American League, track 3
Team Originally Drafted by: Fungo
Lyrics by: Fungo and Sacfly
Music by the Farmhands

First came the title and style. Sometime in the Spring of 2004, I saw a documentary about the drug MDMA or XTC (ecstasy) on tv. In the course of the program, I learned that the drug had its heyday in the Dallas, Texas area, popularized by yuppie partiers in the early eighties, which made me think of George W. Bush and his alleged drug habits, his father’s wars on drugs in the CIA and Reagan Administration, the Bush oil connections, George W.’s ownership of the Texas Rangers before his political career, the Washington Senators moving to Texas to become the Rangers just as George H.W.’s political rise began, and the history of Texas and its name. So I stumbled upon the conspiracy laced musical question, “Who put the X in Tejas?” which, of course, would have to be asked in a pulsating early rave style.

Somehow the composition and recording of the song was put off for months after the idea was conceived, perhaps because the electronic style I had in mind could be done in individual installments, and so our scarce time together was spent on other songs. Before our Skidmore session, I explained the Texas song concept to SacFly. He had the chords and melody for the chorus ready to rock that weekend, but the song didn’t unfold further until he and I got together in Andover on a chilly winter’s day. As SacFly and I mined my recording programs for beats and synth samples, he began rhyming through the chorus with his guitar. Inspired by his thinly veiled implication of our unfortunate president as the answer to each question in the chorus, I began to reweave my conspiracy threads that spun through the connections I had made when originally inspired.

When I recalled that the Rangers play, not quite in Dallas, but in Arlington, I thought of the famous cemetery which shares that name near where I grew up (Baltimore) in D.C.; the national cemetery swirled with images of the assassination of JFK in Dallas and soon the conspiracies coagulated into the verse lyrics for the song. The X in Teixeira was a natural way to begin inserting the actual Rangers baseball players in the lyrics. After the Nolan Ryan reference rhymed its way in, wordplay fell into place with the newer Rangers (Young and Lamb) who have replaced future hall of famers Alex and Ivan Rodriguez (the two Rods). So the lyrics were written.

Inspired by the ridiculous synth intro we stumbled upon, Sacfly improvised the Monster Truck Style vocal intro to the song, parodying the corporate, suburban stripmall character the Rangers have come to embody—one take. We measured the length of the verses and choruses and laid the electronic music out in the computer and then recorded the guitar. We sang the choruses. I discovered the Cher-esque bitcrusher effect for my vocals in the verses which were also quickly recorded in the basement in Andover. The song needed something, and it got more.

Sometime in February, in Manchester, NH, I sat down with Backstop and coached her through the Spanish lyrics that El Donut had provided for the final choruses. I asked for vocal style somewhere between Bono and Cher and I think Backstop delivered the goods. I sent the song to High Cheese to be finished, leaving the crucial mid section open for his wizardry. I requested spaced-out XTC triphop rave sounds, but I got something entirely more disturbing. I got George W.

High Cheese had mined countless soundbytes of our unfortunate president and edited down to a the handful of phrases now in the song. I was mortified for quite a while, but everyone that heard the song was amazed and amused to hear the part. I compromised with the band after High Cheese added other soundscapes in behind the presidential samples. In the end, as with most Farmhands bridgework, I think the part makes the song. For me, it’s the perfect break from the song, yet the ever awkward voice sounds as if he is trying to participate in the song, perhaps even from the DJ booth. Whether you hear it as a culmination or a farcical break, the verses and choruses before grow in stature and the outro becomes all the more triumphant with High Cheese’s presidential cameo.

I hope someday the Rangers will take the field to this song.--fungo