Trex - A Caustic Gutter

This short intro, along with the guitar songs that followed it, were on a tape immediately after "Herbie Wake Up". So, their recording date is soon after that.

This slow, moody riff was my one of my main practice patterns. I consider this the "canonical" version because it's the one that I played the most. I still occasionally try to play it, but almost always fail. Not a big loss.

This is a false start at repeating the "Moody Guitar" riff. You can hear the metronome in the background. Not very interesting. I don't know why I bothered to digitize this, but oh well, we're stuck with it!

This is a much longer version of "Moody Guitar". It's sloppy and aimless, especially in the middle solo section. At the end, I tried to simulate the distortion of an electric guitar by playing really loud, and letting some part of the acoustic guitar buzz. How sophisticated!

For most people, a song like this isn't worth putting on tape, let alone documenting on a web site. But I ain't most people. Nope, I ain't. I just ain't.

This is the final and (in my opinion) most interesting version of "Moody Guitar". It actually consists of two tracks. This let me add a pretty melody on top in the beginning. Unfortunately, my playing is just as sloppy as in the earlier versions, especially at the end, where it devolves into loud banging and mic overloading in an attempt to sound electric.

This is the short, original version of "Christmas in Cancun", which I wrote for the Anchovies.

The first Anchovies version was recorded on 1989-12-21; this version predates that, probably by a couple weeks or months. I'm guessing it was pretty close to December 1989, since the song title refers to an upcoming Christmas vacation.

This is the long, complete demo of "Christmas in Cancun", which became a favorite of the Anchovies. This recording consists of three or four tracks, layered via either a 4-track or pair of tape recorders.

This piano exercise is probably the first Trex track recorded in the 1990s. Does it herald a new level of musicianship? Craftsmanship? Humor? No, no, and no! It's sloppy, tuneless, and annoyingly repetitive. Just like your mama!

Hmmm. Does that sound defensive? If so, sorry; I meant for it to sound offensive. My bad.

Seriously, though, this song and the next few (along with my above comments) illustrate my increasingly "punk" attitude in the 1990s. I was trying to make my music more aggressive and "rock", and less wimpy and jazzy. I think this was inspired by several factors:

1. Switching from IPECAC to Anchovies encouraged my "rock" side, since the Anchovies were more into rock than jazz.
2. I felt "tougher" now that I was an upperclassman in high school. It's not like I had a lot of freshman insecurities, but by the time 1990 hit I had girls after me for the first time, which definitely had an invigorating effect on the young male ego.
3. I no longer had to stay "politically correct" for my cousin Kim, since I had stopped sending tapes to her. I could now be as crude and raw as I wanted.

So when you're hearing the fast piano riff, the self-deprecating "here's my stupid song", and the impatient low-attention-span bridge and abrupt ending, you can picture a frisky bull stamping the ground, snorting and ready to charge.

Argh! So much for ground-stamping manliness. This romantic, classic tune is pansy piano at its pathetic-est. Sigh.

The main tune in here was (and still is, as of 2007) one of my main practice melodies. It sounds nothing like any of my other stuff, which makes me think that it was influenced by one of my piano teachers. I don't know, though, since my piano teachers were into jazz, and I was in several classical-oriented school bands at the time; I could have gotten inspired by some of the music we were playing for school.

Regardless, this is cheesy poop, and my 17-year old hormones didn't have the patience to play it the whole way through without lapsing into aggressive pounding.

For a much cooler version, see "Filler" on Tripecac's College Collage.

This starts off with the bridge to an IPECAC song ("Panorama"), which is another of the very few melodies that I can play from memory. It then digresses into yucky improv.

Here I lapsed into yet another piano part that I could play from memory: "Schnell (demo)". Then I danced all over the place, making a big mess of things. At the end I tried the "Panorama Bridge" again but quickly lost interest.

Zero attention span. Zero quality control. Zero need to digitize and document this recording. Zero chance that I could avoid doing so, due to my compulsively documentative nature.

Sorry, folks. Trex is a "warts and all" project, and there are lots of warts! This is one of them.

This is awful amateur drumming at its amature awfulness-est-est. It's like one big drum fill, with no groove, no timing, no finesse. Fortunately, it's relatively short, probably due to lack of upper body endurance.

Oh god, so much for restraint. This was my attempt at a drum epic. It's epically sloppy and irritating, that's what it is. Epicrapola.

According to my talking, these were supposed to be the drums to the IPECAC song "Kiss the Devil". I was probably hoping the Anchovies would play it.

After about 5 minutes of trying to explain the song, I got bored or distracted and commenced to "rock out". I tried several times later to play the "definitive" version of the drums, but never got more than a few bars in before losing it. I also chanted some lyrics from "Numb", not that they did this chaos any good.

The result is a colossal waste of space. It's hyper, horrible, and embarassing to any normal musician. But not to me, of course. Songs like this make me feel better about what I've been doing recently with Tripecac!

Which is worse, bad drums or bad piano? For me, the bad drums are at least funny. Bad piano is just plan boring and annoying. But don't take my word for it; here's a 16+ minute sample to help you form your own opinion.

It starts off with "First Filler", but then messes it up. So it picks another practice song, and screws that up. And so on. And then I started to improv. Yuck. Barf.

This is the original version of "You Run", which I later recorded as Tripecac. The bulk of the lyrics are extracted from a letter written to me by an ex-girlfriend.

I broke up with the girl some time between 1989-12-19 and 1990-05-27. Since the song is on the Yamaha PSS-470, I'm guessing I recorded this before I got the Yamaha SY55, which was in May 1990; otherwise, I would have probably used the SY55 instead. So, I'm guessing that this was recorded in the spring of 1990, May at the latest.

Note: Although this contains profanity, I didn't write it. I'll post the mp3 so that you can compare it to the Tripecac version.