49. "Lonesome for My Baby" by Andy Wilson

There are little things I've never gotten around to as a musician. Few of them are easy to explain; it's more that every once in a while I'll hear something on a recording, usually a guitar part, and think, dammit, I've never learned to do that. Case in point is this little country rhythm guitar boom-chicka-boom thing, a sort of muted strum that incorporates the "rockin' the fifth"-style bassline that drives a lot of country songs. I've never learned it because there are plenty of other ways to play country rhythm guitar that'll work just as well, and I'm actually pretty nimble with the fills and runs in a few of 'em. But what, really, is the point of this whole exercise if not to pick up a trick or two? So here you have me fumbling around with some really basic guitar technique I should've mastered decades ago. So that it wouldn't be too distracting, I provide overdubs of myself playing banjo and harmonica, two instruments I've never learned to play at all.

I was tempted to credit this to my long-threatened solo country alter-ego Waylon Yutani, but I've decided that, in general, taking on too many aliases for 39-40 would just create more confusion if the mp3's end up circulating elsewhere. Which of course they don't seem to be threatening to do, but principles prevail. Sometimes.

Personnel: Rex

"Lonesome for My Baby" performed by Andy Wilson

"Lonesome for My Baby" performed by Rex Broome

48. "Intro to..." performed by The Soft Boys

The answer to the titular cliffhanger, if you're curious, is "La Cherite".

The Soft Boys now tie with Macca for most-oft-covered honors here at 39-40, although one could argue that, counting solo tracks, Robyn Hitchcock is edging the cute Beatle out with three appearances. However, two of those covers, like this one, have been not of musical compositions but stage patter. Now, if you have to cover between-song banter, Hitchcock's is as good as anyone's, but the whole thing begs a digressive question...

People often remark that allegedly random things, including and often especially song shuffle features, often don't seem random at all, and playlists seem to frequently reflect a high incident of suspicious coincidences. Folks more conversant with higher math and probability have explained to me why this is, and that what we think of as "random" doesn't truly reflect the statistical reality of the thing. Such explanations have always seemed reasonable to me when I've heard them, but my ability to retain even the gist of them has proven massively fail. However, doesn't it seem a bit odd that:

-Out of 48 tracks The Machine has chosen for me, three have been attributed to Mr. Hitchcock Yes, one out of every 16.

-All three have been live performances. My live holdings aren't vast; I've never been a member on Dime or anything, and while I have a few RH shows, I have far more by other artists like The Fall, Neil Young, Television, Ms. Hersh etc.

-All three were PERFORMED AT MAXWELL'S IN HOBOKEN.

Ain't it eerie?

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ tuning

Robyn Hitchcock ~ vocal sample

"Intro to..." performed by The Soft Boys

"Intro to..." performed by Rex Broome

47. "Aliens" by Ronald Reagan

Yeah, I have this kind of stuff in my music library.

Particularly keen-eared listeners who also happen to be complete dorks like me may recognize the background effects to this track as the Zygon control room from the original Doctor Who series. The visuals above have been adjusted accordingly. There have actually been at least four Doctor Who references on 39-40 to date (five if you count Torchwood); anyone who can identify 3 of them wins my first prize: you get to be The Machine for the day. Yep, I will take requests. But at what cost to your soul?

Personnel:

Ronald Reagan: vocal sample

BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Zygon control room sounds

Rex Broome: Assembly etc.

"Aliens" performed by Ronald Reagan

"Aliens" performed by Rex Broome

46. "Hazing" by Throwing Muses

This is as close to an "unfinished" 39-40 post as I have come thus far. Throwing Muses are an epic artist for me and I've done many, many Kristin Hersh covers... in the comfort of my own home. At least I can't recall ever doing one in public. I really wanted to do this one justice. And I really believed I knew the tune practically by heart.

