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BUSINESS BLURB SEPTEMBER '00

"Pretty As A Flower" Not A Pretty Story

This is an account of the making of a demo, seemingly against all odds. Tyrone Anderson and I were recording in his apartment. We both had very busy work schedules, plus he had a wife and three kids. This was around 1980. We got off to a good start and captured the basic concept of our song Pretty As A Flower on my Teac 4-track. It was simply Tyrone singing and me on keyboard. We also had a primitive drum box. I called it the "boom pop box". All it could play was a 1 & 3 bass drum and a 2 & 4 snare. No hi-hat. I got it from a pawn shop for $30.

Before we were able to go to the next step, unfortunately Tyrone's second wife decided to leave their nearly 7 year old marriage and take the kids. Of course this delayed things for a while, but a few years later (1986), we were able to go into a professional recording studio with an improved 4-track rhythm tape, which we transferred to more tracks. There, we overdubbed vocals and guitar. Oh yeah, the "boom pop box" had been replaced by a state of the art (at the time) Linn drum, and things sounded much better. Still, the arrangement needed work and it wouldn't be until the early 90's before we would be back in a recording studio. By this time, a sequencer had become available for less than $300 and I had re-arranged the track using one of those Alesis babies. In fact, I still use mine, although I'm anxious to upgrade to the new computer stuff.

Anyway, while we were in the studio recording and in broad daylight, someone breaks in my van and steals my trombone and car tools, smashing my passenger window in the process. As I sat the following day waiting for the window to be repaired with the session money I had left over, a little voice inside my head kept saying, "Keep going Linc; finish the session no matter what".

So I booked more time at another studio, because the previous one was already booked for a couple of weeks, and I didn't want the bread to slip away, if you know what I mean. Now, here we are working on the vocals again at the new studio when, believe it or not, their two inch recorder, worth hundreds of thousands, starts to smoke slightly and we all detect this electrical burn smell. Needless to say, the engineer is more shocked than we are and immediately turns the unit off. This was in 1994 and my memory is a little fuzzy on exactly what happened next. But, I do remember that he did somehow get it to work again, long enough to finish what we were doing that day.

Okay, fast forward a year or so and we're back in a studio finishing our demo, finally. I leave the studio that memorable day with it all reduced to this little DAT tape that fits in my shirt pocket. When I got home and popped this little doosie into my new DAT machine, for some unknown reason, it wouldn't play without these loud shrieking distortion noises. The next day, on my way back to the studio to have them check the DAT, I'm thinking how will I get another one made. That would mean another mixing session. Right? Who's going to pay for all that? Wouldn't you know, when I got to the studio, the DAT played fine in their machine. What could I say?

By this time, I'm right on the edge. Everything and everyone has a breaking point. I know I'm close, but somehow I keep it together. And it was a good thing because later, I was able to use a friend's DAT deck, that played the tape correctly. So, I made a new copy from his machine to mine. Problem solved.

To hear what we actually came up with after all this, click here.

Moral of Story: No matter what, don't give up on your dreams and aspirations. Even if our accomplishments aren't on the level we had hoped for, it's our efforts in pursuit of these goals that enrich our lives and keep us healthy, spiritually and otherwise.

Please feel free to email any comments or questions.

Or write or call:

Lincoln Ross Music
P.O. Box 90273
Washington, DC 20090-0273
USA
(202)882-5661
lrossmusic@att.net

© 2000 Lincoln Ross Music