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Okay, some time back I promised to digitize my high school garage band’s recordings. The band was called Sound and Fury, after the fragment of MacBeth that the highly esteemed Mr. Larmier made his Sophomore English class memorize:
She should have died hereafter
There would have been time for such a word —
To-morrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Which is an appropriately nihilistic sentiment for a bunch of 15-year-olds! I went back to the text for line-breaks and punctuation, but I can still recite that sucker by heart. Mr. Larimer approved very much of our naming the band after his favorite Shakespeare quotation.
My friend Garrett Delavan and I started the band together in our Sophomore year. He was playing drums, I was guitar and vocals, and we recruited our friend Matt Rogers for bass. Matt was a year ahead of us, and was a fairly good bassist, but he fell into the trap we all fell into at that point: we didn’t know how to listen to each other. Basically you had three guys playing their own music, and they happened to be together on the stage.
Before long we’d included Rudi into it. Rudi played clarinet, which we did our best to add into the arrangement. It never really worked having a clari in a rock band, but we tried. After Matt graduated, we put Rudi on bass. I taught him to play bass one day at Kostas Restaurant, leaving him with a sketch of a guitar fingerboard on a napkin. He turned himself into a very decent bassist, with only that training!
We had some other personnel come through the band at various times. Our senior year we had a guy named Art on drums, to free Garrett up for guitar. Art was a great guy, a ski bum, and a heavy-duty druggie. Pretty decent drummer, but not subtle. He ODed and died the year after we all graduated. My kid brother Willy drummed with us occasionally, though I don’t think he ever performed with us. A girl named Alison, who was in the class below ours, played guitar with us for a while. She was mostly in the band because I had a massive crush on her. What can I say.
We did about half covers and half originals. If we were playing today, you’d probably call us a jam band–mostly our songs were about a context for fooling around. You can hear that in particular in the two instrumentals I have here. The level of musicianship is… well, low. There are some very wince-inducing moments, to be sure, but the general impression I was left with, after listening to this for the first time in 15 years is: we ROCKED, D00D!!
The recording I have here is one of several we made, but the only one I know of that has survived. We did record a 20-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”, which we called “S’God”, but I have no idea where that might have gotten to. Rudi or Garrett, if you have anything else we recorded, I’d love to know about it!
This “album”, which we called “Songs Found in the Attic” was a mixture of live recordings from a show we did in our school library, and studio (well… basement) recordings. It’s funny, I have a very visual memory of recording most of these tunes. I can picture what room we were in and where everyone was standing…
On the live numbers, Art is on drums, Rudi on bass, Garrett on backing guitar (and some lead), and I’m on lead guitar and vocals. Any deviation from that, I’ll note by the track. Also, note that these are digitized at a pretty low volume because the louder it got, the more overpowering the tape hiss became. The live tunes were recorded on a boom-box in the middle of the audience. The studio (well… basement) recordings were done on a cassette-tape 4-track recorder. The audio engineering is about the same quality as the musicianship.
UPDATE: Thanks to Rudi’s now-much-more-advanced sound engineering skills, the mp3s now all sound much better. He cleaned up much of the noise and brought the levels up. Whole thing’s much punchier and cleaner now. Thanks, Rudi!
Okay, so, without further ado: I present Sound and Fury’s Songs Found in the Attic, which I’m releasing under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license. Support the Creative Commons, folks!
01 - Every Day.MP3 (stream)- This song was our “opener”. Written by Garrett and me, we often performed it with a little digital delay on the vocals. It was (as you’ll hear) almost the only tune we did with clean guitar. In this particular recording, we started this song as we opened the doors to the library, after our set up and sound check, so we’re playing it as people come in. I had fun saying hello to my classmates as they came in the door.
02 - Sweet Home.MP3 (stream)- By Lynard Skynard. This is a… naive cover of Sweet Home Alabama. Evidently we recorded this before we learned anything other than the main phrase of the song. We recorded this in Garrett’s basement, which had more room in it than mine did. I remember that day–we kept having to FORCE ourselves not to talk after each song, so we could get a clean recording. We spoiled several takes by going “WOOO!” after the last chord.
