39-40

The Complete 39-40 Project

2011-03-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

So here, in CD-length folders, are all of the tracks created for 39-40.

If you've followed the project, I recommend that you delete all the files you've collected so far and download these instead. I've made numerous corrections to the tagging of the files and in some cases their content over the course of the project; these folders contain the final, definitive versions of the tracks.

Note that these files aren't numbered like individual discs-- they represent one giant 369-track album. But the folders do represent the way they'd fit on 18 separate discs if you burned them like that.

Identically indexed files of all the original versions will follow shortly!

Enjoy.

-Rex

The Complete Source Material for 39-40

2011-03-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

These folders contain the complete collection of 369 original songs and recordings I covered during the project, in the same order. Again, they are presented as one giant 369-track album.

It's the parallel collection, for comparison purposes only. Some of these songs are extremely rare or obscure, and others are common as dirt. The idea here is to provide a quick and easy means of accessing them when listening to or reading about the project.

The folder are a bit larger than the ones for the covers, and I didn't break these down into CD-sized batches as I did with the project songs. This shouldn't cause any trouble other than that these will take a little longer to download.

39-40 Source Material Part 1

39-40 Source Material Part 2

39-40 Source Material Part 3

39-40 Source Material Part 4

Enjoy!

-Rex

369. "Pushing Forty" by Skates & Rays

2011-03-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

This is it. Last post, last song.

I've long planned to reward myself, if I got through this whole thing, with a performance of one of my own compositions as the swan song for 39-40. Prior to the past year, my only real musical identification had been as songwriter-guitarist-singer, honestly pretty much in that order, and I'd barely dabbled in covers at all. A lot has changed with that identification, and not just here on the blog, but it remains pretty amazing that I haven't sung one of my own songs before now (Gen did sing one of my tunes a long time ago, better than I could've). But there you go.

This is an unreleased song that I wrote a few years back. The "original version" featured here is a rough live take from a show at the sadly defunct Scene Bar in Glendale in 2007, I think, when Charlie was briefly a full member of the live band. I chose it so you could hear how fully I copped his guitar part, and not for the first time.

Blah blah blah temp stuff. Woggita woggita woggita. I'll come back and write something better here later. Like, maybe. It's over, people. It's over and I did it. Thank you all; I love you to death.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Vocals, guitars

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

Here's the old one...

"Pushing Forty (Old Live Version)" performed by Skates & Rays

...and here's the very end of the line, people. Play it loud or you won't hear it.

"Pushing Forty" performed by Skates & Rays

368. "Let's Kiss and Make Up" by The Field Mice

2011-03-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

And here is what can only be described as a "bonus track" to the 39-40 project and Foxbase Gamma, although Paula herself labeled it "the quiet b-side" to her cover of "Kiss and Make Up". However you label, it, though, it's lovely.

For fun, I decided to list the "original" for this version as the true original version, the one by The Field Mice. I don't think Paula is unusual in that prior to tackling a cover of the Saint Etienne version, she hadn't known that that one was already a cover. The Field Mice are pretty obscure. So while I could have presented any of the remixes of the Saint Etienne version in my iTunes library, I thought it would be nice to pair this stripped-down version of the song-- which oddly was called, in this version, "Let's Kiss and Make Up"-- with the rarely-heard version by a nearly-forgotten band. That seems rather 39-40 to me, anyway.

Personnel:

Paula Carino & the Flabberghastery

"Let's Kiss and Make Up" performed by The Field Mice

"Let's Kiss and Make Up" performed by Paula Carino & the Flabberghastery

367. "Doubtful Sound" by Skates & Rays

2011-03-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

This was the surprise waiting for me at the end of the long, long slog of 39-40: someone actually taking the time and making the effort to do a cover of one of my own original songs!

And as a bonus, Monkey Typing Pool have arranged this tune from the first Skates & Rays record as a sound-alike for John Cale in general, and rather specifically "Paris 1919", which just happens to be one of a small handful of tune I'd always intended to do for 39-40 but never got to. Cale's a major hero of mine, and his influence looms large over a lot of what I've done over the past year. In addition to massively informing my arrangements, vocal performances, and sometimes my playing, Cale provided the material for the medley I made out of his song "I Keep a Close Watch" and a similar, better known tune, and I quoted him endlessly in my artsy spoken-word ramblings. I only did one straight cover of one of his songs, but it's among my very favorite things I did during the project.

In any case, I am humbled by the effort and the faint association with one of my personal idols. And if my enjoyment of this recording runs to the narcissistic, what the hell. I still like it.

I will take this opportunity to point out that I've just recently remixed my cover of this original tune by Monkey Typing Pool. The drums in general and the kick in particular were just too damn loud on the original mix, and it bothered me when listening to it in the car recently. I have very, very rarely revisited mixes during 39-40, but for some reason it seemed crucial to get that one right... I just dig both the original and my take on it, and didn't want to leave it all half-ass. And, you know, the MTP guy is a friend of mine in a way that Morrissey, to pick one example of many, just isn't quite.

Personnel:

Monkey Typing Pool (J*ff N*rman)

"Doubtful Sound" performed by Skates & Rays

"Doubtful Sound" performed by Monkey Typing Pool

366. "Etienne Gonna Die" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

The existence of this track has to be regarded, by me at least, as something of a minor miracle. When I started the blog I hadn't heard from Jim Poe in many years, so it was cool just to catch up with him. What's even more amazing that I caught him at a point in his life during which he hadn't done anything musical for some time, but was looking for an excuse to get moving on it again. So it's a pretty big deal for me to present his first track in a good long time, and his first completed experiment in Garagebandery, here on the blog.

It's also almost impossible to imaging the endgame of 39-40 without my having taken up Jim's suggestion of Foxbase Alpha as the full album I should cover. For a brief time I was insanely considering doing as many as five full albums, one from each of the most recent decades, but in the end it devolved down to Skates & Rays doing The Church's Remote Luxury, and I almost left it at that... but the Foxbase idea still seemed very compelling, so I paired it up with the idea of contributions by guest artists. It seems very fitting that Jim, under the name Tiger Blanket, should be one of them. There's also an eerie if not quite fearful symmetry to the whole thing: the first track to be covered on 39-40 was the final song on Foxbase Alpha. So I guess the circle is now complete.

Stand by for the "official" release of Foxbase Gamma in the next week or two.

Personnel: Jim Poe

"Etienne Gonna Die" performed by Saint Etienne

"Etienne Gonna Die" performed by Tiger Blanket

365. "Kiss and Make Up" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

Here's the first of a series of posthumous and postdated postings to the blog which will wrap up the Foxbase Gamma project and clear the house of a few additional, special volunteer contributions. They will also push the total song count for my 365 day project to 369. That should look very impressive indeed on paper.

Paula Carino is probably the highest-profile artist to contribute to 39-40, and in this case she has earned her reputation by being awfully damned good at what she does. I'm massively honored that she recorded this track for my humble enterprise, especially since it will go on to live forever (or at least a little longer) on the Foxbase tribute LP, which I'd anticipate will have a slightly longer shelf life than the blog itself.

It's also going to be one of the highlights of Foxbase Gamma, which has overall turned out way stronger than I'd anticipated. Paula's version of this song-- well, it's actually only one of her versions of it, but we'll come to that later-- is a real joy. Some of the reconfigured chord changes she's implied remind me of Lush at their early peak... I hope she'll consider that the compliment it's meant to be. It's definitely one of the best tracks I've had the pleasure of passing on to the listening public.

Personnel:

Paula Carino & the Flabberghastery

"Kiss and Make Up" performed by Saint Etienne

"Kiss and Make Up" performed by Paula Carino & the Flabberghastery

364. "Silver Jenny Dollar" by The New Pornographers

2011-03-17T23:27:00.001-07:00

This was really supposed to be a tribute to Gen, who's tolerated so, so much for the duration of this project. But it's Miranda's birthday, and we're dealing with the ever-charming headlice infestation, and... well, if you're a musician, you know that period at the end of the session where you just get a little loopy and lay down some silly-ass tracks that you probably shouldn't, just to blow off steam? Well, imagine that the session has lasted a year.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Vocal, guitars

Eden ~ Uke, backing vocals

Miranda ~ Backing vocals

"Silver Jenny Dollar" performed by The New Pornographers

"Silver Jenny Dollar" performed by The Broome Family Singers

363. "10,000 Miles" by The Church

2011-03-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

...and with the clang and chime of what must be the most massive wall of guitar I've ever posted here, the Skates & Rays recreation of The Church's Remote Luxury album is complete.

When I started 39-40, I didn't imagine that it would produce what can only be viewed as Skates & Rays' second full album, especially given the scarce involvement of the band in the early days. In retrospect it seems like kind of a no-brainer, and a natural that it would be a Church album we tackled. I'm also glad we did a sort of hodge-podgey red-headed stepchild of a record, rather than a magnum opus like The Blurred Crusade or Seance; it gave us a little space to work with and fewer sacred cows to which to live up.

It's funny that I ended up leaving the two Marty Willson-Piper songs for last. "Volumes" is one I'm not incredibly fond of, so it took a while to work up the concept. This one I just love, and we did it really quite faithfully until it gets to that bridge... and really, a weird but unproggy time-signature change is a pretty Churchy way to go. It's really the first time Skates & Rays has put such a thing in any of our arrangements, garage semi-purists that we tend to be (mostly because of my own leanings), but I think we pulled it off, thanks to the rhythm section. Well done, boys. In our enthusiasm we managed to completely forget the guitar solo section, but I think I more than compensated with the bite I put into the incidental leads and the knifey stuff that overlays those two ersatz bridges.

A little remixing remains before I release our Luxury properly, but for now, we out.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitars & vocals

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"10,000 Miles" performed by The Church

"10,000 Miles" performed by Skates & Rays

362. "Nothing Can Stop Us" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

Nothing, indeed, can stop us now. I downloaded this Skype thing and Ken appeared to me like a vision, and there followed a few moments of myself fumbling to link up components of the Grand Technology of Today using wires I bought at Radio Shack in 1987. Soon enough he had completed the performance you hear today. It was left only for me to add the requisite dub bass and dub banjo ((c) me) and for another definitive step to be taken toward the realization of Foxbase Gamma. The name of the blog and my own, traditionally canine-oriented name make it clear that I am indeed an old dog. Nevertheless, and at the eleventh hour... new trick.

Personnel:

Ken Ostrander ~ vocal and guitar

Rex Broome ~ dub bass, dub banjo

"Nothing Can Stop Us" performed by Saint Etienne

"Nothing Can Stop Us" performed by Ken Ostrander

361. "Volumes" by The Church

2011-03-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Marty Willson-Piper's "Volumes" has a lot of chords in it for the country treatment, but after toying with a lot of differnent ideas about how to approach this one, that's where I went.

Personnel:

Rex as Skates & Rays

"Volumes" performed by The Church

"Volumes" performed by Skates & Rays

360. "Girl VII" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

Brian Huddell, under numerous musical guises, has contributed standout tracks to a number of project I've spearheaded, so thank god he's here to save my ass again. He was also certified as some kind of demigod toward the end of 2010, so the honor is only magnified this time around. Here are his notes on this recording:

Recorded in my 6-year-old's bedroom because my little studio is in the midst of wall and ceiling repairs. I don't have any place to put a MIDI controller in here, so I had fun with synthy guitar effects in place of keyboards. I know I could never do what Rex has done over the last year, and this recording highlighted a new reason why: I found it very difficult to put any energy into a song that I feel no personal connection with. It was a strange experience, but I'm proud to be a tiny part of Rex's impossible project.

I can amplify that last bit a little. For the last three or four months of the project I've been basically picking my own tunes via one method or another, but aI had to do plenty of that "finding my way into harmony with an alien piece" stuff over the first two-thirds of the project, when songs were selected either randomly by machine or by requests from the great unwashed. It gets easier the longer and more frequently you do it, but the results are naturally mixed. I came to adore unfamiliar tunes by Bob Seger and The Swell Maps through the process of transforming them into my idiom. I heaped scorn on songs by Morrissey and The Osmonds, and, while I still don't love the originals, I like what I did to them. I discovered a few other real gems tucked away in my iTunes library. By the same token, I fell well short in my attempts to do justice to a few real favorites of mine. It has been, as they say, a process.

That said, Brian's take on this song is a brilliant addition to the Foxbase Gamma subproject.

Personnel: Brian Huddell

"Girl VII" performed by Saint Etienne

"Girl VII" performed by Brian Huddell

359. "London Belongs to Me" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

As you can see above, I have discovered as yet another edition of Foxbase Alpha, and it pretty much defies description. Please enjoy this image of the limited edition "Subbuteo Box" of our favorite record ever to be covered in its entirety by the Broome Massive.

As to Chris Huff's cover, it kicks arse. I really enjoy the intro with its samples of various iconic utterances of the word "London" (it's a more refined version of what I did a tiny bit of on this track) but it goes on to dwarf my best efforts at reinterpetation and it's a real joy to hear. I shouldn't be surprised: this is what Chris does as a professional, and I admire his work. Sometime over the course of this project in a side conversation Chris delved into the kinds of reactions when he sometimes gets from hipster types when he tells them his primary gig is as a cover artist. Apparently it's not kind, or, worse, dismissive. Seeing as how the past year for me has had everything to do with learning and playing covers, not just on 39-40 but at my own shows and with my dad's band back east, and in my new job of teaching kids how to be a rock band, I can officially declare Chris's naysayers to be a lot of irredeemable tossers. Now that's sorted, let's listen, shall we?

Personnel: Chris Huff & the Solipsists

"London Belongs to Me" performed by Saint Etienne

"London Belongs to Me" performed by Chris Huff & The Solipsists

358. "Pocahontas" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

2011-03-11T22:23:00.000-08:00

A song from one of my very favorite albums of all time, rendered as a complete toss-off. As it's becoming clear that not every track by every contributor slated for Foxbase Gamma will be ready on time, and as the logistics of my actual approaching birthday, as well as Miranda's two days before it, mingle with the realities of having to deal with cases of headlice which might have been brought to my attention when they commenced and weren't, and of keeping 16 bands' worth of elementary schoolers straight in my head as I try to get them ready to impress the hell out of their parent with their mad rockandrollery in three weeks, I find that... hell, I better record something I don't have to think about too much, even if it does shortchange one of the best compositions of the last century. So here you go.

I still prefer my version where the line is "the first TV" instead of "the first teepee". Nobody agrees with me. Fuck 'em, I get to sing it how I like.

Personnel: I forget

"Pocahontas" performed by Neil Young

"Pocahontas" performed by Rex Broome

357. "Spring" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

The work of Maurice Rickard has appeared on 39-40 before, when his immortal work "Red Fiber" was heavily incorporated into my ever-popular cover of "Free Bird", and I've borrowed technique and approaches from him elsewhere, most notably on my should've-been-ever-popular version of "Transmission", so it's most excellent to have him contribute to 39-40 as a solo artist. Even more exciting is the fact that this track is the unearthing of a heretofore all-too-obscure musical genre/subculture, "Scaffo". Maurice explains:

I'm trying to find a Scaffo-correct approach to doing the cover. Backstory:

I had a dream in which a new subculture named "Scaffo" had emerged. There were absolutely no appearances by it in the dream, nor any descriptions of its attributes, other than a vague "Oh, yeah--Scaffo! (smirk, laughter)." So it seemed like a subculture that other people looked on as wrong in some way, but other than that, wide open.

Discussing it with some friends, a few of us want to create the musical Scaffo genre. The problem, of course, is defining this, but the lineage certainly includes Captain Beefheart and U.S. Maple as proto-Scaffo.

We went on to posit various other aspects defining Scaffo, but the best way to bring this dream into reality was clearly to start putting some Scaffo or Scaffo-informed music out there. And so as on project folds, another, grander one begins.

Personnel: Maurice Rickard

"Spring" performed by Saint Etienne

"Spring" performed by Maurice Rickard

356. "Remote Luxury" by The Church

2011-03-09T18:44:00.000-08:00

Part two of the continuous finale of the Remote Luxury project. Again, meant to be listened to along with and immediately after "Shadow Cabinet" with no between-tracks break.

I had the greatest plan for this track: I was going to craft the backing track and then have Derek and Cliff do all the lead guitar harmony stuff. They're the bassist and drummer in Skates & Rays, but they're both great guitar players and I thought this would be a good showcase for them. However, as I've mentioned, the rehearsals for the past two weeks have been scrapped, so I had to come up with an alternate plan. A few days ago I feared my voice was going to completely give out on me, so I thought I'd make the track mostly out of sequenced elements, the kind of thing I could do while languishing in bed. My voice survived, at least well enough to do the Saint Etienne covers, so I put this on the back burner, but I still held onto the synth track idea and made good on it today. To move even further from the mega-guitarry Church ethic, I replaced to dual guitar harmony leads with mandolin and ukulele (as tasteful as Willson-Piper and Koppes almost always are on guitar, I have a bit of an allergy to straight harmony lead guitar... it tends to sound a bit "arena rock" for my tastes, so no, the Hunter-Wagner era is not my favorite Lou Reed period).

In the end I did add a bit of guitar on the very last section, but that was there to accompany the lyrics I transplanted into the coda of what's supposed to be an instrumental track. I've been really quite obsessed with the song "Savage Night at the Opera" from the new Destroyer album, and I was working on the backing track for this tune I kept finding that I was flashing on the words and melody from that one. Turns out they revolve around very similar chord sequences. So I adapted Dan Bejar's opening lyrics with a few alterations to make them Church-specific. In fact, they're somewhat sentimental and schmaltzy in a way of which I doubt Bejar would approve, but as the other fellow said, a song is anything that can walk by itself, so if you're going to set one down on the ground, you can't be too surprised at where it ends up after it's been there for a while.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

(just Rex this time)

"Remote Luxury" performed by The Church

"Remote Luxury" performed by Skates & Rays

355. "Shadow Cabinet" by The Church

2011-03-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I'm doing a lot of things for the last time, and it seems like there would have to be one last massively Fall-centric cover before 39-40 shuts down. Most of the backing track for this cover is built out of Fall-sound-- specifically a bunch of re-pitched samples of "Dr. Buck's Letter"-- and the creepy-factor of the original Church song (which is considerable) is enhanced with little snatches of "Spectre Vs. Rector". For all that, and the way the track sort of sounds like it's delivered at half-time (although it isn't), it's actually pretty faithful to the original. The feel is a bit heavier, but the guitars and vocals are doing pretty much what they always did. Halfway through it, I thought it was going to be fail miserably, but in the end it turned out fine.

