LDB: Let’s make an album

So the A&R rep from R.E.X. Records was on board to allow Dude A and his brother, Dude B, to produce a full-length LP. In order to convince the higher-ups at the label that we were an act worth investing in, Mr. A&R had to have something, anything to present to them. This was before social media and gaging audience by “likes” and “follows.” Shit, this was before MySpace.

A demo would have been ideal. But all we had was cassette tapes recorded in an empty school classroom. The empty school was, at the time, the home of the church we attended. Imagine a cassette recorder pointed in the direction of 2 guitars, amps on 12, and a drum machine piped through an amp. In a reverb box in the form of a concrete and tile classroom. Not very compelling.

Mr. A&R was basing his trust in this project on the work Dudes A and B had published prior with their band. He knew the quality he could expect. So he trusted us and asked that we at least give him the titles of the 10 tracks that would appear on the album. He assured us the titles could change, but that he just wanted something concrete to sell to the decision-makers.

So one day, Dudes A and B and I sat in the tiny living room of the apartment my then wife and I were renting from her grandparents, who lived next door. We came up with concepts we would want to convey through the music, and subsequently 10 titles. Out of our asses.

• Yellow & Black Attack

• Ripple

• Better Ways

• Fighting Gravity

• Lemonade

• Radiant Abyss

• Supersaturated

• Martin’s Dream

• The Weather

• Sprout

This is the track list of the final product. There was another title submitted, which I can’t recall. But upon release of the album months later, nine of the titles we spit out that day made the final cut.

From the time we submitted the list to Mr. A&R ‘til the time of our first scheduled studio time, we had a few months. That meant I had little time to come up with lyrics and melodies for an album, which I had never done to that point. And now that I think of it, I have never done since.

By day 1 in the studio, I had lyrics and melodies for 6 or 7 tracks, and the rest would come in flight. But I managed to write the lyrics through this inverted method of title (plus concept) first. And I must say, the lyrics were one of the standout qualities of the finished product.

Interestingly, we had titles, most lyrics and melodies on day 1 in the studio… but no singer.

Yet.

Leaderdogs for the Blind: The Recipe

LDB. A topic for multiple posts.

In the previous post, ‘Numb,’ we leave off when Dude A pitches a project to the A&R rep from R.E.X. Records based (at the time… now defunct) in Nashville, TN.

Beyond the track ‘Numb’, Dude A and I continued meeting up to scratch out demos. ‘Numb’ was a terrible song backed by a terrible approach. That approach was combining heavy guitar riffs with funk. Executed properly, the combo can work, though it is a bit of a paradox. A heavy guitar riff is usually saying, “Pay attention to me ‘cuz I have something important to say.” That something is often serious, even dark. Funk is the 2nd cousin that wears colorful t-shirts, has cool-ass parents, and seems to get away with partying too much. And has all the sex it wants. All the fun, zero consequences.

Dude A called it “heavy funk and groove.”

And by the way, ‘Numb’ was not executed properly. We put heavy, funk, and groove into a blender, added a tempo that was way too fast, threw in Dude A vocals (who was not a singer), and some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever written. Try that as your morning smoothie. No bueno.

But somehow ‘Numb’ ended up on a compilation album from R.E.X. Then again it wasn’t difficult to see how it got published. The A&R rep was that desperate to work with Dude A. Oh, and the other 10 or 15 tracks on that compilation were also shitty smoothies.

Dude A packaged up 4 or 5 of the demos he and I had created and submitted them for consideration. I’m guessing we sent a cassette tape in the mail. I don’t recall much about those tracks, other than the fact that it was more of ‘Numb.’ Possibly even more numbing.

While that submission cycle was happening, Dude A and I happened to see a video on Mtv. For you kids out there, the “M” stands for music. Mtv, believe it or not, used to play music videos. Crazy to think that was the only content Mtv had at the time. It was popular. It was fun. Artists blew up as long as they could appear either as a magazine cover model or extremely weird.

An entire generation was influenced by Mtv. It changed the trajectory of pop culture. But it was mostly appealing to teenagers and young adults. Back then neither had money, and few had the power to influence purchases. So the corporate overlords kept tweaking the recipe, where “tweak” means–remove all music.

I mean, c’mon. It is America. Corporate. Capitalist. No record profits? Then you must die on the vine.

Back to that video. It was late night when the edgier, fringe stuff received some air time. The band was called Body Count. I don’t remember the track title. The guitar amps were on 11, the groove was thicker than molasses on a Midwest winter day, and there was a middle-finger-in-the-air message.

We were enamored.

We decided to ditch all previous demos. I can now say, you are welcome.

