musical flashback: sound & fury

Dan followed through on his promise to digitize the tape of our high school garage (actually, basement and library) band, Sound & Fury. His post today brought back a lot of memories:

• Recording the songs in the basements of both Dan’s and Garrett’s parents. Garrett’s place was far more spacious, but the Ray’s basement actually allowed us to see what the others were doing a lot better.
• Our shows at the RHSM library’s “Brain Food” Friday lunch events. Lynn DeFreitas, then the school’s librarian, was an early supporter and gave us a place to play.
• The early, abortive tries at including my clarinet in the band. Let’s just say that the sound was a lot more mellow, and would probably work better these days.
• The “bass-lesson-on-a-Kostas-napkin” that was my introduction to stringed instrument playing.
• The cheap Peavey bass I played in those days – the thing weighed a ton, the electronics were partially shot, and the tuning pegs were very loose. But it was a cheap buy ($30) from my friend, Brandon.
• Selling our tapes at the student-run campus snack shop.
• Our campus rivalry with the Sun Masons (one of whom is now married to the sister of a friend of mine here in DC – small world).
• Mixing the tape and drawing the cover art (if I find a copy of the art, I’ll upload it).

Dan posted MP3s of the songs (under the Creative Commons license), but he complained that they were really hissy. It’s not surprising, given that we used fairly rudimentary means to record our songs and the only surviving tapes are some cheap Memorex cassettes. I figured that I could fix that malady, so I dipped into my bag of audio tricks (namely, ProTools and Amadeus II), zapped the tape hiss, boosted the dynamic range and made ’em a bit more (or less, depending on your tolerance for amateur-hour harmonies) listenable.

I’d like to be able to say “I was young and I needed the money,” but that’s not the case. But Dan, Garrett, Art, Willy and I had a great time with the band.

So enjoy – you’ve been warned!

1. Every Day
2. Sweet Home Alabama
3. Song Number Seven
4. Roadhouse Blues
5. See Also
6. Come Together
7. Hey Look At Me
8. Hey Joe
9. French Thing – Peter Gunn
10. Instrumental #1
11. Instrumental #2
12. Comfortably Numb

You can find more info on the tracks at Dan’s site. Thank you, Dan, for preserving bits of our youth for all to hear!