And I do... sort of. Like most of Hersh's songs, this one has some structural oddities that feel organic and unforced; you're aware of them on a certain level and they tell you something about the song, as is their job. But what you don't realize is how many of them there are. I probably could have done an acoustic cover of this with little problem, but when putting together all the drum parts and therefore having to actually understand the structure, one might lose one's shit. There's a lot of counting, and recounting involved, and more than a few times when what you think you figured out on the first verse becomes much clearer on the second and you have to go back and reconstruct the first one accordingly. Maybe the next time I hit one of these I'll make streamlining it a goal (and conversely trick out a Ramones tune in prog-baroque drag (or not)), but it was a bit too late on this one. Also too late to finesse the drum parts the way I wanted to, and literally too late (by the clock and the kids' bedtime) to play the second guitar part through an amp. However, I did get a really nifty sound on the first guitar, mic'ing it, by pure luck, to sound like two different guitars, and that's useful.

Kristin, I love you and wish I could've done better by you. Next time.

Oh, the artwork joke is that the picture of me is literally me during my time in a University. In fact I am wearing my graduation gown. That was a while ago.

Personnel: Rex

"Hazing (Live)" performed by Throwing Muses

"Hazing" performed by Rex Broome

45. "Green Door" by The Cramps

As a song by The Cramps, "Green Door" isn't all that unusual. But as the #1 Hit Song of 1956, which, in its original version by Jim Lowe, it was, it's surprisingly bizarre. The most innocent interpretation of it is a self portrait of a perpetual loser unable to get in with the in-crowd, which is rather dark in itself, but the lyrics also lend themselves to all kinds of unsettling interpretations: drugs, weird sex parties, Masonic conspiracy theories, that kind of thing. But fifties radio, with which I've recently become somewhat preoccupied, is full of all kinds of weird surprises. Hell, I've got a recording rescued off of an ancient 1/4" tape of a song called "The Average Giraffe", about which I've been able to find out absolutely nothing, and it'll pull your cranium off sideways, with a swirl. And don't even get me started on 50's country... if there's a bad sounding recording of a bad song in that idiom, it's deep in witness protection or something.

Anyhow, what's really surprising is how, when you realize that your artwork for a Cramps parody LP sleeve is going to look totally crap if you can't put your name in a Cramps-like font, it takes about 45 seconds to locate and begin using a free Cramps font, called "Cramps font". You cannot, however, as easily find a Throwing Muses font, but that's a story for tomorrow.

Personnel:

Rex

"Green Door" performed by The Cramps

"Green Door" performed by Rex Broome

44. "Fine Line" by Paul McCartney

Today Paul McCartney becomes the first artist to be chosen by The Machine for 39-40 purposes twice. This is slightly surprising because my solo McCartney holdings are not massive, including only maybe half of his albums, as opposed to, say, Neil Young, whose entire official catalog comprises only roughly 1/3 of the titles attributed to him in my library, and who has yet to surface. However, this is a better tune than that Rasta reindeer deal.

I didn't quite develop a unique take on this song, and by and large this process has become fairly comfortable for me, so it's time to shake things up a little bit. Not that you'd notice; I used this recording as a test of a new method of recording my acoustic in stereo with two very different mics placed in different locations, like a real engineer might do. I'm probably going to be doing a lot of this kind of thing. The net result of the experiment was to increase my irritation with the buzz that my mixer picked up a while back, probably on account of being dropped, and push me towards breaking some more gear out of mothballs. Stand by.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Guitar & vocal

"Fine Line" performed by Paul McCartney

"Fine Line" performed by Rex Broome

43. "High Fly Ball" by The Hellers

My possession of this record dates to a time when I was rapidly acquiring all the early Moog records I could find, some of which are just jaw-droppingly strange. This one was particularly interesting due to the involvement of Enoch Light, the innaresting character who ran the Command record label (famed for its art design as much as anything, and your record collection does contain some records whose covers are direct recreations of Command LP jackets) and Robert Moog himself playing his namesake keyboards. Unfortunately this combo is pretty much canceled out by the concept, which is, for some reason, to frame Moog's wild playing with unrelated sub-variety-show cornball novelty sketches. Why this would be packaged to look like a sunshine pop record by a "band" of some kind is a whole 'nother mystery. It's still loopy fun, but it doesn't scale the giddy heights of the most truly out-there Light productions.

