In 1981, Michael played guitar and wrote and sang some of the songs in a band called Some Ambulants in San Diego, California (see: someambulants.wixsite.com/pudrock ). Michael's Sailboat was one of the songs he co-wrote with erstwhile lead singer Carmen Borgia, who provided the lyrics and title. The song was initially titled "Better With Bruises," but was later changed based on Carmen's lyrical content. The resulting fire-cleansed-free-for-all of a track became a particularly unhinged set-ender for the band. Some Ambulants did get a little weird and insane during live performances sometimes. They were, at moments, theatrical.

Michael’s crazed guitar attack on the song was steeped in the free-jazz-meets-no-wave stylings of saxophonist James Chance of the Contortions on their 1979 long player, "Buy." The entire band LOVED that record! At the end of the song when performed live, Carmen would shove Michael down onto drummer Dave Blackburn’s kick drum and duct tape him to it, strip by strip, leaving Michael’s guitar squealing and screaming feedback as the song ended after everyone else in the band had left the stage. Then it was lights up, set over, time to break down the equipment... but first someone had to untape Michael from the kit so he could shut off the aural madness that continued to swirl around the stage long after the set had actually ended. It was kick-ass performance arty shit!

That was then. This is now: scores of years later, Michael picked up the mantle of this incendiary old work of his and Carmen's and decided to recreate and update it in his modern instrumental vernacular to get it out there into the open air for one more curtain call, like some sort of airborne virus! The song is now revealed in three acts: the mesmerizing introduction with Carmen's major-then-minor-then-major melody across the top of swirling Steve Hillage-esque guitars and Mike Kosacek's wandering rhythm patterns (is it 4/4?... is it 6/8?... YOU DECIDE!!), followed by the mad riff definitely in 6/8 that is the absolute core of the song that then builds through cacophonous ricocheting left-right guitar parts to the funky deus ex machina section that takes the melody and rhythm section in a ~way~ different direction to the end. That riff and melody that are so essential to how this song works are heard throughout this version just as they are in the original version from 1981. The riff and melody guide us through the labyrinth!

The odd title and mostly screamed words that Carmen wrote came from the life-altering experience of a friend named Jim Sherman that Carmen and Michael knew from the UCSD Theater Dept. who inherited a sailboat one day, wed with the beating Michael took by a bunch of skinheads from the San Diego hardcore contingent one night at a party (Solo cups, yeah!!...). Pretty wide apart, those two things, but they coalesced into the metaphorical lyrical and sonic musical bliss that became Michael's Sailboat. To explain in specifics:

1. Jim Sherman's parents owned a huge sailboat. They kept it down in San Diego Bay. Jim invited his college friends down to the boat once for some spinnaker jumping off the thing. That was pretty crazy stuff (you'd hold onto a line and be dragged out over the water by the wind about 50 feet up, and then let fly!!... KER-PLASH!!!... then more beer... and much hilarity... ensued... hell yeah!). Some time not too long after that, one or the other of Jim's parents died unexpectedly over a weekend, and Jim inherited that huge boat. After that, Jim was seen less and less at UCSD. Carmen ran into him at some point, and he confessed that he had little time to do ANYTHING else in his life but work on the gawdamm boat (sanding, shellacking, painting, picking barnacles off... lather, rinse, repeat!). The boat literally took over his life. It owned his soul! Jim confided to Carmen, "Owning a sailboat is like owning your own private torture chamber." A first-world problem, for sure, but no less exhausting or confounding when you're a kid. But Carmen grabbed that phrase of Jim's and stuck it into the back of his feverish mind to use later on; and

2. Sometime in that same time sphere (but specifically on Friday, December 5, 1980), Michael went to a house party in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego. A bunch of skinhead punks didn't like Michael's haircut, so they proceeded to kick the shit out of him until famous local punk artist and man about town, Marc Rude, singlehandedly pulled the shiny-headed fuckers off of him. Marc negotiated a spittle-mad detente between them all, and Michael was allowed to leave, bruised and battered. As it would happen, he looked for all the world 'better with bruises.'

From these two disparate occurrences, Carmen wove together the idea of Michael's haircut being his self-proclaimed and self-induced torture chamber sitting atop his head, Michael's Sailboat. And then the song just sort of wrote itself.