Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Tuesday Shameless Self-Indulgence

Okay, I was gonna post this over at the more appropriate although hit deficient Floor Your Love website, but it's just too damn good not to inflict upon all of you.

In which case, from 1980, please enjoy Greenwich Village's finest, the fabulous Floor Models, and their very first home demo -- the glorious Byrds/Beatles homage that is "Enough's Enough."




Written and sung by my chum Andy "Folk-Rock" Pasternack, who's also responsible for the genius electric 12-string stuff. (And also featuring Gerry Devine and some guy whose name rhymes with Sleeve Nimels on guitar, bass, and harmony vocals, with the irrepressible Glen "Bob" Allen on drums).

As regular readers are aware, this is one of the many artifacts of my musical youth that I was able to retrieve from storage two weeks ago, and I must say it fricking slays me.

A few technical details, for younger readers who wonder how home demos were done in the long ago vanished era before computers and digital stuff.

To wit: the bass and drums were recorded in one (mono) track on a cassette plugged into the soundboard at the rehearsal studio we were using back then. Said mono track was then dubbed onto a reel-to-reel tape and three tracks of guitars (recorded directly into the tape deck via whatever effects pedals we were using in those days) were added using a Teac 4-track recorder (courtesy of our producer, David Grahame -- Paul in the 2nd original cast of Broadways Beatlemania). Those four tracks were then dubbed down to two on another reel to reel machine, leaving us two tracks to use to double all the vocals (which were recorded in David's apartment).

The whole thing then being mixed in real-time onto the Maxell cassette you see above.

Jeebus, I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

In any case, I find it semi-miraculous that said three decade old cassette proved eminently playable. And that the song and performance still get me jazzed after all this time.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

should have been a hit by marshall crenshaw!

DB said...

This is terrific. Had this been recorded for a CD, I'd be looking to buy it now.

steve simels said...

DB --

A limited edition Floor Models collection is in the works; that's the reason I've been restoring all this stuff. For more info, see the Flo Mos homepage at the link in the first graph....

Anonymous said...

Very nice tune, and still sounds great - those Maxell hi-bias were The Shit.

Faze said...

Great harmonies, wily guitar playing, and a nice full sound. Those rube goldberg recording techniques really made people pay attention to details.

(should have been a hit by marshall crenshaw!

Marshall Crenshaw should have a hit by Marshall Crenshaw.)

dave™© said...

Wow - I've got a "demo" on one of those Maxell tapes!

Sal Nunziato said...

Good stuff. Looking forward to that lim/ed.

Anonymous said...

David Grahame was a hell of a good producer!!!

ROTP(lumber)