As I hit the big 30 here, let me thank you for your indulgence, to the extent that you’ve actually been reading/listening. I’m marking this round number with another whole album, this time the debut full album by The MayTricks from 1992, cleverly entitled The MayTricks. As this was really the first full-length album I worked on, it definitely has a special place with me, as weird and lo-fi and inconsistent as it is.

This was compiled in late 1992 with recordings recorded over the previous year and a half or so, all after the previous spring 1991 demo. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, here’s the final tune from the 1991 MayTricks demo (which I’ve made a new page for), “Her Skin Is Only Warm.”

The song was written by Steve and was our most bombastic. It was modeled on The Rolling Stones’s “Steel Wheels” album, meaning it has kind of awkward “Rock! Rock!” lyrics, but it was actually describing a particular situation where Steve’s roommate had a thing for some woman. In some of the verses, Steve and I switch off lyric lines, and we harmonize in a somewhat out of tune manner. There was keyboard playing during this song, but the only thing I can detect is the occasional “ping!” sound on the first beat of a few phrases. This was actually the song that, after the fact, made said keyboardist quit the band, as I think he thought it sounded godawful, but we liked it!

A somewhat more technically correct version, still pretty spastic, was completed for the So Chewy album.

Three songs today: cover tunes by The MayTricks from 1992 or so. Specifically, the Police’s “Can’t Stand Losin’ You” (which I sing) and Talking Heads’ “And She Was” and The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” (both of which Steve sings).

These are actual, multi-track studio recordings done with probably as much care as many of our actual album tracks, recorded as part of a demo to impress frats and fratty clubs and other places we should probably not have been playing as a sort of underground, Beatles White album-inspired somewhat psychedelic band. Read the rest of this entry »

Correcting my previous post, apparently this is my first recorded original composition: “The Funny Train.”

While I had always assumed this to be a traditional melody, a quick web search reveals no previous versions, so I hereby claim it. However, I note that “There was a little man, and he had a little can” appeared previously in a prohibition-era song called “No More Booze.”

How does the little man relate to the train? Is he driving the train? No, qua prohibition-era hobo, he is likely getting a free ride, violating not only the law but his own dignity. And what are his possessions? A can. Perhaps he realizes that “man” and “can” rhyme, and possesses the can just for that reason, making himself an art for the ages’ display. The next line gives us a stronger clue: the can was full of worms, which he then puts in a soup. How extreme is man’s degradation, to be forced to subsist on worms! Or is this a life choice? Is he living his life as an art, not only through living a rhyme, but in choosing worms, the replenishers of all life, which by eating corpses and transforming them to arable land themselves symbolize nature’s triumph over death. Is the man, in fact, dining upon his own death? Read the rest of this entry »

At the half way point of this 2010 experiment, I’ve got something very special to post: my first ever intentional recording of a song, which was also my first experience playing with a band that I put together. It’s from spring ‘86 and called “Venus on Earth.”

I had some little music composition program on my Apple IIe that let me type in notes and play them back to me, and so I mapped out a bunch of variations of this little progression, only the simplest of which actually made it into the song. The introduction was inspired by some music from the movie “Something Wicked This Way Comes” that I’d seen on cable a few times, plus the cheesy wind and laser noises that were built in sounds on Brian’s Casio CZ-5000 (used to much greater effect in our later effort). The guitarist (Pete Catsaros) had never actually played guitar before doing this with us, and didn’t know how to play any chords; he just played the same riffs I played on bass, though not always at the same time, with the keyboard covering the chords. Then the lyrics… god, the lyrics are bad, and sung with a weird, quirky English inflection that can only be the 80s at work in me. I can’t imagine what inspired them other than thinking that the words themselves just sounded cool apart from any consideration of their meaning: “I have the indication it’s not infatuation. It’s a different situation that’s worthy of your station.” My favorite part is where I go “…for all eternity- he-e-e hee hee.” Just unintentionally f’in funny. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I present the crown jewel of my high school band years: The Spring ‘89 version of “Run Away.”