I also must have set some kind of turnaround record for sampling by using the drum part from Dolph's cover of "Carnt Sleep" a scant four days after he delivered it to me. And there's another Saint Etienne crossover in the form of a loop from the somewhat obscure (but completely classic) SE track "Filthy" that drives the bridge along.

There's one more experiment at play here: this track is designed to flow directly into the next track on both 39-40 and the Remote Luxury cover album, so the hard cut at the end is intentional. If you're burning either collection to a CDR, there should be no gap between today's track and tomorrow's. That's my general protocol for all of my recordings anyway; this just happens to be the first time I've actually designed the tracks to rely on it.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

As embodied pretty much by Rex and a bunch of samples as detailed above

"Shadow Cabinet" performed by The Church

"Shadow Cabinet" performed by Skates & Rays

354. "She's the One" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-07T19:11:00.000-08:00

Edward of Sim appears, on loan from Linus, to instantly demonstrate that as many different approaches as I've tried out on covers over the past year, I haven't come anywhere near hitting on them all. Specifically, I never attempted to do a multitracked vocal accompanied only by a bass guitar, which is just as well, since if I had, Mr. of Sim's version would have buried it.

I'm told it was recorded this way out of necessity and a lack of other instruments at hand, but it's a bit of a revelation in any case. The chord structure of the original is dictated in places by the material being sampled, and it sort of pivots on chords and seems to be in different keys from time to time in a very Saint Etienne way. Edward's version moves through those changes and makes them sound natural... maybe it's the swing he put into the rhythm. Even more interesting, though, is his suitably creepy stereo-harmonized reading of the coda: I most certainly heard "She's the One" before I ever heard "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" by The Crystals, but part of me has known that it's the source of that section of the song for a long time, but I never really heard it correctly until listening to this cover.

Personnel:

Edward of Sim, limited by Time and Space

"She's the One" performed by Saint Etienne

"She's the One" performed by Edward of Sim

353. "People Get Real" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-06T15:47:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling pretty lousy today, congested and sort of feverish, so I might be delusional, but I think this one may be my favorite recording from the duration of the 39-40 project. I'm very glad I proceeded with the Foxbase Alpha full album cover/tribute subproject. I almost ditched it for a bunch of reasons, but in the end it's providing some brilliant guest contributions and it's gotten me to do some of my own favorite work.

This one, man, it's one of my favorite songs of all time. I even recall having "People Get Real" on a short list of potential band names at one point. I've always found the fact that it's an update in some ways of a '60s girl-group sound on the one hand, and a nod toward blissed-out club sounds (and to me, the associated dream-pop music that would come to be known as "shoegazer" rock) on the other to be brilliant on its own, but the way the dreamy imagery is punctuated by the jaw-dropping lines "Don't tell me this is precious/Don't tell me this is soulful/No, you have to be, have to be getting me on" before eventually landing back on "Don't stop believing it's real"... that's just sublime right there.

I started off with the idea of doing this as a more literal '60s throwback than the original. The sound I had in mind was maybe halfway between The Byrds (the extra work I put into translating the mid-song synth line to the electric 13-string really paid off) and something breezier like The Searchers or Spanky and Our Gang... maybe the midpoint between those would be The Monkees, I guess. Along the way, partly because my voice is too froggy from my illness to do the real Mamas & Papas treatment to the harmonies, the vocals turned a lot airier and a subterranean homesick fuzz guitar showed up, pushing it a little more toward 4AD/Creation territory. But the sum of the parts, I realized when I was done with the string part, is basically the evil twin of the roughly contemporaneous "Shiny Happy People". That was fine.

I ditched a few ideas that tempted me mightily along the way: putting an ominous break on the "Don't tell me" lines started to seem too obvious, and I've done similar things to highlight undernoticed misanthropic lyrical turns on other songs over the past year, and there was a stereophonic symphony of harmonicas on the bridge than I ultimately deleted because they've become a bit of a crutch for me. The drums are actually an edited version of the part Derek played on a recording of Cliff's tune "Last Request", which has a very different feel from this. It's a little unsteady in a way that makes a lot more sense with the tune it was played for, but I was dead set on having Skates & Rays do one of the Foxbase tunes, and with Derek being too injured to play, this was the only way I was going to pull it off. Lastly, I plum forgot that I was going to yell "Get on the floor and look real sexy!" during the bridge.

The craziest part of this, though, was the recording of the vocal. While singing the first lead track, the combination of how happy I was with the backing track and how much I love the song really touched a nerve with me, and by the time I hit my beloved "you have to be getting me on" line, I was actually crying. It's still on there, you can hear it; that had never happened before, so it seemed obnoxious not to preserve it. In fact, when I doubled the vocal, it happened again. There are four vocals in total so it's not the weep-fest it could be, but it's real. I had an overwhelming feeling of having done something very good. I don't think it was a simple reaction to this track, but to the entire 39-40 project as well. The song felt like a benediction of sorts, probably the last "important" work I'll do.

The irony of the fact that the last words I'm singing on this are "Don't stop believing" after having excoriated the Journey tune in the course of describing my cover of "Transmission" is not lost on me. My friend Jim Poe (who also suggested the Foxbase excursion) mentioned being a little freaked out by the "hate" I expressed in that piece, and I've been a little haunted by that ever since, not being the type who likes to think of myself as either too musically snobbish or ferchrissake hateful. And I think I came to understand a bit of what that socially important musical nostalgia is all about here. I've been a little muddled in my thinking about my own musical development and maybe even the whole meaning of music and memory in a social sense. Journey seems like prom music to me, formative high school stuff, and my high school music was largely postpunk and college rock with some '60s psych and a lot of Velvet Underground thrown in... R.E.M., The Replacements, The Bunnymen and so forth.

But that was anything but social music; that was in-my-bedroom rock-music-saved-my-life music. My true social music phase, the joy-of-being-in-a-community with like-minded (musically and otherwise) friends, was college, and while Sonic Youth and The Pixies and Neil Young made the trip with me, it was largely a whole different, and not especially well-remembered scene then. It was Saint Etienne. It was 808 State and A Tribe Called Quest, Ride and Lush, Public Enemy and The Orb, Happy Mondays, Paul's Boutique and Loveless and a lot of other tenuously-connected and ill-remembered stuff that was overshadowed by what the '90s went on to become, but which still strikes me as great and powerful, far more full of the joy of discovery and the possibilities of the new than so much of what came after. But I guess it wouldn't have mattered if it was that great or not: it was my soundtrack to my time. It was my arena rock. And if it was what you heard at every bar mitzvah or karaoke bar today, and some little aging twit with a blog just didn't get it, no, I wouldn't much care either. That'd be his problem, really, and too bad he can't loosen up. So I guess that's my After School Special moment for today: I really do have a lot yet to learn.

Oh, and there really is no reason for Miki Berenyi being the cover model, other than that I thought of her in the throes of my overemotional reaction to this track, and I love her, is all.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS (sort of)

Rex Broome ~ Vocals, guitars, bass, MIDI stuff

Derek Hanna ~ Repurposed drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Composition from which said drums were repurposed

"People Get Real" performed by Saint Etienne

"People Get Real" performed by Skates & Rays

352. "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-05T00:10:00.000-08:00

I'm really not pleased with the way my output is sounding these days. Despite all my best efforts, it's just murky all the time. I have a few more shots to get it right, but at this point I'm sort of resigned to going out with my game a little off. I've probably earned that, anticlimactic as it may be.

I was really surprised at how long this turned out to be when I exported it. I had put all the work into getting to and past the second chorus, the one less than two minutes in that I play with the original chords as Neil wrote them, and figured I could use some mixing tricks and probably my last instance of meandering, stinging lead guitar using the sound that's long been labeled "Kristin lead" to pad out another minute or two. Somehow it ended up pushing the six minute mark. Most likely that means I could've knocked off the guitar wanking a lot sooner, since I was basically following that long solo and switching mix tactics every four measures while I had an excuse to do it.

(Update: In a very rare occurrence indeed, I have replaced the original mix with what I hope is a better version. The fact that I'm doing this kind of thing probably means that (A) I have actually learned something doing this whole long experiment, and (B) it's probably time to quit.)

Crappy as the results are, it was kind of fun. Although this was the first Saint Etienne song I ever heard, back in the halcyon days of MARS FM, and the idea of a group like this doing a Neil Young tune did pique my interest, it ended up being one of my least favorite things on Foxbase Alpha. Not that it's bad at all... it's just that the simple novelty of the idea and the flat-out efficiency of its execution, perfect though they are, don't even begin to hint at the depth of the rest of the record. That and it ain't Sazzy Crackers singing.

The photo, incidentally, depicts me as I looked at about the time Foxbase Alpha was released, rockin' my Miki Berenyi hair color. Within a year it'd start to be mistaken for the Kurt Cobain look and I'd have to ditch it. The '90s: so many things began with so much promise, only to be muscled out of the way by other, less exciting things.

Personnel: Rex

"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" performed by Saint Etienne

"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" performed by Rex Broome

351. "Carnt Sleep" by Saint Etienne

2011-03-04T20:52:00.000-08:00

This recording really blew me away, and I have pretty high expectations for Dolph Chaney recordings. This thing starts out pitch-perfect, perhaps even smokier than the original, gets better with the vocal, then the killer synth lines, and some patented ChaneySonic stun guitar, somehow sounding a little bit Princier than usual. Some time after the second verse, family matters called me away from the computer, but I left the track running, and for a while part of my mind was distractedly appreciating the groove... but then at a certain point I realized it was still chugging along, and some distinctly weird and unsettling things were happening. When I got to take a closer listen I was admittedly almost surprised that it was in fact as crazy and excellent as I'd perceived from afar. In fact, the extended freakout ending is very much like what I've been going for every time I've tagged an extended dub-noise playout onto a track on 39-40. Having done so quite a few times, I think I have a better understanding of the process Dolph went through to realize that part of the track, but that doesn't mean I'm anywhere close to being able to do it as well.

I've known Dolph without having met him for many years. He was an especially supportive friend during the worst parts of my divorce years, which were also, coincidentally or not, the times during which I reorganized my musical identity into what it basically is today. Dolph was one of the first and few to take the new stuff I was doing as I put Skates & Rays together seriously enough to make honest and unfailingly helpful comments on it, which made me feel awfully good because the man's own music, a ridiculous amount of which is available here for no money whatsoever, is damned fine. During the same period I was listening rather a lot to Dolph's Very Just Fine, a 3-disc collection of what might be considered odds and sods, but was, to me, something of a magnum opus. It just has some the absolutely darkest (in the non-silly sense of the word) material I've ever heard, and some of the most life-affirming as well, sometimes simultaneously. It was well suited to my mindset at the time, to say the least, but it was also pretty damned staggering in quality.

Personnel:

Dolph Chaney ~ DR-220a, bass, guitars, Realistic Moog, voices

Recorded to Fostex MR16, 4th March 2011.

"Carnt Sleep" performed by Saint Etienne

"Carnt Sleep" performed by Dolph Chaney

350. "The Yip Song" by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

2011-03-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

It's Robyn Hitchcock's 58th birthday. I asked the Hitchcock online community, such as it is, which song I should cover to mark the occasion. The first song suggested, this one, was the correct answer.

I tried to do the vocal so it would sound like an insane person singing. For some reason I succeeded.

Personnel: Rex

"The Yip Song" performed by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

"The Yip Song" performed by Rex Broome

349. "Constant in Opal" by The Church

2011-03-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is odd and maybe it's not, but when I first came up with the idea of doing the Remote Luxury full-album cover project, "Constant in Opal" was one of the first songs I thought I could restructure into something a little more organic, by doing just what I did here: replacing the pulsing synth of the original with a driving, Crazy Horsey guitar. But now that it's done, I'm not sure it flies. It's not bad, but the other thing I hoped to do to the song was to add some dynamics to it. Instead, I may if anything have done just the opposite. It does have a little more swirl and mystery to it now, largely thanks to Charlie's e-bow guitar part. And that's a good thing, because I somehow failed to capture his guitar at the band session he attended to help us cut this one and "Do It Clean", so I trekked down to his house in Irvine a few days later to record it there. We got a good take in no time and had a good time catching up, but it was a late night.

So many Church albums seem to open with one of these "troubled travelers" songs, and this might be the one that set the archetype. A bunch of wandering people-- always a group, a "we"-- in a strange land, seeking the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, lost because of their own blindness to some fundamental truth. Actually, a lot of Church songs in general follow that concept, but the album openers almost always exemplify it best, and it almost always works perfectly as a mood-setting tactic.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitars, vocals

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

with Charlie Eckstrom ~ E-bow guitar

"Constant in Opal" performed by The Church

"Constant in Opal" performed by Skates & Rays

348. "No Explanation" by The Church

2011-03-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

Hey, remember back when I did "Hotel Womb" and said it would be good as one of those little between-songs fragments on an old Church record? Well, guess what! Here I got to use it exactly that, mirroring the little snatch of music that precedes "No Explanation" on the Remote Luxury album. Glad I kept that thing lying around.

Now, if this arrangement sounds somewhat inspired or informed by "Heroes", that's because it originally was, in fact, a performance of "Heroes". See, Derek has gone and injured his finger rather severely, so I won't be able to convene Skates & Rays as much as I wanted to before the end of 39-40 (perhaps not at all), so I've been left to my own devices to complete the Remote Luxury tribute. I'd been a little stumped as to how to approach this tune, having already given the faithful-to-a-fault treatment to "Into My Hands", but it occurred to me that this drum track might provide the launching pad to push "No Explanation" into semi-shoegazer/Dream Syndicate territory, so I gave it a shot. Helping things along is the coincidence that the verses of the two songs revolve around the same chord change, so all the ambient band noise bleeding onto the drum tracks is in the right key. If the drums sound a little ragged, it's not Derek's fault: I had to do some awkward editing to keep the parts in synch with the feel of the new cover, and in any case this was just basically us rehearsing a cover with tape rolling, so it's not like we were trying for anything other than capturing the feel of the Bowie tune.

It's a middling success, I'd say. I discovered a neat new harmony, and made a little headway solving my newly-discovered 12-string recording issues. The second lead guitar is a bit sketchy and the whole thing is murkier than I'd like, but I may be able to fix it with a remix when I prep the fake Remote for separate release.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Vocals, guitar, bass, harmonica

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Ambient bassisms

"No Explanation" performed by The Church

"No Explanation" performed by Skates & Rays

347. "He Stopped Loving Her Today" by George Jones

2011-02-28T22:52:00.000-08:00

Completely Unplanned Country & Western Week continues here at 39-40. Cut at the same time as "Loving Cup", with almost the exact same backstory including the feature of another fine Derek Hanna lead vocal, here's one of George Jones' many "comeback hits", and probably the biggest one. Again, the whole thing was Derek's idea.

During this session Cliff told me that a female country artist-- I can't remember who and I can't find any references to it online-- recorded an answer song to this one called something along the lines of "She Never Stopped Loving Him", which kind of made me want to write an answer answer song called "Fat Lot of Fucking Good It Does Him Now That He's Dead", because I think that would make a good country song even, or perhaps especially, devoid of the context.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Derek Hanna ~ Drums, lead vocal

Rex Broome ~ Guitars, harmonica, backing vocal

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" performed by George Jones

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" performed by Skates & Rays

346. "Rocky Top" by The Osborne Brothers

2011-02-27T16:51:00.001-08:00

And here's the final mix in the Thunderhill sub-project! Which only means that the sequencing and fine-tuning of the Thunderhill compilation, due out in Summer 2011, can begin in earnest, but at least it's one obligation fulfilled as far as 39-40 is concerned, and there are now only 20 more songs to complete all told. That's pretty crazy... I couldn't even begin to relate this stage to what it was like completing the 20th cover any more than I could then have speculated what was going to happen before I got to 346, much less the end.

These Thunderhill remixes are going to require a lot of finetuning before they end up on the CD, but I've gotten a lot of work done, but the project should be basically fun from here on out. Maybe a little stressful deciding what's going to make the cut and what isn't, but I think its going to be a cool thing for a lot of people, whether they're just looking for copies of the old recordings or into the new stuff and the rarities from the vault. Who the hell puts out a compilation covering 1963 through 2011? Seriously?

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry "Vic" Marsh ~ Tambourine

From the same show at the Honi Honi as all of the previous tracks...

"Rocky Top" performed by The Osborne Brothers

"Rocky Top" performed by Thunderhill

345. "You're In a Bad Way" by Saint Etienne

2011-02-26T16:35:00.000-08:00

And here's the "bonus track" for the Saint Etienne tribute album, a song not from Foxbase Alpha but from the band's subsequent album So Tough. Trivia, So Tough is one of at least two Saint Etienne records to take its title from an obscure-ish Beach Boys track, the other being the compilation You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone, which is perhaps the most appropriate title yet for the 39-40 tribute, especially since I've recently realized that we're actually covering the US version of Foxbase which has two stealth bonus tracks inserted in amongst the running order of the UK release. And that's just one more reason I'm more than happy to add this song to the package.

Another is the opportunity to feature New Zealand's own James Dignan again, this time in the spotlight. The list of contributions James has made to the project is long enough that I'll just advise you to do a search for his name on the blog to get caught up. Working on this project made James aware of the unfortunate demise of his trust 4-track, so this is his first digitally-recorded home project. Funny, it sounds better than most of what I'm coming up with after nearly a year of this stuff...

James also provided his own cover artwork, based on one of his own paintings. Yeah, James wears many hats. You can see some of them hanging at his website, here.

