Amanda dug up another four tapes. After spending more than two hundred bucks having her whole collection transferred, I’m no closer to having that Papa Ghostface footage I’ve been chasing than I was a little less than twenty years ago when I started chasing it. I would bet anything it isn’t lost or dead, but buried somewhere in a garage or at the bottom of a box of random things, waiting to be rediscovered in the next century when human cloning is all the rage and no one knows which generation of themselves they are anymore.
There is one last hope. It’s the longest of long shots, but I know a second video recording exists — or used to exist — of the same live performance I thought we’d unearth somewhere on one of Amanda’s tapes. I know because I sat in a classroom a month or two after it was filmed and watched it. I just don’t know who made the tape.
I do know who might be able to answer that question. As unlikely as it is that they would remember who was manning the camera seventeen years ago, and as even-more-unlikely as it is that the tape is sitting around waiting for me to find it with its head crowned by a halo of heavenly light, it’s worth a try.
I have a realistic view of the situation. I’m pretty sure all of this has been for nothing. I just don’t want to give up until I’ve exhausted every possibility.
Like I said before, I did end up getting my hands on some great archival material. So it hasn’t really been a pointless effort. It’s just that the footage I want most of all continues to elude me, as if the whole thing is a sick little cosmic joke designed to make me swear even more than I usually do.
What else is new? The remastering thing keeps moving along, sort of. 121 songs done now. 67 left to do. If I really dig in, I can probably have it all done inside of a few weeks. It’d be nice to get that taken care of so I can devote all my brainpower to this album I’m supposed to be finishing.
Here, for no real reason, is a little song that was filmed ten years ago at the old house and then never recorded or revisited. I miss that shirt. It kept getting rattier and rattier, until by 2011 I don’t think the sleeves existed anymore. Check out my dresser mirror reflecting all those empty water bottles lined up like soldiers on a bookshelf.
Sometimes, after chasing something for a very long time, you think you’ve managed to catch up to it and dig your fingers into its shoulder blades. Then you press down a little harder and notice what you thought were shoulders are your own kneecaps, and you’re not wearing any pants.
This is one of those times.
Pretty much nothing I thought was going to be on that stack of 8mm tapes was there. That’s both good and bad.
As I was expecting, there’s footage here I never knew existed. What I thought was going to be a party at Gord’s from 2002 is instead a triple-header of a house show from late 2001, with a set from punk band Kanada sitting right in the middle of the musical sandwich. It always felt like they were kind of given short shrift in the music scene, so it was a great surprise to stumble onto some video of them doing their thing back when we were all skinny teenagers.
A tape I thought was going to have random high school footage on it instead has some moments from the night of our graduation. Another tape I was positive would be a recording of a bar show is instead a ton of footage of SEED OF HATE being recorded at the old Walker Power Building. I remember a camera being there, but I only ever saw about two minutes of video and assumed not much more than that was filmed.
There’s enough raw footage to put together a grimy documentary about the making of the album from start to finish, if I wanted to do a thing like that (and I did, about a year after writing this post). There are a lot of fun moments in there, including the revelation that recording the guitar and bass tracks direct instead of mic’ing up the amps wasn’t the plan all along. I’ve been remembering that wrong all these years. Instead, it was a last-minute move made to counteract too much bleed and not enough microphones. And the band didn’t record piecemeal, but together as a unit, live-off-the floor, with the exception of the vocals and some guitar overdubs that were added later. I’ve been remembering that wrong too.
But then there’s this: none of those Papa Ghostface performances are included in any of the eight hours of footage culled from these tapes. There are some pretty amusing bits from me, with some non-sequiturs I don’t remember ever dishing out, but there’s almost no footage of me playing music in any capacity. For the most part I’m only recording it, or sitting in the audience watching it happen.
I say “almost” because one of the surprise finds on these tapes is a casual little jam session with me and Tyson running through bits and pieces of about half a dozen different GWD songs. It isn’t true band footage. Gord is filming instead of playing bass, and what little singing I do is not trying very hard to be serious. Still, I was pretty sure this stuff was filmed on Tyson’s camera and I’d never get to see it again. I’m happy to be proven wrong, and ecstatic to have another small piece of video documentation from that musical period fall into my lap.
After the fifteen-year chase and the money I spent having the tapes transferred, finding out the things I most wanted to see weren’t there was a bit of a kick in the teeth. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for what I’ve got here. There’s some great archival material I never thought I’d get my hands on, a lot of it looks and sounds better than I thought it would, and I’ll be able to do some fun things with it. But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed.
To Amanda’s credit, she’s said she’ll take another look at her collection of tapes and see if there are any others she thinks I might be on. So it isn’t an “all hope is lost” situation yet. There’s still a chance.
Whatever happens, I can’t thank her enough for opening up the archives and allowing me to travel back in time about sixteen years. Thank Jack Russell Terriers she was either around for these adventures or willing to let someone borrow her camera so they could be documented. Some of this stuff is absolute gold.
In the meantime, please enjoy Kanada testing the limits of how much volume a camcorder’s built-in microphone is capable of handling while raising your glass of ginger ale to my clean-shaven bandana-wearing cameo and a black-haired, near-unrecognizable Joey Desroches on drums.
Wherever you are now, Christine Kowala, I want you to know I still love you and your Batman shirt.
Another bittersweet hindsight moment here: everyone who was in my band at the time was at this show. We wrapped up the last full band recording session for GOOD LUCK IN THE NEXT LIFE earlier that same day. We could have easily played a set and made the house show a quadruple-header.
While our music might not have fit in with the punk, metal, and hardcore grind, I’m pretty sure the people we were hanging out with would have been open-minded enough to give what we were doing a fair shake. And then we’d have a full GWD live set on video, with me doing more than just reacting to some guitar feedback during someone else’s soundcheck.
Failing that, I could have at least recorded some of these shows. My rig was pretty portable in those days and more than adequate for capturing loud live music. Then I’d be able to sync this video, and others like it, with some high quality audio.
The idea never entered my mind.
I’ve had about all the smelly not-to-be potpourri I can handle lately. I need a time machine already, so I can confront some of these oversights, punch ’em in the mouth, and give ’em overbites.
Since my brain moves in strange ways, when I was navigating the initial disappointment of realizing the footage I most wanted to see wasn’t on these tapes, I thought I’d really wallow in it by revisiting some past disappointment. Double your displeasure, double your pun.
In the late summer of 2011, I played a set at the Shores of Erie Wine Festival. To date, it’s the last time I’ve played a solo show. It was such a horrible experience it kind of made me never want to do it again.
Everything that could have gone wrong that day didgo wrong. I found out the sustain pedal for my rented keyboard was dead minutes before my set started. The one person I knew who had a sustain pedal I might be able to borrow was also playing that day, but she’d just made it pretty clear she didn’t care about me at all when I thought we’d spent the better part of that summer becoming close friends.
