|
PANDORA'S BOX hollis stoneDerek Burch became a really close friend. He stopped by once, in 1985, with an old, beat-up reel-to-reel machine he’d found somewhere and nursed back to life (Derek was really good with electronic repair). He also had a, I kid you not, Timex drum machine, one of the earliest non-Linn, non-Oberheim drum machines. It was really bad. We set up shop in my living room and recorded Summer of ‘75, my tribute to Lolo, one of my best friends’ kid sister, whom I once had an inappropriate crush on (I was 17, she was 13. Heaven forbid). The track was awful, but Derek and I had fun recording it, tickled by the notion of recording our own studio tracks at home. Karen picked up on my giddiness and bought me a 4-track cassette recorder, the Tascam PortaStudio, for my birthday. I went out and bought a bass, a red Ibanez. Could I actually play bass? No, as Aaron Hall (late of Teddy Riley’s group Guy) proved the first night I brought it to church. Hall borrowed my bass and played up a storm, then handed it back to me, leaving me sitting there, dumfounded about what to do with the thing. I got a Roland TR-707 drum machine, and immediately started making my demos at home. I had no clue whatsoever what I was doing, as my bizarre cover of Louie, Louie certainly attests. I think I covered that song because there was a Louie, Louie contest on the radio with a cash prize for the best cover. I didn’t win. Michael came over and did the vocal. The tape, now 14 years old, deteriorated quite a bit, so Michael’s vocals are unintelligible. Of course, so were the vocals on the original Louie, Louie. Here my big influence presented itself in this attempt at the Minneapolis sound freshly minted by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ monster track I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. I tried to copy that song’s reckless coke-fiend-on-the-Autobahn over-the-top head banging, but I had not much clue what I was doing. Love Letter #2 was a song I’d written back in 1979 for a girl named Brenda. She was in William’s New Witness Band, and I adored her. But she had a few bats in her belfry; I mean, Brenda was always kind of unavailable in a really Zen way. I picked up the line, Like falling rain brings life, you brought life to me in this compilation’s finale, Chapter 4’s If I Should Perish. I didn’t really get the hang of the 4-track thing until I moved into Hidden Lake, a luxury apartment community in North Brunswick, NJ. Karen and I unofficially broke up in 1986, though she didn’t move out for nine months after. Some weekends, Derek Burch and John Parker would come up to the house and work on some music. John always wanted to work on some music. He was a very dedicated musician, who thought only of his art, But he was also a generous musician, who could play my songs as enthusiastically as his own.
So, by 1986 Qab was a good friend, and it came to pass one long weekend, John, Derek, and Qab came over, sleeping on my floor and sofas, while we cut tracks all weekend on the PortaStudio. I’d met Glen Alexander in a Rutgers University Chinese restaurant, where he was playing elaborate New Age stuff out of cheat books and necromantic box charts. He joined the guys at my house to do Eddie Van Halen riffs on I Don’t Wanna Be Your Friend, Joyce, and Bustin’ Out— tunes that ended up in a demo I called Girls. Noisy, unlistenable stuff, I recorded most of this on metal bias cassettes, which meant High End City. Most of Chapter 2 is pretty painful, literally, to listen to. What The Heck was me getting into those pretentious “intros” a lot of bands were starting to do, while borrowing whatever I could from my heroes, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. I Don't Wanna Be Your Friend sprang out of a conversation with Qab. It’s designed to sound like a riff from The Time, a narcissistic romp meant to open shows by undermining the fake rapport artists are supposed to build with their audiences. The most interesting thing about this track is my Billy Cobham drum track, a very involved and complex program that took me almost 10 hours to create. Daddy was my Jam and Lewis take on the song from Streetwise. I did not recruit Michael to sing it because I didn’t feel like driving the hour and a half each way to pick him up. The song has some interesting ideas, but the wretched playing and high noise make this a really painful experience. The laughable “drum solo” that grinds everything to a halt doesn’t help much, either. I do, however, revel in the track’s off-kilter drum pattern, something I’m certain would have earned me The Look from Lester. Oddly enough, he liked it when I played it for him. Yikes, that was the last time I saw him, around 1988 or so. Qabid literally screamed at me for not letting him play bass on this. He was right. Joyce was my one and only dalliance with Country & Western musical styles. Inspired by my beloved first cousin who lives in (gotta say it a thick hick accent) Nashville, I fell madly and completely in love with this woman the moment I laid eyes on her (I met her for the first time when we were in our 20’s). She became the standard, the bench mark by which to compare and rate potential mates. I’ve promised myself if I ever find someone who is half the woman Joyce is, I’d marry them on the spot. I loved this track and still do. The oddest thing happening here is Qabid, the funkmeister, grooving with startling ease and serious melodic craft