I finally got some Digital Audio CD-Rs. I almost gave up on them and had decided that they weren't even manufactured anymore. But good ole K-Mart...they got a nice big shipment just a few days ago, so I dispatched my wife to purchase some. My plan is to dub as many of my old tapes to CD as I possibly can. These cassettes are ancient, some older than 25 years, so I don't imagine they're gonna be much good for anytning before too long. I've got several hundred, so there's no way I'm gonna ever get all of them transferred to disc. Which is just fine, because probably 80% of the stuff is junk, anyway. I'll have to pick and choose what I consider to be worth saving and let the rest go to waste. I did this a couple of years back, but I got bored and by the time I decided I wanted to do it again the cassette deck I'd been using had bitten the dust. My son hasn't been using his stereo these days (having gotten an iPod for Christmas) so he let me hook it up to my CD burner and now I'm in business.
My first project was to dub Johnny Bravo's first "album", as opposed to our first recording session, which was only 4 songs long, EP length...I think I've already got it on CD, but I should check. If not, I guess I should have put it on the same disc...Woops. Anyway, it's got 10 songs, most of which were written when we first began playing together. Not to sound immodest, but some of them are very, very good in all respects other than the primitive recording methods. My favorite song from this lot is called "Liberation". Unlike the other ones, "Liberation" was still sort of in it's formative stages when we decided to record it anyway. A real slinky guitar & bass line over some solid drumming and some of the best lyrics our vocalist ever wrote. I can only imagine how awesome this song would have sounded had we the opportunity to flesh it out, polish it up and get it recorded properly. Another track on this tape, "Mozart", sort of got dropped from our repetoire not too long afterwards. That was a terrible shame, in my opinion. Another excellent song with top-notch lyrics and great music to go with them. Everything else on this recording was re-done at a better (ie. REAL) studio in 1996, and those sessions became our one and only CD release.
At the present moment I am transferring a tape from June 1991 onto CD. It's a show I performed with Psycho-Relix, which was the group I happened to be playing with that year (it seems like every year I'm with a different band). The location was Oakridge Home, which was a facility that housed developmentally delayed and/or mentally disabled individuals. I worked there at the time...the people in charge knew I had a band and thought it would be a cool idea for us to play at one of their activities (I'm not sure if it was their idea or mine, but it was a good one). We set up our gear in the cafeteria and waited for the residents to congregate...and when they did, when they heard that first note, let me tell you the place went WILD. We had a crappy little cassette recorder there, for some odd reason, and recorded the festivities. It's one of the funniest tapes I have in my collection. Those guys were hyped up like you wouldn't believe. LOTS of "between-songs appreciation" and the kind of crazy, weird vocal ejaclations you expect from this kind of people. I don't mean that in a bad way...I got no problem with them. Respect them, actually. But there is no denying that when you get 'em together in large groups there is gonna be some serious, and seriously weird, revelry.
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