The landscape of a gift
Ya gotta love this rock music story.
| Posted at 11:46 AM | Permalink |
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 25, 2012 11:46 AM.
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Comments (3)
Yep! When's the tour comin' to town?
Posted by Mojo | July 25, 2012 12:21 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONIJXHvoynw
Posted by John E. | July 25, 2012 1:23 PM
Love the guy's voice. I'm going to call my old sax player in Spokane and see what he knows about the Emerson Brothers.
We did a very similar thing with a Teac 80-8 studio in a basement up there in the mid 80s. Great times. I'd just record for hours in our studio we called, "Nightmare on Boone Street". Just me and a classic dog named Tacoma. Then the other 2 guys would do their stuff. Strange compositions - most of them. Some of mine had no major or minor chords and would often be in 7/4. One was in measures of 15. Another was in 11.
and one was in 9. Odd numbers for an odd group.
We were trying as hard as we could to be original, and our lyrics were ...well, they weren't all that normal, either. I had one song that was specifically about the test pilots of the X-15 test program. Not a big dance floor favorite.
The sax player - a computer genius - wrote a song in 5/4 about the blood-testing machine his company was building at work: "Get one for your lab today."
The passage of time gives things such a glow, but I can guarantee we were feeling quite a glow at the time. In fact for a while there the band was called "The Shrumes."
We did do some commercial type things. At one point the sax player fell in love with a coked-up aerobics instructor - imagine those classes - so I wrote a song specifically about her to try and help him out. That was about as close to pop rock as I ever got.
What a good time. It was very artistic and a lot of fun - at least until the FBI arrested our drummer. Sigh. He was a good drummer when he was keeping time - not so good when he was doing time.
The charming thing about this Emersons album is the "trapped in time" aspect. Meanwhile our music was so far out there that it could never go out of style, because it could never be in style. I love the old tapes to this day. To paraphrase e.e.cummings, "I have measured out my life in boxes of cassettes."
What the Emerson Brothers really have that's great is the vocal sound. Very haunting and other wordily. Plus the conjoined twins cover is classic. Excellent post.
The memories are stirring.
Posted by Bill McDonald | July 25, 2012 2:30 PM