This week I give you an entire album from my murky past: “So Chewy” by the MayTricks (no, that movie had not come out when this band existed, so that name isn’t as awful as it seems, though it’s not so good, I think; any band name you have to spell for people is bad news). It was recorded in the summer of 1993, just after most of us had graduated college.

This is that band’s second album, and the most coherent, in that it presents our live show of the time, built up over the two years previous (instruments were in general recorded live, just as for the MayTricks demo tunes I’ve been posting here, with vocals, guitar solos, and other bits overdubbed; all on 4-track cassette). Many of the tunes had been written years before, some as early as 1987 or 1988 when we were in high school. I quote from the goofy, pretentious liner notes here:

“It’s natural in this country to be raised on cruddy, simplistic, obvious music, and so to start one’s songwriting within that style. It’s also natural to eventually rebel against these basic forms and search for higher ground. But when after doing this, you return to the old songs and have to sing them as yourself today, something sinister happens.”

The liner notes also state that “J.P. Sartre plays inaudible saxophones.”

I should mention that as far as a presentation of my songwriting in particular, this is about my least favorite project, with the album opener “A Call to Attention” (written in the summer of 1992, I believe) striking me (not just now, but not long after it was actually finished) as as particularly ill-conceived. Still, overall, the thing is very energetic and fun, and less lo-fi than you’d expect given the technology we were working with.

My most recommended tracks: “Without” (one of Steve Petrinko’s) is probably my favorite, with his “Wooden, Stone” also a great out-of-tune sloppy acoustic Rolling Stones kind of thing. Of my tunes, “The Like Song” is my favorite (featuring a kazoo solo). “Time” is also probably the best straight ballad I’ve ever written (from back in 1988 or 1989), though this is not the ideal recording of it.

Yes, another song not written by me, from the same 1991 demo as the last two weeks’ entries: “Wild Flower.” However, I did play this 40 million times and wrote the swell bass line and contributed to the somewhat out-of-tune backing vocals. The performance is actually pretty darn good, and the recording was only left off of the eventual album because we preferred to show off the later line-up instead. This song (also written by Steve Petrinko when he was in high school) was our crowd pleaser and set opener, and everyone got to do a solo (well, I don’t solo in this version, but there’s a bass solo on the album version that’s also linked there). Simple, fun, happy, cheesy. So why not just play this kind of stuff all the time and get many more frat party gigs? Not our ideology, I guess.

So I want to ask about the futility of art vs. playing what people like, but the subject tires me and the question is, I think, ill-formed. This song was and is a highlight for me, and if it’s derivative, it’s blocked out for me what it might be imitating, and Steve’s hippie lyrics save it (for me) from the cringe-inducement involved in, e.g., the Spin Doctors, whose big album was released the summer after this recording was made. I buy the comedy here (whether it was intentionally comic or not), whereas for the Spin Doctors, I just don’t, but this just points to the fact that it’s hard to enjoy a band if the lead singer strikes you as a douchebag.

Here’s “Wasted Youth,” a song by Steve Petrinko, also (like week 14) from the MayTricks 1991 EP, which I’m retroactively calling the “Happy Flowers EP,” as “Happy Flowers” was to be the name of the album that we started recording with this lineup shortly after making this demo (at least according to my decision; I don’t know that the band had agreed upon this).

This is a song Steve wrote at age 17 about the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now I don’t usually write social protest (Steve doesn’t either), and the earnestness and some awkward bits in the lyrics always rubbed me wrong, but I still liked the darkness of the song and the power of the bridge, and I love the feedback-soaked Pink Floydesque thing that our guitarist Dave Roof did with it. Nonetheless, this was not recorded for any later album, so this is the definitive band recording, such as it is.

Rhythmically, the song is sort of a mess, but I actually did quite a bit of work in that respect, moving around some of the out-of-time drum hits (which are on the same track as the bass and drums) and lining up the keyboard (which was recorded too quietly in the initial live band performance and so was re-recorded on its own track) and the vocals so that they’re in sync. This likely doesn’t mean much to you non-musicians or people who’ve not seen what digital magic is possible nowadays in fixing up multi-track recordings, but trust me, this is a lot better than it was.

So, social protest songs… These struck me as disingenuous (at the time we played this; now my opinion is as always, both liberal and self-contradicting). Art, if honest, expresses personal pain, and unless the tragedy is happening to you, then you’re just faking it, and I’d be pretty sure that someone sitting in a high school classroom in Michigan is not going to have a clue what it’s actually like for protesters getting gunned down under a totalitarian regime. So instead of being about the event, it’s actually about one’s fantasy of the event, which to me seemed a weird thing to have a fantasy about. Discuss! (Note that I did eventually write a social protest song myself, a pretty oblique thing about the Iraq war and the Giuliani-type response to terrorism called “Lock Them Away.” I tried to make it about what actually made me depressed about the whole thing, not pretending to be a soldier a la Billy Joel’s song about Vietnam or something.)

One of my heretofore unmentioned projects for this blog is digitizing and mixing the original, 1991 5-song demo from my college band The MayTricks, so here’s the first tune: “Run Away.” I’ve also posted an mp3 of the eventual 1993 album version of the tune for comparison. I like the demo better, I think, though the album version has its charms.

During high school, I fantasized heavily about what a kick-ass band I was going to get going in college given the amount of talent that would undoubtedly be available there. During my freshman year I attempted to get an all-songwriter band going, and the only person who stuck out of that was Steve Petrinko, who became my co-conspirator in forming The MayTricks. The initial line-up of the band came together in our sophomore year and included two freshman, a guitarist named Dave Roof and a keyboardist named Josh Fielstra, both of whom were actually pretty great players. Those guys, along with a 26-year-old named Rich Stapleton who played with us for about a week, played the tunes on this demo, the instruments for which were recorded live to two tracks of a 4-track Tascam cassette portable studio. I recorded all the vocals myself after the fact, though some of the live singing bled through here.

This song in particular I wrote when I was 16 and was the first tune I ever recorded (by myself) and then performed, originally with my high school band The Backdrop. I made five studio recordings of the song in high school (it was one of only about three original songs the Backdrop had), then these two with the MayTricks, and I’ve got an unfinished, hi-fi version mostly recorded from 2006 just to give the thing some closure, which I’ll eventually post. The lyrics are total cheese dip, as is the 50s verse and the 1-4-5 chorus, but I’ve still always liked it, and I think this demo version, despite some rhythmically sloppy and/or out-of-tune parts of it, works overall better than the eventual album version, which featured only Steve and I from the original band, plus Geoff Esty imitating a synth with a weird guitar effect and also playing some classical and Brian Drake on rhythm guitar.

Philosophical thought of the post: To what extent can you enjoy the creative products of your naive youth? I’ll be honest: even though these lyrics are cheesy, they’re much better than anything I’d written earlier, and I could still choke them out without being utterly embarrassed.