head down

So do you wanna hear what I sounded like almost forty years ago?

Northwestern has a student-run musical showcase which started in the eighties, which I think still carries on today in a slightly different form, called The Niteskool Project¹. The idea was that students would submit demo tapes of songs they’d written, then a board of student producers would select their favorites, and a full studio album would be recorded. Anyone with an iPad can approximate a recording studio now, but back then, going into a real recording studio was a big damn deal.

During my fourth² year at college, I wrote a bluesy kinda thing called “Head Down” and it was selected for inclusion. I’d performed on other people’s songs the two years prior, but this was new for me. I usually work in support of the front man, and this was my shot to be that guy. With two of my unbelievably talented band mates at the time, Geoff Fisher and Thom Russo, we rehearsed it in some dorm basement for a few days and then headed over to Studiomedia on Davis Street, run by the exceptional Benj Kanters, who I think was also on the NU faculty at the time in the School of Speech.

I don’t remember a lot about the tracking; I’m sure it went very quickly. I remember a bit more about the overdubbing of the solo and vocals, which I did on a different day. There was a small crowd present in the studio for that: producers, engineers, probably Geoff and Thom, possibly some other friends, an interesting girl. I’m not the world’s most comfortable vocalist, and as nerve wracking as you might think singing on stage in front of a giant crowd is, let me promise you that being isolated in a vocal booth with a pristine recording system capturing every flaw in high fidelity, and pumping that through giant reference monitors into a control room full of intent listeners whom you can’t necessarily see, is nightmare-level terrifying. I got through it, obviously, but this kind of work is not for the faint of heart, or larynx.

Drama ensued. The student producers didn’t like my vocal, not at all. “Pitchy,” they said. Unbeknownst to me, they brought some other guy in to do an alternate vocal take, and then later had me come to the studio to listen to it. I was a bit taken aback, feeling defensive, and, honestly, I didn’t love the other guy’s interpretation. You can guess how it played out from there. A bunch of twentysomething baby creatives Had Big Feelings about Art, and surely harsh words were exchanged. Ultimately, I had a friend on the executive board (also a student) who brokered a compromise: we’d use my vocal take, but I’d be listed as the producer for that track instead of them. The other guys thought it sucked so hard that they didn’t even want their names associated with it. Felt like a win to me at the time.³

It was released on cassette; this was 1988 and CD’s were still a bit newfangled (and very expensive to make), and vinyl was already déclassé. This was the dark age of audio media. There were six songs altogether, and I don’t think any of them went on to light the world on fire. I remember an unkind review in the Daily Northwestern, but I also remember utterly not caring what some weenus music critic thought—a stance that has served me well since.

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I’m sure I had a copy or seven of this cassette at some point, but all my cassettes were lost to the sands of time. Like my uncle says: when it comes to your possessions, three moves equals one fire. The kids who run Niteskool supposedly have plans to digitize and publish all the archives, but the 1988 release is elusive for some reason. Once everything moved to digital a couple of years later, I’m sure the holes are filled in more easily.

I’d been trying to find this recording to no avail for years, when it finally hit me to check the university archives. And sure enough, they had a copy. It was still in original cassette form in a box in some room that I imagine looked like the final scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. The archivist I was working with, Dana, was really helpful. It took a few days for her to transfer the cassette to a digital format to upload, and she also scanned the folding cardboard lyric/notes insert. I downloaded it, eager to hear this recording.

There were immediate technical problems. One, the cassette appears to have stretched during storage, or maybe her deck was misaligned. I can hear some wow in the playback, subtle but definitely there. I don’t know of an easy solution for this. Two, the cassette was clearly encoded with Dolby, but not decoded on her playback deck. Listening to it evoked the sensation of having small icicles jammed into my ears. This I was able to fix by importing it into Logic and finding a Dolby decoding plugin. I also applied some other minor mastering EQ and compression to get it sounding more modern/punchy.

Those problems aside, though: what a wild experience to open this time machine from 38 years ago. To hear my voice, my playing, and what I thought were good songwriting ideas⁴ at that time. So many memories came flooding back from that era. I was beyond fortunate to be surrounded by such talented people at every turn. A couple of things about the recording/performance did pop out at me:

• The producers were right about me being pitchy, but I don’t think it was bad enough to merit bringing someone else in. I got the big, long notes right. It was the transitional short notes that could be better.⁵
• I sure wish I could hit those high B’s and C’s again. Probably should have taken some voice lessons before I wrecked myself over the next decade.
• The solo is too long, and there is at least one cringey bit in the second eight that I wish I’d fought harder to fix. I’m sure we talked ourselves into it being “cool” or a “blue note” or some other “yeah bro, feels so live!” kinda thing, but there’s a bright line between that and a plain old mistake, and we crossed it. Alas.
• That said, I still play some of those licks today. I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to find the back half of the beat since then. Let it breathe, kid!
• I won’t make any critical comments on the mix, given that I had to do so much surgery on this to get it where it is, and that others worked super hard on it at the time. I’ll just say I wish I could get my hands on the 24-track master for another stab.

Without further ado, here’s “Head Down.” If you can’t play the audio below directly in your email client or browser, I also put it up at YouTube.