Personnel:

James Dignan

"You're In a Bad Way" performed by Saint Etienne

"You're In a Bad Way" performed by James Dignan

344. "Loving Cup" by The Rolling Stones

2011-02-25T16:23:00.000-08:00

This is not only the first time I've featured a lead vocal by Skates & Rays drummer Derek Hanna on 39-40, it's the first time he's gotten a lead vocal on an "officially released" Skates & Rays recording. That's just plain ridiculous, because it's always been a part of the Skates & Rays thing that Derek not only sings but may well be the best vocalist in the band. This Stones cover was Derek's idea for a cover to throw into the set at the Oyster House a few weeks back, and I really wanted to record it while it was relatively fresh in our minds. It starts out a little rough, but it gets better, and I'm very happy to present Derek's singing for the first (but not last!) time on the blog.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Derek Hanna ~ Lead vocal, drums

Rex Broome ~ Guitars, backing vocal, harmonica

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"Loving Cup" performed by The Rolling Stones

"Loving Cup" performed by Skates & Rays

343. "Do It Clean" by Echo & the Bunnymen

2011-02-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

Charlie Eckstrom has appeared on 39-40 in the form of an information-ghost, most notably on this track which was constructed out of a very old demo tape of a song he had written, and this one which was cut together from a recording Charlie, Derek of Skates & Rays and I did a while back, but this is his first appearance in the flesh. Like the Skates guy and Tom Heckman, Charlie's a guy I've done a lot of music with, for a long time, and it really wouldn't have done to have 39-40 shut down without having him on. Nor would it do to have Charlie's epic version of this Bunnymen tune, which has been his concert calling-card since before I met him, slip into the mists of obscurity. So here he is, belting out his take on the live version of "Do It Clean", with Skates & Rays doing our best to keep up with him.

Hell, I can't believe I haven't done Bunnymen tune before now. I mean, I did do an extensive quote of "Silver" as an addendum to "The Daily Planet" by Love last July, and I was quoting "Never Stop" as recently as a week or so ago in "Into My Hands", but somehow a full cover has never happened. Those quotes, and I'm sure there are others (hell, this song itself is quoted in one of my original songs, "Dead Tongue") stand as a testament to have very very much I love the band.

Personnel:

Charlie Eckstrom ~ Vocal, guitar

Rex Broome ~ Guitars

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"Do It Clean" performed by Echo & the Bunnymen

"Do It Clean" performed by Charlie Eckstrom with Skates & Rays

342. "Won't Find Better Than Me" by The Kit Kats

2011-02-23T22:09:00.000-08:00

People, I'm really tired, and really burnt out, and sort of struggling to stay just two days behind on the blog right now, and it comes down to this: gremlins. There's no other explanation. No matter what I do, I can't stop that 13-string track at the beginning of this song from breaking up all staticky-like. The meters didn't peak; the waveform's not squaring off; none of the tracks are in the red. And the gear I'm using is the very definition of industry standard for decades and then some: Shure SM-57 pointed at a Fender Twin, which sounds, as it should, clear as damn bell in the room. And yet that static is there. I've had this issue before with the 12-string sound, but hell, the pickups on my Rick 610-12 are as time-tested as all of the rest of that stuff, and again... it sounds clean in the room, and it's not pegging any meters. So W, I ask you, TF?

What's particularly irritating is that this track is actually meant for better things, and all told it's the last track but one for me to finish before tucking into seriously compiling the upcoming Thunderhill double-disc retrospective. So it's supposed to be good and stuff, and most of what I achieved on it tonight is pushing it in that direction, it's just... that... damned... guitar...

However, this is a pretty good performance of a Thunderhill live staple, and once again a rare opportunity to hear the original version of a song which changed drastically from its inspiration, as it was easily able to do because nobody's ever heard of the Kit Kats. They are tucked away in the record collections of a few collectors of forgotten "sunshine pop", but I found them because my dad's band did this song and my mom put a lot of their tunes on the 8-track compilations she made for car trips (yeah-- I know-- my mom made mix tapes, how awesome is that?) and when pretty much everything they ever released became available on a CD compilation, I had to get it as a gift for the family, and happily kept one myself... because it's still really kickass. Looking at it from the perspective of your average sunshine record, it's got less filler and more originals (man is it weird how many bands recorded "The Nutrocker", but as this was the only version I heard or knew of for years I can still even dig it), but the main thing is that the standout tracks are really inspired. A lot of what you'd expect, but top-flight in execution-- big vocal harmonies, crazy keyboards, orchestrations-- and the songs are really good, complex and ambitious without the least bit of pretension and almost all catchy as hell. There's this one, of course, but also the maybe-better-known and dazzling "Let's Get Lost on a Country Road", "Breezy", "That's All Right", "You Got to Know"... man, good, good stuff that should be heard by any fan of chamber pop in its original form, Zombies, Beach Boys and all.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums, vocals

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, vocals

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, vocals

Jerry "Vic" Marsh ~ Tambourine

Recorded live at the Honi Honi, Summer 2010 by Heckman, messed with by Rex at Minco in early 2011

"Won't Find Better Than Me" performed by The Kit Kats

"Won't Find Better Than Me" performed by Thunderhill

341. "Houdini Blues" by Kristin Hersh

2011-02-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

So I find myself three days behind... this kind of thing would never have happened in the early days... but I develop this great plan for how I'm going to bash out three songs today without any of them sounding subpar, thanks to the backlog of band tracks I have at this point. That's when I reach for my MOTU... and find it doesn't work again. No, I never really solved the whole issue of what's wrong with it, but by and large it has behaved itself for a couple of weeks, only crapping out once and being easily reset on that occasion. But not this morning.

So I decided to give it a rest and see if it'll come to its senses while I bash out another weird phasey open air recording in the bedroom. I'm really surprised that I didn't pull this song out during the Lightning Round... I've been playing it for a long, long time.

Personnel: Rex

"Houdini Blues" performed by Kristin Hersh

"Houdini Blues" performed by Rex Broome

340. "This Is Radio Etienne" by Saint Etienne

2011-02-21T23:31:00.001-08:00

And here we have a rendition of the opening sound collage of Foxbase Alpha, reconfigured into a similarly-structured sound collage by the enigmatic Monkey Typing Pool, whom you may recall have twice appeared on 39-40, once contributing a cover and once supplying the original track for me to cover.

The Head Poolboy has this to say:

So, my idea was this: I listened to the original, and rather than cover it as such, I decided I would just make a track that was similar to it...vaguely oldish radio-sounding music, "foreign" talk, etc. There's no musical similarity at all (except accidentally); I just went for structural similarity.

Most of my foreign jibber-jabber means nothing. Except in the middle - that's pseudo-Slavic-language for "This is Radio 39-40" (phonetically, something like "den siss rod-nyom tronsip-nupp fartsip")...

Heh heh heh... fartsip.

More on the creation of the track can be read here.

Personnel:
Monkey Typing Pool

Keyboards, sound effects, completely made-up "foreign language," samples (based on excerpt from Antonio Russolo's "Corale and Serenata" - 1921).

"This Is Radio Etienne" performed by Saint Etienne

"This Is Radio Etienne" performed by Monkey Typing Pool

339. "Like the Swallow" by Saint Etienne

2011-02-20T23:25:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm becoming a one-man clearing house for Foxbase Alpha tribute art. And I'm far from done.

This is the first big vocal piece from the album to be covered, and once again it started in one place and ended up in quite another. When we last left, um, me, I was determined to get the kids to play as a real live fake string section, and out of the songs on deck I felt that "Like the Swallow" could best use string accents. So I worked out the chords, transposed it down a half step and some change, and... well, neither "arranging" nor "orchestrating" are humble enough terms for it: I assigned individual notes to two cello parts and two viola parts, and then broke them down into a couple of different rhythms. I also worked out the spooky little synth/horn melody figure that floats through all that cool windchimey ambient stuff at the beginning and wrote that up for Eden to play on viola a couple different ways. None of it was especially artful, but at the same time I was sure that none of it was "wrong".

Then I got Eden to lay down the viola part; I took one of her lines and copied it pitched up an octave with a neat little plugin I just now discovered in GarageBand, to simulate a violin. While Miranda was recording the cello parts, she played part of a gypsy folk tune she had learned, and it happened to be in the same key, so I had her lay down some of that, too, and you can hear it during the breaks as and alternate melody on cello. I lined all of the parts up (it totals out to six tracks worth of strings most of the time) and had a listen to it against the beats I'd looped (which are actually lifted from another Saint Etienne song, "Speedwell") and it sounded pretty good to me. I decided to use it as bulk of the tune's sonic heft, and so I did. The way I spread them out in stereo causes some weird illusions, so I'll just let you know... there aren't any synths or samples or electronic washes on this track, it's all cello, viola and guitar.there aren't any phasers or flangers in use, either... the strings only have reverb and the barest touch of delay on them. The electric 13-string has some old fashioned Fender Twin vibrato on it, but that's about as processed as it gets.

Toward the very end of the recording process Gen volunteered to do the lead vocal, and I was happy to oblige. She'd been encouraged by her vocal on "Rain" and wanted to try something in a different range. It worked for me because I'd been planning on asking her to sing "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", but this one was if anything better for her and I'm no stranger to Neil Young covers. Gen was really happy with the results, saying she thinks it's one of the best covers I've done. I'm pleased, too.

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ Lead vocal

Eden Hain ~ Violas

Miranda Broome ~ Cellos

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, bass, backing vocal, assembly etc.

"Like the Swallow" performed by Saint Etienne

"Like the Swallow" performed by Genevieve Broome

338. "Stoned to Say the Least" by Saint Etienne

2011-02-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Osner provides the first of what I hope will be a bunch of guest covers of tracks from Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha (and if not, I'm gonna be slightly screwed). Amazingly this cover, spotlighting Mr. Osner's fiddle playing, sounds something like I expected it to when Jeremy was matched with this tune, and that's a good thing.

This is, as I undertand it, the first and thus far only track from the Mountain House project. Jeremy's written a little bit about it at his blog Readin, which is eternally linked to in 39-40's sidebar and always worth a look.

I'm excited to have these submissions starting to appear! The idea of the two full album tributes escaping from 39-40's gravitational pull at the last minute is a lot of fun... one might even hope they could have a life beyond March 2011. One might also be deluding oneself; one is good at that.

Oh, and by the way, yes, that is a completely different LEGO recreation of the FBA cover up there. By someone completely else. I don't have anything to do with either of them other than finding them amongst the Series of Tubes.

Personnel:

MOUNTAIN HOUSE

Jeremy Osner & Dan Rosen

"Stoned to Say the Least" performed by Saint Etienne

"Stoned to Say the Least" performed by Mountain House

337. "Rain" by The Beatles

2011-02-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

Another cover that ended up miles from where it started. "Rain" was the song Miranda was learning on bass for her lessons this week. It also happens to be my very favorite Beatles song ever, being that one Revolver song that isn't actually on Revolver every time you listen to it. Last night Eden was doing a uke performance at the intermission to a poetry reading (just because, okay, no need to make a big deal out of it) at Burbank Music Academy. It was just her and Miranda and myself, and while we were waiting for things to get started, Miranda decided to work on the song with one of the Academy's basses. I ended up picking up a guitar and working on it with her, and Eden hopped in on uke, and it was all good.

So I was going to use that framework as a springboard, inasmuch as one is allowed to use frameworks as springboards, to a version of "Rain" with Miranda and Eden also performing a rudimentary string arrangement on cello and viola. I worked up most of the track you hear on the final version, coming to realize along the way that this really should be a purely wood version of the song, which is why the mandolin snuck in in place of the guitar lead. Miranda laid down her bass part and Eden did the uke, and then we sat down to dinner, at which point Eden pretty much bailed on playing the viola. Which made Miranda's planned cello part a moot point and left me with a track I never would've arranged this way if not for the string parts that now weren't going to be on it. As I sat down to record the vocal, Gen, who hadn't been thrilled with her vocal on "Waterloo Sunset" mentioned that she'd once sung the song in one of her bands and offered to do the lead vocal. Which saved it, but left it resembling my original concept in almost no way whatsoever.

Anyway, tomorrow's a day off of school for the kids... I'll get my string arrangement out of them yet!

Personnel:

Gen Broome ~ Lead vocal

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, mandolin, backing vocals

Miranda Broome ~ Bass

Eden Hain ~ Ukulele

"Rain" performed by The Beatles

"Rain" performed by The Broome Family Household Quartet Family

336. "My Hope" by Molly Lewis

2011-02-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

This might've been the least fun Eden's ever had doing a 39-40 contribution... she just had a frustrating time doing the song. I was cooking up a killer chicken and mushroom masala for most of the time she was working on it (that's the type of hands-on control I exercise over the blog these days) and it turned out that what she really needed was someone to scroll they lyrics down for her while she was playing. I still managed to make things difficult by not doing it right, which is why you can hear her whispering "Down!" and "Up!" from time to time. In the end, as always, she nailed it to the ground.

It's a very cute song by one of her latest YouTube uke artists (there should be a sub-area of it called UkeTube, honestly). I have a little bit of a hard time parsing exactly what demographic she's taking to task here: I don't typically think of Jonas Brothers fans as the worst offenders in terms of MySpace self-humiliation, but Molly's probably just a little, well, young. The song dates back all the way to 2008, which is staggering in a way... was it really only two and a half years ago that MySpace really had enough cultural currency to be worth mocking? In fact one of the slightly vexing things about the YouTube musicians, who are damned straight by and large more interesting and engaging than most of the "regular" pop music the "regular" kids are into these days, is that it's so tied to current tech and pop ephemera that it's not likely to age so well. Yes, occasionally some nods to contemporaneous tech become transcendent in the long run-- The Modern Lovers' power of the AM, Kraftwerk's homecomputer, Mark E. Smith being into CB, and 808 State's... erm, 808-- there's a far greater likelihood of ending up with a "Pac Man Fever" or "Convoy", isn't there? Going for today's kids is that they're doing this stuff with a serious panoply of timeless musical settings... I mean, ukulele, for Bowie's sake, how can you beat that for old tech?

Oh, another weird little generational-nomenclatural divide: the kids all say that they have "a MySpace" or "a Facebook", whereas most adults would either say they have a "Facebook" account, or that they are "on Facebook". I have no idea what that signifies, but listen closely and see if I'm not at least a little bit right about it.

Personnel: Eden

"My Hope" performed by Molly Lewis

"My Hope" performed by Eden Hain

335. "So. Central Rain" by R.E.M.

2011-02-16T12:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll admit it: some part of me has been waiting to make the "R.E.X." joke on a fake record sleeve since 1986 or so. It seems somehow anticlimactic. But it's almost made up for by the fact that I'd somehow never seen the actual 45 sleeve for this song before today, and it's fucking rad is what it is.

The 13-string makes a return here, after being temporarily demoted to a regular 12-string for live purposes. In fact it's doubled here, once played through my Twin and once played through the DeVille, just to see how that whole thing worked. It's neat, but somehow, as much as I kept turning the trim knobs down take after arduous take, both tracks managed to peg the meter at at least one point without my catching it until a day later. The Rick 12 has a tendency to do that fore reasons that aren't totally clear to me. It's a sign of growth, in a way, that these three little hits bug me so much when a year ago I would have totally let them slide, but such putative maturity doesn't make those moments any easier on the eardrums.

Personnel: Rex

"So. Central Rain" performed by R.E.M.

"So. Central Rain" performed by Rex Broome

334. "Go Tell It on the Mountain (Live)" by The Thunder Hill Singers

2011-02-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

So now we're oscillating wildly between the different ongoing subprojects, and I'm really cracking into finishing up the unreleased tracks for the Thunderhill compendium. This might be the trickiest one of the lot, although even the best case scenario won't see me cleaning it up as well as I did with "Take Her Out of Pity". It's a live performance from what my previous labeling has as a 1974 show in the old Keyser High School auditorium... seems to me it would have been earlier than that, but when I researched all this stuff before I was pretty scrupulous about the dates, so I was probably more correct then than I am now.

Anyway, it is a pretty nifty performance, but the original recording is way muddy. Dad really wanted me to see if I could clean it up, so I did my painstaking best here. There was just a hell of a lot of midrange mud in it, so I really busted out my whole arsenal of equalizers and filters, none of which I really know how to use, and scrubbed as much of the mids and lows out of it as possible, and then flew in a very narrowly filtered track with just the cleanest version of the low harmony as I could isolate, panned off to the side a bit. With the bass part pretty much gone, I played a new one, and also added a new acoustic guitar to give a little definition to the rhythm. These both then had to be, ironically, muddied up just a little bit so they didn't poke out at the listener as unnaturally sharp compared to the rest of it. I also tracked in a distant tambourine... there is a pretty serious need for something to keep the beat, especially in the middle where some extraordinarily white people make a desperate attempt to clap along in time and fall sadly short.

I've spent so much time on it and heard it in so many iterations that I can't tell if I've improved it at all, although I'm pretty sure I managed not to make it worse. Unlike previous retro reinventions on 39-40, I'm not digging up another artist's version to post as the "original", partly because I couldn't recall or discover whose arrangement the guys were using as a template for this version, but that's probably for the best... in this instance I would rather post a "before" and "after" anyway. It's again a pretty loose definition of a "cover", but it was quality time spent with grappling and modifying someone else's material, so I say it counts. And in this instance, any feedback on how it worked out is very welcome.

Personnel:

THE THUNDER HILL SINGERS

Jim Broome ~ Guitar, lead vocal

Ed Jordan ~ Banjo, vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Bass, vocal

Unknown (pending Dad's feedback) ~ Harmonica

Rex Broome ~ Retcons

Recorded live in the KHS Auditorium, 1974 (?)

"Go Tell It on the Mountain (Live)" performed by The Thunder Hill Singers

"Go Tell It on the Mountain (Remix)" performed by The Thunder Hill Singers

333. "Waterloo Sunset" by The Kinks

2011-02-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

Catching up on old promises again, here's Gen doing "Waterloo Sunset". And I got her to play lead guitar as well! She's been idly playing that riff and singing the song since I met her, and a recent Facebook discussion of how perfect it is prompted me to bring this into the world. I mean, who better? I have the blog, the gear, and most importantly and in contrast to everyone else, I have Gen. And even then, in terms of her voice, I barely made it... she had a tooth pulled this morning and I don't know when she'll next be able to speak clearly, much less sing this well!