I’ve previously blogged about this song, which is pretty cheesy, but pleasurable, I think. This version owes a lot to the keyboard programming of the last couple of albums by The Cars (my favorite band at the time). The story of The Backdrop, the band that gave rise to this, can be found here. The important point was that with this band, and the maybe four songs we programmed in this way, I had pretty much total control over orchestration, and in this case, this was the third studio recording I’d made of this with my keyboardist Brian Greenfield, and the fifth recording overall. Previous to this (and after all those four other recordings) we had put together a large group to play this at the school variety show, but for this version, I reasserted control, doing all the nine vocal parts myself and all the guitars except for the guitar solo (played by Mike Goldberg, which solo I complained about at the time as being too much like Chuck Berry and having little to do with the song, but which I like just fine now; I may have been responsible for putting it through my phaser pedal, but I’m not sure). The sax is by one of my best friends Sanj Ghogale, playing a part I wrote out for him.

We had a more elaborate drum machine program that we’d used for earlier versions; this version just leaves in the hi-hat and hand claps and a couple of other things. I think the plan was to have a real drummer overdub the rest of it, but we never got around to it, and I think I thought it was fine as is. Now that I’ve added a mess of noise reduction, it actually makes the piercing drum machine hi-hat sound more like a shaker, so I actually like that.

Some of this was actually recorded on the school’s 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, but then it got bounced to Brian’s new cassette 4-track for the last couple of overdubs. This makes it just about the only recording of mine from before ‘91 that doesn’t sound absolutely terrible.

When we played this live (for the variety show in spring ‘88; I forget whether we revived it for our one of our few other gigs, at the “gym jam” near the end of ‘89 where we played covers by U2, Huey Lewis, R.E.M., etc.), there was some conflict in the band between the whole “Mark is the composer and gets to tell everyone exactly what to do” faction and the fact that I had two guitarists playing very simple parts and a drummer who initially was asked to play along with this drum machine part (later in the process, the drum machine was eliminated, but the synths still used a sequencer, so the drummer had to use headphones with a click track on them; very 80’s!). This taught me a more hands-off approach to arranging that I’ve since used with bands, and given that I don’t typically take 2 years arranging a single song now, I don’t have time for that kind of detail work anyway, but I’ve long wanted to get a real mastery of computer music programming now that it’s so much easier (i.e. software I currently possess but haven’t figured out how to use can do it) and do some really complex arranging. It’ll happen some day.

My computer no longer boots and is in the shop, which means I’m on my wife’s MacBook, which means it’s time for more camcorder youtube uploads! Here’s a version of “Love Is the Problem:” http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/0/e0LblloTUnc

We (my band New People) recently played a very big show at Madison’s Brat Fest, on the “Quench Gum” stage, which I honored by inadvertently saying “quench” instead of “clench” during two different songs. The stage was huge, the sound was great, and we brought in a laptop to record the sound right from the board and my camcorder was set up in a great spot also next to the soundboard, away from chatty people.

However, we had not managed to get anyone not on stage to help us make sure that these things were working, so the sound didn’t record at all on the laptop, and the video was poorly framed, with our guitarist and drummer very small in the middle of the screen and me entirely off screen.

So, what I’ve posted is not that, but instead a couple of tunes from a show last August, our final outing with our drummer Julian, who by then had gotten mighty tight. On the whole, this was one of our best played shows, though the newer songs are stronger now that we spent time recording them (some rough mixes should be available for my posting w/in a couple of weeks). The video is pretty good quality, with all three of us actually visible and all the parts audible (though the bass is a bit low, at least where I’m listening to it). It was a great venue, but no alcohol, so our turnout (on a Friday night, no less) was pretty poor, and I’ve not bugged them for another show.

I’ve also posted there a great newer one of Matt Ackerman’s called “Lucky” (http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/qh3dByWYw9E). I’ll likely upload some more tracks from that show over the next few days; so check back to the channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer.

I felt bad enough about posting the previous tune that I spent a bit more time and “polished” up another two old clunkers from the same pile, because mom always told me “If you do something bad, do more of that same thing to make up for it.”

So, first, a very old (1988) demo called “A Little Feeling.” This is a piano tune, which was and is rare for me, inspired, I think, by Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna.” This is not actually a terrible song for my 17 year old self, and it was briefly added to the first-lineup MayTricks set but not revived after we lost our keyboardist, so this is it, unless I’m motivated enough to record a new version some day, complete with the free-form New Age piano solo in the middle and the echoing Pink Floyd-esque guitar I pictured.