You could say there was some tension there. And I wasn’t about to try and break it by asking for a favour.
If that wasn’t enough to set an ominous tone, I wasn’t used to playing on a stage that big, cut off from the audience to the point that it barely felt like they were there. I couldn’t hear any of their applause. It didn’t feel like I could interact with them. Not that there were many people to interact with anyway. There wasn’t much of a turnout that early in the day. But losing anything that resembled a feeling of intimacy threw me off.
Add to that the people shovelling mulch in front of the stage while we played (I thought it was manure at first) and the feeling that it was too early for my voice or my fingers to be awake enough to cooperate with me, and it was a recipe for a bad time all the way around.
The worst part was having to perform without a sustain pedal. I had no idea how integral that little thing was to the way I played piano until it wasn’t there anymore. As it was, playing a digital piano live when I’d been spoiled by the grand piano at Mackenzie Hall and my upright at home was a little uninspiring, with all the sensitivity I was losing. But I could have dealt with that just fine if I had a working sustain pedal. Without it, I had to rethink every song on the fly. Everything I’d rehearsed went out the window, and my piano-playing became more of a reluctant intellectual exercise than anything, testing what I could and couldn’t do with no margin for error.
It was one of those shows where nothing feels like it’s working, you don’t enjoy being up there, and when it’s over you’re glad you forgot to tell the audience what your name was, because it would be embarrassing if anyone thought what they heard was an accurate representation of what you sound like when things are going well.
There’s video of the whole performance. I ignored it for years, not wanting to relive the experience. Almost six years later, when I was feeling low about the lack of 8mm Papa Ghostface glory, I decided to subject myself to it for the first time.
I listened to the audio on its own so I wouldn’t have to see the mulch flying around. I didn’t cringe. In some places, against all the odds, I found myself thinking, “For feeling on the day like my singing and playing was garbage, this isn’t all that bad.”
I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but after being pretty positive the Mackenzie Hall performance of “A Fine Line Between Friendship and Baked Goods” from earlier the same summer was always going to be the definitive version of the song, I think this one might give it a run for its money.
It’s a little more far-reaching, with bits of “Here Comes the Rain Again”, “Out of Touch”, and “State Trooper” getting tossed into the blender, along with a brief callback to the “I Put a Spell on You” section first improvised at Mackenzie Hall (only the first of these musical inserts was rehearsed; the rest were spontaneous). Some of the melodic ideas from the long improv section in that version are revisited here, including another quote from “Rondo Alla Turca”. There’s also a whole lot of improvised stuff unique to this performance that I don’t remember ever playing. And the line I forgot to sing in the first verse at Mackenzie Hall doesn’t get dropped this time.
All I know is, I’m liking it, when I never thought I would — never thought I’d even want to hear it again. If for whatever reason I don’t end up ever playing another solo gig, I don’t think this was such a bad note to end on after all.
Out of great disappointment a mound of focaccia bread sometimes rises, I guess is what I’m trying to say here.
This is what a MiniDV tape looks like after its casing has been disassembled and the guts have been pulled out.
When I was just getting started importing all these old tapes, one of them decided to jam up on me after being rewound to the beginning. I was able to get it out of the camera, but there was no way to get it to play after that.
Bob at Unique Video Systemstook the thing apart, transferred the tape into a new casing, made a splice to fix the part at the beginning that went janky, and all the ideas preserved therein got to live to fight another day.
If you need any video-related work or repairs done in Windsor, Bob is your guy. To say he knows his stuff would be a bit like saying the sun is hot and if you got close enough to touch it you might lose a finger.
Now, this righthere…this is the Holy Grail.
You know how a few posts ago I broke down a list of video footage different people shot of me over the years that I didn’t have in my possession? And you know how I mentioned some early Papa Ghostface footage filmed back in our high school days?
This is that, and a whole lot more.
I’ve been trying here and there for fifteen years now to gain access to this material. A few days ago I thought I’d give it one last shot. I reached out to Amanda, Gord’s high school girlfriend. She’s the one who filmed this stuff.
I wasn’t even sure the tapes still existed. It’s been almost two decades since the earliest of them was filmed. Things get lost or thrown out over that period of time. It just happens.
She sent me a picture so I could see she’d kept the tapes and they were still intact. She said she wasn’t positive which ones we were on, because her camera didn’t work anymore and she never really documented the contents of her tapes, but she was able to narrow it down to seven possibilities. If I was willing to share copies of the digital transfers with her, she’d be glad to let me have them.
As of today, I have those seven tapes. There isn’t just vintage Papa Ghostface footage on them from a time when I had short hair and a beard was nothing but a distant hope in my head. There are house shows Fetal Pulp and ADHD played at. There are candid moments from the times Amanda brought her camera to school. There’s…I don’t even know what, to be honest with you. There could be footage of me and people I went to Walkerville with in here that I didn’t know existed. There probably is.
It goes without saying that I’d love to have the video Tyson shot of the band in late 2001 and early 2002. Knowing how easy it would have been to pop a tape in my VCR and hit record each time he hooked his camera up to my TV so we could watch what he’d filmed makes me want to go back in time and throttle myself for not thinking to do that when it counted.
In a way this is even better. Beyond a few things I’m pretty positive are here, I don’t know what I’m going to see. I get to be surprised.
After spending a good few years getting used to the idea that I’d never get to see any of this again, I get to go see Bob on Monday and talk to him about transferring all the tapes onto DVD (I’d make the transfers myself, but these are 8mm tapes and I don’t have the necessary equipment). I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. I thought I was doomed, and here I am waiting for the weekend to disappear so I can dive even deeper into the past than my own camcorder tapes have allowed me to.
Never underestimate the power of dogged persistence, right?
When someone finds out I went to a Catholic grade school, they tend to think of uniforms, Jesus overload, and outstretched hands stung red by rulers.
It wasn’t really anything like that.
There were no uniforms. The Christianity was there, but it wasn’t force-fed to us. We went to church sometimes. We read the bible. We were also respected as individuals and left to work out what we thought of it all for ourselves.
Instead of berating us for not being better Christians or trying to scare us with stories about the horrors of hell, our priest told us God wanted us to be happy and enjoy our lives. He sang harmonies to hymns instead of singing the melodies straight. He was a baritone. “Lamb of god,” we would sing, “you take away the sins of the world,” and while he was tracing out a countermelody, my best friend Pete would be sing-shouting the words like the hymn was a Metallica song, screwing his face up into a look of exaggerated intensity that was so funny I thought I might die from trying to laugh in church without making a sound.
Pete would probably still sing “Agnus Dei” just like that. It’s part of what makes him Pete. This is a guy who slow-danced with his mother to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” at his wedding, and it was one of those perfect moments you get lucky enough to witness every so often, because it was so him.
