Ten years ago tonight, I recorded the first “demo” for This Precious Scene, an album I never finished, despite spending something on the order of $6000 trying to complete it satisfactorily.
New Bad Things were as Portland/Olywa as it gets; in 1996, they drove non-stop from Portland, OR to Saratoga Springs, NY to play a single show at Skidmore College, at the invitation of Jamie Kennard, creator of the authoritative Northeast Show List (which did more for underground pop and punk than any digital publication since). Today, the Bad Things have a Facebook page, and have posted a few of their John Peel-blessed tracks—including the bounding “Concrete”—to YouTube.
Peel-ing back the digital onion in 2013, I can’t seem to source the above track, which led off the demo tape they handed out after the show, and made me wonder if the NBTs might bring about a nifty Madchester revival. Alas, they broke up soon after, and ceded said target to !!!, who missed the bull’s eye.
Like you, my driving ambition on graduating college was to make my mark in the music industry. Like you, my first office job was as an unpaid intern—for Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, MA. Unlike you, I was greeted by a thriving music industry and global economy (barring the devaluation of the Ruble in 1998).
Fetching tea for and later shaking hands with David Bowie made it worth my while, though fetching a particular sort of chair demanded by Beck helped steer me on my current path.
The only other substantive perk I can point to was Brian Dunton of Helium dubbing me a very hot DAT of the first Breeders demos as thanks for my time. These sessions—performed by Kim and the Throwing Muses, sans Kristen Hersh—were bootleged within weeks, and there are purer copies than mine floating around. “Silver” is the big surprise, as it later ended up on the Pixies’ flawless Doolittle.
The original mix of this session was dry in the extreme, and clearly rushed through in a day (it was a pro forma demo for 4AD; I believe Ivo signed them midway through the second song). The drums and vocals are far too loud, to the point that the kick distorts everything underneath its 60-80Mhz thud.
I crammed things together a bit more, and tried to add some punch. You can find the original mix, from a very strong source, as a series of YouTube videos, and there’s a lossless FLAC on most file-trading networks. Since I went to the trouble of running this off, as part of a tape-digitizing rampage I’m on, I figured I’d throw some plugins at the songs, and pass the results around.
