Live on CJAM (2003)
just two tracks from february of 2003 when i played on chris hewer’s show actual air for about the third time (with sean hosting in chris’ stead). there’s an early version of aura of the insipid with different bridge lyrics that are inferior to what i eventually ended up singing on the album version, and a cover of tim buckley’s lorca. i’m not normally one to play someone else’s songs, but i think it was the anniversary of tim’s death and i wanted to tackle something no one else would be bold enough to attempt. not that many of the people listening would have known who tim was anyway…
what should be on the cd, and will be showing up on that big misfits collection in the making, is the stuff that was recorded during my first appearance on the show. it was funny how it happened…gord’s friend josh was becoming a friend of mine, and we were in the process of getting to know one another. he seemed to like the music i had been making with gord. one friday josh paid a visit to his friend chris, who hosted the show actual air on CJAM. he wanted to bring a GWD cd with him, but gord was sleeping and josh didn’t know where our cds were. it also didn’t help that i wasn’t in the habit of writing titles or anything on the cds back then, so if the disc wasn’t in the case you had no way of knowing what it was without listening to it. anyway, he saw the mr. sinister cd INCOGNITO IN AUSTIN lying around and decided to grab that instead. he played chris the title track and told him some hilarious improvised lies about my musical history (something like, “john’s been making music since he was two years old”…in a way it was true, but josh had no way of knowing that). chris liked what he heard and told josh to get me to come in and play on his show. so, the following friday, i did.
at the time i hadn’t yet started working on a follow-up to BEAUTIFULLY STUPID, but i had just recently written “filler” and “unstable things” on my new acoustic guitar—the first decent one i ever owned—and i thought they might make for good on-air material, instead of tackling old tunes. to my surprise, chris ended up making me the “focus group” of the evening and devoted almost an hour to my music. so i played some tracks from my still-fresh first post-band solo cd BEAUTIFULLY STUPID, a few band tracks from STELLAR and the posthumous CASTRATED ep, the two new acoustic tracks, and we talked a bit about what i did and how i came to play the guitar in such an odd way. i even somehow got away with playing “absolutely manhole blues”, which contains about thirty rapid-fire shouts of a four-letter word that rhymes with “duck” in the last twenty seconds. when it was time to play the live tracks, the microphone i spoke into was angled halfway between my face and the guitar in an attempt to capture an ample amount of both. i was nervous as hell, which was why i botched my guitar playing on both songs, but even though the re-recordings that ended up on TEMPORARY AMNESIA are technically superior and i hold that high note on “unstable things” for much longer, there’s something about these first versions that i could never recapture. particularly on “filler”, even though my guitar playing is clumsy, my singing completely destroys what i did on the cd version. maybe it was a combination of the thrill of being on the radio for the first time in my life and unveiling these songs for the first time, not entirely sure if they were written to my satisfaction yet. whatever it was, i think it’s about time the original versions made the transition from tape to cd. i only have a second-generation copy of the tape because my original has been missing in action for some years, so the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired, but what can you do?
TRACKS:
lorca
aura of the insipid
+ both tracks backwards
STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