My high school was Walkerville — Walkerville Collegiate Institute, if you want to call it by its big boy name. Walkerville had (and still has, as far as I know) a celebrated arts program. For eons it’s been touted as a place for musicians, actors, writers, and artists in any medium to thrive.
It had nothing on St. William Catholic Elementary School, where I was taught to be myself, to be inventive, to think outside the box. At Walkerville I was expected to live in the box, with nothing but a few ragged holes for air and the odd muffled sound of someone walking by to remind me there was life outside the cardboard, until I got fed up and started tearing through it with my teeth. I was not a rebel by nature. High school warped me into one through the sheer force of its bullshit and my resistance to it, which was more instinct than anything.
In the fourth grade, Mr. Janisse told us about the Family Allowance — more commonly known as the “Baby Bonus”. He explained its history and purpose, explained how Brian Mulroney’s government wanted to abolish it, and then opened up the floor for all of us to weigh in with our thoughts. I don’t remember what I said, but I got pretty fired up about it, railing against Mulroney’s shortsightedness.
Think about that for a second. We had a political discussion in grade four,and all of the students were treated as intellectual equals. Find me a Catholic school — or any elementary school at all — where that happens now, and I will eat my own chin.
My sixth grade class wrote our own play about decision-making. Mr. Giannetti suggested a riff on The Twilight Zone. Six or eight of us who were up for the challenge committed to it, and we created our own characters and wrote our own dialogue, workshopping out in the hall, bouncing off of one another, improvising, testing things out. I don’t know what was running through anyone else’s head. I thought it was thrilling.
Mr. Giannetti offered advice and ideas when we got stuck, but he left us to determine the final shape of the thing. He did make the suggestion that I could be a Rod Serling type character, framing the story, offering exposition, and part of my shtick could be an oral fixation. There I’d be, looking suave, clutching a lollipop.
My suit was a loaner from an adult. I was going through a growth spurt that didn’t seem like it was ever going to end, so it just about fit. The sunglasses were my own. The lollipop was a red Tootsie Pop.
I still don’t know how many licks it takes to get to the motherlode of chewy goodness inside.
What we came up with was a morality tale called The Decision Zone. There were two performances. One was during the day for the rest of the school to see. The other was an evening show for our parents.
At the late show we stretched things out, took more chances, improvised more of the dialogue, and got a little more “adult”. Somewhere someone has a decaying VHS tape of that performance, with my closing narration making room for a spontaneous rant about taking my kids to the lollipop factory only to leave appalled by the mediocrity of the modern lollipop and its desecration at the hands of soulless capitalists.
The body of the story followed a court case. The finer details left my memory a long time ago. I think Kyle Jaques might have been a court clerk? I know Ashley Coulter was the judge. I’ll never forget Pete walking into the “courtroom”, hiking up his pants past any sane place, presenting her with a bouquet of flowers, and slipping into a high-pitched, nasal voice to announce, “Beautiful flowers for a beautiful lady!”
It took everything we had not to crack up onstage along with the audience.
In grade seven I got to be the bad guy in a Christmas play called The Villain and the Toy Shop. My character’s name was Mr. Glowerpuss. Now there’s a name you can sink your teeth into. I borrowed someone’s cane, put on a fake moustache and a black fedora, and someone came up with the idea of massaging baby powder into my hair to make it look grey.
I acted in a lot of grade school plays. It kind of became my thing. One time I was a Jamaican guru who helped a group of stranded explorers. That play ended with everyone singing Rod Stewart’s “Sailing”. I owe Ms. George a lifelong debt of gratitude for introducing me to the greatness of “I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers, which served as our musical introduction if I remember right.
In another play we wrote ourselves, I did my best impersonation of Mr. Giannetti. Jeremy Head electrocuted me with jumper cables when I started choking on hard candy, shouting, “He’s blowing chunks!” as the curtain came down to end the first act. Gary Collins inhabited a low-rent James Bond-type character named Dan Ger, with a soft g (“The name’s Ger…Dan Ger”).
Over the years I got to be everything from a solemn offstage narrator to the high-strung father of a fugitive played by Matt Brown. But playing the main antagonist in that Christmas play was my proudest moment. I got to chew scenery and cackle the most evil, maniacal laugh I could come up with. I loved it.
When you’re a kid, you look forward to your time away from school. For me, school was the escape. I wasn’t living with the father person yet. Things at home were…well, I’ll just tell you I was breaking out in hives and developing the beginning of an ulcer when I was thirteen because of the emotional strain, and let you fill in the blanks.
On the days I didn’t get to see my padre and musical other half, school let me forget about what I was afraid to go home to for a little while. It gave me a place where I could be as weird as I wanted to be without being made to feel like there was something wrong with me.
In grade eight I showed up for school every day dressed like a stockbroker. By then the way I looked was the only thing in my life I felt I had any control over. I liked to dress up. It made me feel good about myself.
That my self-imposed dress code and emphasis on immaculate grooming would somehow become an act of rebellion tells you all you need to know about the absurd atmosphere I was living in.
Some days I walked around with a bulky old cassette recorder, documenting snatches of conversation, amusing moments from other students, and song ideas. No one ever told me to put it away. No one at school made fun of me for the way I dressed. The only thing I ever heard about it was, “You look nice today, John.”
Brandi Rivait wrote in my yearbook, “Johnny, don’t wear dress pants and a suit in ninety degree weather! Please! You’ll get sunstroke!” But I think she was only looking out for me.
I showed up dressed the same way for my first day at Walkerville. Before the end of lunch recess, someone outside my field of vision whipped a glass bottle at me that just missed my head and screamed, “FUCKING FAG!”
Welcome to your new liberal arts school.
I went into high school thinking it wouldn’t be too much different from grade school, where in the sixth grade we listened to the O.J. Simpson verdict being read live on the radio and talked about it after, where I made great friends and scared one of the few borderline bullies stupid when I slammed his head against a brick wall after he stole my winter hat one time too many, where I learned how to snap my fingers but not how to whistle, where I cheated on a test just once and the look of disappointment on my French teacher’s face when she caught me was all the punishment I needed (I never thought about cheating again), where I learned CPR only to forget most of the salient bits in a matter of days, where I said something dirty to a girl who was going through a mean phase in front of my entire class and won the Student of the Month award for politeness a week or two later, where we were educated about grammar, racism, sex, and everything in-between.
In stark contrast to that, high school taught me only one real thing, and I don’t think it was the intended lesson: there’s a lot of stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, and if you choose not to buy into it, you become an insurgent in spite of yourself.
All of my St. William brethren moved on to St. Anne’s after graduation. I went from knowing every soul in my school in the eighth grade to knowing no one my freshman year of high school. It was disconcerting, and a little lonely. I settled in and made friends after a while, and I had some twisted adventures, but out of the forty or so different teachers I must have had at Walkerville I can count the good ones on one hand. A few were wonderful. Most of them were just kind of there. A few were incompetent, abusive, and so negligent I was amazed they managed to hold onto their jobs.
