It had moved something inside of him, got him stirring.

There are a few subtle, yet extremely important differences between the Korea Town and Silverlake dialects of American English in Los Angeles, which makes communication between speakers of the two disparagingly difficult. Fortunately, Nathaniel understood Zebastian's query without error.

'I have a band already,' said Nathaniel. 'But we need a guitar player. What kind of music do you like''

'No thank you, I'm straight, though I'm very flattered ,' said Zebastian, a bit flabbergasted, though slightly curious.

'What did you say about my mother'' Nathaniel pulled back to punch.

After a brief scuffle and much confusion, they eventually made nice through a crude sign language and stole pencils from behind the bar. By jotting down their conversation on napkins, the backs of peeled-off beer labels, and whatever scraps they could rummage, Nathaniel told Zeb the story of the one-armed man, and they found their musical tastes to be quite compatible. The Fall was underlined numerous times on the inside of a matchbook, the Stones and the Stooges punctuated with exclamation points (!), and LOS ANGELES was printed in large capital letters, with Love, the Doors and the Plimsouls drawn circling around the city name. They dubbed the list 'Music Worth Losing Limbs Over (MWLLO),' and the pair drunkenly set off to Zebastian's apartment to attempt to meld the MWLLO into one defining sound, transfused with the lifeblood of modern Los Angeles.

Their goal proved quite difficult, however. Whenever Nathaniel keyed into an exciting idea on his piano, he would jump up onto the highest platform in the room and start dancing. The piano is a wonderful instrument, and it can create a lot of wonderful sounds, but it cannot spew out anything at all without a worthy human fingering its keys. Every time the music would approach brilliance, Nathaniel would climb up onto a table, singing and jerking about. The tune would die a little death before it ever had the chance to live.

All this foreplay with no grand payoff began to take a toll on Zebastian after a few weeks of messing around in the apartment. He worshipped Nathaniel's unbridled passion, but wished the man could control himself a little better. Zebastian's guitar required a great deal of coaxing, tickling, cooing and loving before it could explode with magic, and he desired an understanding partner. He had an idea.

'Let's find someone else to play piano. It gets in the way of your voice, of your moves,' he said.

'I'll call my neighbor, she distills it herself,' replied Nathaniel.

The boys had deciphered each other's accents a few days prior, but Nathaniel had always been fervent about the notion that a little confusion was important every now and then. He brought up the mysterious distillate because Miss Dyan Valdes'Nathaniel's classically trained neighbor and University classmate'happened to have a bathtub full of absinthe. He phoned her and read her the MWLLO. (She already knew of The Blood Arm from Nathaniel's passionate outbursts at school.) A knock came on the door shortly thereafter, and the band blossomed into a four-piece: Vocals, piano, guitar, and a potent fluorescent green liquid.

With Dyan at the keys, Nathaniel was able to sing and dance and jerk about without abandon atop the highest platforms he could find. With the piano sparkling while Nathaniel was singing and dancing and jerking about, Zebastian found the inspiration he required to coax the magic out of his guitar. Dyan thrived in her role as the backbone from which the boys grew, and the absinthe provided a cushion for even their weirdest ideas to land comfortably and make sense.

The following year was a cloudy hallucination in which the Blood Arm floated out of Zebastian's Silverlake apartment and into a Downtown practice space, out of the practice space and onto the porches of East Los Angeles house parties, and from the parties into small clubs and venues. All to the beat of a bizarre helicopter noise Dyan pounded out of her keyboard. Then her bathtub ran dry of substance, the band sobered-up, and Dyan had an epiphany.

'Why, if our music will ever be worth losing limbs over, it needs a human heart, a human beat. We need a drummer!'

Finding one was surprisingly easy. Ben Lee'the band's Master of Ceremonies and the narrator of this biography (not the Australian pop star)'had been pressing them to try out his close friend for months. Zachary Amos, the close friend, happened to be a great, great drummer with respect bordering on zealotry for the MWLLO. He once stubbed a toe kicking dirt at someone who badmouthed Brian Jones.

'Hello,' said Zachary at his first practice with the band, then proceeded to attack his kit like a spider on steroids. He had them at that.

The addition of Zachary completed the system, pulsed the Blood Arm to life. Zachary's heartbeats freed Dyan's left hand to key bass lines, and his drum set meant Nathaniel would never want for a high place to dance. Zebastian feasted on the driving rythms, and they practiced and performed with a newfound voracity. The Blood Arm became a real band. And people became passionate about the Blood Arm.

Los Angeles fans brought their friends to shows, who in turn became fans. People made their own t-shirts, tattooed the MWLLO to their chests (presumably so the ink wouldn't go to waste if someone were to hack off their arms) and begged Nathaniel to kiss them. They didn't have to beg.

The Blood Arm thrives off the love of Los Angeles, they live for it. It is their passion. And today, propelled by a list scribbled on the inside of a matchbook and the love of a major metropolitan city, the Blood Arm seeks to infect music lovers everywhere with their passion, give them something worth bleeding over. Or maybe just play some people some good songs, and get them to dance in the process.

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Tracklisting

The Blood Arm - Lie Lover Lie