05. The Tower (Afternoon Delight)
We are now in Orange County, California, where I'm attending grad school. Was grad school a good idea? In hindsight, no. But I was able to do a lot of fun activities while postponing actual adulthood for a while, so I guess it's not all bad.
I was lucky enough to meet the weirdest dude in all of Irvine by random dumb luck because he was assigned to be my roommate in grad student housing. The legendary Ned Raggett. Accept no substitutes.
Ned turns me on to the idea of a "swap meet." I drive out to various parking lots in various far-flung SoCal locales and bring home unbelievable treasures most weekends. On this track there's a Rhythm Ace drum machine from Anaheim, some weird guitar from, hmm, Huntington Beach?, a Commodore 64 from, well, I forget now, but the point is, I found a lot of really cool stuff for really cheap. I amass a garage full of super weird instruments and supplement my meager grad-school stipends by selling things on Usenet and early Internet auction websites.
The song itself? Uh, it references one time in college when I went to visit my then-girlfriend and did not realize that I was supposed to pull the door instead of push (or vice versa). Shades of that Far Side "School for the Gifted" comic, I know. I was also probably wearing shorts in the Pennsylvania snow at the time and being horribly awkward with said love interest. Sorry to everyone. Apologies for making a really unnecessary reference to THAT song.
Brian MacDonald made a fantastically strident dub out of the song using my 4-track and some Yamaha multi-FX unit in KUCI's Studio B. I probably should have included that here, but such are the casualties of trying to fit 29 years of music onto one cassette.