03 - Song Number Seven.MP3 (stream) - Another Delavan and Ray composition. This was one of our most popular originals, and we played it at every show we ever did. There’s a real nasty bit of tape flutter right around 2:50 that was on the master. Like I said, high school audio engineering.
04 - Roadhouse Blues.MP3 (stream) - by The Doors. This one was fun. We obviously didn’t have a harmonica player, so I covered the harmonica part on guitar.
05 - See Also.MP3 (stream) - A Delavan/Ray original. This song is a great example of the sheer freaking brilliance of Garrett’s lyrics. I think he came up with them after a trip to the optometrist:
Baby
You belong with me
Like black and white woman
Belongs on a colorblind TV.
And baby,
I belong with you
Like a hollow-hearted man
Belongs in a tunnel-vision tube.
These are near-sighted eyes I’m looking through.
And the way I see it babe, I gotta be close to you.
Check out the cool “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2″ quotes in my guitar solo, too! Aren’t I slick?
06 - Come Together.MP3 (stream) - by The Beatles. We had fun mangling this classic song. Rudi’s on bass, I’m on guitar. I think Garrett is playing drums on this one. This was in Garrett’s basement, same day as Sweet Home, above.
07 - Hey Look at Me.MP3 (stream) - Delavan, Ray. Okay, so Garrett’s lyrics weren’t always so great. Still, I think this is a pretty cool song.
08 - Hey Joe.MP3 (stream) - One of two Hendrix covers we did. I really wish we had a recording of us doing “Little Wing”, but it’s lost to the ravages of time.
09 - French Thing - Peter Gunn.MP3 (stream) - A Dan Ray original followed by a crowd-pleasing piece of filler. Here’s a secret I don’t think my Spanish- or German-learning bandmates ever knew: I was making up these lyrics as I went along!
10 - Instrumental #1 (stream) - Delavan, Ray, Ray, Riet. This was an improvised jam tune based on a theme of Garrett’s. Willy’s on the drums here. I can’t remember if I’m on guitar and Garrett’s on bass or vice-versa. Rudi is playing the keyboard and supplying “neayh”s. We’re in my basement this time. This thing actually had a name, but I think those brain cells are being taken up with Regular Expression syntax now.
11 - Instrumental #2 (stream) - Delavan, Ray, Riet. Again, improvised around a theme by Garrett. That’s him on guitar, and I’m playing (some might say over-playing) drums. There are some places where my second tom overloads the mic and the whole recording level drops. These moments sound tantalizingly like a fade-out, but… no, there are still several minutes left to listen to. This song might have been titled “How to wring a 5-minute song out of an 8-beat riff”. This was recorded upstairs at Garrett’s house, in the room that his brother moved out of when he went to college. It’s a very small room for this much sound!
12 - Comfortably Numb.MP3 (stream) - Pink Floyd. This may be the worst Comfortably Numb cover of all time. There are some bands that are known for their tight vocal harmonies. We weren’t one of them. But you’ve got to give us credit for trying, right? Right? I think Garrett is on bass. I believe the second voice straining to hit the harmony line is Rudy, though I’m not certain. I think that must be Willy on drums–and I feel for his ride cymbal arm. I actually don’t have any memory of recording this, or even that we covered this song at all! This recording is so wretched, I must have repressed the memory entirely.
I can’t believe I’m scooping Rudi on this one…
All four members of Pink Floyd will be reuniting for next months’ Live 8 concert to fight African Poverty at Hyde Park, London on July 2. As you might expect, the concert is organized by Pink himself, Bob Geldof.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Pink Floyd to play Live 8 show
Romance at the intersection of ubiquitous-wifi, social networking, and egocasting.
http://www.al3x.net/archives/2005/02/22/they-stopped-calling-it-rendezvous