Braine is the band again, this time pretty much for real, and they sound great, I must say. All of the kids played their respective instruments and, other than loop wrangling and editing, the only noise I contributed was the warbly keyboard which serves as the only remaining relic of the Moog origins of the original piece. In fact we replaced Moog's composition with one that Miranda cooked up, her first, and due to be completed with lyrics some time soon. It's really good on its own, not least because of the groovy guitar part Eden added to it.

Personnel:

Miranda Broome: Bass, musical composition, engineering, sportscaster, astronaut #1

Eden Hain: Guitar, engineering, astronaut #3, alien #2, artwork (Alice)

Ridley Broome: Percussion, astronaut #2, alien #1, artwork (garden)

Rex Broome: Engineering, editing, keyboard

"High Fly Ball" performed by The Hellers

"High Fly Ball" performed by Braine

42. "Ace of Spades" by Union Avenue

Here's one for which I didn't have the highest expectations, but turned out fairly well. I couldn't quite develop my own take on the original. But a few days ago, doing the Talking Heads cover, I'd finally worked out how to create my own drum loops, and thereby hangs the tale.

Twenty-some years ago, I actually made my own tape loops, literally, by disassembling cassette tapes and splicing the loops of homemade recordings end to end with Scotch tape, rebuilding the cassette, trying it out, and then taking it apart again and resplicing until it looped properly. I started doing this to create ambient sounds for walk-through haunted houses and so forth, but eventually got insane enough to try to do this with actual musical parts for demos, and I got surprisingly good at it. The last time I attempted it was when trying to record the soundtrack for a student film; in particular I was failing to make a loop out of the odd drum part at the beginning of "Warning Sign" by, coincidentally, Talking Heads. I ran out of time, but the idea to use that part never left the back of my mind, and in my fury of creating loops of... erm, fury, I guess, I finally, digitally created one and I kinda wanted to use it.

I thought it would turn out pretty weird, being not especially a rockabilly-sounding part, but it did have a little slapback delay on it that helped it all fall together in no time, while the kids were watching Shark Boy & Lava Girl, which I fancy you can hear on the vocal track without much difficulty.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything.

"Ace of Spades" performed by Union Avenue

"Ace of Spades" performed by Rex Broome

41. "The Ballad of Bethnal Green" by Paddy Roberts

This is the kind of thing I envisioned happening on this project, except when I envisioned it, as generally happens when one envisions things, it sounded a lot cooler. There is, it is to be hoped, some entertainment to be had here, at least in the on-the-fly capturing of an absurd moment.

I had a moment of quiet at the end of the day to rehearse/figure out this number, but was being annoyed by the constant buzzing of LAPD helicopters over the Silver Lake reservoir. Eventually this struck me as a pretty absurd environment in which to be attempting a cute British music hall throwback, and I decided to document it just that way, maneuvering the laptop close to an open window and recording the song as quickly as I could. Another few minutes and I could've gotten a true stereo recording, but unfortunately (I guess) the choppers would have departed. So here you go.

Contains the words "titty" and "gay".

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Guitar and vocal

LAPD (and perhaps local media) ~ Helicopter accompaniment

"The Ballad of Bethnal Green" performed by Paddy Roberts

"The Ballad of Bethnal Green" performed by Rex Broome & The LAPD

40. "Houses in Motion" by Talking Heads

"Remain in Light" was my first favorite album. I don't think it's ever departed from my personal Top 10 since the first time I heard it. The funny thing for this Appalachian kid is that I didn't even realize I was listening to something funk-derived when I fell under its spell until someone told me it sounded, in less sensitive terms, like African-American music. So I guess David Byrne was my own personal Elvis. I've had (The) Houses in Motion on several short lists for band names. This is primal stuff for me.

So, was this fun for me? Hells yes. I started out with this idea of doing "Houses" in the style that the original 4-piece Heads might have done it three years earlier than they did, but those kind of high-concept cover ideas only last so long. Somewhere between stealing Busta Jones' bass licks from the live version on "The Name of This Band..." and working out that tight little riff on the chorus (all by myself!), I altered course and ended up doing the fake Belewisms and giant choral vocals. What pleases me most is that this is no way a straight cover of the original, but almost everything about it seems true to the period and ambitions of the band.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"Houses in Motion" performed by Talking Heads

"Houses in Motion" performed by Rex Broome

39. "On Trial" by Minutemen

Yesterday's multitrack extravaganza did not jam econo. So you might assume that I'd be happy that today The Machine has assigned me a :41 track by the three-piece Minutemen, the power trio being my primary delivery system for rock music. But in fact I found this one far more daunting. For one thing, I respect the hell out of this band. For another, they were crazy talented and creative guys who put more into those forty seconds than most pop songs can dream of containing.

So it was going to be hard to figure out anyway, but to further complicate matters, this particular track is one of the many on Minutemen records which was lifted straight off of an audience tape to better represent the vitality of the performance. There's no studio version and the recording quality isn't the clearest. Suffering most from this are my approximations of the lyrics, which certainly must have possessed a political specificity that's lost in my wild guesses. And I honestly feel kind of bad about that, but I did get the hook, so I was at least able to guess where it was driving.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Vocal and guitar

"On Trial" performed by Minutemen

"On Trial" performed by Rex Broome

38. "Way Over Yonder" by Carole King

I'm pretty sure this is the most tracks I've used on a 39-40 cover so far. I've been promising someone that I'd do a song in this style for a while, and this song seemed lyrically suited for it, although its original performance is in a very different style.

You really can't get a cat to pose in a pre-determined position in a self-timed photo that you yourself have to jump into before the camera goes off. Just sayin'. And also saying thanks to Miranda for the loan of her FurReal pet Whitefur.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"Way Over Yonder" performed by Carole King

"Way Over Yonder" performed by Rex Broome

37. "Magenta Moon" by Rex Broome

When I set out to do this project, I considered putting my own songs off limits. I also thought about excluding odd stuff like stage banter (which I've by now done twice) and any number of other odd things which might happen, but I eventually decided to let everything ride... random is random, and The Machine is The Machine, and I gotta keep myself honest. So up pops one of my own compositions for the first time. Hey, at least it took more than a month.

In this case I'm sort of glad, because this song really never found a place after I made the demo you can hear here as the "original"; it didn't quite fit with what Skates & Rays were doing at the time and I didn't really have anywhere else for it to go. At one point Gen expressed some interest in singing it, which sounded like a good idea both at the time and today when I was faced with how to record this thing a little differently. I did change the arrangement a bit as well, but right at the time I was ready for Gen to do her vocal, she walked up to me and said, "I think I have a fever... can you check?" She did, but she went ahead and did the vocal anyway; I didn't torture her for multiple takes, so what you have here is sort of a demo-level remake of an older demo. Now if we could just get the whole household healthy...

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ Vocal

Rex Broome ~ The rest

"Magenta Moon" performed by Rex Broome in 2007

"Magenta Moon" performed by Genevieve and Rex Broome

36. "Midnight to Six Man" by The Pretty Things

I fought the loops and the loops won with a vengeance yesterday, so today I'm playing as rubato as I possibly can. I had the idea of converting this celebration of debauched late night living into a bit of a lament about the same... somewhere on the starker streets of The Replacements' neighborhood, "Here Comes a Regular" or "Nightclub Jitters". It came out a little more like one of the Big Star tunes that certainly inspired Westerberg when writing his. This is straight into the condensor mic again. On the first playback I got a bit of phasing from the mic still being open... I liked it and decided to incorporate something similar (without which the track would be in mono). Messed around with the chords a little bit on the way to a suitable feel. Fair game, I'd think.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"Midnight to Six Man" performed by The Pretty Things

"Midnight to Six Man" performed by Rex Broome

35. "I Gotta Know" by Teenage Fanclub

Absolutely hands down the most frustrating experience I've had yet on a 39-40 cover, and on a song I was initially so happy to have been handed by The Machine. I curse the loops, you see, but moreover and more severely I curse myself. See, I laid out the drum tracks for this one, and it has a bit of a swing to it, and I painstakingly cut and pasted the loops to simulate that. For all that effort, when I played the guitar and bass and the other guitar and the other couple of guitars, I kept jumping the beats over and over again, despite trying like hell to compensate. Much later when I though I was done, I became annoyed at my lousy timing and took a closer look, seeing as how all my instruments were off by about the same amount in the same places... and damned if the thing didn't swing more than I'd consciously realized. So then I took the loops back apart and tried to put them together all over again, trying now to match the instruments and now struggling with my earlier efforts to rein in the swing... and then deciding that I had to fix the verses as well as the choruses. Final result was hours spent trying to make the thing sound, like, just kind of unsettlingly awkward instead of outright whack. Bleh.

