Someone Else Remembered What I Did Etc., Part Three or Something

I had plans for December. Things I was gonna record, including a new, very dumb song about the holidays, but man, have I been sick. Just colds and throbbing sinus, but I've basically been sick for the entire month of December. Bah. Humbug even.

Anyway, here's another of the alleged songs I recorded at my brother Joe's old place in Philadelphia way back when. This one didn't get played to a paying audience, saving them and the box-office staff much trauma.

I don't remember exactly when I wrote it, but I clearly remember that the germ of it was my first exposure to Bobcat Goldthwait, doing a standup routine on (most likely) whatever show David Letterman had at the time. He had a funny line parodying the idiotic "coffee achiever" ad campaign being run by some coffee marketing board or other.

Another inspiration was reading that Woody Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a response to God Bless America. This sounded like a good idea, so I wrote this as a response to Bill Withers' Stand by Me.

Humanity Zoo (3.69 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

Hey Joe, Where Are You Going With That Detective Novel In Your Hand?

As I've mentioned earlier, my brother Joe is a composer.  He was recently commissioned by the California Chamber Orchestra to create something related to Perry Mason, the fictional defense attorney created by Erle Stanley Gardner in a series of books, and later made into a popular TV series starring Raymond Burr.

The premiere was November 7, 2009, and Joe's wife Amy caught each of the three movements on her iphone.  Don't laugh - the video is so-so but the audio is remarkable for a cellphone capture.  In addition to the Chamber Orchestra, the performance featured the other three members of Joe's ensemble SWARMIUS (see the link to the right).

And yes, the violinist in SWARMIUS is freakishly tall.

Suite Noir: The Passion of Perry Mason by Joseph Waters

Movement 1: Whispering Sands

Movement 2: The Court of Last Resort

Movement 3 Cerulean and other colors of the sky

This Just Dropped Through A Freak Wormhole From A Month Or So In The Future

NOTE: As this is a song about Christmas, a few edits have been made so as to not detract from the holiday spirit.

And now I'm gonna shift gears a little, and move away from demonstrating my total mastery of creating "rock music" in favor of demonstrating my total mastery of creating "country rock".  Or maybe I should say my total mastery of creating holiday-themed novelty songs, because this is what it is - a happy song about the joys of shopping for Christmas presents.

I wrote this in the early 1990s.  And it started life as a wonderfully enhanced version of the Peter Gunn theme, a favorite riff of punky new-wavers back in the day.  Once I became awesomely proficient at playing the first guitar part, I picked up my beautiful hollowbody guitar, a stunning example of the luthier's art, and started messing around with arpeggios.  And once I had a 2nd guitar part I liked, the original 1st guitar part no longer sounded right.

One thing led to another, and I know you're right there with me when I say that once you reach a certain point with a song, there's really nothing to do but make it a novelty song about Christmas shopping.

And yes, the title is a total steal from Mad magazine.

The Ghost Of Christmas Presents (3.09 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

I Believe The Technical Term Is "Idiot"

Duh!  Totally had a mangled URL in the link for Whipping Cream!

Here's the correct URL: Whipping Cream

Next time tell me or something.  Jeez.

And Now For Something Really Stupid

And by that I mean the song titled Something Really Stupid, of course. Duh. I mentioned it a while back. I know I did.

One day I heard that weird recording by Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy called Something Stupid, and I thought, "Well, it may have been stupid, but it wasn't really stupid, just sorta stupid."  And the next thing I knew I was filling the niche.

This song is an innocent victim of the turnover in my drum machines over the years. The drums were originally sequenced for a Kawai drum machine that was definitely not set up anything like a GM drums arrangement. I really liked that drum machine.

Needless to say, it was stolen. 

Next I traded some guy for a different drum machine, which used its own, completely different and non-GM arrangement. And the drum part was now completely wacky and I never got it completely normalized for that machine. At any rate, I sold it some time back.

Or maybe it blew up, I don't remember.

And now I'm using a software drum instrument, which started off as GM but has been mutated to fit my own purposes. And when I tried this song, the drum parts were wackier than ever. I was able to make parts of it usable, but it was just too messed up to deal with. If you listen to the part of the song where every line starts with "I don't know..." you can hear sets of four hits that were originally supposed to be drums. They're not drums. They're wood blocks. At some point I just threw my hands in the air and embraced the wrongness.

