An experiment in discord. I hear my dog, Flop, in the background near the end. That means I was still living at home with my parents when this recording was made, so it was definitely pre-1976 but more than likely around 1971 or 1972.

I never listened to punk music until after the year 2000, but apparently I was right in the timeline for composing musically correct unharmonic tonalities, though this one is probably a bit too gentle and melodic to even qualify as Punk’s little brother.

I’ve always thought of this one as like the ending theme for an upbeat Charles Chaplain silent movie. Makes me smile. (Wait… was that a reference to a song Chaplain wrote? I guess we’ll never know…)

Like a painted that is painted over an earlier painting, this recording has two songs on it, one under the other. Prominent is a jangly little piano riff, but underneath it is some muffled guitar and vocal. Now there’s two possibilities: One – I accidentally recorded over an earlier song and the machine didn’t quite erase the tape of the old one. Two – It is bleed-through from the other side of the cassette. The way that worked was cassette tapes ran to the end and then you flipped them over and recorded on the other side. The way this worked was that there were four channels – left and right stereo tracks on the first side, and also left and right stereo tracks on the other side. The tracks alternated something like First Side Left, Second Side Right, First Side Right, Second Side Left. So – there is a reasonably good chance of spillover from one side to the other if the tracks didn’t align quite right. The way to tell which of these two possibilities is at work on this recording is to listen to the quieter guitar song. If it is running forward then it was an erase issue and there is a lost song that future tech might be able to reconstruct. But if the guitar track is going backwards, it is track mis-alignment and the other song was also saved when I transferred that other side of the cassette to mp3. For now, it’s a mystery. Listen carefully…

This one has no redeeming features. It is just awful. It should be drawn and quartered and then burned. Yes, I must admit I wrote it. But now, some half a century later I ask myself, “What the hell was I thinking?!”

Original recording of a tune I later revised and multi-tracked. Not a mean bone in its body.

Pine Mountain Club, California