"All the Friends You Knew" (DEMO)

In the first installment of “Unraveling Unheard Music,” I promised to explain to you (and really, to myself) how in God’s name I came up with all of these cockamamie tunes.

I’ve navel-gazed my way through almost every tune I wrote that wound up re-recorded and produced with musician friends in professional studios between 1974 and 2004.

But what do these demos that I keep prattling on about actually sound like? With the progression of the Boho Zen project in the early 2000’s, the audio fidelity of our demos improved thanks to advances in digital home recording technology.

Starting in 1999, Bob and I began swapping song ideas using TASCAM Porta 02 Ministudio 4-track cassette recorders. To squeeze four tracks onto 1/8” tape, the device needed to use both sides of the cassette. You’d burn through a ton of cassettes as a result. The Porta 02 was intended only to function as a sort-of demo sketchpad.

We both later graduated to a digital Boss BR-8, which gave us multitracking capabilities with 8 tracks (and more, if we “bounced down,” or combined, tracks to make room for more instruments or vocals). It wrote to Zip drives, which gave you a whole lot more storage headroom (up to 750 MB) than an audio cassette (around 13 MB). Because the BR-8 was digital, you could tack on additional tracks without worrying about audio degradation — the demon that haunted the analog Porta 02. It was an amazing leap forward.

After recording our “Release Me” EP, we continued to kick a few new demos back and forth for the next year or so. We talked about going back to 609 Recording to produce a final EP (which I suggested we call “All’s Well That Zens Well”). The universe had other plans. We never got back to 609.

We did, however, select four songs that would ostensibly have populated “All’s Well That Zens Well.” Two tracks were Bob tunes, and two were mine. One of my songs, “All the Friends You Knew,” is a track I’d still very much like to work up in a studio setting. Not sure that’ll ever transpire at this late stage in the game, but here’s our demo for the song, direct from our Boss BR-8 devices:

I like the circular nature of the tune — the song starts with its chorus, which ends with lyrics that begin the next iteration of the chorus:

You

And all the friends you knew

Partied until two;

When the night was through

You found some other things to do

Until the sun did shine

Party one more time

Everything is fine

And fine is how you’re feeling too

The song is about a party Sue and I hosted with two visiting friends, a guy and a girl who drove in from different parts of the country. I learned many years later that they kinda decided to take things a bit further with each other after we wrapped up the festivities in the wee hours of the morning. It happens.

The lyric “…until the sun did shine” is a tip of the hat to Buzzy Linhart’s song, “Talk About a Morning.” (I also dropped a Buzzy nod in my tune, “Lemon Twist,” as you may recall from my last post). “Talk About a Morning” begins with a watery, loping, phase-shifted guitar intro, then Buzzy sings “…now, talk about a morning — when I awoke, the sun did shine; the sun did shine.” It’s one of those tunes that never left me. I had to play a bit of that back in tribute.

On this demo, I double tracked my vocal (one of our studio engineers, Don Depew, always double tracked my vocals, famously remarking that “…sometimes two wrongs DO make a right”) and overdubbed two acoustic guitars — one doing a straight rhythm thing and the other arpeggiating the chord progression. I added a bass line and a heavily reverbed, double tracked Strat solo for the song’s ending and fade, and shipped the Zip drive to Bob.

What you hear on the Soundcloud link is the demo exactly as I got it back from Bob after his remarkable additions. Aside from the lovely backing vocals he added to the choruses (starting with the second chorus), he punctuates the ending of each bridge (“…just close your eyes and you can go back again”) with a tasty, declarative drum break. Finally, he gave the tune a bit of a reggae splash with his addition of keyboard fills on the verses. For all its rough edges, the resulting overall vibe makes it one of my favorite demos.

The “All’s Well That Zens Well” EP never happened. “All the Friends You Knew” and the three other tracks we selected to re-record at 609 exist only in demo form on a couple of old CD-Rs, and maybe a Zip drive tucked away in the corner of a shelf or a drawer somewhere.

I reckon that by now, readers will have gleaned that I’m a realist: I realize I’m writing a blog almost no one reads about music almost no one hears, but that notwithstanding, I’m inexplicably compelled to do it.