Okay, in the high school that Mr. Brown and I went to there were, at the time, three buildings. It was all one big structure, but they'd been adding onto it over the years I guess, connecting each new building via long hallways that looking back on it now were more than a little reminiscent of airports. If you've ever been to the Phoenix, AZ airport you will no doubt know what I'm talking about. A building was purely academic, B building was a continuation of that with something else thrown in, I don't remember exactly, and C Building was for the stoners and special ed students (one and the same in some cases - and I'm saying this as a graduate of that school's stoner program).
Anyway...
About two years out of high school Mr. Brown and I were in a band called Wink Lombardi and the Constellations. We weren't twenty-one and at that time I was really more of a pothead, so we spent most of our spare time in our practice space, recording with every available instrument, microphone and concept our drug-addled brains could come up with. This past time was not limited to just the five of us in the band* but most of our friends. One of those friends was the now-departed Jake. The dude was awesome, but he was a fucking hurricane of insanity waiting to blow free at any given moment. Jake had no musical ability per se - although he sure could sing - but that made his contributions that much more heartfelt and unique.
And insane.
Brown and I decided to start a band with the three of us and whoever else - something where we'd just set up stuff and play and see what happened. Usually for these sessions I played bass, Mr. Brown did some form of vox or keys and Jake did everything we could think of that he didn't know how to play but that might benefit from his fresh approach. He'd play guitars run through five different types of distortion pedals. He'd play drums (again - for being untrained, not bad). He sing. He'd read bizarre passages from his or Mr. Brown's high school notebooks, he'd play a
keymonica. Whatever. Our main method of recording at the time was a
Tascam 464 - hey this was 1996, there wasn't any home digital equipment yet. No youtube, nothing. So anyway, we decided to call this band - what else - The C-Building Kids. Now you can appreciate the reference.
Most of those tracks sat on moldering casette tapes for a few years until circa 2002 when I was in the band The Yellow House and the singer and I bought a Pro Tools rig. Not the super professional one, but a Digi001. We were recording our debut album and that was how we'd chosen to do it. In the downtime from recording that band - and because for years I clearly did NOTHING exception become inebriated and make music (not a bad thing) - Mr. Brown and I spent many a long night going through those old C Blding tapes, transferring the material track by track. Jake had passed away a few years between the original project and this re-mastering so it was important to us.
Still is.
We managed to make one album out of the most usable of that material. Pro Tools is a non-destructive, digital recording environment and it enables you to have a hell of a lot more tracks than a Tascam 464 does. After transferring all those old songs we added tons of stuff to link all the tracks and basically make the whole thing flow like one giant, diseased clusterfuck of a record. We named it The C-Building Kids: Shitting in the Urinal and never released it because... well, again, there was no youtube still at this time and just who were we gonna send this to?
The above track actually doesn't even have Jake on it. Most of it is one single track - I remember the night perfectly, Sonny and I walking up into the old practice space during the Wink days, seeing Brown sitting there with a small Casio keyboard in his hand, plugged into the Tascam. He played us what he had just created - again on ONE TRACK - and we were just like whoah. I never knew how to add anything to it, when we transferred it I strapped on my guitar and running it through my handy-dandy
effects pedal and did some crazy, off-the-cuff hoo-doo that really actually worked. Then we added our roommate Two Foot making some weird humping noises inspired by the title (which Mr. Brown had recorded the initial track based on) and the rest... well, while it might not be history, it's certainly our story.
......................
*Mr. Brown, myself, Sonny D., JFK and fifth member that rotated between several different people, none of which were Abe Vigoda but one of which carried the unusual surname of Crackrockski. Polish?
