308. "Common Reactor" by Silversun Pickups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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