Also in the warm embrace of wrongness is my vocal track. This song was always a struggle to sing, since it was at the very top of what I humorously refer as my "range". I don't really have a range. More of a hotplate. At any rate, now that I'm less younger than I was, when I strained to hit - OK, to approximate - the high notes, I used to sound, well, strained, which was the point of the song. But now when I try it, I sound like a wheezy old man.

Something Really Stupid (3.56MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

What's the Signal-to-Noise Ratio for a Recording of Noise?

Note: Fixed broken download link.  Sorry.

Continuing my quest to recover the crappy songs I recorded back in the day, we come to a personal favorite, Whipping Cream. Not a favorite because it was any good, but because it was, how can I put this, really goofy.

Following the example of the Beatles, for a while I was filling all four tracks of my tape recorder with parts, then bouncing those down to another tape recorder, giving me more space to record on. The Beatles did two things differently than I. First, they bounced down to only one track, leaving three to work with but mushing the original tracks to mono, whereas I bounced to two tracks, only leaving me two more to work with but leaving the originals in stereo. The other thing they did differently was being the Beatles. Still not convinced that's relevant.

So I had two tapes with this song on - one with the final four tracks, and the other with the original four backing tracks. Sadly, the final tape was one of the ones that was totally destroyed by moisture. "No matter," I thought cheerfully to myself. "I can start with the backing tracks and just try to recreate the other two!" Imagine my shock and horror when I discovered that while the sound on the backing tracks was clear, the tape had become stretched out oddly over time, and now had wildly uneven speed. Impossible to work with.

Crucially however, it also had the sound effects in fairly clear condition. Sound effects, you ask? Yes, sound effects. Well, mostly voices stolen from old dictation training and children's records. I said it was goofy.

So I had to recreate the whole thing. At least I could listen to the drum, bass, one keyboard and one guitar part for reference, but the rest I had to try to remember or just make up. I remembered the lyrics off the top of my head, which is pretty good for something I wrote 26 years ago. There's another song on the same tape that I only remember the first two lines for, so you probably won't have to suffer through that one.

Whipping Cream (2.66 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

Somebody Else Remembered So I Don't Have To, part 2

Having had such success recording tunes at my brother Jim's studio, I decided to try my luck at my brother Joe's studio. Yes, at that point in time I had two brothers operating recording studios as part of their musical lives. I come from an artistic and musical family. I'm like that Baldwin brother who can't act. What's his name again? Zeppo?

This was still in the late 1980s sometime. Joe, at the time, was in Philadelphia. Now he's in California, teaches at a university and is involved in a whole bunch of musical directions at once. Jim, by the way, still runs a studio, but he traded the urine-soaked pavement of NYC for the stinking desert of Tucson.

Joe was part of a group in Philadelphia that promoted New Music, and my visiting to record coincided with them starting to put together a show. Just by coincidence, the theme of the show (the fusion of New Music and Pop music) dovetailed very nicely with this song. Also just by coincidence, one of the people in charge of putting the show program together was related to me. And so this silly little song got its world premiere before a paying audience at the Painted Bride in Philly.

The audience was stunned by the sheer brilliance of the work. So stunned they couldn't even remember to clap. I'm sure they were deep in introspection after hearing the lyrics, a searing indictment of people's television-watching habits.

Yeah.

Your Glass Eye (4.86MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

You can still hear me trying way too hard with that drum machine. Jeez.

Anyway, this is one of those tunes for which I remember the exact origin. In 1985 we moved to New Jersey, and our new next-door neighbors were gutting the building next door to turn it from a run-down old tea shop into a proper house. Since there was no TV, their kid started coming over in the afternoons to watch He-Man, She-Ra, and Thundercats. I was struck by how blatantly they were ripping off Phillip Glass.

So one day I was walking down the street, as one does, and a semi-Glassian tune kept playing in my head, and just when it was about to drive me insane, a voice (also in my head) sang, "with your glass eye" ...and I went straight home and wrote the first draft of the lyrics.