The Bad: Part II

Prologue

Lately, I’ve found it difficult to write about politics as I have done with this site for more than eight years.  While passionate about it, I find myself lacking a voice in the arena.  This particular series offers me the opportunity to tell a story that you’ve not heard from anyone else.

I’ve been personally writing about The Bad over the course of a great many years.  Not too terribly long ago, I asked Steve and Dylan to send me their memories of our adventures.  Thankfully, they obliged my request thereby allowing me to honor them properly.

The Bad, Part 2

Gathering of the Three

Being the lead singer of The Bad redefined me fundamentally.  Strangely, I had no idea I would be so changed when it was happening.  This is something I had dreamed about for the majority of my life.  When we started recording, I was nearly numb with excitement.  Yet, the idea of an actual album still seemed incomprehensible.  We only had a couple songs written, and I was a newborn baby as compared to the guys I was working with.

When it came down to it, it took each of us to step up when we were needed, and I think we all did so in fine order.  So, all of the sudden: we have an album.  Now what?

We made our efforts to get people listening to our music.  I was selling CDs to every friend, coworker, neighbor and stranger alike.  Dylan was able to utilize some of our tracks for independent films he was scoring.  Because of this, my name is listed in the scrolling end credits of “The World's First B+ Movie!”  We also managed to get played on the radio, and I even convinced the local bar owner to put a copy in his jukebox.  None of it really mattered because an independent album with no distribution channel had no chance for traction.

Since it was obvious that there was to be no profit in this endeavor, Steve and I had to decide whether we were going to keep making music regardless.  It was a pretty easy choice to make: we were having a lot of fun writing music together and were now going to throw ourselves into the arena of trying to record it ourselves while maintaining the quality level Dylan’s production savvy brought us on the first album.

Steve:

“This left me with one choice. I had to learn how to produce music myself. The only problem was I needed some fucking money if I was going to get the equipment necessary to put together a decent sounding recording. Our first album lost so much money (mostly failed marketing costs) that I was already in hock, but thanks to the magic of credit cards and eBay I was able to slowly put together a used Fostex 8-track (reel to reel) and mixing board. I had a couple of cheap effects processors and a kick ass compressor that I never really understood how to use.

Tim and I wanted to make a blues rock album and the first song we did was “Always Bet on Black”. I got the whole thing programmed into the sequencer (keyboard drums, bass, and guitar) and I even got Dylan to play some blues piano. The problem was, I had a room at my parent’s house that was literally becoming crammed full with equipment. It was becoming clear that we weren’t going to be able to record the vocals there. So we packaged up the reel-to-reel in the back of Dylan’s car and headed off to the basement once again. Having an isolation booth for singers is more important that just getting a clean sound. It lets you get into character, without feeling like your being stared at like a circus freak.

We ended up doing three recordings like that, including “Buzz on Blues” and “Out of Sight”. They were satisfactory in the sense that they were all blues rock songs that sounded like they belonged together on an album, but I still hadn’t achieved my goal of being independent of Dylan and his (much nicer) studio. His interests had shifted radically and my little bedroom was no place to record an album. Besides, we couldn’t drink or smoke in my parent’s house. Things seemed to stall for a while and that’s when Tim pulled off a minor miracle.

Yes, JP and I wrote the lyrics on bar tabs

The song “Rollin’” was written by a work friend of Tim’s named JP - a nice guy who I had met at several parties, but never imagined him a poet. Tim put together an arrangement for this song with a percussive guitar element and it was just magic. It was perfect for my style of guitar and we recorded a version of it on Tim’s 4-track that was really good. I decided to bring the studio equipment up to Tim’s house because he lived in a house with a basement and there we were free to work in an environment that we were comfortable in.

Partially inspired by the pseudo live sound of “That’s Not What Life’s About” we recorded “Rollin’” and it was the first time we had put down anything totally by ourselves that had the magic of our earlier recordings. It was like the wall opened and Tim totally revamped his basement to make it into a studio where we could record. We went on to do “Another Day Passes” (with a stellar loop arrangement by the very gay Rob Willson), “Land of Freedom”, “Here to Me”, and “Halloween ’79”.

At work, my boss/friend Steve had left to pursue other interests (as well as my sister), so I was handling all the network administration, PC maintenance, Internet development, catalog design, and ad materials. This left me in a pretty good position financially (along with a booming Cartooniverse.com). I decided to invest in a digital 16-Track that would basically allow me to bring a recording studio where ever I wanted. So Tim had the 8-track analog studio at his house and I had the 16 track at mine. In order to test everything out I recorded two songs by myself “The Skies of Mars are Red” and “Fortunes Only Son”.

Dylan was doing a bit of dance music around this time and one night we got slaughtered over at his house and he recorded a tripped out industrial song called “Give in to You”. This was nothing like anything on our album, but the song was strangely compelling, so I asked him if I could put it on the album. He agreed and a short time after that, the whole band was together and we recorded the equally strange “You’ll Never Have it Again”. These two songs didn’t really belong on this album, but it was the beginning of our desire to experiment with our music beyond what was commercially identifiable.

A second album is born

The idea behind the two dice on the cover was that they would be two 4s since this album was recorded on an 8-track. But that was not really that important, we just wanted Rob to model the dice (that’s right, he’s also a 3D savant) and we would put together the layout for the album, which was going to be titled “Rollin’”. We were ready to get this project completed and Dylan came through with a great bid for the CDs. He worked at printing company now and knew how shave pennies. Now we just had to wait.

I’m not sure what happened, but for some reason the CDs took forever to get to us. It was like weeks (maybe even a month) we waited for the albums to come back. There was always some excuse for why they weren’t ready and I could feel my blood squirting angrily through my chest pump. But then just like that they were finished and the album was great. If Tim and I were like Lennon & McCartney, Dylan and I were quickly becoming Mozart and Salieri.

At the time people speculated about which album they liked better. The common consensus seemed to be that the first album was produced better and sounded more like a cohesive whole. But there were some songs on this album that people seemed to like more than anything we’d done before. Since “The Bad” and “Rollin’” were our only two real albums (meaning, we sent them out to get replicated commercially and tried to promote ourselves) my thoughts looking back is that the two albums are apples and oranges. The first one is a slick ride in a limo, and “Rollin’” is like bouncing around the beach in dune buggy.

Tim and I had produced an album. It couldn’t have been done without the help and guidance of Dylan, and it wouldn’t have been the same without the lyrics of Rob Willson and Jim Parr. We weren’t sure what marketing would work for this album, so we just started giving them away almost like business cards.”

Stylistically, “Rollin’” was much more eclectic than its predecessor, but it was an incredibly important step in our development as writers, performers and producers.  We were evolving our sound from a very technically produced and structured one to a looser, more acoustic and more organic sound.  Steve and I were expanding our abilities to play new instruments we thought were key to a specific sound we wanted.

One thing was for absolute certain: I was having the time of my life.  Setting up the 8-track studio in my basement and learning how to properly record with it was lots of work, and I loved every moment of it.  Writing and recording original music can be long and tedious work, and I loved every moment of it.  I was no longer dreaming of being a recording artist.  I was doing it.