Remembering the Past, Doomed to Repeat it Anyway.

Back in the 1980s I wrote a bunch of what, for lack of a better term, I will call "songs" and recorded them using a couple of guitars, a bass, a Casio keyboard and a cheesy drum machine, all on a 4-track tape deck. Recently I dug those tapes up and was horrified, or perhaps gratified, to see that they had been badly damaged by years of high humidity and the occasional flood. So I've started trying to get them digitized and cleaned up as well as I can.

Some tapes are almost totally lost, leading to the horrifying realization that I may end up relearning some of these old songs and re-recording them. That'll teach me to not take care of my crappy old tapes.

Anyway, I plan to start posting them now and then as I get them ready. Here are the first three. As you (if you're foolish enough to download them) will soon see, when I write lyrics they tend to be a bit, well, silly. Love songs and political statements were not generally on my agenda. Nor was, how can I put this, knowing how to carry a tune.

So the songs are:

Toothpaste (2.83MB mp3) download from MediaFire
When I was about 20 I found a copy of a book aimed at young male readers, which I had read several times as a young male. It was part of a long-running, popular series. Even back then I realized it wasn't very good, but as the woman said, we didn't have cable and had to make our own fun. Re-reading it, one scene in particular struck me as being, well, stupid. So I wrote a song about it. If you are of a certain gender and age group, you will immediately recognize the book. If you're also psychic, that is.

It Doesn't Bother Me (3.3MB mp3) download from MediaFire
I was so intent on making this song sound Indian that I bought a cheap electric guitar and mutilated the bridge to make it buzz like a sitar. So much for that. Boy, with all the tabla loops and sitar samples available these days, I could probably make a new version that sucks marginally less than this does. Yeah. These are possibly the most sarcastic lyrics I've ever written.

It Was The Other Day (3.95MB mp3) download from MediaFire
This isn't even really a song. I used to carry a blank book around with me in case I felt like being creative and sometimes I'd just blurt out a bit of stream-of-consciousness. I don't do that any more. Stream consciousness I mean. Nowadays my consciousness is more of a dribble. Maybe I should see a urologist. So basically this is me vamping for 4 minutes so I could read this silly story. There are some other voices in between. Probably from a TV show, but I can't tell what it is.