Well now, you all have been looking forward to this moment, I’m sure.
I just finished mixing the seventh of the seven unfinished songs from my failed attempt at the RPM Challenge in 2007. Six years later, and it’s finally done! (well… if it were done there would be 10 songs, because that’s the rule for RPM, right? So it’s not done really, it’s just the seven unfinished songs that are done. Yeah, whatever) It’s Miller Time!
Oh good, thinks everyone reading this, another crappy song from the 80’s.
You guessed it!
The Time Will Come as written by Tempest Fero (aka me and my band back in high school).
I don’t remember much about how this came about. I know the lyrics and the melody came from Jeff the Drummer but that’s about all I remember. Hell, I couldn’t even remember the title until I found a cassette tape labeled Tempest Fero.
I have one more T.F. song planned. There are still two more that I will add to the mess if I can just find a tape. One of them is our 10 minute marathon song.
Wish me luck.
It lives again!
Tempest Fero’s instrumental magnum opus, Toilet Water From Hell!
If I remember correctly, this one dates back to 1987 and it was the second song we wrote. I thought about making the keyboard solos guitar solos today but that just seemed wrong. Somehow my awful keyboard playing just seems to enhance the cheese factor here. Also note that I managed to fudge with Garageband enough to allow the occasional bars of 5/4 time into the 4/4 project. Yeah, I am pleased by that.
100 bonus points if you can name the Blue Oyster Cult song that we “borrowed” (read, stole) liberally from. Bass solo and everything.
Rob’s blog, where the 80’s live forever!
(note: more 80’s Tempest Fero songs to come. At least one more, maybe as soon as tomorrow.)
This is #6 out of the 7 leftovers from 2007’s failed RPM. I wrote the lyrics and the melody on Tuesday May 28, 2013 at about 7:30am. Just minutes prior I heard a recording of a conversation between Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alex Lifeson of Rush. Rush has been my absolute musical idols ever since I was 10 years old. In the interview, Alex Lifeson talked about how easy it is for mediocre musicians to use Garageband and make decent sounding records and how that was leading to the watering down of the entire music industry.
Alex didn’t mention me by name, but I know in my heart he was talking about me. Musically speaking, me and all of the songs I’ve writen are just a big fat sham.
Not that that is going to stop me, of course.
I was hoping there would be three songs to post tonight, but I’m way too tired so you’ll have to settle for two.
These were both started in 2007 when I first tried and failed the RPM challenge. This makes five of those seven songs that have finally been finished. The lyrics to the first one are about nothing, hence the song title. I was trying to make a point in the lyrics to the second song, but I can’t figure out what that point was. Typical.
These two files will eventually be deleted, someday, when I finish recording all of the songs that I consider to be part of my leftover songs project. Once they are all done I’ll move the whole thing over to bandcamp. But I’ll put these here for now.
The music project was reborn tonight. Three of the remaining 2007 tunes now have rhythm guitars. By this time next week I hope they will have lyrics and vocals. I can do it, I know I can!
I don’t know how this bad news slipped past me, but Peter Banks died last week.
If you’re a prog rock fan, you know who Peter Banks is. No, he wasn’t the keyboard player in Genesis. That’s Tony Banks. Peter was a founding member of Yes. He was the guitar player on their first two records.
Much like ex-Rush drummer John Rutsey, Banks has the misfortune of having his abilities rated not so much on his own playing, but by the guy who replaced him. Rutsey was replaced by arguably the greatest drummer in the history of recorded music, Neil Peart. Peter Banks was replaced by one of the most staggeringly talented guitarists ever, Steve Howe.
Don’t let the comparisons distract you though, Peter Banks could flat out play. The guy was awesome. This Birds cover from the first album is probably my favorite example of his playing…
When I was in High School I turned into a Yes fanatic. Unfortunately for me, Steve Howe’s playing was way beyond me. I could play a phrase or a riff here and there, but there were very few songs I could survive all the way through. Well… I could play a bunch of Asia songs, but there weren’t many Yes songs I could survive. I could fudge through Roundabout, and big chunks of Perpetual Change. Thanks to a very productive guitar lesson I could get through Siberian Khatru, but I had to hack through my own solo. Howe was just too fast for me. Thankfully, I had the first Yes record on vinyl, and I could get through pretty much all of that one. I played along with Peter Banks on that album about a billion times. Granted he left me in the dust every time, but I loved every second of it.
Rest in Peace Peter Banks. Gone but not forgotten.
Over the last two days I threw together a new recording of the first song I wrote for my 2009 finished-way-after-the-deadline RPM Challenge.
Why? Because the old recordings sound like vomit and I can’t tell if the songs themselves are vomit or just the recording. So maybe if I dust some of them off I can make that determination.
Here’s the new recording…
And here is the old recording…
Both of these files are going to be deleted at some point, when I figure out what to do with the new version.
Look who came out for a visit this morning.
The rest of this post is yet another music home demo recording nerd post.
I have three songs in the works right now. Thanks to the acoustic guitar that suddenly needs a new nut (uh oh) and the leaky, mostly out of tune sax, one of them is ready to be mixed. A second is missing just a lead guitar. The third still needs all guitars and vocals. That one might not get finished until next week.
So I seem to be on a pretty quick pace right now. I have posted four songs since March 1st, which followed the 14 from February. My free soundcould account is going to run out of room again. That means this year’s RPM will get deleted and all of those previous posts that include embeded soundcloud files will lose their audio. Oh well. I think I might make a new page for playlists of recent music. I will use bandcamp to host the playlists, and keep soundcloud for works in progress kinda things.
I’ve also decided that the four songs I have finished this month, and two of the three I’m playing around with now do not belong with the left over songs project. I started a new playlist for the re-recorded songs. That is meaningless to everyone on Earth except me, but what are ya gonna do, right?
I will take my lunch break at 1:00. My MacBook and my Les Paul are ready and waiting to finish tracking another song. I might be posting two new ones tonight. We’ll see.
I consider the first “real” band I ever played in to be Tempest Fero. Horrible name. Fun band. It was Mike on bass, Jeff on drums, Jim on keyboards, and some fat doofus on guitar.
We had a number of “songs” that we’d come up with that were just instrumental riffs that were fun to jam on. Goldfish, Toilet Water from Hell, Guppies from Mars and Beyond. Yeah, we were 16 and 17 year old nerds. I remember toward the end of my junior year in high school we had decided to stop looking for a singer and start just doing it ourselves. Jim was good. Jeff was better. I wasn’t so hot. Mike only sang when it was funny. I thought that if we were becoming a real band we should probably write lyrics to our instrumental songs. My first attempt was really bad, but I fudged it into a melody that went over Goldfish. Time for a Change was born. It was the first song I’d ever written or cowritten that was really complete. My simple melody got trashed in favor of a better one that Jim came up with. They were sort of similar, but Jim’s blew mine out of the water.
All of that happened about 25 years ago. Now, after all of this time, I give to you, oh internets, a sloppy little GarageBand demo recording of Time for a Change, 2013. Gasp in wonder at how lame it is…
But wait, there’s more!
I had to dig through a box full of old cassette tapes to find the arrangement and the lyrics, but I eventually found a tape that was in awful shape, with the worst wow and flutter in the history of magnetism. It also didn’t have Mike playing bass. That made me sad. Still, there were four other songs on the tape. One of them was a song that Mike and I wrote in his basement while playing with his 4-track recorder. This was probably either late ’88 or early ’89. I really can’t recall. Jeff took over the melody this time and made my simple, feeble attempt a billion times better.
The lyrics came from two places. I bought a copy of Steve Hackett’s Till We Have Faces album and the opening track was called Duel. It was based on a Spielberg movie of the same name about a commuter who is stalked by a psycho driving a truck. That idea, combined with nearly getting in a head on collision while driving home from work late one night made up the basis of what was sadly probably my best lyric effort with Tempest Fero. Not to imply my lyrics ever got much better, but this was the best I had come up with at the time. Jeff had started writing lyrics for T.F. too and his squashed mine like the proverbial grape. Anyway, in the hopes of not making Time for a Change feel all lonely and stuff, I also made a new GarageBand demo of One on One Duel…
Enjoy these two flashbacks to Rob’s early days of writing music, way back in the 80’s!
Inside the Red Head's Head 