Everyone nose the story of Pinnochio, but not everyone gno’s about his best spuddy Gnocchio. Their friendship is taterly genuine, and comes with no strings attached. They met in N’yok City.
While drawing Gnocchio’s nose, I started wondering if all of the phallusies in the political ads lately subconsciously inspired this drawing. To be frank, unlike most candidates in the erections… I mean… elections, Gnoccio is a true weiner. A real spud muffin. Hot dog!
This ain’t no lie: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pinocchio! I grew up in the pre-VCR era, when the only way to see movies was in theaters or filmstrips at schools. Apparently, it hit theaters in ’78 and ’84. By the time VHS rolled around, I was too busy watching quality cinema like Strange Brew, Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Jerk. Pinocchio was kid stuff. Oh well!
Gnocchio-doh doh
In December of 2021, I started writing an ICED INK song called “DeFazio (Vo Dee-Oh Doh Doh)” at our kitchen table in what would soon, unbeknownst to me, become our former apartment in Minneapolis – just a few months later, the Return to NYC apartment search began. I was rewatching Laverne & Shirley at the time, which I used to watch as a kid, and found myself developing a little crush on Laverne and her sassy, mischievous vibe. Funny thing: as a kid, I thought Shirley was the cute one and Laverne kinda creeped me out. But on the rewatch, Shirley’s uptight, whiny vibe actually annoyed me a bit, and I found Laverne’s feisty energy to be much more appealing.
The tune got put on the back burner in the spring of 2021 when it was time to load up a moving truck and be New York residents again. Once we were back in NY and the moving dust had settled, “DeFazio” was completed in February of 2022.
I tend to paint myself into a corner by creating guitar parts I can’t really play 100%. I have to follow the sounds I hear in my head, no exceptions – if I have trouble playing something in real time, I think, Eh, you’ll figure it out. There’s at least one of those land mines in every INK song if not more. There are certain parts in songs we’ve played for years that I wonder if I’ll land when they come up, and I usually manage to pull them off. I don’t think in terms of chords and scales when making new music, or think at all, really! That’s when things start sounding intentional and calculated, and why I don’t listen to much prog music.
It’s all about translating the colors and sounds I see/hear in my head into sounds. I don’t even know what some of the names of the chords I come up with are… If someone ever asked, there are quite a few I’d have to sit and figure out before answering. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that!
In the case of “DeFazio”, it had been a few years since I stuck a fork in it and called it done. Lately, we’ve been talking about learning it at rehearsals. It has what I learned is an E6 chord that’s a bit of a challenge. I toe-tee-oh-doh-doh-tally forgot how to play the song, and forgot certain passages even existed… but I remember that chord shape being a challenge, to the point where I most likely spliced a few takes together just to get the idea out of my head before it disappeared. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reverse engineering and isolating the guitar track to figure this one out!
As for that E6, the voicing I used is a real sumbitch to play, at least for my personal hand and finger size/shape. There are other ways to play an E6, but only one fits the bill in this case. It’s funny to see in that photo – my fingers aren’t nearly as close to the frets as they should be (other than my index finger, which is almost past the fret), but it works. Grab a guitar and give it a try – strum all 4 strings and make it nice and clean, I dare ya!
- Pinky on D string, 6th fret
- F-U finger on G string, 4th fret
- Index finger B string, 2nd fret
- High E string open
The B and C# right next to each other are the secret sauce. Here is how it first appears in the song, with a bonus pinky slide (ideally with pinky vibrato in bar 2) at the end to make it even more awkward:
It’s gated off and you have to go around it, but 50 feet later you’re back on that road and running through what the peeps who cross that line get to see after 26.2 miles: the sides of the road are lined with every country’s flag. It’s a pretty cool view. Ever since moving here in 2009, I’ve wanted to run the marathon. Who knows, maybe one of these years I will… but I’ll stick with my 7-mile daily runs for now. To quote Navin R. Johnson, “And that’s all I need!”Â