At St. William it was different. I don’t know if the teachers had a tacit agreement with the principal, or if they were all just left to do their own thing, but I don’t think more than one or two of them paid too much attention to whatever the curriculum was supposed to be, or else they created it themselves. They seemed to tailor their lessons to us. Almost every one of them felt like a friend, and the feeling hung around long after they’d stopped teaching me. The few times I came back to visit after graduating, it felt like coming home.
Our teachers were interested in who we were and who we were going to be. They wanted to do what they could to help us grow in whatever direction we wanted to grow. I don’t remember ever being condescended to, or anyone telling me, “You know, this passion you have for music isn’t all that realistic.”
Walkerville even managed to kill my love of acting. It was a ninth grade production of Peter Pan that did it. During rehearsals a lot of the actors and dancers would talk and joke around with me. Sometimes when nothing was going on a group of us would walk to Tim Hortons to get some coffee or something to eat. I felt there was something there to grab onto.
When we were finished with the play, all the camaraderie evaporated. I would see one of the dancers or one of my acting buddies in the hall, I would say hello to them, and they would look at me for a moment like I was a door-to-door salesman with some awful, disfiguring infectious disease. After registering their disgust, they would ignore me.
The message was clear. I wasn’t cool enough for them to acknowledge once they were no longer obligated to.
A little later, when I started sharing my CDs and performing music at assemblies, all those people decided I was cool enough to talk to after all. Funny how that works.
I guess you could say grade school showed me what people were capable of when they were committed to being the best versions of themselves, and then high school tore all that down and introduced me to the fickleness and mixed messages I would have to navigate throughout my adult life.
Instructive? Yeah, sort of. Fun? Not so much.
This isn’t really about all that, though. I have too many stories to tell, and you have a finite amount of time left in your life. This is about one afternoon in grade eight when I felt I knew, if only for an instant, what it was like to be one of the Beatles during the crazed height of their fame.
For a long time I pretty much kept my music to myself. I think there were two things behind that. The first thing was not giving a whole lot of thought to sharing it. I made it because there was something inside that needed to be expressed, and because it gave me joy. Using it as a means of generating attention was never a consideration. The second thing was maybe being a little shy about it, not thinking I was good enough to get anyone interested in what I was doing even if I wanted to try.
I almost went out for the talent show in grade seven, but playing a song out of a book didn’t hold much appeal, and I was still in the early stages of the on/off piano lessons that would do little more than force me to get a lot better at picking things up by ear to make up for my lack of facility when it came to trying to make sense of all those dots and dashes and squiggles on the page. So whatever I might have done had I gathered up the courage to go through with it, it wouldn’t have been too impressive. And it wouldn’t have really been me.
In grade eight the urgency of the moment convinced me to swallow my nerves and grab the mechanical bull by the plastic junk. High school and the unknown were right around the corner. I wasn’t going to get many more chances to perform in front of all these people I’d grown up with — to share this part of myself with them.
The music I was making had grown a little more refined and conventional by now. Maybe in hindsight it was sometimes, in some ways, a little less compelling than what I was doing back when I was still trying to suss out things like harmony and structure, stumbling onto unorthodox chord voicings, twisting my limitations into idiosyncratic strengths without having any idea what I was doing most of the time.
The music would get consistently weird again soon enough. In the meantime, I had more confidence now that I knew my way around the piano better. That made all the difference.
The culmination of this surge in confidence was bringing a pile of home-recorded tapes with me on our week-long grade eight year-end field trip that took us to Ottawa and Toronto. I’d be playing one of those tapes with Johnny Smith himself sitting next to me on the bus (a handful of parents acted as chaperones/group leaders), someone would ask what I was listening to, they’d perk up when I told them it was me, and the Walkman would get passed around all over the place.
The most memorable moment came when the headphones made their way to Victoria Gunn. I asked what song she was listening to. “All I know,” she said, “is your dad’s singing something about a Tyrannosaurus rex.”
(That would have been “No Luck”, a deep album cut on Return to Innocence.)
But before the field trip, there was the talent show. Mrs. Howell was running the thing. I auditioned for her in a room with a dozen other students, playing the school’s old upright piano, belting out “Evil Woman”. I was a bit of an Electric Light Orchestra nut at the time.
I asked if it would be alright if I played two songs at the show. She said that was fine. Only about half as many kids had come out to audition as the year before, so there was some room to play with.
My second song would be an original, and the one I chose to play was something called “Duty-Free”, which was…not very representative of the music Johnny Smith and I were making as the West Team. Almost all our songs were improvised as they were recorded. “Duty-Free” was something I wrote, with the words on paper and the music mapped out and hammered down. I can’t remember why I went for that tune. Maybe it was a simple case of recognizing that it had some pep and was fun to play.
Agnes Wnek provided the initial spark. I had a crush on her the size of a small country. One day she said to me, “We should write a song together. I’ve got some words for you.”
They went like this:
I’m duty-free. They can’t sell me alky. I’m underage. And besides, I can’t afford it — I’m on minimum wage.
I took the first line and ran with it, treating it as a punchline before the joke and an excuse for some wordplay over a pretty simple bluesy vamp. While the result wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, following up a line like, “Temptation overcomes common sense,” with a bit about Michigan’s public spitting laws is the kind of oddball turn that still appeals to me today. And all the talk of one-night stands is sort of hilarious, coming from someone who didn’t even know what first base was.
It says something that I never gave “Duty-Free” another serious thought after its one live performance, and it only got something close to a proper recording when “Dust in the Wind” (the on/off piano teacher) wanted to record me playing one of my songs with his DAT machine as an experiment and I thought it would be fun to revisit it. It was more of a novelty song to me than a meaningful piece of music.
I think you need to hear a little bit of what constituted “serious” music for me at the time to understand what I mean. So here are two songs that were recorded a few weeks before the talent show, from an album called Kaput.
Our West Team songs were an unpredictable stew that mixed up events and characters from our lives, toilet humour, philosophy, and pure fiction. Though there were some solo pieces here and there, most of what we did involved a tag-team dynamic. One of us would start singing, setting the scene, and then we’d take turns filling in the finer details. I’ve said this before, and it’s worth repeating: the thing that never stops being surprising to me every time I pull out an old tape, even just to hear a song or two, is how varied this music is. The songs go a lot of different places.
My favourite go-to song shape in those days was the dark psychodrama. There’s some pitch black music on these tapes that wrestles with madness, isolation, and broken relationships, at a time when you’d probably expect to hear me singing about crushes on girls and hating homework. There is a little bit of that in the odd song like “My Dad Ate My Homework”, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Some of our best songs were the ballads, and very few of them were typical love songs.