The backing track didn't quite hit my mark, mostly because I recorded the rhythm guitar while Eden was home sick and I didn't want to fire up the amp while she was trying to rest, so it's all amp-modeled, and I really couldn't find or fine-tune the sound I heard in my head for this. It's mitigated in the final mix by the contrast with Gen's lead on acoustic.

The basic drum groove pleases me, though; it's a sample from "Bonita Applebum". A few weeks ago, probably leading up to the cover of "Violet Town" (although I wouldn't swear to it) and after listening to a lot of old 39-40 on CDs in my car and being a little let down at the familiarity of all the drum loops, I decided I needed some new ones and decide to go jackin' for beats, and to do it where I oughta. So I went trawling through my old school hip hop and some of the artists famous for providing the beats upon which hip hop was built. Got some great stuff, but halfway through the Incredible Bongo Band's oeuvre I realized I didn't truly have enough days or songs remaining in the project to use all that stuff, especially considering how many of the upcoming slots are reserved for live band stuff. And after 39-40 wraps I don't see me doing much loop-based recording in the immediate future, so I should really use this stuff now. If that makes your experience of the final month just a bit funkier, then so much the better.

Artwork note: I like to include the cover art for the original 45s of the songs being covered when possible; it's just a little more interesting than seeing the cover of Something Else by The Kinks for the millionth time. But I was surprised to find a sleeve for "Waterloo Sunset" showing the boys still wearing the hunting togs-- as much as I like that gear, it didn't seem period-appropriate. Turns out it's the German single cover and so a little behind the times, I suppose, but I kept it anyway.

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ Lead vocal, lead guitar

Rex ~ Everything else

"Waterloo Sunset" performed by The Kinks

"Waterloo Sunset" performed by Rex Broome

332. "A Month of Sundays" by The Church

2011-02-13T21:42:00.000-08:00

In case you were worried that I'd forgotten the other album I'm covering in its entirety, here's another step toward the completion of Remote Luxury as reimagined (<-barf term) by Skates & Rays. There's another one partially finished as well... this will get done.

Hearkening back to my conception of the record as a "coming of age" type deal, this track is one of the key elements in that theory. The scenario is sort of the thing I liked to daydream about as one of those weird loner kids: meeting an exotic woman who not only validates one's romantic self but also opens the door to a new and invigorating social world. Although on some level I recognized the druggy implications of the friends as having "good things to add to the blend", I seem not to have registered at the time that the whole thing is a sham, that in the end the woman seems to be trying to take something from the narrator, and certainly using him somehow... she is, after all, a "bad man's woman", probably sent to seduce the singer for unclear reasons. It's all there, but what I heard instead was the chorus's insistence that the singer had felt as if he belonged with these new people, departing slowly and hoping to be asked to stay. I tried to put some of that earlier, naive perspective into my performance of it, vocally, but the arrangement is supposed to suggest the creakier, more world-weary viewpoint: this is now not what happened yesterday, but a long time ago, the bitterness now difficult to sort out from the rush of discovery felt at the time.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS as embodied by just Rex this time

"A Month of Sundays" performed by The Church

"A Month of Sundays" performed by Skates & Rays

331. "Wilson" by Saint Etienne

2011-02-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

The endgame for 39-40, a multi-artist guest star extravaganza covering every track on Saint Etienne's classic album Foxbase Alpha, commences here. Sort of. The truth is, it actually commenced with the very first 39-40 post ever, which was, ironically, the very last track on Alpha. Some would call it destiny.

This track being an audio collage, I again called upon my long-standing partners in experimental noise, Butterfly Distraction. In fact, the Beefheartian guitar and bass bed for this track is extracted from the same recent longform BD performance as used for this track, although you'd never know it: an average Butterfly improvisation goes one for well over an hour and wends its way through so many permutations that you could easily chop it up into far more than just two dissimilar sounding selections.

It was clearly the right thing to do to bring Anjali around one more time to provide the spoken word sample. Matching the male voices was a little tougher... there wasn't a "UK Male Child" voice available in the voice synthesis engine that brings Anji to life, so "Come on Auntie, we'll miss the bus" is actually the same voice as "It's the new money, you know", just repitched and sounding, if possible, even more unnatural and disturbing.

Personnel:

BUTTERFLY DISTRACTION

Rex Broome ~ Guitar

Miranda Broome ~ Bass

Derek Hanna ~ Guitar

Clifford Ulrich ~ Guitar

Anjali and friends ~ Vocals

"Wilson" performed by Saint Etienne

"Wilson" performed by Butterfly Distraction feat. Anjali

330. "Transmission" by Joy Division

2011-02-11T00:12:00.000-08:00

This may sound in some ways like a mashup, but it isn't. It does employ some elements of the original Joy Division recording, but the lead vocal and the approximation of Barney Rubble's guitar scratchery are all new performances by me. Meanwhile, the pieces of the... other song... that you think you're hearing are actually radically reworked bits of a karaoke rendering of it, making this less of a remix/sound collage than the culmination of my various experiments with karaoke tracks, which have included writing my own new lyrics for a song, singing the lyrics in Esperanto (and I have to admit I'd totally forgotten that one), getting crazy with the kids, singing the lyrics to a completely different and much weirder song, and most pertinently to this track, who could ever forget this thing.

As to that other song, as most people who know me are aware, I've long held "Don't Stop Believin'" to be in a dead heat with POD's "Youth of the Nation" for the title of Most Offensively Bad Song Ever, and this has only become more vexing as it inexplicably rises year by year higher into the stratosphere of Universally Treasured Cultural Artifacts. So I did want to piss on it. The inspiration for the use of "Transmission" came from the recent appearance of this piece of genius, which is somewhat funny, but also really gets me excited about just how damned awesome the song is, probably one of the most stirring pieces of minimalism I can think of, the very essence of what was and is so great about postpunk music and the antithesis of the bloat personified by the Journey song.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and if it's not "What the fuck is this asshole talking about?" it's probably, "Oh, God, the tired reductive myth of punk rock nobly slaying the dinosaur-dragons of commercial arena butt rock", and I'm right there with you and would tend to shoot down any such simplification, but hear me out. The years have had their say, and I could really care less about the larger issues. I might once have done, decades ago, but I've long since become a basically punk rock dude who unironically loves Cheap Trick and Glen Campbell whilst despising Smashing Pumpkins and GG Allin. I couldn't care less about the broader cultural implications of music; I like what I like.

But for the moment, with regards to the artists at hand, I'll play the game with slightly more nuance. Even as a kid, the likes of Journey struck me as pablum. The zeitgeist seems to have started to agree with me, and then slowly and insanely to reverse itself, first ironically and then with greater and greater sincerity, to the point where expressing a dislike for stuff like this is viewed as humorlessness or not having gotten over oneself. A tortured path, sure, but hardly less so than what's happened to Joy Division, who cynically might be viewed as an avatar for depression and suicide fetishists, and if it helps I'll admit that I had my prejudices against them once long ago for that very reason. Factor in the complications provided by the entire career of New Order-- probably a lot of people have "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Blue Monday" on the same '80s classics playlists, and there might be as many kitsch-centric reasons to love New Order as there are goth-poseur excuse for blindly idolizing Ian Curis-- and the rise over the last decade of postpunk revivalists running the gamut from the sublime Bloc Party to the execrable She Wants Revenge, and you've got a tough text to parse. But I really think, and maybe I'm just nuts, that if you cast aside nostalgia and peer pressure and listen to Substance back to back with Journey's Greatest Hits, which appears to be the 24th best-selling album of all time in the US, you'd be hard pressed to come to any conclusion other than the obvious: Journey sucks, and Joy Division is awesome.

And so I jammed them together, and if that reeks of novelty, so be it. If you can't smell the sincerity wafting off of my vocal and guitar here, it's not for lack of trying; I simply fail it. It works for me... it's one of the very few 39-40 efforts I've instantly wanted to listen to again and again, and it actually moves me. Maybe that's narcissistic, but you'd have to hope that out of 330 efforts I'd be able to please myself every once in a while.

As a side note, the cover art for my version is a little off the mark for what I really strive for in terms of these things-- they've evolved to be generally intended to function quite literally as virtual 45 sleeves-- but it just amuses me to think that some day someone might run across this image devoid of context and have to figure out what the hell it's on about. At the same time, it occurs to me that, statistically speaking and given the rarely acknowledged real-world eclectic musical tastes of most people, there are probably a lot of Journey and Joy Division CDs rubbing up against each other in a lot of peoples' alpha-by-artist record collections. Not mine, though.

Personnel: Rex

"Transmission" performed by Joy Division

"Transmission" performed by Rex Broome

329. "Weasley's Wizard Wheezes" by Eden Hain

2011-02-10T23:50:00.000-08:00

I did some quick math today and realized that there are only 37 more songs to go before the end of 39-40, and almost all of the slots are occupied by subprojects and obligations, so from here on out it's a parade of "last evers". This one marks the second and last appearance of Mandolele, the super-high-end duo Eden and I formed as a semi-joke around the time I got my mandolin and she took up the uke. Here we're doing a new wrock tune of Eden's, which was fittingly written as a duet by Eden and her friend Eden (not making this up) around the idea of the Weasley twins, Fred and George, trying to sort out their future plans in what I think is the fifth Harry Potter book. I'm George and she's Fred. It's a damned sophisticated piece of writing, and Eden's uke chops now clearly eclipse my mandolin skills, but the harmonies and Eden came up with work just fine in our arrangement. We actually performed this as a segue between her set and the Skates & Rays bit at the last gig, and I'm afraid I botched my bit up rather badly. This version is a sort of apologia.

Personnel:

MANDOLELE

Eden Hain ~ Ukulele, vocals (Fred)

Rex Broome ~ Mandolin, whistling, vocals (George)

"Weasley's Wizard Wheezes" performed by Eden Hain

"Weasley's Wizard Wheezes" performed by Mandolele

328. "Twenty-Five Forty-One" by Grant Hart

2011-02-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

Listening to the beginning of this, you might conclude that it's become a bit of an ideé fixé of mine to do Grant Hart solo songs on mandolin. This one eventually moves on to broader territory, though. One kind of neat thing happens here: on that ever-recycling chord sequence, the voicing I used for what's supposed to be an A minor on the mandolin turned out to be a power chord instead, and the melody barely suggests that it's a minor. So the two or three times that overdriven guitar actually plays the full chord during the playout are effective the first time the "real" chord progression reveals itself. Some call it accident, but I like to describe it as retroactive genius.

If Grant Hart had done nothing after Hüsker Dü other than writing this song (and compared to the output of a lot of people, including Bob Mould, over the last twenty years, that's not for from the case), it would still constitute a brilliant solo career. It's just a fantastic song, also covered by the amazing Robert Forster, and a few others, I believe.

Personnel: Rex

"Twenty-Five Forty-One" performed by Grant Hart

"Twenty-Five Forty-One" performed by Rex Broome

327. "Here Comes A Regular" by The Replacements

2011-02-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

Continuing on with my efforts to catch up to where I'm supposed to be date-wise and the uncertain functionality of the MOTU unit, this one's another literal bedroom recording... I was even mostly lying down when I recorded it. The very essence of unpremeditated... a first take, although admittedly this, like much of this entire project, would not have been possible without the miracle of having the lyrics instantly available on the same device on which I was recording.

This one goes out to Megan Lahman, who's been an avid supporter of the project since it began.

Personnel: Rex

"Here Comes A Regular" performed by The Replacements

"Here Comes A Regular" performed by Rex Broome

326. "Dennis and Lois" by Happy Mondays

2011-02-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

See, I know this recording sounds weird. At this point the MOTU unit only works about 75% of the time, and certain things will make it crap out not to be revived for several hours. And right after I got everything ready to do this tune, I stupidly did one of those things. There was nothing for it but to proceed using the condenser mic on the Mac, and that meant that a lot of stuff I normally would have played, er, analogically, like bass and electric guitar, got ditched or replaced by sequencing (which might sound good, but programming bass takes me a lot longer than playing it). And then when I started to record the acoustic guitars, for some reason I couldn't get them to stop phasing. There didn't seem to be any electronic reason for it, so it was really puzzling. Thinking about it later, I guessed that the phasing was a natural, physical acoustic thing relating to the room in which I was recording and my position within it: I was dead center in my living room underneath the seam of its rather large cathedral ceiling, and I think the sound waves were just bouncing around in there canceling each other out. The vocals weren't affected nearly as badly, so of course I added some artificial phasing to those.

Jim Poe said to me once long ago, "One thing I really like about the Mondays is that they're kind of total dicks", and I completely knew what he meant. It resonated years later when I was talking with Skates & Rays bassist Cliff about the Stones, and how there was something truly seductive about evil as they portrayed it, much more matter-of-factly than your average faux-Satanic or ultra-hedonistic metal band. Those kinds of bands are off-putting to me because they're really just about establishing their own badassness over and over again, never really getting to anything else. The Mondays and the (interesting, evil iteration of) the Stones don't take much time to posit their own evil or threateningness: it's just there, and then they're on to the next thing. The Cult of Badassery seems to have grown to new levels of all-pervasiveness in recent years, and it's hard to imagine a "bad boy" group being as totally weird as the Mondays in this Michael Bay world... nobody hoping to look threatening to your mom would bother to be as goddamn groovy, or to spew forth lyrics about whatever the hell it is that Sean Ryder's on about when some gothy makeup, a scary logo and a broody, sharp-sounding name will do the trick. And I loved the Mondays for it, bastards though they were and are. In some ways, it was a dry run for my later mania for The Fall (whom I actually heard and liked well before Happy Mondays existed, but didn't become pathologically obsessed with until much more recently)-- it's beyond imagination that Mark E. Smith and Sean Ryder appeared at the same spot on the map, because while they're really two of a kind, the parallel only really holds on paper, and hearing either man at work you'd never begin to get them confused.

One last piece of Fall-related trivia: a few years back I was following a Fall discussion group trying to piece together the sordid tale of the backstory and fallout of the infamous Brownies gig, with then-Fall-member Julia Nagle relating her side of the story. Julia referred a few times to a NY couple who'd helped to organize and promote the doomed tour and with whom she'd corresponded about trying to get some of her gear shipped back to the UK, and at some point I realized that she was referring to them as "Dennis and Lois". And yes, they turned out to be the Dennis and Lois of song, about whom I'd previously known nothing, and who are pretty damned fascinating. Above all I was surprised to learn that they were American.

Personnel: Rex

"Dennis and Lois" performed by Happy Mondays

"Dennis and Lois" performed by Rex Broome

325. "The Spinnin' of the World" by John Stewart

2011-02-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

Today I'm really not feeling well at all, and it is also Superb Owl Sunday as well as the centennial birthday of the late, meh-at-best former President Ronald Reagan, most fondly remembered as a prior contributor of really bizarre 39-40 source material. More importantly than any of that, it's the birthday of my brother, Dr. Jeffrey L. Broome. As a tribute, I present a recording of a song I played as the toast at his wedding to his wonderful and amazing wife Monica, some 12 or so years ago. It's a low-fi outing, owing to my illness and also the fact that half of my gear is still wedged into my car and unlikely to make it out of there until I feel slightly human again, but it is a song that I really love and which comes from the Broome family favorite LP Bombs Away Dream Babies by John "not the guy from the Daily Show although he's cool too" Stewart.

I wish there were a recording of the duet my dad and I performed at the actual ceremony, of a John Fogerty tune Jeff had specifically requested of us. It was the first real such duet we'd ever done, although such things are a lot more common these days. Either way, I was mighty proud to be a part of the occasion and I hope it won't be too long before we see Jeff and his family, currently planted in northern Texas, again (and in the case of my nephew Carson, for the first time).

For those who've never heard the original, yes, it's Lindsey Buckingham, whose musical awesomeness my brother recognized well before I did so, on the backing vocals.

Personnel: Rex

"The Spinnin' of the World" performed by John Stewart

"The Spinnin' of the World" performed by Rex Broome

324. "That's Entertainment" by The Jam

2011-02-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

I've always been a little leery of doing a Jam cover with Skates & Rays because, like, okay, here's me, skinny moptoppy guy with Rickenbacker fronting scrappy power trio... sounds like an invitation for unkind comparisons, and that is indeed why we're not doing "In The City" or similar. Still, I really wanted to do this one for my wife, who loves the song, and in the end I couldn't resist; it wormed its way onto our setlist in almost exactly the same was as "She Comes in Colors".

Thing is, in all its four chord, three minute majesty, it's not an easy song to learn, consisting as it by definition does of six whole verses constructed almost entirely out of non sequitirs, often two per line. I put a lot of time into trying to flat-out memorize them, and never quite nailed it, deciding eventually to rely on a bare-bones cue sheet at the show. Things can be counted on to get tight when setting up, though, especially when we're setting up our own PA in a space that's filled by dining tables right up until the moment the kitchen closes, and in this case it was well into Eden's opening set until I finally had all my guitars tuned and had a second to figure out where I was going to post my crib sheet. There being no good wall surface, I constructed an ingenious music stand out of one of those clear plastic drink-menu placards and a stack of Skates & Rays CDs.