Not only do I like the song I've just butchered, I'm also regretful because my wife Gen contributed a fine lead vocal to this one... should've been a big occasion to have a lead vocal by an actual human female adult, let alone one this good. Maybe the first half of the recording is listenable enough to get an idea of what she was up to. Sorry, dear!

Personnel:

Genevieve Broome ~ lead vocal

Rex Broome ~ everything else

"I Gotta Know" performed by Teenage Fanclub

"I Gotta Know" performed by Genevieve & Rex Broome

34. "Recycling Ad" by McLeod Landfill

There's an interesting side note to artist name on this one (assuming that you've by now determined how much stock you want to put in my proclaiming any given thing to be "interesting"), and it doesn't have to do with the viability of a landfill being called the actual "artist" of the track (to which I answer in the affirmative, because it entertains me). It's the fact that my mp3 of the track, and every mp3 available online as far as I can tell, credits it to "McCleod Landfill", but I noticed that the cover art features a sign reading "McLeod Landfill" instead. I did a little research on the titular landfill and discovered that the correct spelling appears to be "McLeod", and so today's posting of the original track probably marks the internet debut of the correctly tagged and artist-attributed mp3 of "Recycling Ad". You are most welcome.

My 7-year-old daughter Ridley drew the portrait of me in the artwork mod, and it's my favorite thing about today's track because she just put "The Fall" on my t-shirt of her own volition, not at any prompting on my part for cuteness's sake. Having created the track to sound vaguely like Wire or perhaps the Adverts, I had originally intended to sing it like Richard Hell, but I finished the art before the track, and that pushed me towards finally getting my MES impression over with instead. Insekt posse will be crushed.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything musical

Ridley Broome ~ Portrait drawing

"Recycling Ad" performed by McLeod Landfill

"Recycling Ad" performed by Rex Broome

33. "The Times They Are A Changin'" by Simon & Garfunkel

And finally I'm able to present a recording with a genuine guest performer not related to myself. Lending his talents to this version of Simon & Garfunkel's version of the Dylan tune is Mr. Clifford Ulrich, who plays bass guitar and sings with me in Skates & Rays, and contributes the songs that I don't write. Good man, good musician.

The political Dylan songs-- which I sort of think of as the Middle Period of his Early Period-- aren't my favorites, not quite possessing the spook of his earlier roots reinterpetations nor the ultra-spook of what he dove into next. But they do have an eerie power of their own; the song definitely came barreling through me from elsewhere when I sat down with the lyric sheet to sing it all the way through for the first time ever. "Visions of Johanna" I've sung a million times before; this one not so much.

Anyway, Cliff and I sort of did this backwards and messed a lot of stuff up, as you can hear, but we learned a good deal about what not to do next time. The methodology is necessarily different with two musicians... I can't just contain all the plans in my head like I'm used to, so that's a good challenge.

Personnel:

Rex Broome~ Acoustic guitar, lead vocal, harmony vocal, bass, left harmonica

Clifford Ulrich ~ Harmony vocal, right harmonica, electric guitar

"The Times They Are A Changin'" performed by Simon & Garfunkel

"The Times They Are A Changin'" performed by Broome & Ulrich

32. "Didn't Wanna Do It" by Danny Collet

I used to be related through marriage to a helluva Cajun fiddle player, and that's how I came by these types of records. Great guy, fantastic musician... that's about the only thing I miss about that part of my life. But I'll not let this paragraph become the habitual place to bash the ex-boss, the ex-wife, etc.; there's work to be done.

Trouble is, I really really have no voice. So I'm handing the vocal duties on this one over to Anjali, the British-Indian Robot Lady who performed half of the Kingston Trio stage patter thing. I like Anjali. For one thing, she give me an excuse to do a "feat." song... I've been so jealous of modern pop stars whose singles always seem to feat. each other or T-Pain or whomever. So I'm going to feat. Anjali today.

