I'm presently copying old cassette tapes of my "band" -- mainly me, later on with my cousin -- to my computer.
About forty or fifty C-90 cassettes. I'm going through them chronologically, and I'm up to about the fourth.
Aiiee! Fatboy Slim hisself could not pull music out of these tracks.
In fairness, the early ones date back to the late Seventies, when I was a clumsy guitarist and a worse vocalist.
I'm still both, but more discreet these days. Or at least not as loud. I was a good lyric writer, though I wince today at some of my oh-so-clever couplets.
So most of what I've heard so far is a lot of banging around on an acoustic guitar, with some horribly off-key (but oh-so-clever) singing somewhere in the hissing background.
My cousin came along in . . . 1983? and rekindled my interest in music. He was (is) a crackerjack guitarist who could play anything and sounded at times like Jimi Hendrix screaming out of the sky. Come to think of it, he sounded like Jimi throughout each and every song, which made the ballads problematic.
Eventually we hammered out a rough agreement: Verse/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Screaming Guitar Solo/Chorus...etc., and eventually improved to the point where we actually resembled a good garage band on occasion.
I switched to bass guitar (which sounds great no matter how you abuse it); we added some effects pedals and a cheapo Radio Shack mixer; got a better drum machine; learned to multitrack; got a four-voice keyboard; learned how to manage my limited vocal gifts.
But still, this old stuff is so bad, it's funny.
One effort I'll relate. I had read somewhere that Hollywood extras simulating an angry mob were told to mumble "Rhubarb! Rhubarb!" You get a couple hundred people together doing this, and it sounds like an ominous, threatening murmur. Or so they say.
Now I had an idea for a slow tone poem, set to jazz guitar, played in a nightclub. Very atmospheric, smoky, cabaret-ish. So I thought that we could get some of the background texture with the "Rhubarb" chorus. (I don't know precisely why I wanted to mimic an angry mob in a nightclub -- although, if they'd paid any sort of cover charge, I could understand the reaction.)
We copied that several times over. And then, what's a nightclub without tinkling glasses?
Didn't have any of those, but there were a couple of cases of empty beer bottles conveniently at hand (there usually were), so we shook those around for another few overlays. Then we dropped in the guitar and vocal.
Put all together, it was eerie -- it sounded exactly like a couple of losers chanting "Rhubarb! Rhubarb!" while clanking beer bottles together, with the added bonus of an exceedingly lame Beatnik poetry reading.
Sad to say, it never made it on to the album we never made. Maybe I should release it on KaZaA as some rare Allen Ginsburg bootleg?