Second, “Pakistan-the Complete Works,” a recording made using a walkman from spring 1991, maybe only a month after the MayTricks demo was recorded, when two of our members didn’t show up for rehearsal, so those of us left (me, Steve Petrinko, and our new rhythm guitarist Matt Diaz) all traded instruments (i.e. to ones we didn’t know how to play too well) and improvised three songs, pretending to be a garage band called Pakistan, which shows you my snobby attitude towards “garage bands” (i.e. many of our peers), whereas I saw us as usually playing intelligent, carefully orchestrated pieces. So this is me, with a hoarse voice, apparently, improvising lyrics that are supposed to be funny and sometimes are, though the whole thing is equally juvenile to “Girl.” Steve in turn adopted a persona of a demented individual named Bucko or Bucky, depending on the song.

There are three “songs” on here, but I saw no reason to break them apart, as the whole 14-minute experience is the thing, man: Baby (Don’t Look at Me), Swishy Boy, and Cram. The second, which I played guitar on, actually sort of sounds like a song, whereas the other two (where I played drums) are just chaos. I will admit that this recording is fairly dear to me, and makes me chuckle. And yes, a security guard did come and make us stop (we were playing in a dorm basement practice room, and there were complaints both about the volume and the foul language).

Warning: foul language, juvenile humor, possible misogyny, and terrible sound quality. The song is called “Girl,” and it is from fall, 1989, just a couple months into my college experience, recorded in the excruciatingly awful sounding method of tape-to-tape dubbing, which is what I used from 1987 or so through spring 1991.

This was my first collaboration of any sort with Steve Petrinko, whose MayTricks material has appeared in this blog before. I should say that due to its foulness, Steve has been against this ever seeing the light of day, despite his bitchin’ guitar-solo and “bitch”-saying little sampling keyboard that we used. It was also my first, though very knocked off, co-writing effort, and I find it amusing that even for this piece of drivel, I was egotistic enough that I remember very clearly who wrote which lyric lines and felt the need to point that out whenever I would play this for anyone so that the lyrically inferior parts wouldn’t be attributed to me. I will resist doing so now.

If someone wants to post a comment re. the line between humor and misogyny, be my guest. Later, in 1997 or so, I wrote (purely in my head; no tape was stained by this idea that I recall) an Elvis-ripoff song called “Rape My Life,” which has irritatingly never left my memory. The joke of that song was that it was the opposite of euphemistic, meaning that whereas a euphemism expresses something offensive in less offensive terms that might not even be recognized as offensive by innocent parties, this song was making a bland, unoffensive point (about changing ones life for the better) by using over-the-top, needlessly offensive language. One of the verses went like this: “I want to rape my life, want to do it in the eyes; I want to f*#% that skull ’till it’s paralyzed. I want to rape my life. I want to rape my life. I don’t need a gun, I don’t need a knife, I’m the man, I’m the one, I want to rape my life.” (Procedural point: it’s OK to say “fuck” in a blog post, but not when it’s next to the word “skull.”) My wife pretty much cried (not in a good way) when I sang it at her, even with my explanation of the subtle and complex humor involved, so away it went until now. Lucky fucking you.

Some technical crap: This was digitized from cassette with some processing back in 1994. My work on this just now was applying my bitchin’ noise reduction plugin-in to it after bouncing it (along with a dozen other old recordings, some of which showed digital glitches and things) from my decrepit DAT machine, which I purchased in 1993 and looks like this:

It apparently no longer rewinds, so I need to open the little tapes and spool them back by hand (well, with a little screwdriver, actually). Luckily, most of my master mixes (I used this as the mix destination all the way up through 1998.) have already long since been bounced to PC (the DAT is digital storage, so it’s just a matter of transferring the data, though you still have to actually play the tape while hitting “record” on the PC program), but I still have a small shelf of these tapes. I actually keep the DAT machine in my active stereo setup as a pass-through digital-analog converter for listening back to my computer and sometimes for digitizing cassettes; it’s not strictly necessary, but it’s convenient, and it doesn’t require that the machine be able to rewind.

To apologize for many weeks now of old (i.e. poorly recorded) and (in the case of the “classical pieces”) near unlistenable material, I’ve now newly encoded and posted the entirety of my “Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio” album: http://marklint.com/FJTalbum.html.

