Memory Excellence available for purchase on cassette

If anyone is looking to pick up a genuine cassette version of the Memory Excellence compilation, it's available at the Deathbomb Arc webstore at the link above. It looks sharp. While $12 is a little steep for a cassette, you're only paying 36 cents a song.

MP3s are available at Bandqlamp for about 21 cents per song. Or if you prefer the streaming model, search for Memory Excellence on your favorite streaming service. However, watch out for false Jake Andersons.

RIP Daryl D and a list of horrible things I've done

The Captain is dead. Farewell, Captain. In his honor, here is a list of horrible things I have done to or with his music over the years, in roughly chronological order:

(1) Lobstora's song "Run Captain Run," which performed long-distance psychoanalysis of the Captain and T's relationship based on the awkwardly staged bulldog photo on the cover of Love Will Keep Us Together. Was there feedback? There was feedback. Also, a super-lo-res sample from "Broddy Bounce" (admittedly a jam) looped on my brother's Performa along with Macintalk exhortations to the Captain to run, run far away. If you read T's autobiography (I glanced through it at the library's used-book store), it sounds like the exhortations should have been sent in her direction, not his, but either way. I feel like there were other references to Love Will Keep Us Together on that tape, too.
(2) Super-scabrous feedback and delay-abuse version of "The Way I Want to Touch You" done with A. in the garage in Costa Mesa at a weird point in my life. The one existing recording of my old MXR rackmount digital delay from the swap meet, me poking buttons like I'm running an Osterizer and making it emit shrill goose honks. Noteworthy.
(3) At one point I think I holed up with a sampler and a copy of the Spanish-language version of LWKUT (entitled Por Amor Viviremos) and sampled a very short loop of T. singing "oo-may" from the phrase "tú me perteneces," roughly "you belong to me now," one of the lines referenced in (1), that plus a lot of Language Master something.

Are there other things? Probably. Were the 90s a weird time if you had some means of sampling sound and a predilection for so-so 70s soft-rock records? Yes!!!!!

Memory Excellence 33: 1986

33. 1986

Nothing is real and everything's blurry

A brown landscape moves around me

Everything I knew, I left it behind me

the wilderness closed in

Nothing is real and everything's blurry

A house springs up while I'm sleeping

My mouth is not fit to pronounce these names

of roads that run off like gnarled branches

Nothing is real and everything's blurry

I don't understand it. Let's start again.

This one is from the album Tualatin or the Voice of Shrillness, which mines my years of maximum adolescent awkwardness for song material. In 1986 I hit a certain developmental milestone, moved approximately 2000 miles, and got glasses, big horrible aviator specs no less. A rough year.

The third stanza owes a debt to the first story in Jason's graphic novel Sshhhh!

OK, song descriptions done - time to rebuild my archives!

Thinking about doing Bandqlamp even though I dislike Bandqlamp on principle - while I get the idea that it makes things easy for artists and encourages people to pay for music, I don't like the fact that it has basically domesticated DIY and put everything on the same template, one that revolves around money instead of music. Alternatives exist (e.g. archive.org) but can be clunky. I'll get things sorted out soon.

Memory Excellence 32: Don't Stand So Close to Me '86

32. Don't Stand So Close to Me '86

Make sure your ego is as brassy as your synthesizer
Make sure to visualize the subject of your fantasy

That is how you make it
But get thee behind me
That is how you make it
But don't stand so--

Ultimately I made sure that I'd blend into furniture
My ego was the tarnished nickel of endless broken strings

Every greatest hits album has to have a song called "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86," right? I think it's the law.

This one is from an upcoming album tentatively entitled 99 that is going to have 99 super hits. I have a long way to go. Having a baby and a side hustle really limits one's ability to crank out super hits in the garage. But I'll persevere.

Memory Excellence 31: (You're Never Alone with a) Delay Pedal

31. (You're Never Alone with a) Delay Pedal

I bought a copy of myself
from a box
and took it out - to repeat:

Took myself to the garage
Took a copy
Took myself - to repeat:

Endless copies
Infinite garage
Which one is me? To repeat:

Endless selves inside a box
I'm not alone
beside myself - to repeat:

Put myself inside a box
Waking up
to turn it off.

I got a Boss DD-3 for $5 at the swap meet and my sound changed. Oh the 1990s. I bought swap-meet delay pedal after swap-meet delay pedal and stretched everything out forever, hiss and crunch. Ravenous cavernous. Years of dissipation and navel-gazing while being dead sober. I didn't release an album for like four years during my period of maximum music playing. Endless delay pedal wankery in the garage. Delay pedals. Delay pedals. Delay pedals. I'm not alone beside myself.

Memory Excellence 30: Encyclopedias

30. Encyclopedias

I got a world
A world in the bathroom
I digest the universe
Page by page, letter by letter

There was a champion on Tic Tac Dough back in my formative years when I was watching Tic Tac Dough a lot who claimed that his success was due to a lifelong habit of reading encyclopedias in the W.C.  I have certainly done that to no end.  My current set of mid-80s Britannicas isn't quite as restroom-friendly as my childhood set of early-70s World Books, but still.

I really like the album that this song begins (Scripts) and would have liked to include more of its songs. Oh well. Gotta get that one back up on the internet.

Memory Excellence 29: Hallway Odyssey

29. Hallway Odyssey

I would like to kindly ask your forgiveness for not transcribing these lyrics. They're easy enough. They are directions. Now that I think about it, a debt is owed to Chris P's "Keep Walking," though this is, um, less infinite? And it will actually lead you somewhere very important if you start in the right place, i.e. my desk at my previous job.

Ring modulators. Love them. Thank you to Carlin for a completely unexpected and life-transforming gift of a ring modulator back in 1995. I still have it and still love it.