Back when I was young in the 80s (the 1980s – geesh) I quickly became fed up with the mindless pabulum on MTV that was supposed to pass for entertainment.  Sure, there were a few innovative pieces.

For example, who can forget Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” debut with the first use of computer graphics!  Well, if you are under 30 you still can’t forget it because you weren’t frickin’ born yet – can’t forget what you never see, see?

No matter, this song is a broad accusation of the entire music video machine with just a dash of conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure.

I had always dreamed of recording a complete album of my songs. After completing the eight efforts I just posted here, I compiled them together onto a master tape titled Dichotomy and distributed it on cassette tape to friends. This was somewhere around 1986, as I recall.

For a while, this satisfied my Muse, especially since at the time I was working rather regularly in the film industry as a writer, producer, and directory of educational films, industrials, and small budget commercials – even a music video for a local band.

As time went on, I began to think about the possibility of a second album of songs with lyrics, rather than just the instrumentals of the first album. Now I’m a poor musician and an atrocious singer, but a pretty good composer. So, the prospects of this new album were not stellar from the get-go.

Still, I resolved to do my best so that the songs I was hearing in my head at least might be shared with others, even if the performance was sorely lacking despite good intentions.

The next few posts present the individual songs from this first vocal album, titled Tarnished Karma.

Pine Mountain Club, California

In this category, I’m posting all of my musical compositions, ranging from quick riffs and muddy recordings of melody lines on old cassette recorders to all digital multi-track efforts in both song and symphony.

I’m trying my best to keep these in chronological order of their record date, starting with the oldest first. So, what you see at the top of this category are my most recent offerings.

As of this note, I’ve covered my work from the late 1960s, all of the 1970s, and we are now into the mid 1980s.

I believe there are number of songs somewhere on “lost” cassettes in my boxes of old possessions, and if I ever find them, I’ll just plop them in with a note that they are out of order and my best guess as to where they belong in the sequence.

That is all. Please resume your previous activities.

Back in the mid 1970s I as in my mid-twenties.  I had purchased a TEAC four channel reel to reel tape recorder and a Casio CZ101 synthesizer and could finally approximate some of the music I was hearing in my head while I played it only on the piano.  This is one of my early experiments with that equipment.  All these years later, I’m still pretty happy with this one.  I especially like the bendy organic sound to it.  It may be on a synth but it is anything but stilted or programmed.  It was all performed “live” – and recorded on analog multi-track – nothing processed or electronically arranged.  (Pat own self on back).

This one is inspired by the television series, Miami Vice, which was playing new episodes at the time.  I wanted to see if I could compose something in the style of Jan Hammer who wrote the score for the series.  While I wrote this I was picturing Crocket and Tubbs, all scruffy and chic at the same time, driving through the rougher parts of town on their way to meet some drug lord as undercover agents posing as distributors to make a buy.

Here’s one I wrote and recorded in the early 1980s. Kind of a psychedelic jam session. I was experimenting at the time in bendy music – trying to get away from “notes” and more into evolutions, yet making a whole series of intertwining threads work together, even though they are all on their own organic meandering courses. Recorded on my TEAC 4 track reel-to-reel recorder I bought in the late 70s and on my Casio CZ 101 Synthesizer.

Think of ruins in a jungle – not the cutesy Indiana Jones kind, but more mysterious and slightly threatening with a majesty that almost hides the danger lurking in the shadows.  (I love old Tarzan movies)

A cool bongo and flute style tribute to the quirky beatnik character portrayed by Bob Denver (of Gilligan’s Island fame) on the old Dobie Gillis television series in the 1960s.

This was performed on my CZ-101 synthesizer from Casio way back in the early 1980s.  It struck me as kind of a steampunk calliope, though the word “steampunk” hadn’t been coined yet, hence the name it’s stuck with.

I picture a high-tech Jules Verne style merry-go-round where each disturbing animal mount is some creature from a different planet.  As you ride faster and faster around the circle, you eventually dematerialize and your consciousness is transported into the body of that same creature on another world as an adventure.  But just as in Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, the rides at “Cougar and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show” often come with consequences.

As you can hear, I was getting a little more comfortable with my synth and stretched a little farther here than in my earlier song, Anticipation.