06. Waverly
We are still in California and attempting to be comfortable there. Not really succeeding. I develop a snarky persona that isn't really me but that fits well enough in the sarcastic 90s. I keep amassing items and writing bad papers at the last possible moment. This song sounds like it's being sung from the bottom of a well, which isn't so far off, even if that's just the delay pedal talking.
What exactly is this song about? Well, it's complicated - I finally watched Aelita, Queen of Mars and thought about how I'd talked about that movie with L., and how I'd driven across the U.S. with J., and how the night looked on Highway 3 in Iowa en route to the old ancestral homeland, and I'm sure A. figured in there because that's how that moment was happening, and, well, bottom of a well. This song becomes a little clearer when viewed as part of the song cycle that is Celesteville's Kohoutek. Maybe.
The jangly instrument here is my tiple, a 10-stringed instrument in the ukulele family that I found in a Portland music shop one winter break, and which has been a comforting presence in my life on many dark occasions. The bass instrument is an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer that I got at the Golden West swap meet for five bucks, battery included. I think I borrowed the drums from someone named Franz? Sorry about my drumming.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Memory Excellence 05: The Tower (Afternoon Delight)
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.
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.
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Memory Excellence 04: No. Central Iowa (I'm Sorry)
04 No. Central Iowa (I'm Sorry)
I'm sorry about the title being a pretty blatant R.E.M. ripoff. I probably did not need to do that.
OK, so a few things to note about this song:
(1) I did, in fact, spend my childhood years not that far from Buddy Holly's flight path from Clear Lake, IA (not Mason City) to Sioux City. Now that I look it up, it's actually about an hour away, but whatever, some of Buddy Holly's atoms must have passed through me at some point.
(2) The crazy drums on this one are courtesy of the great Dave Hanson (RIP), the original drummer in the band I mentioned in the last entry. Among the funniest people I've ever known, and a wild one, and I am sad that I will not be getting any emails in the future with phrases like "buttocks ahoy from some madmen."
(3) This song was the last song on a split tape that I did with the great Charlie McAlister (RIP), another wild Southerner, a true one-of-a-kind spirit who deserves more than just a paragraph. Charlie was one of those people you only meet once in your life, and I was lucky enough to see him at least three times.
(4) Recorded live in Studio B at the college radio station, all live. Let it be said that college radio, much like the four-track, was one of those things that changed everything. So many hours spent trudging up to the odd-smelling fourth floor of that building, listening through headphones to the thousands of records and CDs, taking in everything, blasting it out to a little chunk of the western suburbs of Philadelphia.
I'm sorry about the title being a pretty blatant R.E.M. ripoff. I probably did not need to do that.
OK, so a few things to note about this song:
(1) I did, in fact, spend my childhood years not that far from Buddy Holly's flight path from Clear Lake, IA (not Mason City) to Sioux City. Now that I look it up, it's actually about an hour away, but whatever, some of Buddy Holly's atoms must have passed through me at some point.
(2) The crazy drums on this one are courtesy of the great Dave Hanson (RIP), the original drummer in the band I mentioned in the last entry. Among the funniest people I've ever known, and a wild one, and I am sad that I will not be getting any emails in the future with phrases like "buttocks ahoy from some madmen."
(3) This song was the last song on a split tape that I did with the great Charlie McAlister (RIP), another wild Southerner, a true one-of-a-kind spirit who deserves more than just a paragraph. Charlie was one of those people you only meet once in your life, and I was lucky enough to see him at least three times.
(4) Recorded live in Studio B at the college radio station, all live. Let it be said that college radio, much like the four-track, was one of those things that changed everything. So many hours spent trudging up to the odd-smelling fourth floor of that building, listening through headphones to the thousands of records and CDs, taking in everything, blasting it out to a little chunk of the western suburbs of Philadelphia.
Memory Excellence 03: Becoming the Floor
I wish I had more room to devote to my high-school adventures on this tape. There is a lot of recorded material and some of it is really wild. Oh well, off to college.
03. Becoming the Floor
I pack up my bags and head off to the greater Philadelphia area to go to a fancy college. I write songs, join bands, read a lot of books, etc. I'm still averse to social interaction, but at least now I'm a shy wreck in a band. In said band I sing (half the time) and play bass (all the time.) This self-pitying but sorta funny little number is a hit with the undergrad crowd in the indie-rock-centric early 90s. Eventually I rewrite it so it is skitterier and strummier.