Unfortunately, as soon as we started the song I realized that Cliff was standing unknowingly directly between me and my placard, leaving me high and dry without any help. This is fairly comical for the first verse or so, but from the third verse on it's about 75% correct, and maybe 85% intelligible. Not that anyone much cared, as you can tell... Gen hadn't been able to make it because Miranda had come down with a fever literally just as I was leaving to load in, so that didn't work, either. But here it is for you to... I dunno, "enjoy" might be too strong a term, but hey, that's entertainment. I had thought of doing a super-extended solo version of it with all of the original England-in-the-'80s lyrics followed by an equal number of new Silver-Lake-in-the-'10s verses, but things are piling up on me quickly now... honestly, less than two months' worth of songs to go? Jesus.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitar & vocal and sticky black tarmac

Derek Hanna ~ Drums pounding and the cry of a tomcat

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass guitar and thinking 'bout your holidays

Recorded live at the Oyster House Saloon, 2/4/2011 and breathing in petrol

"That's Entertainment" performed by The Jam

"That's Entertainment" performed by Skates & Rays

323. "She Comes in Colors" by Love

2011-02-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

Having just recently for the first time posted a repeated version of a song, albeit with the caveat that the artists performing the cover were different (talkin' bout this and this), here I'm taking it a couple steps further. Although the last time I posted a cover of "She Comes in Colors" it was a solo "studio" version, and this one is by Skates & Rays performing live, those aren't hairs I'm interested in splitting. It's the same guy singing and playing all the guitar, and I don't even have an alternative "original" version to post. But I thought it would be, having come this far, actually sort of fun to see, at least once, what happens when a song goes from being something I just know how to play to a thing the band can perform live at a show.

The song made it into our set pretty much by accident. We were looking to add a big bunch of covers to the repertoire in order to keep the Oyster House crowd involved, but we weren't thinking of anything quite this offbeat. I don't remember why, but I started playing it idly at a rehearsal, and the band jumped in, with Derek coming up with a very cool drum approach which was a lot different from the original but a perfect fit, and we just figured we'd roll with it. As it turns out, purely by accident, we did keep a few people in the bar a few song longer by doing it. One of them was Eden's dad, whom I did know to be a big fan of Arthur Lee, but I had no idea that he'd be just about to leave when we uncorked it, so hey... thank you, Mr. Lee.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitar & vocal

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ullrich ~ Bass

Recorded live at The Oyster House, Studio City, CA, 2/4/2011

"She Comes in Colors" performed by Love

"She Comes in Colors" performed by Skates & Rays

322. "So What About It?" by The Fall

2011-02-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

It's amazing that this is only the third Fall song to be done on 39-40, especially considering that when I started the blog I had only recently finished another year-long experiment: listening only, and I do mean only, to The Fall. In fact, one of the early, discarded ideas for the blog was to attempt to cover every Fall song known to man. That would've taken a lot longer and automatically exposed me to a notoriously cerebrally caustic audience, so here we are instead.

The idea was to perform this is if it were not at all a Fall song, while making as few substantive changes as possible. I was going to add harmonies, but I ran out of time to solve a technical glitch. It's probably better this way.

Here's a trivial oddity: as many, many times as I have played harmonica on 39-40, and as many times as I have appeared to play it live along with an acoustic, this marks the first time I have actually cut the harmonica and guitar parts at the same time. I'd long ago lost the tightening wingnut on my harmonica rack and never thought to replace it until I started playing harmonica on a few new covers for Skates & Rays (it's Cliff who dons the rack and plays the harp on the records and live for the band up until now). Turned out to be harder than expected: my rack is German made and requires a metric wingnut. My gift to you is the opportunity to write your own joke. The irony is that, in this song, the not-overdubbed harmonica instantly sounds like a overdub because you hear my voice along with it! It is, in fact, the voice that was added later, when I realized I'd forgotten to do the "bulletin from Moth City" bit, which is, as any true Fall fan will know, a quote from the pre-roll to the remix of the song which can be found on Listening In: Lost Singles Tracks 1990-1992.

Personnel: Rex

"So What About It?" performed by The Fall

"So What About It?" performed by Rex Broome

321. "Into My Hands" by The Church

2011-02-02T00:35:00.000-08:00

Part of me really wants to put a really succinct writeup on this one... something along the lines of:

-Aw, hells yeah!

-Most. Jangle. EVAR!

-This is why I love having a band.

Basically, maybe I'm deluding myself, but this feels like a hard-won high-water mark for latter-day 39-40 at a time when I often feel like sticking a fork in it. And it was a long time coming: Skates & Rays cut the backing track for this one about three weeks ago. Today I was facing the mountain of material I needed to learn for the gig on Friday, and lamenting the MOTU sketchiness that's made it tough to get blog stuff done, and I decided to take a run at finishing this one if I could get the unit to function long enough to record the overdubs. I made sure to have the amps and mics all set up before I even plugged the MOTU in, in order to make the most of the probably limited time I would get with it. Miracle of miracles, it held out for the whole session, which got a lot more involved than I'd dared to dream it could, and I was really happy with just about every development as it occurred. I think I got a highly reasonable facsimile of everything I love about the original track, and got to add a whole lot to it in the bargain. I could write about it forever, but here are some of the highlights:

-The backing track: the band didn't know the song, so I basically led them through it and let them write their own parts. Derek reinvented the drums and Cliff came up with a bass part that mirrors the vocal melody more than the root notes, which was brilliant since the guitars play a hell of a lot of the bass.

-I've always thought that the slide part on the original was a great idea, but a bit flat in execution. I seem to have corrected that, perhaps to an absurd degree.

-Little lyrical shifts. There are probable twenty or thirty of these in an average week of 39-40, a shit about which probably nobody will ever give, but there's a story behind them all, and on this occasion I'll indulge myself and detail a few. Yes, as a tribute to Eden's Pottermania, I do indeed sing "Some seek sleek and Slytherin charms". The word "caryatid" appears as a tribute to one of my favorite Son Volt songs, mostly because it fits the bill of "breath of words" better than the original lyric does, at least in terms of my understanding of the line as a celebration of the sheer joy of language. The improvised stuff in the second instrumental break sure does nod in the direction of the Bunnymen for the second day in a row. And it just didn't seem right to sing "stupid bloody things" as a Yank, inappropriate though my substitute may be.

-Pursuant to the above, yeah, there's a bit of an unintentional fake accent going on here, but much to my surprise, my Kilbey impersonation seems, to me, to have veered wildly into Howard Devoto territory on the third verse.

-James Dignan again proves to be a good luck charm for me. He has also done a terrific cover of this song, which I was lucky enough to hear before I did this one. James had previously requested a Roky Erickson tune which turned out to be one of my very favorite covers on the blog, and shortly thereafter provided an original song for me to cover, my version of which was lucky enough to be meet with his approval and was a joy to create.

There's more, but basically, I am well pleased. That's three out of ten Remote Luxury songs down, and I have fancy plans for the others. And pants to match.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitars and vocals

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"Into My Hands" performed by The Church

"Into My Hands" performed by Skates & Rays

320. "Heroes" by David Bowie

2011-02-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

I'm not really sure I should even post this one, but what the hell. The only reason it sounds like it does is because my MOTU is acting up again. I was set to do the overdubs to the Skates & Rays version of "Into My Hands" for the Remote Luxury subproject... I had in fact dialed in a really nice sound for the 13-string and I was pretty psyched, but after about an hour of trying to get stable enough input to record a track, I pulled the plug. Meanwhile the band has a gig on Friday and we're doing two sets, so we'd decided to add some covers to the set, and I was planning on recording a few of them for 39-40 as memorization practice. I was now sitting in front of the computer with only its onboard mono mic open, with the 13-string in my hand and my Fender Twin about 20 feet behind me with a useless SM-57 pointing at it, and I decided to try to run trough "Heroes" (or should that be "'Heroes'", or even ""Heroes""?) in that most l0-fi of setups to see what happened.

I did a performance that I liked okay, but the lo-fi presentation seemed to need something more. Still not very committed to the idea, I prepped a second track and played a goofy lead part with exactly the same guitar and amp settings (it has one egregiously wrong note which I kept because it sort of reminds me of some Will Sergeant's more out-there breaks on Porcupine), but I couldn't quite settle it into any kind of stereo picture. A day later and with about the same level of enthusiasm, I popped the session open and opened the MIDI track that was already there, grabbed literally the first synth pad I saw on the menu, and played along with it live. This was the equivalent of one-finger playing, but even stupider, because I was just moving the cursor over a little icon of a keyboard. At this point it started to sound okay in a weird way to me, so I tweaked a few of the notes on the MIDI track and printed it. All I can really say in my own defense is that, personally, I've heard versions of "Heroes" that I like less than this one.

Personnel ~ Rex

"Heroes" performed by David Bowie

"Heroes" performed by Rex Broome

319. "Internet Love Song" by Tom Milsom

2011-01-31T22:31:00.001-08:00

This one's a bit of a summation of a lot of what's ended up happening with 39-40. A friend of mine recently told me that one of the things he's enjoyed most about the project has been watching me foster and respond to the musical development of my daughters. That's been important to me, too, but sometimes it's easy to forget how far they've come with me during the project. I wouldn't at all claim credit for Eden's powerhouse uke-and-vocal solo performance skills as she demonstrates them here, but hey, this right here was her first-ever time picking up a uke, and she's logged a lot of time on lead vocals on the blog. I am mighty proud of her. The harmonies on this thing she put together on her own, too... pretty impressive. We've all come a long way.

A measure of that is the fact that I'm not even entirely sure I should be posting this as "my" work on the blog... and the best argument for me doing so is probably that all the work to get to this point has been cumulative. My general definition of what qualifies for a 39-40 entry has been "a recorded work that wouldn't exist at the end of the day were it not for me", meaning that as long as I'm the primary motivating factor nursing it into reality, it'll count. And as long as it's a cover. There's usually not much stretching of that definition required, but it's allowed me to feature other vocalists and players, or to do what amount to "remixes" of the original work, or to offer up "repurposed" older recordings from time to time, all of which have, it is to be hoped, stopped the blog from becoming a parade of acoustic renditions of '60s garage psych, '70s punk/postpunk and '80s college rock tunes. For that you should all be grateful.

Personnel:

Eden Hain ~ Everything except:

Rex Broome ~ Harmonica and half of the handclaps

"Internet Love Song" performed by Tom Milsom

"Internet Love Song" performed by Eden Hain

318. "I'm Going Home" by The Kingston Trio

2011-01-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

There are a few more songs left from the Thunderhill concert for me to work up to specs for CD release, but this one, as always, was the last one of the set. This song has been the closer and, usually, the opener for any Thunderhill set since the band released their single of it in or around 1965. Often referred to by the title "West Virginia", it's been called the "true" national (sic) anthem of the state and apparently to this day is blasted at tailgate parties outside of every WVU home football game in Morgantown (and I can take a certain pride in that, since any and all CD or digital copies of it trace back to my digitizing of the Thunderhill catalog in the early '90s). So it's pretty well known for what it is now. What's less well known is what it was orginally.

It can't be any surprise at this point that the original is a song made popular by The Kingston Trio. What might be a little more surprising is that if you listen to the "original" version, you'll discover that it was not written about my home state of West Virginia, but rather my other home state of California! The two states have the same number of syllables in their names, so switching that over, along with a few other geographical tweaks in the lyrics, is a pretty simple thing.

It'd be interesting enough if it stopped there, but the origins of the song get even murkier. The California version of the tune was written by a fellow named Fred Geis, whom I've just learned passed away only two years ago. The Trio version was actually on its way to becoming a decent hit record when Geis was sued for lifting the tune to the song from another source, causing the single to be withdrawn and cast into obscurity (which ultimately made a lot more people think the Thunderhill guys had written it). Accounts vary as to what tune Geis had allegedly (and probably subconsciously) stolen; some say it was folk tune incorporated into an opera, and others have it as the title tune to the Broadway musical Milk and Honey, which is itself sort of hard to come by thee days (although you can hear Eddie Fisher, the massively popular '50s vocalist (and father of Carrie Fisher) doing a version of it here). That's a lot of controversial authorship right there. What's fairly certain is that Thunderhill have gotten the most mileage out of it for the past 45 years, and it's traveled far and wide throughout at least the northern part of West Virginia as a beloved anthem for most of that time.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drum, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

The Honi Honi Chorus and Drunken Vocal Ensemble ~ Backing vocals

Recorded live at the Honi Honi, Deep Creek, MD, Summer 2010

"I'm Going Home" performed by The Kingston Trio

"I'm Going Home" performed by Thunderhill

317. "Violet Town" by The Church

2011-01-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

About the cover artwork... there are at least five different covers for Remote Luxury, although one of them (the best one, really) only applies the the five-song EP by that title. Comes in handy for keeping the visual side of things a little more interesting. Better still is the cover image for my cover of this song, which, were it an actual 45 sleeve, would seem to imply that Skates & Rays is covering an entire Green Day LP as the b-side.

Anyway, I return, finally, to the task of covering the entire LP by The Church. This is the second track on the album. Again, I hope to have relieved it of some of its original stiffness. The track was really difficult to craft, though... in some ways is was a throwback the the difficulties in the earliest days of 39-40, when stuff just didn't come out right and I had to backtrack and rethink things on the fly, and even then it was a struggle. My first plan was to have Eden and Miranda play a couple tracks each on viola and cello to give me a nice fake string quartet as a bed for the whole thing, but scheduling didn't allow for that. And it just got tougher from there. The final arrangement is very good, I think, but unfortunately all the performances betray the clunkiness of all that retrenching and reorganizing, not to mention a few drum loops that kept slipping off tempo before I caught them. At some point, though, you have to call it a day.

I guess at this point I should start to talk about my take on the songs on Remote Luxury, which strike me as really, although probably accidentally, of a piece with each other. It feels to me very much a "coming of age" album. There are, as always with The Church, songs of travel like this one, often songs of a deluded group on some kind of fool's errand in exotic but tiresome territory; in this case, though, it's just a town in Victoria, AU, and I therefore relate it to a lament on the grind of touring as a small, poor band. This one might be a sort of "Pleasant Valley Sunday" type of thing, although the vibe is of a bit of a sinister, seemingly deserted place. My relationship with the lyrics is a bit pretzel-like: what I found on the internet corrected a few things I've always misheard in the words, but was clearly totally wrong on a few other points, so what I sing is a hybrid of the real, the imagined-by-me-for-decades, and a few on-the-fly inventions depending on what I felt best fit the theme I imagine for the original LP, and which really will pervade my "re-imagined" version of it (more on which as the album develops).

Personnel-wise, this is by any measure a solo track by me, but I am crediting it to Skates & Rays as the full Remote Luxury cover album will be attributed to us as a band and this'll just be one of a few tunes on it on without the rest of the guys.

"Violet Town" performed by The Church

"Violet Town" performed by Skates & Rays

316. "Old Time Rock & Roll" by Bob Seger

2011-01-28T23:55:00.000-08:00

And now, I double the size of the available Rich Frush lead vocal performances with Thunderhill by presenting this here live favorite, never before available on any album. Anyone paying close attention could by now have assembled a pretty fair bootleg of vintage 2010 Thunderhill performances. In fact we're only three songs away from having presented the entire setlist performed at all three shows last summer. Stick with me people. The end to ever so many disparate forms of suffering is nearly at hand.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Rich Frush ~ Lead vocal, drums

Jim Broome ~ Rhythm guitar, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Live at the Honi Honi, 2010

"Old Time Rock & Roll" performed by Bob Seger

"Old Time Rock & Roll" performed by Thunderhill

315. "C4(Ever)" by The Exploding Ninjas

2011-01-27T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is one of a number of pieces which has been on deck and partially finished for a while now... multiple projects are well and truly leapfrogging one another on 39-40 in its last days. "C4(Ever)" dates back a couple weeks to my stint teaching at band camp. On one of the last days I taught an impromptu songwriting class. It resulted in a complete song that a bunch of the kids were able to perform at the final concert. The funny part was that the song was basically about explosions and disasters and grisly deaths. That's apparently what you get from a bunch of boys that age... I'm far more familiar with the female side of things, which really isn't universally girly, its just... I don't know, less single-minded about these things, perhaps? In any case, I was able to get the guys to frame their images of mayhem and destruction as something vaguely recognizable as a mirror to an emotional state. Sort of. I'm not sure if it mattered.

The "original" recording is the final live performance of the song at Burbank Music Academy. I started out my "cover" of it hoping to create something which sounded sort of like the demo for the song, a sort of backward-engineered faux 4-track. It didn't quite stay that way; toward the end I was just basically trying to make sure nothing sounded like a "real" rock band. I wanted to reserve that glory for the kids who rocked it on stage that week.

The personnel on the original were Austin on lead vocals, Marco on drums, Stephan (who wrote most of the riffage) on bass, and a whole bunch of other kids pitching in on vocals and auxiliary instruments, with me filling in the guitar.

Personnel (on the cover version): Rex

"C4(Ever)" performed by The Explosive Ninjas

"C4(Ever)" performed by Rex Broome

314. "Ah, Woe! Ah, Me" by The Kingston Trio

2011-01-26T23:15:00.000-08:00

Continuing the documenting of the Thunderhill show last year, here's another one where many fans of the band will be hearing the original version for the first time. Like many such songs, it's from the album-track side of the Kingston Trio catalog. This one hasn't changed too much from the original version, which is really sort of racy for its time. I have a pretty vivid memory of my parents telling me not to play this song (and a few others) when I took my Thunderhill LP in to my kindergarten class for show and tell. I didn't get it, but I got off light compared to my brother, who apparently got into some trouble in second grade for innocently singing "It take a horny man/To sing a horny song". It's these kind of experiences that led me to make a little time to record "clean" versions of three of the songs on the Skates & Rays record... not that the kids have ever asked to take one in for show and tell or anything.

I put the picture of Dad and myself conferring between songs as the cover image for two reasons:

1) I'm frankly running out of photos from the concert, and

2) Much of the song is a dialogue between a father and son. In fact, this is one of at least three songs from Thunderhill's set that involve questionable paternity. It's not something I worry about on my end, since I show evidence of the Broome/Pratt genes in spades. But if some shady psuedo brothers worm their way out of the woodwork at some future date, I guess I won't be able to say I wasn't warned.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Vic Marsh ~ Tambourine

Recorded live at the Honi Honi (as with previous tracks)

"Ah, Woe! Ah, Me" performed by The Kingson Trio

"Ah, Woe! Ah, Me" performed by Thunderhill

313. "Junk" by Paul McCartney

2011-01-25T23:03:00.000-08:00

The last time I had Gen sing a song on 39-40, I even mentioned that the tune she wanted to do was Paul McCartney's "Junk", but I was too lazy to work out the chords. Well, since then, Gen, in her wanderings on YouTube, found a performance of McCartney's band doing an instrumental version of the song. I asked her to forward me the link, thinking that in a pinch I could hijack the audio from the clip and have Gen sing over it, satisfying a number of needs at once.

