Winter Palace release now on Bandcamp

Winter Palace, Veteran's Day, Music And Candlelight and Listen are now on Bandcamp. Also Provisionally Yours, Instrumental For Plug, so on . . . 

ye olde J-card

Provisionally Yours, Someone In There, At Night

Provisionally Yours


Somewhere around the spring of 1985 I had the presence of mind to go shopping for an actual guitar amp.

Through the Auto Trader I found a Fender Twin Reverb for sale. The owner was an electrical engineer who lived in Eclipse, worked for GE and gigged in country bands. He was looking to sell the Twin and get a more reliable Peavey combo instead. I liked the amp, he showed how to check speaker polarity with a battery and that was it.

Soon after I was putting that tremelo & reverb to heavy use recording the likes of Provisionally Yours and working up my Howard Devoto impression.


Someone In There



At Night



This was recorded some years after being written. I like it musically and like the arrangement done here. Even tho' this meant to be a classic unreliable narrator kind of tune, the lyrics still spook me.

Literal minded folk (of either a dark or a protective frame of mind) be warned--this just ain't your song. Go behave.

Comfort Waltz, Winter Palace, Hear Me Call

Comfort Waltz



Winter Palace


Hear Me Call

All three songs were written in the mid 1980s. All bear some grandiose notions-- the latter two wanting to be something like Fairport Convention circa "Tale In Hard Time" with a touch of Mission of Burma, Hüsker Dü, et al.

(Yeah, go ahead, laugh . . .)

Whatever they are or aren't in terms of concept or execution, they are some of my faves.

Gratuitous geek note: Hear Me Call might be one of the first things I recorded with anything sequenced besides a drum machine. Indeed, I used the band's Roland TR-505 drum machine as a rudimentary sort of MIDI sequencer to drive my bandmate Dale's Korg Poly-800. Still doing the passing between two cassette decks trick, I could record the drums, a very basic synth bass and whatever live stuff in one pass.

The versions of the others were recorded later on with, at the very least, the best MIDI gear a Caldor or a Lechmere could offer.

Veteran's Day, Listen, Music and Candlelight

Veteran's Day


Here's another fave of mine, another bigger and better than me surprise.

Being just enough of a geek to connect my old two tapedeck recording setup to a mixing board (my bandmate Dale's ARP gizmo), I could do almost decent recording of songs. Something of a old habit that was now half-justified (& half-obviated) by playing in a band. I could record demos . . .

Being more of a control addict than a team player, I'd get all fancy with the production and effects galore. And thanks to Dale, there was a Roland drum machine to do my rhythmic bidding.

Listen


This is another demo recording.

There's also a studio version that Dale, band mates Dan and Dan and I recorded as Nobody Home. By that time, the song had been kicking around a while, but I still liked it. I still thought of it as a pleasant surprise.

Music and Candlelight


Years before this recording, my friend Bob and I were loitering in our friend Pete's apartment. It was in Paris, someplace I'd never been and would likely never go again. Montmartre was close by and we could see Sacre-Coeur Cathedral through the window. Strumming along on Pete's classical, this song kinda just fell out of thin air.

In like fashion, this recording came along. Thrown in there was the sound of my brother Alex's verdigris'd saxophone (same one used on Grunt Grunt Pig). Not really planned, not really perfect, it was yet another surprise.