He's refused to tour, and he finds the idea of stopped-in-the-street fame abhorrent. He performed "Whatever" on David Letterman's show last year, and the Foo Fighters invited him to sing the tune before a crowd of 15,000 at a concert in April. Lynch emerges from this hyper-creative cocoon only for engagements he finds irresistible. One of those will pay for all the broken plates." "Seven plates are going to fall and break, and two of them will keep spinning. "I feel like I spin plates for a living," he says, seated in a swivel chair in his studio one recent afternoon. It's about the birth of Tenacious D, the bombastic rock duo that Black has played in for years. Most of his time now is spent on a screenplay he's writing with "School of Rock" star Jack Black, which Lynch is slated to direct. Or writing his own songs, which he produces at a pace of about one a day. suburb, editing videos he's shot for bands like No Doubt and Foo Fighters. Working an insomniac's hours, in 30-hour jags that end when he begins to hallucinate from fatigue, Lynch is a one-man multimedia machine, and in his back yard he is quietly building one of the quirkier resumes in the entertainment business.Īt any moment of the day or night, this 33-year-old native of Akron, Ohio, might be found in his two-room studio in this L.A. On a trip to Los Angeles soon after, he drummed about 10 yards from the bedroom - in Lynch's backyard studio, where Starr manned the kit on a pair of tracks, released last year as part of Pumkinhead's first release, an album titled "Fake Songs."ĭistributed through EMI, "Fake Songs" was only a modest success, but it turns out that music is just a fraction of Lynch's life. Lynch returned the call, signed with Pumkinhead, and Ringo was nearly as good as his word. And if you don't want to sign to our label - whatever!" "I want to come set up me drums in your bedroom. "Hello, this is Ringo calling from London!" the former Beatle bellowed into the answering machine. Hudson hit the Internet and turned up a phone number in California's San Fernando Valley. They assumed a guy by that name would live somewhere in Ireland. All they lacked was Liam Lynch, and they didn't have a clue about how to get in touch with him. They grabbed a piece of paper and drafted some makeshift incorporation papers for a company that they named, with little regard for spelling, Pumkinhead Records. Right then and there, he and Hudson decided they would start a label, just to sign Liam Lynch and make him famous. It's hard to convey on the page how explosive and hilarious it sounds, but Starr declared it the best burst of rock he'd heard since the '60s. This dude comes up says 'Hey, punk.' I'm like - yeah, whatever." "Then I'm on the corner, wearing my leather. As soon as he arrived, Hudson began exalting "Whatever" and the two kept the radio playing while they worked until the track aired again - a shambling 90-second ode to teenage apathy, yanked along by a grungy surf riff, the vocals a perfect imitation of spoiled and jaded youth: Hudson was on his way to a remixing session with Ringo Starr, who was readying a new album. It was just a guy playing rock-and-roll." "It was so compelling, so raw, so unlike what is getting made these days. "As soon as I heard it, I pulled to the side of the road," recalls Hudson, a Grammy-winning producer and songwriter who has worked with Aerosmith and Ozzy Osbourne. It's been lighting up the request line all week, the announcer gushed, and amazingly enough the guy who wrote, sang and played all the instruments on "The United States of Whatever" didn't have a record contract. Driving to a recording studio in London two years ago, Mark Hudson turned on the radio and heard a DJ raving about a song.
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