Finding Old Tapes Of Yourself

You guys are serious wimps with your proper songs and decent playing
and singers who can hold a note
I can top it all - I have a tape somewhere of my band of 1989 playing the
now demolished Baggot Inn in Dublin and covering Abba's 'Mamma Mia'
at breakneck speed with twin guitars, an out of tune singer, even more
out of tune harmonies (courtesy of me) a bad keyboard player and a
drummer with no discernible talent for anything than collecting
waistcoats of dubious hues. It's hilariously bad ....
and I thought we were great and wondered why we weren't getting
queues of a&r types round the block for our shows...
In fact it's so embarrassing I can't even post it...

Does anyone else have tons of unlabeled tapes?
Or am I the only idiot who was to lazy to put labels on
them? Some of them actually have labels with nothing
written on them. Pretty lame, no?
I pretty much record everything I play. So I've got 20
years of good stuff, lame stuff, and downright
unlistenable stuff.

My favorite old tapes are of a four man improvisational
space rock band circa 1986. "The Craftsman". We had a
vocalist who was nuts (he's now an undertaker). The stuff
he came up with off the top of his head was sometimes
insane, sometimes brillant. We called him "The Birdman" I
swear his head was the same shape as tweetybird. "I
thought I saw a Rickenbacker".

My brother played keys. I remember lugging his
keyboards to the studio. He had quite a rig, and would
always make a convienent "Beer run" during the loadout. I
was on Bass and guitar. Not at the same time of course.
My buddy Bob played drums, a cross between Ringo, Watts,
and Collins. Excellent timekeeper.

The music isn't so great, but it has it moments. The
reason I love these tapes is because they represent a
time in my life when the music was fresh, and exciting.
And full of possibilities. Four friends just letting it
rip. I was pumped up for days before the jam. I wish I
could capture that feeling again.

Peace.

Edited by synthguy

I did a short tour on bass with a straight-edge hardcore punk band back in '88/'89. If you don't know, 'straight edge' means no drinking or drugs (any fans of Minor Threat here?). Luckily I was just a replacement, so the other three couldn't do much but express their disdain when the roadie and I got high. A year or so later, I ran into the guitarist; he'd gone off to college, grown his hair and discovered the Velvet Underground. Needless to say, we then proceeded to smoke ourselves silly that night...and I have tapes of our old punk shows, as well as the bizarre droning jams that he and I did once he'd seen the green light.

 

oops, almost forgot...my oldest recording (freshman/ sophomore year in high school) has me and a keyboardist trying a Jan Hammer-ish fusion sound. If you listen past me being out of tune and just really not a very good player, and the keyboard sounding cheesy and harsh like only a DX7 can, it actually sounds pretty amazingly horrible.

Edited by James Lee

I've got a few - but seriously no prog!

My favourite is one I've just dug up:

From 1988: Tranceplant (formerly known as Mantas). A 5 track demo of original "technical thrash" recorded in a single day in a semi-pro studio and mixed by an engineer who had never heard thrash metal in his life before. We played him some Megadeth, Sacred Reich and Slayer to help get into it, but I don't think it worked...

The fact that we'd only written the songs a few weeks prior to the session didn't help much, and they all sound totally rough, with bad drop-outs and awful bass playing (from me ) - but I have MiniDisc'd it, so I'll rip it to mp3 in the next day or two... if anyone's interested in hearing "technical thrash"... the guitarist (then aged just 17) was AMAZING!!!

Edited by Certif1ed