Difficult Music

I was all set to take off to the D Room for some jamming today. Unfortunately I got an email from Sox in the morning that described circumstances that stopped me from going over. Sometimes the serious side of life intrudes on the Sunday scene.

For years and years at the D Room all we’d do was roll tape and jam. Taping everything is the way things are done there. The evidence is everywhere. Old cassettes spill out on to the floor. Dozens of unlabeled VHS tapes (from the days we recorded direct to stereo VCR) peek out from shelves and behind stacks of old LPs. The closet in Dogo’s old room is full of 1-inch reels. When I’m alone down there I like to sort through the cassettes on the floor, putting them back in drawers for safe keeping. I especially prize the tapes that date from before I knew the Logan boys. It does my heart good to find a tape from the mid-eighties labeled “Hellgrinder: Desecration of Surrey” or somesuch.

We’ve recorded hundreds of hours of jams, but no one listens to them. I’ve always thought it’d be a useful (but thankless) project to go through the tapes, extract the good bits, and put out a compilation of listenable material. I have no doubt we could scare a bunch of people silly with a release like that.

There must be hundreds of bands in hundreds of D Rooms across this continent. Look at the JPT Scare Band—three guys who recorded themselves with two mikes in their jam space in the mid seventies. Now they’re selling CDs of the stuff and recording new material for their newfound audience. I love finding out about bands like this, even if I’m underwhelmed when I inevitably fork out for their albums.

All you need to do is capture a certain musty mystique and sub-cult notoriety can be yours. And (this is the part I like best) you don’t even have to leave the basement.