This is probably my single strongest collection of tunes. The recording quality is decent (i.e. digital 8-track, not 4-track cassette like the MayTricks stuff), and we put A LOT of time into the arrangements and mixing, though I of course didn’t have my current computer magic whereby I can fix things out of tune and/or time, so it’s hardly a professional masterpiece. It was also a transitional time for my voice between its nasally, unsupported origins and its current state of relative strength, meaning that people have criticized my singing on this. Still, it’s a dream compared to the older stuff, and the songs are, again, a bit stronger on the whole than what I’ve produced more recently, I think.

“The Fake Johnson Trio” was a band name I came up with because I wanted it to sound like a jazz or folk thing but with an obviously fake name, and actually using the name “Fake” was the most absurd way of doing that. This was my attempt, unlike the MayTricks, to do marketable “alternative” rock, conceived in 1994 or so when grunge was still alive and well. I would deny or at least subvert my sensitive side to put on a manly, jaded air and use big drums and distorted guitar and all that obvious, cliche stuff. This would undoubtedly make me the big bucks.

Well, it still turned out to be a weird niche band, but I like it, and it’s the culmination of the my first three or four years in Austin building up a tight ensemble, though the recording itself was not completed until said band had safely broken up, meaning that I ended up playing the majority of bass parts myself even though that was not my role in this band and we used a few different drummers, only a couple of which I’d played these songs live with, and I dragged in a fleet of singers to do various backing parts so it wouldn’t just be me singing against myself.

Note: Among the many session musicians on this is one Hal Thorsrud, who now teaches ancient philosophy at Agnes Scott college in Georgia.

Continuing this thread, a multi-movement horn trio: “Ron Visits the Land of Insanity.”

I think these undoubtedly very talented music school players practiced this once together before coming into my class to try to get through this, and I put them through some mighty indignities including trombone parts written much too low and choreographed coughing. I see I’m going for a Gothic soundtrack kind of thing; I recall my TA telling me afterward, “If you have strings play chord clusters like that, they’ll sound like magic, but horns doing that just sounds like horns playing chord clusters.”

My guesswork regarding chronology is growing slightly firmer, though without actual printed evidence: This and Week 20’s entry I now think came from Fall 1991, with that project being the mid-term and this the final, but then again it could have been Spring 1992.

Here’s another, earlier music composition class piece of weirdness: “Argument Leading to Death.” I’m thinking now that my week 19 entry was likely from the early spring of 1993, while this one was from late fall of 1992 in the previous semester’s class. I think I decided it would require less effort this time around if for the class performance I just brought in a tape of something I’d put down at home, and this was it.

I’m playing electric bass here, and my roommate Sanj Ghogale (now a doctor in the navy) is playing alto sax. Sanj has been my friend since early high school and played in my high school band The Backdrop, whose small body of work I will eventually post. We recorded this on my 4-track recording, which gave us the advantage of being able to punch in a lot, which means that instead of playing the song all the way through, you just play a phrase (or more) and then stop, then you can punch in and do the next part. This is a totally routine way of doing things in the studio (for parts like backing vocals, anyway; it’s not so easy with, say, drum kit) and really lets you perfect your parts, or even make them up as you’re recording. In this case, I had sheet music written out, so this was merely a matter of us being able to get the recording created without having to practice very much. Still, I guess this is proof that I did start playing bass by reading music in orchestras, and this may have been the last time I ever really had to read a part written out on a staff as a bass player.

Is anyone actually enjoying these pseudo-classical pieces? I’ll admit that while I seem to treasure to the point of fetish even a lot of my old songs that were too crummy to have ever been recorded, I’d totally forgotten about this until I went just now through my tapes, and the same goes for last week’s entry. Listening back to this very loud on headphones, though, I kind of like it.

This week I’ve dived into digitizing old cassette tapes and waded through a couple of unlistenable options before coming across this thing that you might find interesting. “What happens in music composition class stays in music composition class,” goes the old saying, but I’m letting out some of the hell: a song called “Patriotism,” composed in (I think) 1992 and performed in class with me singing (my TA advised me afterwards that I should really use a real singer for these things) and a classmate named Jeanne (whose name I didn’t know the correct pronunciation to, and so never called her anything) playing piano.

