Cassette Recordings of various bands I was in:
These represent 11 years of time starting in 1987 and ending in 1998 and are mostly lost in time now. Here's some memorable moments caught on cassette.
1987 - My friend Aaron, another guy named Kevin and myself used to play really badly in Aaron's basement after school and record it on a boombox. That's not totally a fair statement because Aaron was several years ahead of himself in the musical developement arena, Kevin and I played badly because we were really inexperienced. Aaron recorded this song on his own using multiple boom boxes to acheive multi-track recording called 'Jamaican Dreams(?)' It was as good as any novelty record ever written and I still crack up when I think up the surrealistic lyrical gems he penned such as '500,000 years have passed me by, but all I got for Christmas was a big bow tie'. For the most you had to be there to appreciate it, I was there and I still appreciate it, 24 years later. Aaron's mother always said it sounded good, but I'm sure what really sounded good was the fact that she knew where her teenage son was and what he was doing with his friends even if the music was 'music' in vaguest sense of the word.
1990 - Aaron and I did a 4 song demo on a 4 track recorder. He played bass guitar and drums and I played guitar. I still sometimes listen to this one. I was going get someone to sing on it, but it never happened. I was thinking that I could send this demo to Mike Varney at Shrapnel records and get a deal to do a solo album.
1996 - I was in a band called Primal Faith with 3 other guys and low and behold, we recorded a couple practices on cassette tape. Back then my day job was working at a bank and everyone there knew I played in a band. No one really said much about that one way or the other but at some point someone did ask if we had ever made a tape. I brought it in and got surprisingly good feedback, but none of my bank coworkers ever showed up for gig.
1997 - Primal Faith went into the "studio" on a couple Sunday nights and recorded 4 songs on cassette. Unfortunately, I don't think this recording really captured us at our best. The biggest problem in retrospect was amp quality. No matter what anyone says, bad gear can kill a band's sound, and the cheap solid state amps we had gave a raw lo-fi sound but not in a good way.
1998 - After Primal Faith fizzled out, a second band called Edgar Blunt was attempted (more on this later) We went into a studio and recorded a 4 song demo on cassette that turned out pretty good. I managed to get a copy of this tape into the hands of Savatage/TSO guitarist Chris Cafferty. I wonder if he ever listened to it or not, or if it just ended up flung out of a tour bus leaving Cincinatti.
I listened to all of these cassettes over and over again. They reprsented small victories and milestones in my musical life. I really wish I could hear them one more time, but that is fleeting nature of life. No dress rehearsals, no rewinds. You get one shot in life sometimes so you better take it. I'm glad I took it back then and committed it to tape. Who knew the day would come that everyone and his brother would be able to do their own digital recording on CD in their bedroom? Not the guys bashing it away in the parent's basements in the late 1980s, that's for sure. I still record my own stuff to this day, even if no one else will ever hear it, because that is the nature of the creative musician.
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