and wit through the winding labyrinth of this square-dancer. I actually marveled at how comfortable he was with the tune, never really giving it a second thought. To Qab, a tune was a tune was a tune. If Qab liked a tune, he’d play the hell out of it, no matter who wrote it. He was, in many ways, the Anti-William. And, while he was at best marginally aware of William, William disliked Qab intensely. John Parker, at the session, was annoyed that I opted to not put any keys on the track. Joyce is the only tune I’ve ever done that doesn’t have a keyboard part (until I Know You Don’t Believe, Yanick’s vignette in Chapter 4). If You Only Knew marked a brief but ugly period in my life when I was completely obsessed with Nancy, an old friend from summer camp. We’d met when I was around 15 and she was 13, skinny and tomboyish, standing on a knoll outside the camp kitchen, mocking me while I worked inside as a dishwasher. She was Lucy Van Pelt to my Charlie Brown, and it wasn’t until we bumped into each other again as adults that any real attraction presented itself. Nancy, now an attorney and married to some extremely well-trained fellow, had this yes-no, come closer-go away thing going on with her. And I, back in my more co-dependent days, went along with any program she tossed out. The most significant thing about the relationship was she didn’t actually seem to like me. I had long hair and wore freaky clothes. But by the time Nancy got done with me, I looked like an accountant. I became exactly the man she, by design, invented. And then she got bored and moved on to torture someone else. If You Only Knew was written, essentially, to try and impress her. I’m not sure she ever really listened to it (or any of the things I wrote about her) with any meaningful insight. Summer Of ‘75 was the more or less official recording of this whiny tribute to missed opportunity. Of course, Lolo, the flower of innocence I had such a secret crush on, actually turned out to have been, at 13, far more experienced than I was at 17. Maybe more experienced than I am now. The reality of Lolo’s sophisticated handling of me— her complete sexual and emotional dominance— was the first and best example of my chronic isolation from reality. Summer reflected the fantasy of what I wanted life to be. What I wanted her to be, when the reality was all around me, people were gently orbiting in a kind of loving deference to my lunacy and innocence. I was The Man Who Knew Much Too Little about everyone and everything. Absolutely everyone in my life was lying to me. Most of them still are. Gentle lies, for sure. But everyone from my mother and sister to Lolo and my friends to Nancy The Terrible told me basically what I wanted to hear. I was like this mentally challenged 12 year-old, beloved by a world of liars. I finally realized how simple and naive I was, how great a subject of pity and derision, the night I caught myself stalking Nancy. Totally in Obsessive Mode, one night I drove the hour and a half from Hidden Lake to her house in Bayside, sat on the hood of my car and waited for her to come home. I actually thought I was being cute, or romantic. But as the hours dragged on, it finally dawned on me, Nancy is on a DATE. And, worse, You REALLY don’t want to be here when she gets home. My God, I suddenly realized, I was stalking her. I was one of those guys, the pathetic losers who own official replicas of Star Trek uniforms. I sped out of there, went home, and wrote Gotta Getcha Outta My Life. Nancy was poison. She didn’t even like me, and I’m not sure I even liked her. But there was some kind of chemistry. Some sick attraction. And I wanted out. Post Nancy there was Monica The Unbelievably Beautiful Model. She was one of those tall, lithe, unnaturally thin women with biologically implausible bustlines and eyes you could lose yourself in. We became close, but couldn’t quite close the boyfriend/girlfriend deal because of two things: one, she was so attractive she’d literally stop traffic. And I became horribly self-conscious when we’d go places and people would, I am not lying to you, stop talking when we walked in. Jaws would drop, and then, the gawkers would stare at me, as if to say, Why is she with him?!? The other problem was, like Nola Darling in She’s Gotta Have It, Monica was seeing three other guys and wasn’t able or willing to give them up. So we never really made it far as a couple, and I sneered out Frank+Timmy+Angelo as a kind of adios! to that relationship. Which led to Yanick, the somber half of the twins who sang on the first studio projects. Annoyed at Monica, and finally wanting to be rid of her, I started digging through my black book looking for Pasha’s phone number. Pasha was Brenda’s sister (Love Letter #2) and, while Brenda was a serious space case, Pasha seemed to be a bit more accessible, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to see what was what. Pasha and Brenda and her family had moved, though, so I kept flipping in the book until I stumbled across Yanick’s name. We got back in touch and it was, for me, love at first sight. But she was seeing someone else at the time, for which I was actually grateful, considering I didn’t want to be in love with anybody. But the fact I could even feel that way about her- about anybody- left me elated beyond words. It meant I was finally over Nancy. And, just like that, I realized I felt nothing for Nancy at all. I’d been let out of jail. Which gave me the impetus for I Used To Sing Like Prince, which I actually wrote for Yanick, though I did send it to Nancy who, big shock, actually listened to it and seemed hurt by it. Whatever. One door closes, one opens. I fell in love with Yanick at a showcase her band was having at Sweetwaters on Manhattan’s upper West Side. I knew it was possible to fall for her, so I had been more or less avoiding her, but she talked me into coming. Arriving at the club, I found a panic-stricken Yanick whose bandleader had locked some of their equipment in the trunk of his car. She put her arms around me for comfort, fell into my arms, and I fell in love. I spent the rest of the evening feeling like the world’s biggest idiot. I met Rachelle at the club that night. Rachelle was closely tied into Yanick and her twins' orbit, but I didn’t realize it at the time. Yanick was still seeing this other guy, and I, anxious to not be in love with her, pursued Rachelle into something that felt a lot more like a stock transaction than a romance. There was a girl from Boston, she wasn’t very tall... my mean-spirited limerick from Chapter 4’s She Likes To Fool Around pretty much summed up the relationship. I really liked her, I really wanted the relationship to be more than it was. I was still The Man Who Knew Much, Much Too Little. The Man Who Was Lied To By Literally Everyone He Ever Met. And, in retrospect, Rachelle was right. I got it wrong. Love Letter #3 was written for Rachelle and sent to her during a particularly down period in her life. She seemed annoyed by it and kind of blew it off. I’d committed a kind of cardinal sin: caring about her. It sent the relationship into a spiral and never really recovered. Like I said, I got it wrong. Years later, I now realize Rachelle was probably the most honest and healthy relationship I’ve had. This song also marked the introduction of my new Yamaha 1204 mixing board. It was, and still is, a huge piece of real estate. A 12x4x2 [+4] board, I had to use all of these step-down transformers so the XLR [+4] outs could talk to my RCA [-10] inputs. It was a really stupid choice for a recording console (it’s actually a P.A. console), but it had tons of headroom and was exceptionally clean. The production values in my little studio shot way up, as I clumsily learned how to use the board by trial and error. Mostly error. Love Letter #3 was one of the first songs I attempted to record in stereo, no easy task when you’re dealing with serious low-end 4-track stuff. Reading up on Bruce Sweiden’s “Acusonic” process, I stumbled onto the concept of half-speed mixing. This involved flipping a switch on my high-speed Tascam 246 4-track so it would play back at half-speed, and mixing down the 4 music tracks to a stereo mix on another DBX deck. Then I would take the new tape, put it in the 246, flip the switch back to high speed, and have a clean mix of the music tracks with virtually no noise and little generation loss. Then I’d bounce vocal tracks, building a choir or whatever I wanted back there, and all of it super clean and quiet. My close friend M.D. “Doc” Bright played bass on Love Letter #3, complaining bitterly about everything, the way he does. Don’t You Care About Me? was my great declarative statement to Yanick, sent to her sometime in 1988. I think we’d been married two years when I played it on the stereo and she paused, asking, “What’s that?” I told her it was the song I wrote declaring my love for her, the one I’d sent her three years before. She’d never listened to it. Doc played bass on this one as well, and I’d recruited my neighbor’s son to sing lead on this originally, but later erased him and tried it myself. I believe Don’t You... was the last song recorded on the old PortaStudio, as I’d just bought the nosebleed expensive Tascam 246 high speed deck. This is a first pass of South Road, my outreach to my sister. It’s the only track Karen sang on. I’ve recently found out Karen has always wanted to sing (and is singing now), but somehow, back then, I’d missed that. Maybe I was as selfish a musician, in my own way, as William was. This is stereo also, and now I was getting better at using the board. Hidden Satanic Message is Ecco, or some part of Ecco, played backwards. I’d mounted the reels wrong on my reel-to-reel, and thought it sounded cool. Fantasy sprang out of my certainty that Monica The Model was out of my league. She was. And she wasn’t. This was mono, recorded on the old PortaStudio on a metal bias tape. Eccch. Glen’s guitar work is superb here, though. I really wish I’d done a better job with this. New Strings is off of Gotta Getcha Outta My Life. I’d discovered my little combo keyboard amp had a direct out on it, and I could play my bass through it and get a much cleaner sound. When This Is Over was written in loving memory of James Edward Crockett, Junior, who died of medical negligence at age 1. A toddler taken in for minor surgery, given a wrong anesthetic mix, slipped into a coma and never woke up. This was James’ son, and we all sat vigil with he and his wife for several days. This was my nephew, my godson. It was a tragic of inestimable proportions, and it nearly destroyed us all. This song is taken from the 61st Psalm, For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy. Christopher J. Priest |
|
TOP
OF PAGE
|
We’re
skipping out of sequence somewhat, jumping to work done after Chapter 3’s
Desperado, where I recruited an amazing bass player named