You may, if you listen to this tune, notice that it is really f’in weird. It uses a text that I believe I chose semi-randomly from a book I owned but had not read; by Googling I see that it was Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1956). The melody jumps all over the place and the rhythm has lots of odd stops in it, so the combined effect is of a mad poetry reading. Well, such were the expectations of what constitutes “serious” music in a music school composition class in the early ’90s (I can’t say whether this has changed since then). If you use regular tonality and rhythm, then you’re doing fake Mozart, like writing a poem where you only quote lines from other poems with minor variations off of them (which describes most rock lyrics, come to think of it). Think of tonality like a language; if you want to say something worth saying, i.e. that hasn’t already been said before many many times, then you have to put things together in different combinations, though you’re still using the same tricks in making it non-random than you would ordinarily: you (well, this is the way I did it, anyway) make things more major to arrive at a resolution, you use rhythms to convey energy level (even if in this case the energy is frantic and whimsical, like paint splashes on an avant garde painting). Unlike the extremes of 12-tone anti-melodic, anti-harmonic, mathematically determined music, this is still supposed to be expressive, though maybe not that fun to listen to.

So, anyway, this is the first time I’ve aired one of my six or seven music school creations (only a couple of which I have recorded; posting hand-written sheet music is probably not as fun for you readers). I’ve hung a lot of my “cred” on this over the years, i.e. that I was a composition minor (unofficially… I took a lot of music school classes), and so I had to actually write notes down and learn some theory and how to write parts for horns and strings and things. Truth be told, my exploration into that whole area was interesting and informative for me, but pretty limited: a matter of four or five courses writing two or three pieces in each, never for more than a few instruments, and I never got to the point where my brain was really connected to the notes on paper, enabling me to just write down melodies in my head without the aid of a piano or conversely to sight read or interpret scores with any particular effectiveness. Since leaving undergrad, I only recall one occasion where I actually used my writing/arranging skills: I got a chance to arrange a simple string quartet part for a song used in my wedding ceremony.

Nonetheless, other people may explain the complexity of their artistic world view through extensive experience with drugs; I had this instead.

…Almost done polishing the turd that is this old demo. Here’s a Pink Floyd-y song of mine called “To Valerie,” written for a girl by that name in my second month or so of college (fall of ‘89). I believe it was elicited when I went to knock on her dorm room and a male voice said “Go away!” so I went and recorded a demo of this by myself and delivered the tape to her room then and there, presumably with the guy (who was presumably her older boyfriend from before she started school, whom she would soon break up with, not that that helped my chances) still in there making out with her. Just pathetic.

Though this is one of the most stylistically derivative things I’ve ever written (if you’re familiar with late 70s Pink Floyd, you’ll get it), it was one of the longest lasting tunes in the MayTricks set list, one they even played a bit (I think) after my departure from Ann Arbor for grad school in Texas (the band changed its name to “Fingers,” got another bass player, and played for another year before they got sick of each other; strangely, I was acting as glue between these strange personalities). Yes, it’s dark, and desperate, and doesn’t have much of a beat to it, and so is really not appropriate for bar/party/dance situations. I still periodically think about making the lyrics less embarrassing, smoothing out the drum part and reintroducing it into the set.

I never particularly liked this demo version because of the general out-of-tuneness between the guitars and in the vocal, some rhythmic problems (which I’ve improved somewhat for this remix), and mostly because our fill-in rhythm guitarist of the day changed my main guitar part (the one that starts off the song) to what you hear here; the part on “So Chewy” is what it’s supposed to sound like. Still, the lead guitar and keys make it a more thorough Pink Floyd rip-off than our later version, which is the spirit of the tune, after all. The weird vocal effect throughout is caused by my singing while we were doing the instruments getting picked up by the drum mics, so you’re essentially hearing me double-tracked throughout. The giant vocal reverb washes that emerge a couple times during the song (e.g. going into the guitar solo) were on the 1991 version, not something I added now.

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.

Not music, this time, but music commentary (sort of), a philosophy of music, if you will: “On Music Appreciation.”

One of the tasks of this weekly routine is to digitize old cassettes, and this is a bit of “Mark’s Diary” from 1978-79, so I believe I was in 3rd grade at the time. I’ve edited it so as to keep it from being totally unbearable. Here I lament the current anti-artistic climate pervading current sleepovers and treat you to some musical comedy stylings. The straight man is my dad. I had no idea until listening back to this that apparently my “favorite song” of the time was an elevator music version of “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel.