This is "Last Chance to Change," a student work I wrote and recorded with Graham Burks back in 1996. It's been lost to me until this week, when I digitized it from the original quarter-inch tape.
When I was an undergraduate at Rhodes College, I took a music theory class from professor David Ramsey. He explained to us that he didn't like to give grades higher than A-minuses in his classes. In order to get an A, a student would have to do a special assignment that went beyond the course's expectations.
I took the challenge, so I asked my new bandmate Graham Burks to produce a song I had recently written called "Last Chance to Change." (We were such new friends, in fact, that I misspelled his name on the cassete case at the top of this post.) We spent a few nights getting it down on his TASCAM 4-track, and we were pretty happy with the results.
Working out a score was a difficult task, and completing even the three bars you see at the right took us quite some time. I then wrote up a paper about the song (title: "My Last Chance for an A"), which worked in the word "Beatle-esque" before the end of the second sentence. Well done, 19-year-old version of myself!
Choosing the cover for the cassete, though, was easy. I picked a black and white photograph that I had taken in a cemetery because that's how you tell the world you are a moody, intellectual artist.
On presentation day, I took my essay and little cassette tape to class and played my song for my classmates. They seemed to like it, as did Professor Ramsey. I felt reasonably confident that my work was enough to get me an A on my transcript.
I got an A-minus.
(You should be able to listen to the song on the player above. Let me know in the comments if it is not working.)
This week I found the long-lost tape and had the equipment to import it to Garage Band. And here you have it! A bit of mid-90s four-tracked indie rock. It's sunny and warm, with great melodies and a pump organ and a bassline that won't quit. The end-rhymes are a little bit dubious, but if you look past that, you might just find your toes a-tappin'!
This week I found the long-lost tape and had the equipment to import it to Garage Band. And here you have it! A bit of mid-90s four-tracked indie rock. It's sunny and warm, with great melodies and a pump organ and a bassline that won't quit. The end-rhymes are a little bit dubious, but if you look past that, you might just find your toes a-tappin'!
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| Graham and me, circa 1998 |
catchy! and who the hell is blair pearle?
ReplyDeleteThat's Blair Pearce, who I played with in the Perpetual Motion Machine and then here and there in the following years. He's a good dude.
ReplyDeleteis that my Moog? Wish I still had that thing. I sold it when I was trying to make rent in the early years.
ReplyDeleteActually, that's Graham's old air organ that you are hearing. I could never get your Moog to do much more than make R2D2 sounds.
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