Here’s the thing: Pubescent Me did not like to play it straight when hanging out in ballad territory. At all. In any given song you’d get Johnny Smith singing something tender and sweet, and then I’d come in and start wailing about dirty bras in laundry baskets (“Julie, Are You Listening?”), the lonesome plight of a vacuum cleaner salesman (“Just a Dream”), or escaping the pain of a failed romance through prostitution (“Caroline”).
There were plenty of songs that didn’t take themselves too seriously to begin with. Take the third track on the Kaput cassette, for example:
Early in 1997 I discovered the auto-accompaniment built into the Clavinova keyboard that served as my main creative workstation at the time. Before that, if I wanted drums in a song I would set up a split mode and have piano or whatever keyboard sound I wanted on the right side and bass or strings on the left to fill in the low end. Then I would trigger a drum pattern and go to town.
With the auto-accompaniment engaged, I could play chords with my left hand and lead an invisible band. Those drum patterns I thought I knew so well developed all kinds of new wrinkles, and all at once I had access to musical backdrops that were much more fleshed-out.
It got a little stale once I’d gone through every available style and all its variations. Eventually I started stripping away most of the extra sounds aside from bass and put the keyboard in a different mode that would allow me to play without using a split, the invisible bassist following me wherever I went, freeing up both of my hands to do whatever they wanted. But for a good few months there, I revelled in all the new sounds.
Here I went for an imaginary Dixieland jazz band, alternating between playing what was supposed to sound like a clean, tremolo-kissed electric guitar with the right hand and messing with the new (to me, at the time) Arp Omni-2 that was sitting on top of the Clavinova.
On songs like this we could both let loose with whatever random weirdness popped into our heads. When it came to the ballads, things were a little different. Johnny Smith became the resident straight man, and I became more of the resident basket case.
There were exceptions. One of them came near the end of the first side of the same tape. I came up with an idea using another sound that was meant to emulate a guitar. This time it was supposed to be a steel-string acoustic.
“We should start recording this,” Johnny Smith said. “Don’t change a thing,” he added, knowing I had a hard-on for those auto-accompaniment sounds, knowing too that the virtual band wasn’t needed here.
“No strings attached,” I said, and we had a title before we had a song. He hit the record button while I was still playing. Then this happened.
What you have here is an example of something I listen to now, after not hearing it for twenty years, and think, “How on earth did we improvise that?” This was at a time in my life when I thought lyrics were always supposed to rhyme. So there’s that. But the song tells the story of a life seen in snapshots through someone else’s eyes. The music moves through different sections and shifts in intensity.
None of it was written. I had the little lick that introduces the song and recurs through the verses, and that was it. Beyond that, it was all made up on the spot, like almost all of our music was. We took turns picking up the thread of the narrative as we were both discovering what it was.
We were both excited about what we came up with when we were finished recording it. It was one of a number of songs that felt like catching lightning in a bottle. But time and distance have a way of making some things seem better than they really were. You return to something like this hoping the music lives up to your memory of it, not knowing how reliable that memory is given all the dust caked into its face.
I was not expecting to be as affected by this one as I am two decades after the fact. There are well over a thousand West Team songs on tape, and not too many outright stinkers in my opinion, but songs like this are special. I mean, if someone wanted to play this at my funeral, my well-dressed ghost would not object — though I think just as strong a case could be made for “The Sack of Symphony”.
(And if you’re wondering, yes, the sack in question is a scrotum.)
See, this is why I’ve resisted listening to too much of this stuff until I commit to digitizing every tape we ever made. There’s so much there, most of it is music I haven’t heard since it was recorded, and a lot of it has the capacity to surprise me and move me and crack my shit up even now. If I step too far into the musical past, I might get lost in there and not want to come back to work on all the things I’m excited about in the present.
Anyway, back to the talent show.
I don’t know why I didn’t play the school’s old upright like everyone else who played piano did that day. We rented a fancy Yamaha keyboard from Ouellette’s and I played that thing instead. I would give half the hair on my legs and maybe a toe or two in exchange for some video footage I could share here now. I don’t think any exists. I don’t remember seeing anyone in the audience, parent or teacher, with a video camera.
There was someone taking photographs. Here’s one that ended up in the yearbook.
If the school had a mic stand, it was either missing in action that day or I couldn’t get it positioned right. Michael Greff stood in front of the rented keyboard and held a microphone in the place a stand would have kept it fixed in an ideal world. If you’re out there somewhere, Mike, I owe you one for going beyond the call of duty and doing it with a smile on your face.
I at least had the foresight to ask Johnny Smith to bring that bulky old tape recorder with him (different from the one we used to record our albums). He sat in the gym with the other parents and captured the whole show on cassette, dance numbers, announcements and all.
It needs to be said: the recording is very lo-fi. It makes our albums from the same period — themselves captured using the invisible microphone built into a consumer-grade tape recorder — sound like million dollar studio productionsin comparison. The mic I was singing into was patched into the PA system. For some reason the keyboard didn’t get the same treatment, left to sink or swim on the strength of its built-in speakers. So my singing is a lot louder than my playing, and it’s not one of the more pristine audience recordings you’ll ever hear by a long shot.
Still, I’m grateful to have an audio record of that day.
I played my first song pretty early in the show. I was sitting on the floor at the back of the gym with my classmates, trying to ignore the butterflies eating at the inside of my stomach, when Mrs. Howell said this and I did a mental double-take.
The first thing that stunned me was the way she was talking about me. This was not someone given to doling out praise. I had no idea she had that kind of respect for me as a musician. It really threw me.
The second thing that stunned me was the way everyone went nuts as soon as she said my name. She had to shush them to finish introducing me.
I went up there, played “Evil Woman”, and got the whole school to sing along. When I was finished, the applause was so loud I’m convinced it would have parted my hair if I hadn’t put enough gel in it that morning to keep it frozen in place through a hurricane. It was insane.
I came back later to close out the “talent” portion of the show before Mrs. Hale got up onstage with her Praise Group to sing catchy songs about Jesus and his dad. Hey man, don’t knock “Glory to God” until you’ve heard it. That stuff gets stuck in your head.
I grafted my little intro/interview with Johnny Smith to the beginning of the song, even though that bit was recorded before any of the talent show performances happened, because I’m weird. Dig the faux-British accent that develops and then disappears with no fanfare. And then dig the sound of everyone going apeshit. You can’t even hear the end of the song. It gets swallowed up by the screaming, and then the tape cuts out, almost making it seem like the audience went on making that sound forever.
I’ve had a few surreal moments playing live in the years since then. I’ve given better performances of better songs. But I’ve never felt anything like the collective explosion of sound that room packed with about four hundred people made twenty years ago when I was thirteen years old.
