Psurgery of Pst. Jude
Psurgery of Pst. Jude
(Spring-Morgan)
Let me tell you about the "Oop!" album.
The scene: 1990. Sook and I have just moved out to LA to find fame and fortune and are living in a a Hollywood hovel, one microphone, a cheap keyboard and a 4-track cassette recorder (the mighty Tascam PortaTwo) our sole recording equipment. Our college buddy Bill jokingly sent us parodic lyrics, song titles and drawings of an imaginary album he thought represented our styles at the time.
Being young, broke and with extra time on our hands, we decided to up the ante and actually RECORD the durned thing. Forget that we had no good equipment, little recording experience and that our musical skills were nascent, to put it charitably. As "idea men" and self-proclaimed rock stars we were gonna make it happen. And happen it did.
The "album" was titled the "Oop!" album (as in: "Oop! Gilligan! Don't drop those coconuts!") and the first song that we plowed into was "The Psurgery of Pst. Jude", which was Bill's take on my take on 60's rock excess: a "concept" piece based on my love of overproduced, byzantine, baroque psychedelia. Given the limitations noted above, it turned out to be a pastiche of ELO & the Moody Blues as formulated by Iggy and the Stooges and sung by Jonathan Richman.
A dozen or so more demos followed representing the rest of the album. First Sook and I would take turns shaping them over the space of several days, but with a self-imposed deadline looming as many as three or four of them were written AND recorded over the space of an evening.
This version of the song is a 2002 remix I dashed off after transferring the multitrack cassette to digital. Unfortunately it is missing a few overdubs recorded directly onto the cassette master (such as Sook's closing monologue), but appears here in generally superior fidelity (such as it is). If i can dig out the other version for transfer I'll post it later.
Anyway, here's an aural snapshot of some crazy kids making lo-fi freaky music on their own terms; beats the pants off Nickleback in my book. More to come...
Al: Psaints preserve us!
(Spring-Morgan)
Let me tell you about the "Oop!" album.
The scene: 1990. Sook and I have just moved out to LA to find fame and fortune and are living in a a Hollywood hovel, one microphone, a cheap keyboard and a 4-track cassette recorder (the mighty Tascam PortaTwo) our sole recording equipment. Our college buddy Bill jokingly sent us parodic lyrics, song titles and drawings of an imaginary album he thought represented our styles at the time.
Being young, broke and with extra time on our hands, we decided to up the ante and actually RECORD the durned thing. Forget that we had no good equipment, little recording experience and that our musical skills were nascent, to put it charitably. As "idea men" and self-proclaimed rock stars we were gonna make it happen. And happen it did.
The "album" was titled the "Oop!" album (as in: "Oop! Gilligan! Don't drop those coconuts!") and the first song that we plowed into was "The Psurgery of Pst. Jude", which was Bill's take on my take on 60's rock excess: a "concept" piece based on my love of overproduced, byzantine, baroque psychedelia. Given the limitations noted above, it turned out to be a pastiche of ELO & the Moody Blues as formulated by Iggy and the Stooges and sung by Jonathan Richman.
A dozen or so more demos followed representing the rest of the album. First Sook and I would take turns shaping them over the space of several days, but with a self-imposed deadline looming as many as three or four of them were written AND recorded over the space of an evening.
This version of the song is a 2002 remix I dashed off after transferring the multitrack cassette to digital. Unfortunately it is missing a few overdubs recorded directly onto the cassette master (such as Sook's closing monologue), but appears here in generally superior fidelity (such as it is). If i can dig out the other version for transfer I'll post it later.
Anyway, here's an aural snapshot of some crazy kids making lo-fi freaky music on their own terms; beats the pants off Nickleback in my book. More to come...
Al: Psaints preserve us!
posted by Allan at
11:59 PM
2 Comments:
I always imagined that "The OOP Album" had a second meaning, taken from the arcane terminology of the record collector: The Out Of Print Album.
Appropriate, I thought.
Gilligan's Island and record collecting...pretty much describes the early 90's for us, doesn't it?
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