Ahhh...the good old days

I was cleaning some shit out of the attic this morning, every once in a while dad insists on some spring cleaning (Yeah, thanks, I know it's damned near fall. I didn't say it made any sense...), and I came upon some boxes of old band stuff. Mostly old set lists, tour itineraries, prescriptions for antibiotics. You know, just meaningless, trivial things that everyone hangs onto for the sake of reminiscing years later. Funny how it all ends up in our attic and not at one of the band guys' places. Right at the bottom of one of the boxes was a set of funny looking smaller boxes. I cracked them open and inside were some odd spools of tape that were about four or five inches across. I did some research on the net and found out they were from something called a reel-to-reel tape recorder. So I went and asked Dad about them. He said that somewhere in the attic I could probably find a reel-to-reel machine that I could play them on.

After another hour of digging, I found the machine. I called up the guys and we took a listen to the tapes. Seems the memories came flooding back. The boys laughed, they winced, they cried. They were obviously moved. I thought the tapes sounded like shit, but then again, this is stuff they did before I was outta diapers. And no, it wasn't from the 60's or anything, the band just couldn't afford to get any time in a real studio, so they recorded this stuff in a garage of some guy named Biff, who 'claimed' to be an 'engineer'. I think he meant sanitation engineer. This stuff sounded like crap.

There was one song called "(Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth 'Cause I'm) Kissing You Goodbye", which is kind of funny, but the bass sound on it was more like the death throes of a killer whale. Tommy Gunns told me that he'd done the bass tracks on that tune and it sounded like that because Biff had become so frustrated with the band's progress on the track that he'd taken Tommy bass and beat it against a cement wall. He bent the neck, and knocked two of the tuning keys off, so Tommy had played the bass parts on only two strings that he couldn't even tune. A trick later copied, in a slightly different way, by Chris Ballew.

On another track, this one called "You're The Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly", the drums sound like someone is beating on upside-down Tupperware with some wooden spoons. Likki was quick to explain that it sounds like that because he was beating on some upside-down Tupperware with some wooden spoons. He told me not to ask why. So I didn't.

The last song (well, the last song I could sit through) was called "Ophiolatry On A Hemocite Platter". Now, I told Johnny Emaxx that I had absolutely no idea what the hell that title meant and that I couldn't understand a damned word of the whole song, but that I thought it was the best song of the bunch. He smacked me in the head and told me I was an idiot. I asked him what the hell that was about...just as he pulled the reels off of the machine and reversed them. Seems the whole song had played backwards. Oh well, what the hell do I know?

Anyway, there's nothing better on a dreary summer morning than looking back over past glories (?). Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

'Til tomorrow...


Eli Finkelstein (Cy's kid)