I think it’s kind of like your first kiss. If everything falls into place just right and you get the meeting of lips you deserve, the first one sears itself into your brain and never really leaves, and all the others that come after are judged against it.
I haven’t had a better kiss yet. I’m not sure I ever will.
I imagine most people who owned tape-based camcorders during their heyday filmed things like family get-togethers, live music, home movies, class projects, and documentaries.
I used mine to record demos and almost nothing else.
Until I got my MacBook in late 2013 and thought to give GarageBand a try, I didn’t record “normal” demos of anything. I either recorded for keeps or I didn’t record at all. The little Sony Handycam I had — and later, the two Flip Mino cameras that would usurp it — became a useful way to get down ideas when they were fresh so I wouldn’t forget them.
We got this camera in 2003. It felt like it was time. I was frustrated that there was a good amount of video different people had shot of me over the years, sometimes playing music, sometimes acting in plays, sometimes just being a goofball, and it was almost all inaccessible to me.
A shopping list, on the off chance some filmmaker discovers my music after I die and wants to make a documentary about me in which people who never knew me pretend they understand me since I’m no longer around to speak for myself or shut them down:
A few grade school plays were filmed, and I’m pretty sure the tapes still exist
My not-aunt’s wedding tape features me singing a half-improvised a cappella song about love in 1997
Andrew Deane shot what I guess you could call “test footage” of me walking around in 1999 for a music video he never ended up making for the REM song “Strange Currencies”, documenting some of the best hair days of my life when I was just starting to grow it out
Unused B-roll from the 1999 student documentary Fish out of Water, including some silliness with me doing my best impression of a canine rapper while Libby Salonen looks on
Papa Ghostface playing “Pacing the Cage” and “The Ballad of Bob and Marie” at the Air Jam in March of 2000
Gord and I playing “Bob and Marie” in the hall during lunch recess a few months before the Air Jam
A few bits of random footage Evan Hansen and Tyson Taylor shot of me at Walkerville in 2001 (I popped up in one video where Tyson was filming a fight as it broke out, playing the role of “sleep-deprived non-observer”, wearing a short-sleeved black shirt I always liked)
Papa Ghostface playing “Be Sorry” as a full band at the Air Jam in the summer of 2001 (I think Amy Mifsud filmed this…I saw the tape once when she let Tyson borrow it)
A lot of footage Tyson shot of GWD recording and hanging out in 2001 and 2002, which may or may not still exist
One or two piano recitals I was told were filmed in the mid/late 1990s
I have the video of my first birthday party (at least I think I still do). I recorded the appearance my grade twelve drama class made on The New WI on my VCR. I’ve got the tape of the two live GWD songs from 2002 that were posted here long ago. That’s about it for things that were filmed before 2003. Whatever else survives, I don’t have it.
We probably should have picked up a video camera a little sooner than we did. If I had access to one even a year or two earlier, I would have been the one to film all that teenage band footage myself, and I’d be able to incorporate the best bits here, instead of wondering if I’ll ever get to see those tapes again (I’m pretty sure I won’t, because there’s a good chance they’ve all been lost or recorded over). I think I remember any kind of decent video camera being prohibitively expensive for amateur home use for quite a while. These were the days before you could shoot video on your cell phone, and before the advent of cheap digital video recorders small enough to fit in your pocket.
By the time we went looking for something, the prices had come down a bit, and we were able to buy a Sony DCR-TRV19 without having to rob a bank. I didn’t know anything about cameras. We just grabbed one that looked nice and was affordable.
Turns out 2003 was the last year Sony made MiniDV camcorders with a 1/4-inch image sensor. This is one of the last models they produced with such good low light sensitivity, headphone and external microphone connections, and a hotshoe adapter for a light or mic, before they started cheaping out.
Talk about having good timing.
I’d like to say once I had a camera of my own I made it count. I did have ideas. I thought about making a DIY documentary following the making of an album, filming myself recording different elements of songs, talking to the camera about the music, breaking things up with random puppet shows and stuffed animal interludes.
I talked myself out of it before I got started. I told myself I wouldn’t be able to make it visually interesting enough to appeal to anyone. Watching one guy do everything on his own would get boring after a while. And how was I going to edit the raw footage — by dumping it onto VHS?
After filming a few random things I leant out the camera in 2005 and didn’t think to ask for it back until the summer of 2007. By then I had a different idea: I would start making a video diary. The crackheads had established themselves in the other half of the duplex we were living in, I couldn’t record any music or sleep in my own home thanks to their twenty-four-hour wall-shaking parties, and I was bitter about romance and the almost violent indifference I was coming up against while trying to get gigs and get my music heard.
I had a bit to say. Talking to the camera seemed as viable a form of self-expression as anything else. It was therapeutic for a while. And it wasn’t just an excuse for me to vomit up a nonstop litany of complaints. I talked about Orson Welles and Keith Urban and the Rocky movies too.
Then we moved, and my motivation went missing. Moving into a new house when it’s something you want to do and you’ve found the perfect place can be exciting — even energizing. Doing it out of necessity, when calling the police nineteen times and documenting more than forty pages of noise complaints and drug buys won’t get anyone to do anything because it isn’t happening next door to any of the cops or politicians or people working at Crime Stoppers or “writers” for the Windsor Star, so they don’t care, and finding out your box spring won’t fit up the stairs at the new place, and the landlord neglected to tell you the central air only works on the bottom two floors, and the furnace is dead…that’s demoralizing.
I kept using the camera, but I stopped talking to it. Now it became my idea-capturing device.
When the first little Flip camera came along and transferring videos onto the computer became as easy as flipping out a built-in USB connector and plugging it in, my old camcorder friend and all the tapes I’d filmed with it got shoved into a dresser drawer and more or less forgotten about. Aside from picking up some slack at the first Mackenzie Hall show I played in 2010 when the Flip camera ran out of recording time, it wasn’t used again.
I dug it out of the dresser a year or two later to have another listen to some of those old musical ideas I recorded. There were lines through the image when I tried to play a tape and the sound was distorted. I tried again some months down the road and didn’t even get the distorted sound. There was no sound at all, and the screen showed nothing but an impenetrable blue square.
I tried different tapes. It wasn’t a tape issue. I tried slamming the camera on a tabletop repeatedly to intimidate it into working (I never claimed to make good decisions all the time). No joy.
I assumed the camera was dead, tossed it back in the dresser drawer of lost souls, and got on with recording my not-quite-demos with the Flip fellas.
Lately I’ve been thinking it would be kind of nice to have access to those ideas again. Maybe I could figure out a way to get all the tapes onto the computer. Worst case scenario, if the camera really was toast I could buy another DCR-TRV19 for a hundred bucks or less on eBay.