The pinch now being that in which I am, I decided to take a second to so see if I could scare up a slightly more hi-fi version of the instrumental. And I discovered, much to my embarrassment, that an instrumental version of "Junk", entitled "Singalong Junk", has comfortably resided alongside its vocal counterpart on McCartney since it was orginally released, a year before I was born, and I've had a copy of it for quite some years already without registering it.

So here we have Gen with the finest backing band she's ever had... better even than Golden Earring, but that's another story altogether.

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ Vocals

Paul McCartney ~ Backing track

"Junk" performed by Paul McCartney

"Junk" performed by Genevieve Broome

312. "Out Behind the Barn" by Little Jimmy Dickens

2011-01-24T23:49:00.000-08:00

What might be a little bit more interesting than the sketchy performance from the dead middle of last summer's Thunderhill show, even for longtime Thunderheads who can't get enough of the song, is the opportunity to hear the original version of it, which I'll admit I had never heard myself until I put this post together. And that's saying something... I've done a lot of research into where the hell a lot of those oddball Thunderhill songs that most people thing the band wrote actually came from (just wait until we get to The Kit-Kats, dear readers). As for Mr. Dickens' version, hell, it don't sound much at all like what Thunderhill's evolved into over the years. That has a way of happening.

I should mention that the Thunderhill live tracks which are being burned off on 39-40 at the moment are really just rough live mixes, because that's all they need to be. A select few songs have been or are being reworked pretty extensively for the upcoming CD compilation; they tend to be the ones which aren't featured in studio versions on any original Thunderhill release, and a couple of songs where Dad's particularly fond of the "reunion band" arrangements. So far the possible keepers I've posted have been "Okie from Muskogee", "(Ghost) Riders" (which, if released, would require a new lead vocal due to the original signal being all gnarly and distorted), and "Sloop John B". All the others are for entertainment or educational purposes only, or however my pretend lawyer would tell me to word that.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Rhythm guitar, lead vocal (second and fourth verses)

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, lead vocal (first and third verses)

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Recorded at the Honi Honi, Summer 2010 as with previous tracks

"Out Behind the Barn" performed by Little Jimmy Dickens

"Out Behind the Barn" performed by Thunderhill

311. "Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

2011-01-23T23:17:00.000-08:00

The Robyn Hitchcock online mailing list "fegmaniax" was one of the first "places" I frequented when I first went online in the mid nineties (I put "places" in quotes because, and I mention this because it's personally reasonable that many people reading this wouldn't be familiar with the archaic notion of e-mail mailing lists, and one of the essential characteristics of such lists is that there's even less "there" there than there is with, say, a website) and the only such community of which I'm still a part all these years later. Today a lot of the interactions of it members (fegs) and traffic take place off the list entirely and on Facebook instead, so while those connections continue, it's a little sad to see the list itself finally fading after all this time, going grey in a museum as our boy might have it.

Nonetheless, it was on the Feglist Proper this morning that I saw this notice this morning:

As I was driving in this morning, I heard what I thought was a Robyn Hitchcock
song on the radio. It sounded like 'Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)'. But it
wasn't. Musically, it was identical, lyrically, it was different. I called the
station (88.9FM KXLU). The DJ said it was 'Is It Cold In Silverlake' by Buddy.

http://www.iamyourbuddy.com/index.html

Apparently the song was on an episode of 'Ghost Whisperer'.

Does Robyn know about this?

Indeed, when we all got to hear it, as you can here, it was a total clone of one of Robyn's very best tunes, which is really saying something when you have as many great tunes as he does. I was doubly vexed because the title presumably refers to hipster haven Silver Lake, the neighborhood in Los Angeles where I just happen to live. Thing is, it's properly two separate words, Silver Lake, not Silverlake (although in fairness a lot of local business make the same mistake in their advertising and storefronts).

Admittedly, Buddy (sometimes it seems to be a guy and sometimes it seems to be a band) may totally admit in some contexts to borrowing the tune, and for all I know they credit Hitchcock in the liner notes, but it's still a little irritating that this thing is floating around in the virtual world positing itself as a different song. It ought to at least have the original title in parentheses and a very prominent tag in the info of the mp3 identifying the original source.

Anyway, I already did a cheap reference to Bono's "song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles" thing on some dimly remembered 39-40 cover last year, but the situation calls for me to repeat it: I'm stealin' it back. And I'm glad I did; there was a lot more to the song than I'd thought for all these years.

Pointless Personal Trivia: The harmony on the original recording was sung by Glen Tilbrook of Squeeze, who was once my wife's boyfriend. That marks the second time in the history of this blog that I've sung a part originally performed by one of her exes. Who was the first one, you ask? Why, that would be telling.

Personnel: Rex

"Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" performed by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

"Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" performed by Rex Broome

310. "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash

2011-01-22T22:51:00.000-08:00

From my flubbing of the iconic (and incredibly easy to play) you can pretty much tell how this is going to go. Calling it a pisstake is in some ways an insult to piss: in olden times, the Thunderhill Johnny Cash tribute was a medley of about five or six Sun era classics with two modulations, bookended by "Folsom". It got a little hard to keep track of the sequence with Thunderhill's infrequent live performances and even less frequent rehearsals, and frankly we weren't sure if anyone noticed the other songs anyhow, so these days it's just the one tune.

The legend behind the medley has Thunderhill performing at a prison, in grand Cash style (and that part of the story is certainly true). Apparently some of the inmates were very adamant, in a kind of life-threatening kind of way, that the band play some Cash. In between sets they scrambled to put a single song together, only to realize that they knew the first verse of almost every Cash tune, but didn't know the whole thing of any of them. Thus was born the medley.

The Broome family and J.R. Cash go way back: the earliest recording I have of my dad singing is from before Thunderhill, in about 1958, and it includes "Train of Love". And through my Thunderhill association I got into the Man in Black well before the Rick Rubin days, when most of my peers still thought of him (and probably most country music in general) as sort of a cornball figure; I got to see him do his unvarnished, unhipsterized touring show at the Rocky Gap Bluegrass festival in Maryland in 1991, and I am now the proud owner of a bootleg of that very show.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar

Tom Heckman ~ Bass

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Recorded at the Honi Honi, Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, Summer 2010

"Folsom Prison Blues" performed by Johnny Cash

"Folsom Prison Blues" performed by Thunderhill

309. "Long Haired Country Boy" by The Charlie Daniels Band

2011-01-21T17:01:00.001-08:00

Continuing the posting of the newly mixed Thunderhill tracks from last summer, this one is, amazingly, the first Thunderhill track featuring a lead vocal by Rich Frush ever to be "released"! Rich played drums and sang harmonies on the two LPs the band cut in the late '70s, but he didn't really start singing lead on anything until after they were released. So there are no studio versions of this one, "Hard to Be Humble", "Old Time Rock & Roll" or the whole bunches of others he sang on. Hard to believe that this is the first time the general public will be able to get ahold of one, but it's true.

This is another unvarnished mix of the performance that day with no new overdubs and a minimum of editing. Rich really digs in on the vocal toward the end. It's a cool thing.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Rich Frush ~ Drums, lead vocal

Jim Broome ~ Rhythm guitar

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar

Tom Heckman ~ Bass

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Recorded by Heckman at the Honi Honi, Summer 2010

"Long Haired Country Boy" performed by The Charlie Daniels Band

"Long Haired Country Boy" performed by Thunderhill

308. "Common Reactor" by Silversun Pickups

2011-01-20T09:24:00.000-08:00

I guess this might seem like sort of a mainstreamy song for me to do, but my listening habits with regards to "new" music are on the random side. Aside from my general eternal browsing through and clicking with older music I'd not gotten into before (which is usually the bulk of my listening) and following the artists whom I've liked forever but have fallen off the radar for most, I tend to sort of pick up random records based on what I've read or heard people talking about. Most of those don't stick, but the ones that do, I play to death with little heed to the cultural context. And so it was that some years ago I was alternating Carnavas, the first Go! Team album, Charlotte Hatherley's solo debut and big rafts of vintage Paisley Underground and early UK postpunk scratch-guitar bands. That's just how it goes.

I'd class the album as somewhat of a guilty pleasure, mainly because the band gets compared with Smashing Pumpkins so much, and I fucking fucking fucking hate Smashing Pumpkins in every way they can be hated. It's the Sonic Youthy, My Bloody Valentiney vibe that pulled me in, along with the fact that the melodies and lyrics are far more palatable than the best Corganisms I've ever heard. The funny thing is, I don't know if I would have liked it as much had I not accidentally burned my CDR of it with the tracks in the reverse order, with "Common Reactor" as the leadoff track instead of the grand finale. The song itself is just great, the little occasional hiccup in the drums was a bit of an obsession for me, and I loved the way it ended with like two minutes of just rrrrrrrrrrr and then on to the rest of the record. Except that it doesn't, at least in the way I heard it for a month or so in my car before realizing what was wrong.

I did a whole bunch of takes trying to rework the structure for my purposes, and I was getting frustrated, when Eden walked over and read the dedication she'd just written for a painting she'd just finished for her friend Anastasia. The tape was rolling, and I just started the song after she was done, just as you hear it on the final recording.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Guitar and vocal

Eden ~ Invocation

"Common Reactor" performed by Silversun Pickups

"Common Reactor" performed by Rex Broome

307. "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotten

2011-01-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

At this point, 39-40 is primed to become a series of leapfrogging subprojects and albums-to-be. Here's the next viable track in the Thunderhill collection. This one is not slated for inclusion on the upcoming compilation, but it's the next song from the concert I'm pillaging for the ones which are, and it seems silly not to have a record of the entire show. The difference is that I'm not manicuring these with overdubs and corrections... they're basically decent mixes (by my standards) of what we played that day, warts and all. I won't be posting all of them (a few are redundant), but you'll hear almost all of it eventually.

Apparently this song is better known than I'd thought; throughout Thunderhill's career it's been obscure enough that a lot of people think it's a band original. Certainly they got it from someone other than Elizabeth Cotten, who wrote it; the fact that they sing "Bleecker Street" in place of "Chestnut Street" is a clue to the general milieu it most have come from, but I forget whose version it was. Anyway, a few years ago a solo performer (and I wish I could remember her name) on the same bill as The Chiggers dropped this song into a set of mostly originals, and that was very cool to hear. It's a fun one to play.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Basic tracks recorded by Heckman live at the Honi Honi, Deep Creek Lake, MD, Summer 2010

Additional recording and mixing by Rex at Minco Records, Silver Lake, CA, January 2011

"Freight Train" performed by Elizabeth Cotten

"Freight Train" performed by Thunderhill

306. "Maybe These Boys..." by The Church

2011-01-18T22:51:00.000-08:00

Barely two months remain in the 39-40 project, and surprisingly my overwhelming attitude is one of... not having enough time left to do half of what I'd hoped to. That may be a response to the last few months of lackluster space-fillers, but I did feel as if a new challenge was due before the whole thing wrapped up.

So I decided to try at least a couple of full-album covers, as that's been a popular artistic move over the last few years. I was briefly determined to do a record apiece from each decade from the '60s (maybe the '50s) to the present, but I don't think that's going to be practical; the two I settled on were from the '80s and '90s, although not necessarily over-representative of those decades: Remote Luxury by The Church, and Fox Base Alpha by Saint Etienne.

This, then, is the first track completed for Skates & Rays' full cover of the Remote Luxury album. I picked it as a spinoff of the fact that I just plain wanted to do "Into My Hands" with the band, but when I looked at it more closely, I realized that it was sort of a redheaded stepchild among Church releases. In some ways, the material on it is as close to a straight revision of the band's '60s psych and beat antecedents as they ever got, but in other, more casually apparent ways it reflects the more dubious aspects of its '80s vintage more than any other single LP in the band's catalog. I feel that as a band S&R is in a pretty good position to bridge that gap, and maybe do a small bit of extending its reach forward as well. But the other, and frankly more important thing that grabbed me about the record is how thematically linked so many of its songs appear to be, how they seem to largely circle around a singular stage of emotional development, and how that stage is just about exactly where I was when I discovered the record at 17 years old (approx.), and that put in a mindset to get at all that personal stuff through reworking the record. So off we go.

"Maybe These Boys..." is one of the more glaring examples of '80s production trends taken beyond any logical or rational ceiling and possibly one of the toughest listens in the band's early output; if I'd had the record on CD rather than cassette I may well have gotten into the habit of skipping it. Why the band took on two idioms outside its usual strengths in the forms of towering synthscapes and bluesy shuffles I can't say, particularly when those two great tastes don't especially cry out to be tasted together. However, rearranging it wasn't very difficult, and considering how quickly we developed and recorded it I'm rather pleased with the results, a few iffy decisions in the lead guitar lines to the side. It is longer than the original, but not by much, and I'd like to think it's a little bit smoother sailing and can still serve as a bit of a waystation at the end of Side 1.

Procedural note on the Full Album Covers project: I'll be posting the songs from the albums as we finish them, but when they're complete I'll offer them up as self-contained albums, properly sequenced to match the originals and with their own artwork, etc.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitar and vocals

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

"Maybe These Boys..." performed by The Church

"Maybe These Boys..." performed by Skates & Rays

305. "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" by The 13th Floor Elevators

2011-01-17T22:48:00.000-08:00

Tried to play this a little unevenly, haltingly, until it really gets going. I probably should have done another two or three takes to really make it happen, but I liked where this ended... I was using the same session as the previous cover and I forgot to take off the automated fade, so the sound suddenly vanished on me... thus "What happened?", which is maybe a fitting conclusion to the trip the song takes.

Personnel: Rex

"She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" performed by The 13th Floor Elevators

"She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)" performed by Rex Broome

304. "Pretty Deep" by Tanya Donelly

2011-01-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

One of those songs I had sort of forgotten that I knew. I got pretty emotional performing it (above and beyond the frustration that's evident at the beginning of the track). For some reason the phrase "I wish I carried a camera" caught in my throat every time, in a sort of teary way. That whole section, the bit with the helicopter as well, really gets me for reasons I can't articulate.

I discovered in the course of preparing this one that there's a really bad video for this song, and I wish I hadn't. No big deal, though. The album this is from is a mixed bag, like a lot of Tanya's stuff after that first Belly record, but I really don't want to miss the opportunity to praise her flat-out beautiful later album Whisky Tango Ghosts, which was hands down my favorite record the year it was released. No big pop songs like this one. Small songs. Almost a redefinition of "intimate". I might have a hard time listening to it now, and frankly I'm a little scared to try. But it's brilliant.

Personnel: Rex

"Pretty Deep" performed by Tanya Donelly

"Pretty Deep" performed by Rex Broome

303. "Sloop John B." by The Kingston Trio

2011-01-15T22:38:00.000-08:00

Properly speaking, as Thunderhill originally adapted their version of this song from The Kingston Trio and not The Beach Boys (who also based their version largely on the Trio's), it should be called "The Wreck of the 'John B.'", which is its title on the Trio's debut album. But Thunderhill have always called it "Sloop", so there it is.

I'm almost certain this is the first time a single song has been done more than once on 39-40, and hopefully this is good enough to compensate for the first attempt, which was one of the early demoralizing failures on the blog. What's definitely a first is that the first 39-40 version was a cover of an earlier Thunderhill version of the song, and the second is in fact a Thunderhill version of the song recorded after the older cover of the older Thunderhill version. Right? Cool.

This is also, with any luck and a little judicious work, a rough mix of a track that'll probably make it onto the "definitive" Thunderhill CD collection to be released later this year. So start saving up.

Personnel:

THUNDERHILL

Jim Broome ~ Lead vocal, rhythm guitar

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocal

Rex Broome ~ Lead guitar, backing vocal

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocal

Jerry Marsh ~ Tambourine

Basic tracks recorded by Heckman live at the Honi Honi, Deep Creek Lake, MD, Summer 2010

Additional recording and mixing by Rex at Minco Records, Silver Lake, CA, January 2011

"Sloop John B." performed by The Kingston Trio

"Sloop John B." performed by Thunderhill

302. "Mannequin" by Wire

2011-01-14T22:35:00.000-08:00

The last time I did Wire, it was more than half the lifetime of the project ago, and a superobscurity even by Wire standards. This, by contrast, is probably one of their best known songs. I made it faster, a feat which would be difficult with many of the songs on Pink Flag, but works fine on this one. Come to think of it, R.E.M. did the same thing with "Strange". Really, the idea that all the songs on the record are fast and short is one of those weird cliches that isn't even true. It would be nice to think of Wire as a sort of artsy Ramones, but they've always confounded expectations... even retrospective expectations of their first release, I guess.

Personnel: Rex

"Mannequin" performed by Wire

"Mannequin" performed by Rex Broome

301. "Lay Your Hands On Me" by Peter Gabriel

2011-01-13T22:31:00.000-08:00

A triple failure, this one... a genuine strikeout. And it started so well.

Back during the preparation of Miranda's Christmas program, there was a bucket of percussion instruments in my car going wherever I went, inevitably circling back to her school. When it was removed, a single maraca escaped. At some point thereafter I found it and kind of stuffed it in the between-front-seats console. And last week, at a red light, for some reason I picked it up and idly gave it a few shakes at roughly the tempo I used on this cover. For reasons still not clear to me, this song came immediately to mind, and the idea for the cover was born: do this with as close to just voice and shaker as possible.

The first time I sat down to do it, my MOTU audio interface thing died on me. I thought it was really quite over with, and was trying to line up some kind of alternate means of recording (explaining, if not excusing, the extra-long break between recordings) when for no reason I can discern the MOTU started working again.

The second time I sat down to do it, I was abruptly seized by crippling heartburn. Heartburn is a bit of a new thing to me in the past two years, there being a reason for 39-40 as the title of the blog. Awful thing, heartburn. Sort of alarming that it's starting now, when I'm a lot less abusive of my physical being than I have been in the past, but there it is.