03. Becoming the Floor
I pack up my bags and head off to the greater Philadelphia area to go to a fancy college. I write songs, join bands, read a lot of books, etc. I'm still averse to social interaction, but at least now I'm a shy wreck in a band. In said band I sing (half the time) and play bass (all the time.) This self-pitying but sorta funny little number is a hit with the undergrad crowd in the indie-rock-centric early 90s. Eventually I rewrite it so it is skitterier and strummier.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Memory Excellence 02: Shudder
02 Shudder
High school was kind of awful and I dreaded social interaction. I'd recorded some stuff on the boombox in my bedroom with fellow nerds with varying amounts of musical ability (mostly low). So my life was completely changed by the gift of a Fostex X-15 four-track by my youth pastor Bob F., who had moved on to an unthinkably luxurious cassette 8-track (!). I commenced to create an endless number of albums on the thing, cranked the input gain up to make fuzz sounds, stuck microphones inside guitars, contact-miked everything, explored, explored, explored. Oh how I loved that thing. I never had a car in high school, but I drove that four-track into the ground.
This song was one of the first things I recorded on it. Two tracks of black pointy-headed Polaris bass, two tracks of the worst guitar ever created. I would get better at everything, I guess, but there's something to be said about taking your first steps.
High school was kind of awful and I dreaded social interaction. I'd recorded some stuff on the boombox in my bedroom with fellow nerds with varying amounts of musical ability (mostly low). So my life was completely changed by the gift of a Fostex X-15 four-track by my youth pastor Bob F., who had moved on to an unthinkably luxurious cassette 8-track (!). I commenced to create an endless number of albums on the thing, cranked the input gain up to make fuzz sounds, stuck microphones inside guitars, contact-miked everything, explored, explored, explored. Oh how I loved that thing. I never had a car in high school, but I drove that four-track into the ground.
This song was one of the first things I recorded on it. Two tracks of black pointy-headed Polaris bass, two tracks of the worst guitar ever created. I would get better at everything, I guess, but there's something to be said about taking your first steps.
Memory Excellence 01: Yellow
I'm going to write up a little blurb explaining each of the songs on Memory Excellence. I will probably not finish in time for the release date (Oct. 12, 2018), but let's give it a shot.
NB: I reserve the right to edit, update, or delete any of these entries going forward. I may also add links to other appropriate songs. When I'm done, I will try to put this up on tapemountain.com so you don't have to read through 33 different Blogger entries.
OK, here goes!
01. Yellow
NB: I reserve the right to edit, update, or delete any of these entries going forward. I may also add links to other appropriate songs. When I'm done, I will try to put this up on tapemountain.com so you don't have to read through 33 different Blogger entries.
OK, here goes!
01. Yellow
This comes from the first Cruise Missiles Named Bob tape Winter, which was recorded over an Information Society cassingle that I bought from the Tualatin Public Library book sale for a dime. We fit seven songs on the space formerly inhabited by "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)" and whatever the flip side was.
Jordan and B. sing backup vocals - thank you. Recorded in my Tualatin bedroom on a Panasonic boombox with my dad's old guitar. This song may seem familiar to connoisseurs of the Raunchy Young Lepers oeuvre, but that's purely a coincidence.
Not sure what prompted this song to be written, though I did have a pair of yellow Chuck Taylors that I'd bought on clearance at G.I. Joe's and that stuck out like the sorest thumb possible at Tigard High School in the late 80s.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Career retrospective tape coming soon
Coming soon on the mighty Deathbomb Arc label of California: a career retrospective of my solo music works, spanning back to 1989 when I was yelling into a boombox all the way up to my most recent stuff. 33 songs - value!
It's called "Memory Excellence" after a clunky but great slogan for a certain magnetic-media company, and I made the cover with index cards, an old diskette, and an Apple //c.
I've made a lot of music in my life, most of it only nominally for public consumption, so it is weird to make a big production out of it. I mean, a cassette isn't exactly a "big production," but it's going to be pro-duplicated on eye-searingly green cassettes.
I'm hoping to make a zine to go with it. Maybe I'll make that happen over Labor Day weekend.
Hoping to post more here soon - I got caught up doing actual work.
It's called "Memory Excellence" after a clunky but great slogan for a certain magnetic-media company, and I made the cover with index cards, an old diskette, and an Apple //c.
I've made a lot of music in my life, most of it only nominally for public consumption, so it is weird to make a big production out of it. I mean, a cassette isn't exactly a "big production," but it's going to be pro-duplicated on eye-searingly green cassettes.
I'm hoping to make a zine to go with it. Maybe I'll make that happen over Labor Day weekend.
Hoping to post more here soon - I got caught up doing actual work.
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