Saturday Classical Music In-Joke Posting

From 1597, please enjoy Giovanni Gabrielli's quite amazing and beautiful Renaissance hit single "Sonata Pian 'e Forte." As performed in 1959, in a glorious arrangement for contemporary orchestral horn section, by Leopold Stokowski and the Symphony of the Air.




This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the mission statement of this blog, but let's say I have my reasons for posting it.

Incidentally, in a sense the Gabrielli piece actually IS kinda proto rock-and-roll, in that it's tuneful, extremely concise (at about five and a half minutes, it's suitable for Top 40 radio play) and depends on tremendous volume to make its point. Plus, it makes very sophisticated use of that whole loud/soft thing that everybody thought was a big deal when Nirvana ripped it off hundreds of years later.

Monday Shameless Cross-Blogwhoring

The post-Floor Models (Gerry, Glen Bob, and me plus guitarist extraordinaire Doug Goldberg) can be heard rehearsing a pretty nice stereo version of The Tremeloes 60s classic "Here Comes My Baby" over at PowerPop.

Or you can simply listen to the mp3 below.



In any case, enjoy.

Tuesday Shameless Cross-Blogwhoring

Another of the recently exhumed early Flo Mos home demos -- in this case, a really bitchen version of our most blatant Byrds rip-off, "Fade Into Grey" -- can be beheard over at PowerPop here.

Those backwards guitars just slay me, I must say.

The Album We Never Made

Here's a rough version of the back of the CD tray.



It'll probably have a pale blue, rather than white, background to match the front cover. But I'm not giving that particular design away quite yet.

In any case, we're on schedule to have the album off to the CD duplicator by the end of October.

"The Indiana Jones of Vault Preservationists"

Okay, as previously mentioned -- and as already documented over at PowerPop -- that missing in action cassette of the first 4-track home demos we did has been rescued and transferred to the digital domain at last.

There turned out to be six songs on the cassette -- four more than I even remembered we had done -- and they are, as it turns out, of variable musical interest, although to my relief all of them survived completely intact, i.e. without tape dropout or any noticeable degradation of the original recordings. In any case, "Enough's Enough," which can be heard at the link above, is killer, and is definitely going on the forthcoming Flo Mos CD. Of the rest, this one -- Andy's epic and genuinely poignant "The Hand That's Strong" -- is the only other one in contention, although I still haven't come to a definitive decision about that.




It's a shame we never did a proper studio recording of the song, but I think this version still tugs at the heartstrings. In the meantime, the perhaps interesting technical details of how it was produced can be found at the aforementioned PowerPop link.

Tales From the Crypt

The Holy Grail has been found.

Okay, actually the first five home four-track demos we did, a high-quality cassette of which was discovered in a storage facility in the wilds of the Bronx two Sundays ago.

In any case, they will be transferred into the digital domain later this week, and then the final sequencing for the forthcoming The Floor Models: The Album We Never Made project will begin in earnest. Still shooting for a final product by Christmas, if not sooner.

And here's something else that surfaced recently.



Unless I'm very much mistaken, that's the rehearsal studio where we recorded the bass and drum tracks for the aforementioned home demos, circa 1980-81. Note the incredibly cool Burns of London bass I was using at the time, courtesy of demo producer David Grahame.

Great looking bass, although it didn't sound as good as it could have on stage.

Songs I Wish We'd Covered. Oh Wait a Minute --- We Actually Did.

From 1968, and (some say, although I don't) their magnum opus album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, here are the aforementioned Byrds and their glorious version of Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "I Wasn't Born to Follow."




I have to admit, until I saw that picture sleeve I had no idea that this had actually been issued as a single.

In any case, I have loved -- nay lurved -- this one since the very first moment I heard it (through a cannabis haze, doubtless) in my college dorm room, and if memory serves it was one of the first covers I suggested that the Flo Mos work up back in the day. My favorite performances of it took place at one of those Other End gigs I've documented earlier; my long time pal and bandmate Tony Forte used to drop by occasionally to play it with us, thus giving us two Rickenbacker 12-string guitars on one cramped stage. Alas, no tape of one of those renditions has surfaced, but trust me -- it was one of the most glorious noises imaginable.

Incidentally, I talked to Tony about this the other day, and he reminded me that Andy's first axe when the Floor Models got together -- a solid-body El Cheapo that we used to jokingly refer to as "that pig of a Hagstrom" -- was actually the only non-Rickenbacker 12-string he ever played and liked.