I did some research and learned iMovie has a spotty record when it comes to importing camcorder footage. I’ve never been a big fan of that program. I almost never use it for anything. It gobbles up resources on my MacBook, turns it into an oven, and either freezes up for ten minutes at a time or is so sluggish it’s impossible to get much done. Reading about some of the problems people have had with audio and video coming out unsynchronized was all I needed to dissuade me from trying to tame the savage beast.
I’m pretty sure the old Acer laptop I use for video editing has FireWire ports, but even though it’s been a lot friendlier to me since a nice dude at PC Outfitters blew an ocean of dust out of its cooling fans, I’d rather not push my luck with that aging computer. It’s still slower than mud. At this point, asking it to do anything more strenuous than running Sony Vegas and a few other programs is probably a nightmare waiting to happen.
My online travels led me to a program called LifeFlix. It was created with the sole purpose of transferring MiniDV tapes onto a computer or an external hard drive. The more I read about it, the more it seemed like the smart way to go. I bought it, bought a FireWire cable and a FireWire-to-Thunderbolt adapter, bought a cleaning tape for my camcorder, and hoped for the best.
The cleaning tape worked brilliantly. I let it play for all of ten seconds and went from the blue screen of death to being able to play all my old tapes again. No artifacts, no lines through the screen, nothing. I was almost expecting at least a bit of that to stick around, because this camera is fourteen years old now. Nope.
Best twenty five bucks I’ve spent in recent memory.
The FireWire-to-Thunderbolt connector Apple makes is stupidly expensive, and there are no real alternatives, but it works. LifeFlix recognized the camera right away and went to work importing video. It works in realtime, so an hour-long tape will take an hour to digitize (at least in theory…more on this in a minute).
The program does a faultless job of breaking a tape up into scenes based on where the recording originally stopped and started, saving you the hassle of separating things into individual clips later on. The user interface is simple but intuitive. Getting files onto your computer after they’ve finished importing is as easy as two clicks of the mouse or trackpad. If you want to trim a little dead space out of the beginning or end of any given clip, you can do that too.
The video compression LifeFlix uses is all but invisible. I can’t detect any loss of visual or audio quality compared to the uncompressed video. Not that this footage was pristine or pro-shot to begin with, but I’m pretty picky when it comes to these things. Being able to keep the file sizes reasonable is a nice bonus when you’re dealing with a lot of footage.
That’s all the good stuff. Now for the things that are a little irritating.
I don’t know if it’s just me and my computer, but the “combine clips” function has been hit-or-miss. It works about half the time. The rest of the time the progress bar will stop moving around the halfway point, assuming it starts moving in the first place, and then it’ll hang there forever, not frozen but with all functions locked up. The only option when that happens is to force the program to quit.
The good news is I haven’t lost anything doing this. LifeFlix saves all the work you’ve done no matter when or how it shuts down. Clips don’t disappear unless you delete them yourself. But when a certain group of clips decide they don’t want to be combined, you’ll never be able to join them together. Doesn’t matter how many times you try. Doesn’t matter how many mean names you call the computer. And these are not long clips I’ve been working with. In most cases I’m trying to combine two or three snippets that are each a minute long or less.
Another thing I’ve noticed: I can’t set the program up to import a tape and leave it to do its business. I need to stay at the computer the whole time, because the best I’ve been able to get is five or ten minutes of uninterrupted importing. At some point a clip will freeze up within the program, or there will be a glitch, and while the camera itself will be playing just fine, when that happens I have to stop the importing process, rewind the tape to the beginning of the last clip, and start again. Otherwise I’ll get flawed video on the computer.
Sometimes I can get another five or ten minutes before I have to do it all again. Sometimes I need to keep going back to the same spot a few times before it manages to import without any issues, and I’m lucky to get one or two clips at a time. With the tape I’m working on right now, it’s taken me more than forty tries just to get eleven short clips totalling about fifteen minutes of footage to import glitch-free.
These are minor complaints. This is taking a little longer than it would if there were no glitches, and there have been a few frustrating moments, but all things considered it’s been pretty easy and pain-free. In the space of a few days I’ve managed to get the full contents of almost half of those tapes onto the computer. Who knows how long I’d be waiting and how much I’d have to pay if I got someone else to transfer the tapes for me.
With my luck, they’d all get lost, or some freak accident would send them off to MiniDV tape heaven.
Now for the part that made me swear so much I had to start wearing a parental advisory sticker on my face.
I’ve been using Sony Vegas as my video editing program for years now. The learning curve was a little weird at first, but once I got past the initial feelings of bewilderment after Windows Movie Maker spoiled me a little with its insane simplicity, I grew to really enjoy using it.
Vegas has been fine with MOV files over the years. Until now. It doesn’t like the ones LifeFlix makes. Whether they’re compressed or not, all that shows up when I import one of these clips is the audio. There’s no video. Any media player on the planet will play them no problem, so the issue isn’t with the clips themselves. It’s Vegas being a douchebag.
If I wanted to have any control over assembling individual clips into something more meaningful, I was going to have to find a way to convert the MOV files into something Vegas was less prejudiced against without the quality taking too much of a hit in the process.
Rewrapping them as MP4 files would be the ideal thing. But no way was I spending more money on yet another program to do that.
I tried downloading a few free programs that claimed to offer video rewrapping, only to find all the relevant functions were disabled and if I wanted to do more than open and close files I was going to have to pay for the privilege. I found something called FFmpeg that was supposed to make rewrapping easy, but I’m not all that tech-savvy, I don’t know anything about UNIX or Linux, and I haven’t for the life of me been able to figure out how to use the program. It doesn’t help that every online tutorial seems to assume you already know what you’re doing. I tried using the VLC media player to save the videos in a different container. That worked, but Vegas still wouldn’t budge.
This is the workaround I’ve come up with:
First I go back and import the specific clips I want to edit again, this time with the compression turned off. Then I use a free program called MPEG Streamclip to rebrand the uncompressed MOV files as MP4s. There has to be some re-encoding happening, because the conversion takes a lot longer than straight rewrapping does, but if the quality is taking a hit it’s so subtle my eyes and ears can’t tell.
Any given MP4 file is about ten times the size of the MOV file it started out as. I save as many of these as I can fit onto a flash drive. From there, I transfer them onto the external hard drive I use with the laptop that has Vegas on it (my Mac external hard drive isn’t recognized by that computer, while the external hard drive I use for that one becomes read-only once it’s plugged into the MacBook). Then I go back and do it all again, and again, and again, until I’ve got all the files I need on the external hard drive. Then I import them into Vegas, and at last I can start editing.
It’s a pain in the ass, but it works.
It’s been an interesting, schizophrenic emotional experience sifting through all this old footage.
There’s regret. I wish I could say I’ve been sitting on a treasure trove of footage from the time of BRAND NEW SHINY LIE. I had my chance to film elements of those songs being recorded and to talk to the camera about the thought process behind trying to short-circuit my own musical language and writing impulses in an effort to get somewhere I’d never been before, and I let it blow by. Even past that, I went to the trouble of testing out different camera angles in the studio when I was recording CHICKEN ANGEL WOMAN, and then did nothing with what I learned from it. I didn’t start to think it was worthwhile to document some of these things in the process of happening until much later.