Please also enjoy my first ever experiments with MIDI. Not in any way to be taken seriously, but a toe in the water, as it were. Gimme a break, I feel wretchedly ill!

Feeling as I do, the cover art is a total toss-off as well. I don't think Anjali really looks like that. But I spent too much time trying to find an CG image of an Indian girl (CG to reflect her robotic nature) and the internet sadly disappointed me. If anyone finds an appropriately cyber-looking image for Anjali, send it my way and it will become her canonical appearance forthwith. I love you guys.

Personnel:

Rex "Sickie Boy" Broome ~ Acoustic guitar

Anjali ~ vocals

Sax, Electric Guitar and Organ play themselves thanks to the Wonders of Modern Science

"Didn't Wanna Do It" performed by Danny Collet

"Didn't Wanna Do It" performed by Rex Broome feat. Anjali

31. "My Secret Flame" by The Mavericks

All my Mavericks records are rips from discs a former boss leant me. This guy was a real bastard, the beady-eyed aphasic kind, and he was a guitar collector with a special interest in Rickenbackers. I just can't get my head around that particular habit of the wealthy-- owning electric guitars that you don't use. It's easily excused if you used to use them and still have them, but to be currently pursuing the purchase of new guitars when you don't have any occasion to play them... it's just a bit creepy. Anyway, I often had me guitars with me at the job if I had a gig that evening, and the boss would always ask to see the Ricks. And he would always say, "Hey, Rex, you know, if you ever fall on hard times and need some money, I'll buy those from you." He got more and more intense about it right before he let me go. Just sayin'. I kept the records because I've heard the band is one of the more vital modern country artists and I figured I might one day want to check them out in more depth.

This is Day Three of me basically doing 39-40 from bed. I keep pulling up vocal-intensive songs and I have no voice. Drat the luck. Arrangement-wise I may have absorbed Sir Paul's faux reggae from yesterday as I went a little dubby on this one.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything.

"My Secret Flame" performed by The Mavericks

"My Secret Flame" performed by Rex Broome

29. "I Don't Know What to Do with My Life" by The Buzzcocks

They say necessity is a mother, and that certainly is true. I've come down with the cold that ruined Eden's second week of spring break (documented in the coughing fit on the playout of "Egg Man") and about halfway through this recording I just couldn't be in the studio (living room) any more and had to go to bed. But I also had to finish the track. Not having the strength nor wherewithal nor Brian Wilson mindset to reconstruct the recording rig in the bedroom, I brought the laptop and the headphones with me and recorded the vocal into-- and this was inevitably going to happen anyway-- the condensor mic on the MacBook. So, like, sorry about that.

They also say that timing is everything. My friend Jeff has demostrated that singing with a headcold aids one immensely in sounding like Jonathan Richman, so this comes a day too late. My voice being messed up cuts into my upper and lower registers, so of course I double tracked myself singing in both, leaving the outcome to the law of averages. The feel of the cover is a bit ill-considered: it sounds like I'm doing the same thing as I did to the Rancid tune, taking a punk-rock composition and rootsifying it, but that wasn't my intention. I just fell into that swing feel while working out the chords. I was actually hoping to capture the spark of the coolest Buzzcocks cover I ever heard, ages ago when my friend KT Wiegman came over to my house and belted out "You Say You Don't Love Me" on an acoustic, at if anything a faster tempo than the one on the record. 'Fraid I didn't come close to her performance, and now, as the NyQuil kicks in, I'm left to wonder where the hell KT is anyhow.

Personnel:

Rex Broome ~ Everything

"I Don't Know What To Do With My Life" performed by The Buzzcocks

"I Don't Know What To Do With My Life" performed by Rex Broome

___________________

POSTGAME ANALYSIS:

I've heard this recording a few times in my car over the past few months as I've reviewed the project, but until re-reading the text above I'd forgotten the circumstances involving my recording the guitars "properly" and the vocals upon my sickbed. Anyway, it seems to work fine and I don't have much to add in retrospect.