dressing to undress

this stopgap collection includes an inferior early mix of don’t go, a skewed self-portrait of my then-short-haired self smoking what looks to be a cigar or a blunt on the back insert, and a few interesting curios. there are two tracks from an early session with andrew whitelaw right around the time SHOEBOX PARADISE was about to get underway (so i guess you could call it papa ghostface & friend): the spoken word tale of domestic bliss gone to hell that is trouble, the lyrics for which were ripped from the blue spiral notebook i was writing in at the time when i let andrew deane leaf through it at lunchtime one day (i’ve never been able to figure out what a heart-on-sleeve romantic like him would want with those words, and i didn’t realize they were missing until some days later, though i remember him having an oddly embarrassed look on his face when he gave me the book back and told me there was some interesting stuff in it), and the mostly instrumental i ain’t got no hair which is kind of aimless but has some good ideas, including my after-the-fact piano overdub and another complete butcher of “i love you” from barney & friends. at the end you can hear me saying, “that was demented,” which pretty much sums it up. i’ve always had a fondness for trouble, with its ominous bass/guitar interplay sounding at times like music from an old blaxploitation flick, but darker and stranger. i took a few of the people i was living with at the time as inspiration and spun a tale of a man gradually driven insane by the bad habits of his wife. but then, the opening passage hints that perhaps he was a little crazy to begin with, and domestic bliss was never in the cards for him. for some reason i’ve always liked the fact that i don’t sound much like myself when i flatly intone, “he returned to australia with visions of alcohol & prostitutes”. andrew plays the drums here, and though he’s not a virtuoso by any stretch, his jerky performance suits the song. nine years (!!!) after the fact, i remixed this track and threw it on OUT-TAKES, MISFITS & OTHER THINGS, which is the best place to hear it.

there’s also a distorted stomp of out-take from the starving artists sessions and the full alternate version of merry fuckin’ christmas, which i eventually tacked onto the album from which it drew its namesake because it was too catchy to be ignored. both trouble and i ain’t got no hair were recorded at andrew’s place one afternoon. i brought most of the equipment i had in the music room at the time, and we didn’t end up using even half of it. the W-5 synth just sat on its stand feeling unloved. we also recorded a song with me on the drums, but as i recall gord and andrew weren’t able to come up with any solid ideas, and gord got me back on a stringed instrument in a hurry. that track was erased accidentally after we finished listening to it, but while i’d be curious to hear it today, i don’t think anything too great was lost, so it’s nothing to feel too badly about.