Hard not to feel like there were some missed opportunities.
There’s the strangeness of seeing in black and white just how much was here the whole time. There were twenty MiniDV tapes in that dresser drawer. I found another two in a different dresser drawer after I took the picture at the top of this post. They’re all full to the brim, recorded in one-hour SP mode for the best quality. Take away everything that isn’t music-related, and that’s at least twenty hours of ideas, almost all of them recorded between 2007 and 2009, many of them things I have no memory of ever coming up with. So many sketches that never turned into finished songs. So many finished songs that were left unrecorded. So many unused alternate sections for songs that did show up on official albums.
If there’s anyone out there who still thinks I throw every idea I ever come up with on my albums, I’d kind of like to sit them down with these tapes for a day. I knew I was going through something of a creative purple patch at the time, but I don’t think it ever hit me just how much I threw away. It’s going to be fun to dig back into these ideas and work out which ones deserve a fresh look.
And there have been some surprises along the way. There’s an acoustic version of “Last of the Two-Finger Typists” filmed in 2003, minutes after I finished writing it. I recorded a song called “Electric Teeth” three times in 2007, from three different angles, almost like I was anticipating someday being able to edit the best bits together. There are some brainstorming sessions where I took the time to make sure my face and my hands wereboth visible, when framing was usually an afterthought. And those video diaries are surreal to experience now. It’s me talking, but I’m not the same person.
I might not have been able to stick the landing, but I wasn’t without ambition. The plan with the short-lived video diary was to break up the rants with songs and song ideas. I started throwing in an absurd comedy sketch called Grandpa the Russian Jew. An old man who sounded half-Russian, half-Jewish (you weren’t expecting that, were you?), played by me, would go on a short tirade about something ridiculous. He would always begin by saying, “You know, when I was your age…” and he would always end with, “…and that is the story of my life,” before passing out snoring. Only instead of talking about technological advances or respecting your elders, he’d insult Julia Roberts in some nonsensical way or muse about having sexual intercourse with a ceiling fan.
In a way, I’ve made good on a lot of what I was trying to do there with the video progress reports, and now on a deeper level with the semi-documentary-thing I’m piecing together about the last few years of musical insanity. I’m still talking to the camera about what’s on my mind, and if it’s a little less personal than the video diaries of yore, well…there is such a thing as over-sharing. The talking is broken up with musical segments and absurd bits featuring stuffed animals and re-contextualized public domain films. And when I started filming entire songs being recorded piece by piece, I discovered it wasn’t so difficult to stitch all the elements together after all, with a little help from some video editing software I didn’t have access to in the beginning.
So maybe I didn’t fail at it after all. I was just a slow starter. And there are things on these tapes I’m realizing I can slip into the larger video I’m making.
Though I might not have any actual recording footage from the house before this one, I have some good shots of my studio space in that house before I dismantled it. I have footage of my current studio space in complete chaos after moving in, and footage of it slowly starting to come together. I filmed myself recording the banjo part for “Blue Cheese Necklace” and then for some reason I’ll never understand didn’t film any other elements of the song being recorded (I want to kick myself now). I can show footage of a song being played at its inception to get the music and vocal melodies down and then segue into a piece of the finished recording. I can even slip in some video diary moments where they make sense, breaking up footage of myself with older footage of myself.
In January of 2008, at exactly the halfway point of the Papa Ghostface hiatus that lasted twelve years, Gord came over and we recorded a song that’s never seen any release outside of an MP3 that’s long since sunk deep into the archives. This was one of the few times I went to the trouble of filming a recording session during the Handycam days. I didn’t have any way to get the raw footage on the computer back then. Now, nine years later, I’m able to do that and edit it into something a little more concise.
The song lives in its own little space, separate from the work we did before and the work we would go on to do later. At the time it felt like a potential first step toward making a new album. It was really a one-off, and it would be another six years before we started working toward a shared goal again with some real commitment.
It’s more a mood in search of a song, though there are moments I’ve always liked. I think “Speed the Truth”, the first track on STEW, is a good measuring stick. Both are dreamy things grounded in the key of A minor, but “Speed the Truth” is a layered soundscape that’s very sure of its identity. This one’s more half-baked. For every interesting turn of phrase (“You’re looking through one bloodshot tier” is one — sounds like “tear”, but it’s not) there are two that either make no sense or are little more than random nothingness (“Anomanomahee…hatred, smoke and…” won’t be showing up in a discussion of my best moments as a lyricist anytime soon).
Such is the danger of improvised lyrics. Sometimes you hit. Sometimes you miss.
Of course, I didn’t think to film myself recording the vocal and guitar tracks. I went through a rough mix on-camera instead. And because I only had the one camera, without even a tripod to screw it into, it was tough to get good shots of the two of us together. There’s a bit where I’m playing chords on the Arp-Omni 2 with one hand and synth drums on the Yamaha W-5 with the other, and because of the crummy framing, you’ve got Gord in the foreground and you can’t see a thing my hands are doing.
I gotta be honest about my 2008 mix, too. It’s not very good. The vocals are way too upfront, everything is swimming in about 600% more reverb than necessary, and I was going through that lame “clipping is okay because it means I can make things louder” stage when it came to the mastering process.
What I’m playing on the monitors is an unmastered rough mix, so the occasional moments of distortion in the video have nothing to do with mastering. They’re present in the original soundtrack, burned into the video, impossible to repair now. The Sony camcorder’s built-in mic is really good for what it is, but I found out the hard way it wasn’t built to handle volume past a certain point.
The instrumental fragment that ends the video, meanwhile, is a mix I did just the other day, stripping away the vocals, dialling down the reverb, and tightening everything up a little. It’s got me thinking about remixing the whole thing just for fun.
This segment will get trimmed down quite a bit when it appears in the epic video of stuff. Here I let it run a little longer. And I still left some things out. I filmed about twenty minutes of us jamming on acoustic guitars, playing pieces of old songs and riffing on new ideas during a break in recording. The first half of the jam felt pretty aimless, so I recorded over it a week or two later.
A funny thing happened there. A few snippets survived between the song ideas I replaced the bulk of the footage with, all of them about three seconds long. It felt like they worked well as random little bits thrown in without warning between the “On Your Life” footage, so I chucked a few of them into the mix.
The last ten minutes of the acoustic jam are still on tape. None of that made much sense in the context of this video, but I’m sure I’ll find a place for it one of these days.
Completely unrelated: Zara just released her new album. If you liked UNCERTAIN ASSERTIONS, there’s a good chance you’ll like this one too.
Dressing to Undress 