One of my favorite songs, The Last Waltz was written in 1969. It was first committed to tape in the backyard of a friend and when you listen to it, you can hear the ambient sounds of a summer afternoon.
I plan to include a few seconds of the original recording on the next CD because it has that energy of goofy young guys fooling around during summer vacation. With a very serious song. Why a waltz? Because I wanted to try to write a song in ¾ time. Why the Last Waltz? Because for some reason I had become convinced that the world was going to end in August. Could it be that I had finished high school and was headed to first year University? It never occurred to me at the time but now it seems abundantly evident that I was terrified about the direction my life was taking.
Where would I be
Without an alarm
Without someone there
Always shaking my arm.
I still remember writing those lines. Over forty years ago. That’s how big an impact a few words and a couple of chords can have on my strange little brain.
Many of the songs on 271 and Unevolved and Too Long Stupid Too Short Smart are composed of old archival recordings, some between 20-30 years old. Baloney was first recorded in Oakbank one night in 1993 when my two daughters were away at piano lessons. I used a classic DIY drum kit that had eight very basic clunky presets that was built by Larry Korba (shown above in his cluttered basement with his brother who grew up to be a pretty good guitar player), a high school friend who loved kit building. All I had at that point was a drum track and a guitar. I’m not sure why I kept it but there was something I liked about the dopey percussion sound.
Then in 2008 I transferred the cassette recording to digital and added another guitar track. In 2010 I decided to either fix it or send it to the big trashcan in the sky. So I cut out about a dozen bars with Audacity and recorded a bass line. You can hear the same drum machine in the piece So Long, the basic track and voice which was recorded on a sunny Saturday in the living room of our home on Sun Valley Drive around 1988-89. This was a case of desperately wanting to just record the idea before I forgot it completely. The words were literally spontaneous to the recording and were never written down; one take on a beat up old reel to reel recording machine that I had bought used for $25. It died shorlty after that but I was able to transfer the recording to a cassette tape before it expired.
Lyrics from so long. hat kept them from flying off inside the machine. Then I strummed a few notes and I still remember how excited I was. Of course, I thought I just invented something new. That sound bite is called Good Good Riddance (1968) Another voice from the subconscious because all I cared about was the fuzzy sound and only added some words to see what would happen. I have the first song I ever wrote but I also have a recording of the first time I discovered distortion. In a tiny bedroom in Selkirk Manitoba. I dropped a very inexpensive microphone that I borrowed from the school AV department (a buddy volunteered there) into the sound hole on my guitar and then turned up the record volume until the little red needles on the tape recorder were bouncing against the little pegs that kept them from flying off inside the machine. Then I strummed a few notes and I still remember how excited I was. Of course, I thought I just invented something new. That sound bite is called Good Good Riddance (1968) Another voice from the subconscious because all I cared about was the fuzzy sound and only added some words to see what would happen. My brother Tim was inside the bedroom closet in Selkirk, using a mic our band used when we played and practiced. It was that classic style, a very tough and robust mic with all kinds of little mic holes and inputs cut into the stainless steel body. I’m guessing he sang this song because he knew the words. Doing the math I’m guessing he was 14.