We programmed that drum machine to pump out thick, heavy grooves, forgoing the funk preset patterns.

The new recipe was starting to feel urgent. Necessary. It evoked deeper feelings. Angst. Raw power.

By the time the R.E.X. rep heard our ‘Numb’ based demo and agreed to allow Dude A to produce a full 10-song LP, we had 4 or 5 fresh demos with the new recipe.

And, we had a whopping budget of $8500 to produce 10 songs and the album artwork. Oh, and we had a few months to do all of this, and by this I mean crank out at least 5 more demos, lyrics to all 10 tracks, find a singer (thank all that has ever been created), and teach the bass lines to the bassist from Dude A’s actual band.

Seems reasonable.

And so it begins.

Numb

The previous post, ‘Michigan,’ explains how I landed in, you guessed it, Michigan.

My wife (the reason I moved) had a handful of cousins. Two of them were about my age, were in an all-original band, and were attending the Recording Institute of Detroit. I later joined the institute to earn a certificate in multi-track recording. Analog. All analog.

To make it easier to tell this story, I’ll call them Dude A, the guitarist, and Dude B, the singer. And let’s call their act The Cousins.

At that time, there was a tiny li’l indy label from Nashville called R.E.X. Records. An A&R rep from R.E.X. tried to persuade The Cousins to sign a deal with the label. But The Cousins, made up of all Christians, had wisely determined to not participate in the Christian music industry.

Dude A had an idea. With the knowledge the 2 had acquired at the Recording Institute, they could produce a band for R.E.X., just not their own band. Trouble is, they had no previous credits as engineers / producers. But Dude A and I had been ripping drop D guitar riffs over a drum machine for fun. It was a creative release for me, and a side project for Dude A.

R.E.X. had put out a call for tracks from new artists for a compilation. Dude A and I wrote a (pretty terrible) track titled ‘Numb.’ That track was selected for the compilation. Sorry world.

That track at least proved to Mr. A&R that the 2 cousins had production chops. Dude A and I had a handful of demos, which amounted to our 2 guitars on 11, a drum machine plugged into a guitar amp (if I recall right), and hitting “Record” on a cassette player. So his idea? → Pitch a full album for the side project.

What happens next absolutely deserves its own post. Until then…

Michigan

Anaheim, California. Not the first words you’d expect from a post titled ‘Michigan.’

So let’s set the path to Michigan, which is both a beautiful place on this planet, and represents an important era in the becoming of SAGRADOSE.

I was born in Anaheim. My parents met in California, eloped, and had 3 children, all while living in California. For the curious, I am the youngest of the 3, with 2 older sisters.

When I was 1, my family moved to Central Illinois. From beautiful California? Why would anyone do such a thing?

My father, Bruce, grew up in the sticks just outside of Canton. It was always home for him. He was the youngest of 6 children. When my dad was 14, he and his parents and 1 of his sisters moved to California. My grandfather, Miles, was diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s not difficult to understand how that could happen as he smoked heavily for years while working as a coal miner. When that caught up to him, cancer care in America was still in its infancy. The best doctors and systems in place at that time were in California.

My grandfather never recovered. By the time my dad reached 18, his dad was gone. A lot of life happened between that time and this move back to Illinois. But for the sake of this post, the keys are as mentioned: meeting mom, starting a family, then moving to Illinois.

The “why” had everything to do with 2 things: work, and the state of the world. My dad was a high school dropout. He worked with his back and rarely with his mind. And work was plentiful then, but you had to go where the work was. He found work in California, but jobs were popping in Canton, IL with the International Harvester plant there.

And, of equal or greater significance, as church-going, Bible-believing Christians, he and my mom and most every other Christian believed America along with the globe was careening towards hell. The end times. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. Vietnam. Political unrest. Civil unrest. Racial injustice. Women actually reaching for their independence and rights. And California had it all, plus the Hillside Strangler and Charles Manson.

Canton, Illinois is a town of ~15,000 people. It was familiar. Safe (feeling, by comparison).

Canton, Illinois is a place where creatives go to die.

I met a girl from Michigan at Cornerstone Festival in Bushnell at the age of 21. We hit it off and would occasionally meet each other half way between Flint, Michigan and Canton. We fell in love and knew what that meant if you’re a Christian: better get married soon or you’ll be in a battle of desire for the dreadful sin of sex… before marriage. Gasp!

For some reason I cannot even imagine in this Universe, we had originally decided that she would move to central Illinois instead of the other way around. And for some reason I cannot remember, that plan changed and we decided to marry and live in Michigan.

This is just the beginning of this era. Michigan holds a dear place in my heart, and always will. But this post gets me to Michigan, which is what gets me to my next topic: Leaderdogs for the Blind.