Flash Bastard, Esq. on Flash Bastard, Esq.: Q: Flash Bastard? Esquire? Panama Pacific? A: There are at least two ways to think of my name. The first comes from British slang, where a flash bastard is a rich but tacky person. Urban Dictionary tells me that it was originally Victorian slang for an illegitimate child presenting himself as a true heir. The second is to ignore all that and think of it as some evil offshoot of Flash Gordon. Either way pleases me. The "Esquire" suffix is to distinguish myself from another group of the same name and does not qualify me to dispense legal advice. Panama Pacific refers to the Panama Pacific International Exposition, a 1915 world's fair in San Francisco celebrating the rebirth of the city and the inevitable, benevolent march of progress. The magnificent fairgrounds were like a miniature city within a city and were razed after the fair, leaving participants to wonder if it had all been a dream. Q: So is this concept album hell? A: I tried not to make it that way. A couple albums that I used as role models were Brian Eno's "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)" and OMD's "Dazzle Ships." Neither one really has a plot that you can follow, but they do feel as if they have something like a setting. I wanted this to feel as if it were taking place all in a separate world, but only about half the songs even obliquely mention anything to do with the fair. Anytime the album concept got restrictive, I set it aside. Q: Why make an album about some old world's fair? A: I was in Japan about a year-and-a-half ago in truly wicked heat with no air conditioning on an Air Force base with F-16s roaring overhead all through the days. To pass the time in the evenings, I had a stack of books, one of which was Greg Milner's "Perfecting Sound Forever," which described the fair in incredible detail. It was included in his book because sound recording was just beginning to spread in a serious way, and Thomas Edison, who was at the fair for Edison Day, was like Prometheus. It's easy to forget that once we had a world where you couldn't listen to records, and then you had a world where you could, that actual human beings not that long ago were born on one side of that divide and lived to cross over to the other. That was exciting enough, but it resonated even more for me in that I had been dreaming of crossing over from being someone who played drums in other people's bands to someone who wrote and recorded my own music. I had been accumulating instruments and recording equipment bit by bit and scraping together what I could learn about making music in similar patchwork fashion. Shortly after coming back from Japan, my wife and I moved to a house in Saint Paul which was built the same year as Panama Pacific. I set up in the basement, and now, here we are. Q: Why not just make friends and form a real band? A: I had done that for about fifteen years by the time I started working on this album. In high school and college, it was a lot easier to be in bands with friends, but when everybody scatters and you don't know anyone in the new town you just moved to, you have to resort to trawling through Craigslist. That's especially bad news for a drummer, who's treated like the low man on the totem pole in any situation, and when you want to actually have a say in how the band sounds, you're nowhere unless you're writing songs. So I kept hoping to find someone who was realizing my vision for me before wising up and realizing that I'd have to do it for myself if it was going to get done. Q: But you're not very good at anything besides drums. A: Maybe so, and that thought defeated me for a long time. A big part of what got me over it was discovering the Slits, the Raincoats, and Liliput. They were these all-woman groups from the seventies (except the Slits, who had a guy drummer) who were not good at their instruments, either, but who made great records. I realized that I could combine simple parts into a sophisticated whole. People will always tell you that if you don't know x, y, and z about something, you have no business doing it yourself. Those people do know x, y, and z and look down on everyone else because they're threatened by the idea that they didn't have to learn those things to express themselves, by the idea that having that knowledge will not save them from banality. I couldn't outplay many people on guitar, but I figured I could out-think them. I also liked to remind myself of Florence Foster Jenkins, the dreadful but enthusiastic opera singer, who said, "They can say that I can't sing, but they can't say that I didn't sing."