Fallout

As I hit publish on the piece falling yesterday, I was visited with the memory of recording my very first song which, of course, had very little to do with the piece written yesterday.

Honestly? I’d forgotten the event entirely. But fragments of the song came back and I couldn’t figure out until this morning why the song sounded familiar.

I was probably thirteen when had gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a singer. But, a singer who couldn’t sing wasn’t on anyone’s list of potential future bandmates. I ended up picking up what was probably a hot bass guitar. The used instrument store, B-Sharp, had a bit of a reputation — whether or not it was justified — for buying and selling any used instrument without asking too many questions about ownership. You couldn’t expect premium prices if you were selling to them, but that was often not the goal — if you know what I mean.

Anyway, after discovering I didn’t know what the hell John Taylor (Duran Duran) was doing with his bass and having started falling into liking garage, punk and post-punk, I started mimicking the bass players from Joy Division, Peter Hook’s (bka “Hooky”) playing style. Which, my friends, did not endear me much to the folks who wanted to play rock and metal, the predominant genres of music to be in a band with at the time. And punk? Well, I was just a kid and there weren’t all that many kids into playing Joy Division styled songs.

I was clueless. I didn’t know (or much care) which note I played, as long as the bass was in tune and it sounded good to my ear. That didn’t mean it sounded good to anyone else’s ear, mind you — especially because I was being really experimental with what I discovered later were minor progressions (with jazz elements). And I grew fond of dissonance because it was more “edgy” sounding. Remember, I didn’t have a clue. I was just playing note patterns that “sounded right”.

One of the things I picked up from emulating Hooky was his tendency to play something other than the root note and turning the top two strings into an open chord. The D-string was open (occasionally with muting) and the G-string was what defined the chord structure.

“Michael,” I was told. “Bass players stay low on the neck, play the root chord and never, and I mean ever, should play chords. Please stop.”

Every the rebel, I ignored their entreaties and played on. High on the neck on on the strings… with chords.

One of the songs that came out of those days was a bass-dominated song called “Falling”. (“Michael, you absolutely cannot call a series of bass lines doing whatever horrid thing you are doing to them a ‘song’. Please stop.”) The other instruments? Drums by a friend who didn’t own a drum set, but played a snare in middle school with me. And… my vocals.

On a lark, I asked the theater teacher in my high school if I could use their recording equipment, a two-track recorder located in the school’s auditorium. He agreed, but only if I had one of the regular student stage crew set up the mics and manage the levels from the booth. And we mic’s everything, including the bass and a drum set that the school let my friend borrow. He even almost sounded like he knew what he was doing playing a full set after about the fifth take.

It was all live takes, drums and bass mixed on one track and vocals on the other. Not only did I have to play bass, but I had to “sing” (sic) at the same time.

And we recorded that bugger in less than an hour (the next class was going to use the auditorium to rehearse and so we had to be quick about it. I almost sounded like a real singer.

And that, my friends, is how I recorded my first song at the tender age of fifteen (give or take), absolutely clueless about what I was doing as a musician or a singer. And it actually, if memory serves me, sounded… okay.

I probably have that mixdown one one unlabeled cassette or another. Chances are that it is completely lost to time. But I’ll probably never find it.

The lyrics were very mid-teen in context — about [an imaginary] crush that never materialized. I had no one specific in mind when I wrote it, I just wanted to write something catchy. What I can recall:

I can feel myself falling
Falling to the ground
With every step towards you
I fall on further down...

If you should walk away
And leave me falling here...

[the rest is scrambled in the noggin]

Bet you can guess why “Walking Away” became one of the next songs I wrote (about another nonexistent woman in my life). That became part of the playlist from my goth band a couple of years later and there are actually recordings of the thing, live at the world’s famous (sic) Fernando’s Bar.

[Side note: I just strummed “Falling” out on my bass after a couple of false starts. Surprising how muscle memory works after forty or so years since I last played it. Also interesting is that it is based on the same key as “Walking Away”. As I said, clueless at the time.]

I honestly hadn’t thought of this song in at least thirty years. Not until I hit “publish” on that poem yesterday. The brain can be strange at times, can’t it?