Third time I sat down to do it, the exact position of myself and the shaker relative to the mics having become strangely familiar, I got through it, except that it sucked. I gussied it up with a few overdubs, violating the original intent, but it's still closer to the original minimal concept than it would've been if I'd really gone in for "fixing" it. But then, I had a bunch more days to make up, so it'd have to do.

Image search trivia: Bon Jovi had a song by this title too? I must have known that at some point.

Personnel: Rex

"Lay Your Hands On Me" performed by Peter Gabriel

"Lay Your Hands On Me" performed by Rex Broome

300. "99 Red Balloons" by Nena

2011-01-12T21:28:00.000-08:00

Another vestige of the '80s setlist cooked up by Heckman and myself for the class reunion last year. I think we actually performed it, too. The idea at the time, and the idea I've basically carried forward into this version, was to do it as a jangly, earnest folk ballad to try and restore some of the gravitas that it had in its day, but is difficult to hear now due to the production values, as if, perhaps, it was actually the same song as "Fall On Me". Perhaps it really didn't have any gravitas at the time, but it sure as hell felt like it... the Cold War was still on, and real, and we felt it. I don't think that whole fear of annihilation vibe survives very strongly in the perception of the '80s as it should, and the reason for that is simple and sad: unlike the '50s and '60s, the '80s didn't leave behind any preposterous "duck and cover" instructional films about how to survive a nuclear attack. Because by then we knew we were totally screwed no matter what.

Perhaps I'm being reductive about it, but sure as shootin' I was expecting the world to get blowed up real good any old day during my childhood. So this song was kind of a big deal in my mind, which is odd because it completely predates any true interest in pop or rock music on my part. I associate that with the way novelty music, or music related to films or TV, tends to involve kids before they start responding to music on an emotional level, and "99 Red Balloons" is sort of like a movie in and of itself, thereby standing out to me from the run-of-the-mill pop radio fare. The same is true, for in some ways the same reason, of, among others, "Mr. Roboto" by Styx, but "Mr. Roboto" pretty much sucks and offers nothing more these days than a laugh about how nuts we were to listen to such thing. "Balloons" is different, though, because underlying the story there is something emotional... profoundly emotional, in fact, although we might not have known it at the time, assuming as we did that global fatalism was the only reality we'd ever know. Whatever... both Heckman and I agreed that the song is actually pretty awesome and still produces some chills up the spine when we hear it now.

Personnel: Rex

"99 Red Balloons" performed by Nena

"99 Red Balloons" performed by Rex Broome

299. "Broken" by Eden Hain with Skates & Rays

2011-01-11T21:12:00.000-08:00

This dates back the Skates & Rays rehearsal at which Eden's ukulele playing powered the abstract jam that was turned into the cover of Mark Gloster's "Dinosaur". While trying to sort out a recording issue, I asked Eden to take over playing my guitar so I could concentrate on the board and the cables and all associated folderol. Within a few minutes we realized that we could be killing two birds with one stone by having her lead the band through a couple of her original songs that we'd needed to record as demos for way too long now. This one is the older of the two, as evidenced by the fact the she wrote it on guitar: she writes almost exclusively on uke these days.

A third bird is now being killed by yet again the same stone as I convert the recording, finished yesterday, into, to all intents and, if you will, and you will, purposes, a cover of itself. Given that I subsequently added the lead guitar to the band recording, it had already turned into Eden fronting Skates & Rays, and with me replacing her vocal, it turns out to be just plain Skates & Rays in its totally normal form. The second tune recorded this way will probably surface within the week.

Personnel:

Eden Hain: Rhythm guitar

Rex Broome: Vocals, lead guitar

Derek Hanna: Drums

Clifford Ulrich: Bass

(Personnel on the original identical except for Eden ~ Lead vocal instead of Rex)

"Broken" performed by Eden Hain with Skates & Rays

"Broken" performed by Skates & Rays

298. "Badger Badger Badger" by Weebl

2011-01-10T20:50:00.000-08:00

The original is the music to an old internet phenomenon from 2003 (prehistoric in that arena) that I somehow missed at the time, primarily meant to be experienced as an endless flash animation. Eden pointed it out to me a few days ago, and I assumed that it was a new riff on the apparent importance of badgers in the upcoming season of Doctor Who, but such was obviously not the case. Nonetheless it stuck in my head as something that would be easy to do as a stopgap for 39-40 (not that I ever need those, of course) and something that would just be a fascinating curiosity as a decontextualized recording amongst the others on the blog. A bit of variety, you know. I guess the sounds on 39-40 are pretty diverse, but it often doesn't seem that way to me, inside looking out.

Our version is in a different key, not that it really matters, but I dig the fact that I added an actual bass part to the song. It's one of those "less is more" basslines, for which I have an ever growing affinity and appreciation. At least it feels like a recent thing to me; truth be told, the parts I come up with in that idiom are almost always akin to to the minimalist throb on "Papua New Guinea" by Future Sound of London, a track I've been obsessed with since shortly after it appeared, an even longer time ago than the whole badger thing. I also love the Au Pairs drum loop that powers the whole thing along.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Male rock vocal, bass, loops and stuff

Eden Hain ~ Female rock vocal

"Badger Badger Badger" performed by Weebl

"Badger Badger Badger" performed by Rex Broome & Eden Hain

297. "Gentle On My Mind" by Glen Campbell

2011-01-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

Another song built on the skeleton of a Thunderhill performance this summer... this time the only remnant of the original is Frush's drums and the original 12-string, panned way off to the side and mixed down for a little sugar. Everything else is me, today.

Anyone familiar with this song will notice right away that a lot of words are missing, and may wonder why I did that. Well, I didn't... my dad did, and the song has been that way since very shortly after Glen Campbell's version was released (which seems to have been pretty much at the same time as the very original, by the song's writer John Hartford, came out as well). The story goes that Glen's version was first released in 1967 and bombed, but Dad and the Thunder Hill Singers heard it on a camping trip and decided to record it for their next single. However, the company that pressed their records had a strict running time limit for 45 rpm singles (I've never understood that bit and sort of suspect it was some kind of scam on the part of the pressing plant, but maybe I'm missing something) and the band just couldn't get "Gentle" under the limit. They were faced with a choice of leaving out a verse, or, as they eventually did, dropping a few lines here and there in each verse, which explains what happened to the backroads of my memory and all that jazz. The song was basically unknown at the time, so it went into the live set in the "edited" version; the single was subsequently added to an LP they put out in the '70s, and the arrangement has stayed the same for 43 years now.

When Glen Campbell re-released the single to massive success in 1968, people would offer the band their condolences about how Campbell was getting away with murder by taking their song, adding some words to it, and getting a big hit out of it.

Personnel:

Rich Frush ~ Drums

Rex Broome ~ Everything else

"Gentle On My Mind" performed by Glen Campbell

"Gentle On My Mind" performed by Rex Broome

296. "Thought That I Was Over You" by Jack Frost

2011-01-08T23:07:00.000-08:00

Another cover from the McLennan/Kilbey project's first album, which I apparently like a great deal. It's actually not that uncommon for me to pick up two covers from a record I'm really into... three from one album seems a bit much so it usually stops there, and then only one will tend to survive in my long term memory, but in this case two of them are still at my fingertips.

Also another dashed off direct-to-hard-drive-via-laptop-mic production. It's enlivened by Eden's uke and vocal overdub, which happened just as you hear it on the recording, at the end: I finished my take, and she walked into the room and asked to do the harmony, so I cued it back up and she did it right away. It's a cute novelty on the one hand, and a sweet addition to a great song that I didn't completely louse up performance-wise.

Personnel:

Rex ~ Lead vocal, guitar

Eden ~ Backing vocal, ukulele

"Thought That I Was Over You" performed by Jack Frost

"Thought That I Was Over You" performed by Rex Broome & Eden Hain

295. "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day

2011-01-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

This might be the only 39-4o post thus far in which I did not generate, even through digital manipulation or programming, any of the sounds present on the recording. It's the final live performance of the main band of kids I coached throughout the past week at Burbank Music Academy's Winter Camp. They named themselves Dry Ice and spent most of their time working up this Green Day tune, although they also crossed over into guest slots in some of the other bands thrown together at the last minute by the camp staff. Actually, at Dry Ice's practices throughout the week, I did play with them, holding down the bass slot (and managing Stephan's footswitch) while we pieced the song together. But Miranda, who's been out of town for the holidays with Ridley and her mother, got back into town on Thursday, and I asked her if she was interested in replacing me for the final performance (I think it just looks better to the parents and feels better to the kids not to have an adult ringer onstage with them at the end of the week) and she said she was into it. She learned the part that morning and dropped right into the lineup like a charm... I was mighty proud.

Teaching at band camp is a serious whirlwind and requires a bit of homework, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, as much work as I did with them, I didn't end up knowing all the kids' last names. Consequently they're all listed by first names here in the personnel section, although Miranda's surname ought to be obvious by now. None of the boys were older than 11, and Marco had never played drums before this Monday (he's a very good pianist, though).

Personnel:

DRY ICE

Tristan ~ Vocal, lead guitar

Stephan ~ Guitar

Marco ~ Drums

Miranda ~ Bass

Bradley ~ Keyboards

Rex ~ Coach, offstage operation of overdrive footswitch

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" performed by Green Day

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" performed by Dry Ice

294. "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" by Das Racist

2011-01-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

Well, it's coming to the point where there'll start to be a few "lasts" for 39-40, and this may be the first last. There's been a subgenre of the blog in which songs, always involving performances by the kids, have been recorded in part or completely in the car during long-ish drives. I don't anticipate there being any more of these. I do think the tradition is going out on a high note with this one, though, and the grotty recording quality probably lends more aesthetic interest to this one than any of the others. The kids are really, really funny in a few places here, too. And the song, being more or less a reboot of "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" in a way, is road-trip-perfect.

I also like the backing track I assembled the night before the trip, as rough and in need of further development as it is. Surely someone has used The Band's "Up On Cripple Creek" as a source of sampled funk before, but I've not heard it, and I had the idea to scrunch it up with the oldest and most straight-up of old school beats, and I think it played out-- most of the rhythm tracks here are jacked from "Cars With the Boom", slowed down to Satanic proportions.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ First vocal, track assembly

Eden Hain ~ Second vocal

Miranda Broome ~ Third vocal

Ridley Broome ~ Fourth vocal

"Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" performed by Das Racist

"Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell" performed by Rex, Eden, Miranda & Ridley

293. "Hotel Womb" by The Church

2011-01-05T00:39:00.000-08:00

A real embarrassment of a stopgap, this is the second of the two repurposed rehearsal recordings from this week's Skates & Rays rehearsal. I intended for this one to be less a recording of the song than one of those whispy ghosty in-between-song music fragments that were commonly found on the more mysteriously interesting college rock albums of the '80s, such as those of, hey, The Church. Somehow I made the thing too damned long to really function as such, but I still hope it can be heard as a distant passing conversation dimly overheard in a near-sleep state as you ride the 39-40 train to the next destination of some substance, glimpsed between the overproduced and undermixed edifices of the cluttered MIDI-scape or maybe out in the dark fields where the acoustical pisstakes grow in giddy profusion.

At some point I really should give this song its due; I've been dancing around it for years, and it even made a partial appearance on 39-40 last summer, appended to the acoustic version of recent cover-boy Tom Verlaine's take on this Kris Kristoferson song.

The image for the cover art turned out to be really cool. I thought I was in for a nightmare of creepy, crude fetus artwork based on my google image search for the title words, but for once I got lucky.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS ~ Rex, Derek & Cliff as per usual.

"Hotel Womb" performed by The Church

"Hotel Womb" performed by Skates & Rays

292. "The New Pollution" by Beck

2011-01-04T00:17:00.000-08:00

I'm spending this week working as a camp counselor and band coach at the Burbank Music Academy, where my task is basically to organize a group of 10-14 year old kids (all boys, as it turns out, just to keep things out of my real of child-management experience) of wildly varying levels of musical experience into bands and teach them to play at least one cover song at a performance for their parents and other assorted worshipers on Friday. And indeed one would think that at this point I would be fairly qualified to teach people how to make cover versions of rock and roll songs. Unless, of course, you've listened to enough of my recordings to decide that I'm one of the least qualified people to do so on the basis of not having been able to do so myself. However, if you do feel that way and you are still reading this, you have bigger problems than I have time to address at the moment.

One of the songs we've been working on (and which is sadly unlikely to make the final cut) was George Harrison's Beatles classic "Taxman". The band who chose that one doesn't have a proper bassist, so I'm playing bass for them, unless, as hoped, Miranda gets back from her holiday travels in time to step in. But I have been messing around with that awesome "Taxman" bassline, which is up there with "Why Can't I Touch It?" as one of my favorites. The Jam seems to have agreed with me, famously borrowing it for "Start!", and I was thinking for obvious reasons of that one, too, but for some reason, when those two songs melded together in my mind, what I heard was not one song or the other, but instead "The New Pollution". During my lunch break today I lined up the Beatles and Jam songs, grabbed samples of similarly -pitched parts, and crammed them together like a sandwhich just for fun. Then I checked them against "Pollution", which was in yet a third key. By this time I had a pretty solid plan on how to re construct the Beck song out of the pieces, although for sanity's sake I put the whole thing in yet another key. Then there was much mirth to be had. Always fun to write fake Beck lyrics just to see if anyone notices... I really liked the ones I came up with here, "waxworks of the willing" being a favorite. I've just decided, thought, that I wish I'd sung "coalition of the clothed" instead of "clothes".

Personnel: Rex

"The New Pollution" performed by Beck

"The New Pollution" performed by Rex Broome

291. "Breakin' in My Heart" by Tom Verlaine

2011-01-03T23:51:00.000-08:00

See, this was a day when I had to do a lot of stuff that involved driving to every location. Yes, I ended that sentence exactly where and how I intended. Anyway, already being behind yet again on 39-40, I'd planned to use Skates & Rays' weekly rehearsal as a session to trouble-shoot the new studio setup and record some covers to deploy over the remainder of the week. To be honest, I was hoping to work the kinks out of the board by having Derek and Cliff record some covers of Cliff's choosing and overdub them at home later... that sounded fun, anyhow. But due to the being everywhere including late to rehearsal thing, it happened that by the time I got there, Cliff and Derek had already set up the drums and PA several rooms away from the "control room", and I didn't want to waste any more rehearsal time wrangling that stuff around, so I contented myself-- well, not really, at all-- with a pair of open-air Mac mic recordings of songs only I actually knew, and the semi-confidence that I could manipulate them into something at least experimentally interesting later. And then I didn't.

It occurs to me that given our recent output here, some might be coming to view Skates & Rays as a sort of (shudder) jam band, albeit an arty, Beefhearty-Velvetsy jam band. I assure you, though, that if you listen to the album we put out last year and the singles we'll be issuing in 2011, you'll hear by and large concise and structurally reasonable literate pop songs. It'll be the same guys playing them, and they'll be singing more, and better... whether it makes much difference is up to you, dear listener.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ guitars, vocals

Derek Hanna ~ drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ bass

"Breakin' in My Heart" performed by Tom Verlaine

"Breakin' in My Heart" performed by Skate & Rays

290. "Wasted" by Black Flag

2011-01-02T23:27:00.000-08:00

Two days ago when I scared up the Devo cover from the KHS reunion in 2009, I took a look at the other recordings from that fateful day, seeming to recall a scant few other listenable performances (not including the ill-advised Poison covers), one of which was a short drumless rip through this Black Flag classic-- the sort of thing I would've really liked to have heard at the prom but could not then imagine getting away with performing in front of the entire student body twenty years later. Unfortunately, all I have in my possession seems to be Heckman's soloed vocal track from the show. Odd. But it did remind me that I always have "Wasted" in my back pocket for emergency use. Having spent most of today putting together covers for other people to perform, including a Linkin Park tune (hey, it's a paid gig), I found that tonight's 39-40 had EMERGENCY USE written all over it in 80-foot-high hot pink comic sans. Which may explain why this version is even more jacked up than usual.

Personnel: Rex

"Wasted" performed by Black Flag

"Wasted" performed by Rex Broome

289. "Good Hearted Woman" by Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

2011-01-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

I wasn't entirely sure how to credit this one, artist-wise. The backing tracks, the bulk of the whole thing's being, really, including the jarringly enthusiatic crowd reaction, are from this summer's Thunderhill performance at the Honi Honi in Deep Creek, MD. I'm working through those tracks, and the ones from the Stray Cat in Keyser, WV, to mix the best of them for inclusion on the definitive Thunderhill CD collection to be released later this year. It's not easy work, and a lot of stuff needs to be replaced. For this version, I sang all of the lead vocals (as it's pretty easy to tell) and, for practical reasons, had to replace my dad's rhythm guitar track with an acoustic. So while this was originally performed by Thunderhill, in this version, there's no Jim Broome on it at all, so it definitely isn't Thunderhill. And it didn't seem right to retroactively name the backing band as "Rex Broome and the Whatever Boys" since neither Rich Frush nor Tom Heckman never signed up to be Whatever Boys, so, while it also seems sketchy for me to call it a solo track, that's pretty much the best I could come up with.

I've heard and played this song so many times that I almost don't hear it any more, but when putting together the pictures for this entry, I did marvel at the cover of that Wanted! The Outlaws record, as I do just about every time I encounter it. The family had that on 8-track, for realsies, and its impact on why and how I do music can't much be measured.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Lead vocal, guitars, backing vocals

Rich Frush ~ Drums, backing vocals

Tom Heckman ~ Bass, backing vocals

"Good Hearted Woman" performed by Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

"Good Hearted Woman" performed by Rex Broome

288. "Whip It" by Devo

2010-12-31T15:24:00.000-08:00

No , I do not like the pattern into which I've fallen of missing days and then playing catch-up on posting recordings. That, along with the fact that I've basically chosen my own covers for almost two months now, seem to fly in the face of the original concept of 39-40, and I seem to be operating under the very definition of "limping to the finish line". I'm trying to do something about it, but I'm hesitant to promise anything.

