522 - wooden led

[cjdenecia]

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.

[icararse]

[Peevette]

Love the acoustic git playing.....

Oh yeah, the vocals are hot too...



Good show, man!

[cjdenecia]

thanx ikk, peeve. I sure wish I had my tascam 424 and all those master tracking tapes .... 40 to 50 songs I never mixed, half originals that I have completely forgotten and some really different covers along with about 12 or 15 zep songs. many of which have drums I programmed on an old roland after getting some quick lessons from a drummer who taught me basics about what voice goes where. and there's one bluesy original that I recall where I hit some wicked soprano notes ...

till I get those tapes and recorder, it's all just fish stories forgotten.

[charvie]

That's some good stuff cj. You guys did a damn good Plant Page.

Love it.

[steban]

This is authentic lo-fi ceej!

I wish you could have saved all of those 4-tracks, dude. There is a lot of atmospheric value in this, and it wouldn't matter how many little errors are there.

So far, California is pretty darn tightly performed. I like that flange in Babe. It just adds flavor.

You do a great Plant, maybe if you dyed your hair blonde you could have fronted a successful cover band, but at the time you probably had greater expectations. Is it possible the present day cj owes some of his cynical wisdom to experiences of such a yesteryear? That is a rhetorical question, I suppose.

Anyway, I had a Tascam once, and it was amazing how one recorded on both sides of a cassette tape at the same time to get the mix. These recordings sound great for that, and in the day the pro studio we can almost achieve at home now was so noticeable.

[cjdenecia]

[Mark Kaufman]

[cjdenecia]

[icararse]

[pbakkenist]

For what it's worth i enjoyed this a lot man, and yeah, i know the game of those days. But i disagree with the '2010 being hard' remark, i think it's just getting worse. Not to get your music out and listened to, but back in the day i sold some cd's by making a 50/50 deal with store-owners who were more then willing to promote my disc and put it on the counter and all that.. i don't have that opp anymore.. then it became cdbaby and then it became itunes and then it became ilike (read: fascism) everything art is free for cultural purposes or some other lame reason that will not last another decade. Internet killed us. And you and i and a whole lot of us promoted it.

Anyway, i still enjoyed the tunes man!

[cjdenecia]

thanks for listening patric, glad you enjoyed 'em.

but - we ain't dead yet man - we ain't dead yet. the game continues to change and the goalposts keep moving but rest assured, where there's music, life goes on. and life goes on here cus we have the music and we'll continue living with it - with the current crowd and with those who want to make it live on till it all turns around again.

we ain't dead yet.