August 30, 2004

  • Today I went to a garage sale. For $10 I got a cassette deck and a turntable. The turntable was an upgrade for me, and I haven't had a cassette deck since my last thrift store one died.

    But the point here is that I've pulled a few things off cassette and into the digital domain. I've had access to my landlord's deck, but I didn't want to pull it out of his stereo rack and mess with it. It's a nice one, too, so the temptation has been great. But now, I can do it guilt-free with my own deck.

    So I'm going to be 'blogging some tunes.

    The first comes with a story: Back in 1986, I was going to school to learn how to be a recording studio engineer. While I was at that school, I met a guy who turned out to be a good friend over many, many years. This friend of mine is Brett, who I wrote about not long ago. The point of this story, however, is that he had a band called The Bends, and he asked me if I wanted to jam with the band. Naturally, I did. We both had work to do in our recording classes, so we shared projects to a degree. We recorded ourselves, shared the responsibility, and turned in two sets of projects.

    This was one of the things we turned in. It's the kind of thing that happens when your time in the studio is 1-5am and you've had too much Mountain Dew. It demonstrates all the freaky crazy stuff you can do with 2" tape. It also happens to be enjoyable enough to present here. I apologize for the fact that I used to enjoy the sound of overdriven reverb inputs, foolishly thinking they'd make up for what I thought was missing from the tracked material.

    The only thing at the proper speed and in the right direction is the guitar solo, played by Mr. Pat Stallings. The tune is 'Never Let Anything Mechanical Know You're In A Hurry,' which was written on a sign over the 24-track deck.

    There used to be a really really long remix version of this, where we spliced together three mixes of it with various bits muted in and out in odd places. Thank me for not being able to find that one.