This one is from the nearly-bare vaults. The original recording was from the set Heckman and I did as a guitar-bass duo at our 20 year high school reunion last year. It was supposed to be a full band, but, you know, it wasn't. This one track, however, got a special reworking by Heckman a few days later when he added the drums and keyboard to it (without changing anything on the original tracks, I'm pretty sure). He did this thing he's been talented at for decades and of which he is now an undisputed master, which is playing a drum machine live and in real time along with previously recorded drumless tracks and having it sound good. You sort of have to see it to be properly amazed. In any case, the weird vocal effects, off the cuff keyboard track, and the crazy ambient noise provided by our classmates partying in the background give the whole thing a really unhinged, chaotic feel which is, believe me, many times more exciting that what we did in the room at the reunion.

Personnel:

Tom Heckman ~ Lead vocal, bass, keyboard, live drum machine

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, backing vocal

Basic tracks recorded live, August 2009, at the Wind Lea in Keyser, WV

"Whip It" performed by Devo

"Whip It" performed by Tom Heckman & Rex Broome

287. "Kotton Krown" by Sonic Youth

2010-12-30T19:53:00.001-08:00

I can't move my laptop for another six hours... it is tied to two external hard drives, serving as a conduit for backing up data. It doesn't demonstrate great foresight that I chose to set it up to do so in my bedroom. For all practical purposes I didn't have any other options than to record straight into the mic on my Mac for the first time in quite a while. I chose to do so experimentally, at least, with one blind and weird overdub, some ambient doubling of the original track via its tinny echo in the room, and a sampling of the feedback sound that greets me every time I open up a project without having remembered to close down all the mics the last time I put it away. Not easy on the ears, necessarily, but, it is to be hoped, interesting.

The song may well be called "Cotton Crown", but it says "Kotton Krown" scrawled right there on the artwork. Of course, it also says the band name is The Sonic Youth on one side, so it's up to the individual listener whether or not I got that bit right. I first did this acoustic arrangement of this song as a wedding toast quite some time ago. The lucky couple are still together, and I do believe they appreciated the effort I put into it.

Personnel: Rex

"Kotton Krown" performed by Sonic Youth

"Kotton Krown" performed by Rex Broome

286. "Lysander" by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

2010-12-29T18:03:00.001-08:00

Another recording done by "earballing it" (recording without headphones), a process which seems to push me to use uncharacteristic guitar sounds. This one is a preset designed for an acoustic guitar (and no fucking way would I ever use it on an acoustic), but slathered on top of my Tele Deluxe's two Fenderfied humbuckers it seemed to suggest some of the solo electric tones on Hitchcock's solo albums (the awesome ones with the green covers). It probably has a little too much delay and chorus on it to sound truly authentic, and I probably could have twiki'ed it around a bit better, but given the compromised listening situation that would probably have just mucked it up yet still more, so I left it alone, figuring I might as well put some weird-sounding stuff out while I have the excuse.

The Perspex Island record comes in for a pretty severe drubbing from a lot of Hitchcock fans. I like it a great deal myself. The guy's got a deep catalog and doesn't seem to be slowing down, so it's easy enough to cherry-pick the best stuff. Just play nice, okay?

Personnel: Rex

"Lysander" performed by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

"Lysander" performed by Rex Broome

285. "The Wagon" by Dinosaur Jr

2010-12-28T17:35:00.000-08:00

Spent most of yesterday trying to put together a studio for the band at our drummer's place of business (in a former meat locker, to be precise). There's nothing high-tech about this deal... we're basically pooling all of the resources we've purchased, scavenged, or otherwise accrued throughout the year at the most logical central location, the place where we rehearse, and gearing up to take on the project of recording ourselves more or less properly. That is, in large part, what I had in mind when taking on this project: forcing myself to learn how to do this stuff. By the end of the day, through a lot of troubleshooting and trial and error which was a good deal more rigorous than we can usually muster, we managed to have ten tracks clearly recording simultaneously. Sounds like a little thing, but it's a big deal to me.

Since a lot of the heart of the control room is the my laptop and my (well, Heckman's) MOTU unit, and my mics and stands are forming part of its gear complement, I'm going to have to get used to sorting out which stuff I can leave there and what needs to go home with me to keep 39-40 afloat when I'm not "at the studio". I managed to get a good slimmed down cross-section of what I need, including that new pop screen about which I'm so excited, but somehow I managed not to bring home a pair of headphones. So this recording was done entirely based on what I was hearing out of the laptops's shitty little speakers. Yeah, I should have "real" speakers to properly mix stuff anyway, but hey, I don't. I tried to create a track that came as close to using that kind of "blind mixing" as a positive. The acoustic and vocal were actually recorded on the same mic in mono. I don't know it it worked or not, really.

Personnel: Rex

"The Wagon" performed by Dinosaur Jr.

"The Wagon" performed by Rex Broome

284. "Why Can't I Touch It" by The Buzzcocks

2010-12-27T21:59:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking recently that I should do a week of 39-40 with no guitars. There are plenty of instances of my having done that during the project, but not lately, and never for a sustained period of time. I'm not starting such an endeavor right now, but this song was a case where I needed something that could be done quickly and I just couldn't abide the idea of strumming my way through another anything. I learned the bassline to "Why Can't I Touch It?" a long time ago, and I really do think it's one of the best, most insanely hooky bass parts ever written, and I thought I could make something out of it in a dub sort of way fairly quickly, so that's the story with this one.

In an effort to atone for the recent rehearsal takes which have extended a song or two well beyond their original lengths, this cover is well shorter than the Buzzcocks' version. Make no mistake, though: by Buzzcocks standards, the original is incredibly long and jammy.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Bass, vocal, radio controlled Dalek

Eden Hain ~ viola

"Why Can't I Touch It?" performed by The Buzzcocks

"Why Can't I Touch It?" performed by Rex Broome

283. "Shake Some Action" by The Flamin' Groovies

2010-12-26T21:43:00.000-08:00

When I first met Gen, she was just coming off of a period during which she'd been rehearsing with a reformed version of her old band Backstage Pass. Backstage Pass never put out a proper album, but its members would go on to release records in other bands (most notably Holly Beth Vincent of Holly and the Italians, Marina Del Rey of Vivabeat, and the drummer Spock whom I was quick to discover had played percussion on the excellent and obscure Rainy Day record, to which I was listening a lot at the time). Gen had played in other bands as well, but not for some time, and the Backstage Pass reunion had gotten her working on music for the first time in a while. One of the things she and the band had been working on was a cover of "Shake Some Action". The reunion unfortunately didn't pan out, which is doubly a shame as Gen also wrote some very good songs during that time (and since).

I asked her to do a song for me for the first time in a while, and she was very keen to do Paul McCartney's "Junk". I really wanted her to play guitar on the track, though, and "Junk" has some pretty weird chords on it, so I suggested reviving "Shake Some Action" instead. Gen had the privilege of being the first singer to record a vocal using my new pop filter, a very useful Christmas gift given to me by Gen herself.

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ Vocal, 12-string guitar

Rex Broome ~ Mandolin, backing vocal

"Shake Some Action" performed by The Flamin' Groovies

"Shake Some Action" performed by Genevieve Broome

282. "Regenisraen" by Game Theory

2010-12-25T21:20:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas to all the faithful who've followed me this far. Thank you for your patience... your call is important to us.

Personnel: Rex

"Regenisraen" performed by Game Theory

"Regenisraen" performed by Rex Broome

281. "Mississippi Kite" by Kristin Hersh

2010-12-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

Not the first instance on 39-40 of the original artist appearing on the cover, but a unique one thus far, and hells of fun. Kristin Hersh is one of my very favorite songwriters and performers of all. I have met her, and stammered stupid stuff in her general direction on those occasions, but I've never actually collaborated with her musically in the traditional sense.

However, for the past three years or so, Kristin has released most of her material online accompanied by stems from the recording sessions so that fans can remix the tracks and share them with each other. I know a few other artists have done this type of thing, sometimes temporarily in the interest of competition or promotion (as with the recent Byrne/Eno release), and there probably are other artists doing this sort of thing, but Kristin's the only one I've tracked personally. It's rather extraordinary, really, and a bit overwhelming to think that one's Kristin Hersh library cannot be complete without tracking down every last fan-created reimagining of these songs, and I haven't tracked the developments as closely as I'd like to have done. It's been in the back of my mind to work with this stuff on 39-40, though, in a more-sophisticated-than-karaoke fashion, and I was just reminded of that idea when taking a look at her website to see what she got up to this year.

So here I worked with the stems from her recent song "Mississippi Kite", which first appeared as part of a work-in-progress record then called Speedbath which seems to have gone through a number of subsequent iterations, but which in its original form was my favorite work by Kristin in quite some time. Initially I intended to do all the vocals myself and add a little lead guitar spiralling around and answering the snaky lead lines Kristin played on the original, but as I got into it I started mixing it as a fake duet for us, with me bouncing between lead lines and harmonies with melodies. That engendered a not entirely successful attempt to match the recording tones between her vocal as recorded and mine, but after the initial shock of the contrasting qualities it seems to settle down and start to sound normal. The second guitar worked pretty well, I think, and it was fun to do the whole project... I just hope the new, homespun stuff I added integrates itself into the original tracks without calling attention to its living room origins.

Oh, and despite having listened to this song for a year or so, I had no idea that a Mississippi kite was a bird until I did a google search for images to use in the artwork. Always educational, those KH lyrics.

Personnel:

Rex Broome: Male rock vocals, lead guitar (stereo right), mandolin

Kristin Hersh: Female rock vocals, rhythm guitar (left), rhythm guitar, bass, drums, organ

"Mississippi Kite" performed by Kristin Hersh

"Mississippi Kite" performed by Rex Broome & Kristin Hersh

280. "My Beloved Monster" by Eels

2010-12-23T21:33:00.000-08:00

If this seems more appropriate to the holiday back in October than Christmas Eve Eve, that's because Michael J. "Monkey" "SayntMykyl" Simpson and I have been planning on doing it since just about then. Monkey and I were just reminiscing about our first attempt to do a Holiday recording some years back. It ended poorly. This went better. Michael's a multitalented individual, responsible for, among other things, the art design of the Skates & Rays CD and the fine photography available for viewing here. I feel stupid in retrospect (among other ways in which I feel stupid) for not setting aside time in this session to photograph the unique group of players... I have instead stolen an image from his photo gallery for use as the cover art. So Happy Holidays, whatever be the holiday for which you deem this recording appropriate.

There were a number of cool things about recording this, not the least of which was the fact that Michael had never played, perhaps not even touched, a banjo prior to this recording, and one of my favorite things in recent 39-40 memory is his exact replication of the brief banjo intro on the original (which sounds more like a fragment of deleted track, and never fails to remind me of cruising past the dilapidated Cajun shack in the Bayou section of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland). His dead-on E-style vocal really brings it all together. Another watershed of sorts was how Miranda and Eden printed their contributions to the track... they both did it totally on their own while I was cooking dinner. We're starting to have a fully functional music making household around here, apparently.

Personnel:

Michael J. Simpson ~ Lead vocal, banjo

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, backing vocal, programming etc.

Miranda Broome ~ Bass guitar

Eden Hain ~ Ukulele

"My Beloved Monster" performed by Eels

"My Beloved Monster" performed by Michael J. Simpson & The Broome Household

279. "Dinosaur" by Mark Gloster & Big Rubber Shark

2010-12-22T21:16:00.000-08:00

And completing the dividends from this past Tuesday's highly loose Skates & Rays rehearsal, we have... this. Which has no right to be make as much sense as it does. This is actually an extract from a very extended ending to a run-through of our song "Fort Ashby", which we did primarily because Eden was there with her electric ukulele and she knows how to play the song on ukulele. What I didn't know when we started it was that Eden was going to insist on playing the ending inna raga stylee. Yes, it's her and not us old relics steeped in our Crazy Horse and Sonic Youth who propels this... erm, "jam" isn't quite the word, is it? Weirder still, owing to my mic setup, her uke is barely audible (I overdubbed a substitute track) and owing to me kicking over the mic on my amp, my guitar is heard only in the most ghostly of manners. And that works pretty well... it's the Derek and Cliff show, which is not a bad thing.

I sent out a call for requests for the first time in forever, and the winner was, thankfully, this song by Mark Gloster, which lends itself quite well to this restructuring. The original has some elements of spoken extemporaneousness itself, and is hung on a musical piece which also can't quite be classified as a "jam" (because it has way better things to worry about) but certainly has a lot to do with live musical chemistry. It's actually possible that what this version of Big Rubber Shark is doing on the source track is pretty much the same thing as what Skates & Rays are doing on our version... ours just naturally turns out whooshier and wussier. In what I hope is a good way, though.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Guitar, vocals, ukulele

Derek Hanna ~ Drums

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass

with Eden Hain ~ Electric ukulele

"Dinosaur" performed by Mark Gloster & Big Rubber Shark

"Dinosaur" performed by Skates & Rays

278. "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

2010-12-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

Yet another Skates & Rays rehearsal, and yet a few more refinements to our recording setup. This time I managed to get an actual discrete mic on the kick drum and better sounding stereo drums in general, but between having forgotten a few key cables at home and having Eden along with me this time (we had the band cut backing tracks for demos of her most recent songs, which is a pretty cool development), I failed to check the signal I was getting from a few of the more obvious sources, so I ended up with too little guitar signal and a frequently overdriven bass sound (which I just rolled with here by converting it to a full-on fuzz bass, a choice I doubt Cliff would have made, but damn does it sound good on the type of stuff he played here). Personally, I was in an off mood in terms of my own playing and couldn't think of a good cover for us to do as a troubleshooting experiment, beyond the vague idea that a Beefheart tribute might be cool.

I had an unusual conflict about how to present what turned out to be our version of "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish". The full track is close to 15 minutes long, and, frankly, I like it that way. The recognizable Beefheart part only surfaces around nine minutes into it, though. I've posted quite a few epic-length Skates & Rays tracks since rehearsals recommenced, so it didn't seem fair to those expecting to hear us doing Beefheart to saddle them with ten minute of not that at all, but what in fact starts off as a bit of stiff white funk. Now, like I said, I like it, but that's partly because we started this thing of with me literally calling out to Derek and Cliff just lay down some kind of groove, any kind of groove. Once they get going, it's pretty good stuff they're playing, and I'm able to keep up enough to fill it out... but it was only about halfway through the "jam" that I decided that this was going to be the Beefheart tribute, and I switched to a more Magic Bandy approach on the guitar. My favorite aspect of this is that the rhythm section really had no idea of my change of heart, so they kept on cooking up what they'd already thrown on the grill.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in the full performance, they can find it here as yet another 39-40 Appendix Track. And there's absolutely nothing to stop you from retagging it as 39-40 track 278, and pitching the truncated version.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Guitar & Vocal ~ Rex Broome

Bass ~ Clifford Ulrich

Drums ~ Derek Hanna

Additional commentary on the biology of the octafish ~ Miranda & Ridley Broome

Recording assistance ~ Eden Hain

"Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" performed by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

"Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" performed by Skates & Rays

277. "Star of Bethlehem" by Neil Young

2010-12-20T22:31:00.001-08:00

This is the second of the three aborted Skates & Rays Christmas tracks from the 2007 Heckman project. The third was a slightly sleigh-bell-laden version of my song "Double Blades", which I'd love to get before the ears of the listening public in some form, but can in no way justify as a cover, so this is it for vintage Christmas tunes, I guess. We're working on getting some new Skates & Rays stuff on a release schedule for 2011 as 39-40 winds down, though, and a superior version of "Double Blades" recorded with Bradley Cain is on deck for that.

This time around we have backing vocals by both Cliff and Derek. And interestingly, I didn't have to replace all of the guitar. I just added an acoustic and that was it. I retained the original guitar leads from three years ago for my own personal satisfaction: I really worked to be able to do those leads at the time, and it was literally the first time I made an effort to play something that came from a true place of "country" picking. I've done a great deal more of honing that style since then, firstly for a few tracks on the You Are My Home, then in a few rounds of intense learn-on-the-job effort as the substitute lead guitarist or Thunderhill, and recently on quite a few rootsier tracks for 39-40. Much to my surprise, this really early effort was pretty solid, especially when it trades off with Cliff's harmonica playing, so I was pleased to preserve it. The whole thing is still a lot murkier than I'd like it to be, but it's interesting as a Crazy Horse-like version of a non-Crazy Horse Neil tune.

Another small piece of trivia here: Derek's drum part on this tune was previously edited into another structure by me and used as the loops for the Dwight Yoakam tune "The Big Sandy" early on in 39-40, a tune I tackled in a similar fashion (electrifying an acoustic tune) with no real idea that I would resurrect this one at the time. I hope I may be forgiven... it's good drumming.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

Rex Broome ~ Lead vocal, guitars

Derek Hanna ~ Drums, backing vocals

Clifford Ulrich ~ Bass, backing vocals, harmonica

"Star of Bethlehem" performed by Neil Young

"Star of Bethlehem" performed by Skates & Rays

276. "Didn't Know Where I Was" by Jack Frost

2010-12-19T22:00:00.000-08:00

I simply got sick of being a day behind, and decided to record the first thing that came to mind as some kind of deal that I could probably do without thinking much about it, a guaranteed one-taker. This song, from the obscure-ish Grant McLennan/Steve Kilbey collaboration Jack Frost's self-titled album, rose to the surface for reasons not immediately apparent to me, although it is a great favorite of mine... this track was a mainstay on the French radio station Oui FM during my time in Paris in 1991, although at the time I didn't know who performed it and only later began to suspect it was a Kilbey solo project (and I wouldn't even become a Go-Betweens fan for another four years or so after I picked up this record). In any case, it was indeed a first-take affair, and by the time I reached the lines "Torches search the heavens/It's raining out at sea", I realized that that was probably what was behind the whole thing. It's been raining for days in LA now and I'm starting to feel a bit washed away by the whole thing.

Personnel: Rex

"Didn't Know Where I Was" performed by Jack Frost

"Didn't Know Where I Was" performed by Rex Broome