after 3 of my bands went down in smoke back in 94 ... in chrono-order, thinqsyrius, babbling genius and cranial sabotage, the last 2 remaining idiots still wanting to play out, me and bob (rj) decided on doing an acoustic duo gig. we wanted to keep playing our own originals but realized that we'd have to also play 'some' covers. so we decided we'd do strictly zep covers and a few other select songs along with our own.
for the name, we didn't think much about it - we'd started with 5 members early on, that shrunk to 4 until I ended up taking over bass at the end of the CS run, knocking us back to 3 in the band at the end of the 4 or 5 year run on the florida original grind circuit. so (thinking caps on now), we went from five to two. 522. duh.
it was pretty simple really, rj played some 12 string, some 6 string lead, some acoustic bass ... I played the 12 on a few, the bass on some others (hated my ovation bass - that bitch always slid under me with the slick round back) and sometimes just sang.
on nearly every zep song, I just sang. "what is and what should never be" and "hey hey, what can I say" - I played the 12 string ... no B's or tough chords in those.
anyway, while looking for some other songs on my old hard drive last night, I happened upon these 2 files -recordings we made for a demo to show bar entertainment directors and coffee house owners and the like ... unfortunately, the masters are on cassette stuck in an attic in florida but these real low fi 32 bit mono files are interesting anyway. they represented pretty much how we sounded and I was always pretty stoked that I could sing these demanding songs with only an acoustic accompaniment. they were encoded on one of those original mp3 encoders (hence the !! in the file name - do you remember that shit?) - and I am pretty sure I needed to save hard drive space - in those days, a 40 or 60 meg drive was huge - plus I recall wanting to fit them on a floppy disk ... 1.44 mb's or so right?
but these are from the same group of recordings that yielded the one I put up in the review forum some time ago - my own private public by CRANIAL SABOTAGE. cus of the horrid bitrate, rj's guitar is muddy, frequency challenged and just downright hard to hear but I thought my vocals were just so friggin' hot I figured I'd share them in this song story forum. not every singer out there can pull off a robert plant line credibly but I think I did pretty damn ok. the biggest problem we had live was that frequently, in the coffeehouse type joint, I was soooo loud singing some of this zep stuff (including "stairway", "rock'n'roll" and "ramble on") that even with rj's guitar pumping thru the PA and me holding the mic at arms length, I overpowered the crowd. hence, we got a lot of "you guys are great but you should be playing bars with a full band!" comments. oh the irony. where were these people when we played the 300 person venues with only 12 people in the crowd? florida - not a music mecca outside of disney and miami.
so, it's not that there's a particularly interesting story behind it - but it's something for this dead space.
these are the two tunes - "going to california" and "babe, I'm gonna leave you". sorry about the quality and yes, BABE is 7 minutes.
what the hell .... it's a post.