Hello and welcome to Mini Music, Mark, welcome. Hello and welcome to Tiny Tunes Tuesday. Here we are. It's Tuesday.
Well, it's Monday. Oh, well, it'll be Tuesday when they hear it. Oh, you know. Yeah.
With thinking about our audience, the day that it will be for them when they hear this. Yeah, they're not like, it's not Monday. What are you talking about, woman? Well, we didn't do a Mini Music Monday.
Sometimes we have to do Tiny Tunes Tuesdays. Yeah, it's just life. Sometimes you have to move the sketch around a little bit and be flexible. Yep.
I was just on a tour. We postponed the last third of it. So I came home a little prematurely. Yep.
I got arrested for a few days. I hung out in bed and I listened to cassettes. Yeah, and you did some really cool substacks. I did.
We should put in our Barlow Family General. Barlow Family General. Yeah, that's what we thought that little diddy in there because we'll put the link obviously in our show notes because Lou put up some really cool posts. Really, since the Mark thing, Mark Harris thing, I got one of my original cassettes that I set Mark.
I know that was returned. His ex-wife sent me this cassette and I don't have anything quite like that. I know. I actually don't have any like that.
Like a tape that I actually sent him, I really crafted these tapes for him. That's incredible. I'm so grateful that Cindy sent that back. So I got one.
I got one. Only one of like, I sent him thousands maybe of like these series of like compilation tapes. That's what we call them compilation tapes, not mixed tapes, but I said them compilation tapes that I would play DJ on and I started my little songs on them, you know, doing these short little songs and the tape that I got back, I think was the last tape that I made for him that I put my own songs on. It's also the last tape that it was primarily hardcore punk on it because 83 was where everything kind of changed for me, which is as said, exemplified by the song, Just Gimmie Indie Rock, started back in 83, I started singing things differently.
So this tape that I got back is exactly on that cusp of that. When hardcore wasn't doing it for me anymore and I started to like slow in music and I also really started to write my own things and became really obsessed with my tape recorders. I'm playing two tape recorders at the same time into another tape recorder, like doing all this very experimentation. That must have been really fun to be like having these tools or kind of like just come from school.
You can do that. Collage commencing in four of these. Like, the Batter Legend song. Ah, ending.
Yeah, so I put a little collage of songs that I made to go in between. Instead of being the DJ, I just started doing that and I really like planned those out and made that really. Yeah. And I kind of repurposed parts of that stuff for like later, Sabado, stuff that came out years later actually, because this is 83.
I hadn't released a lot of it until 89, but I would take, I would sort of, but that's like the original little run of songs that I made and they all kind of went into each other. Some of that I never released because I felt kind of embarrassed of it. Like, because I'm so earnest and some of that I thought, this is my life and not so old. I was like, yeah, but now, now of course, I mean, having so much distance, I just think, oh, it's kind of cute.
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's just, and it's kind of special to me to actually get that back because that's the original form of the songs. And it's also a very, it's a, a lot of times what I would do is I would take if I subtracted things from that to release the later, you know, that that would be almost like, you know, third or fourth generation cassette. So there were even more like more noise on them.
That's like a crisper original recording of that stuff. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like my original, it's kind of, I've been really, really have to thank Cindy. I'll call it all for that. She, you know, she, when we were reaching out to talk about Mark and, you know, she's like, I have these tapes.
So would you like them? And that one in particular has been really kind of, it's been kind of neat revelation for me. It's a really nice little, little letter from my past and reminds me of how much energy I put into it and reminds me of just the beginning of when I really started to feel like I wanted to write songs and Mark was my audience. You know, he was, he was my audience of one.
And of course things changed right after that because I was in Deep One with Jay and I was in a real band and writing songs for the hardcore band. And, um, if you might mean, within like, you know, I'm on staff for that, I mean, dinosaur dream really started, I mean, dinosaur. Jay started, he was in, he was a freshman college and he started writing these incredible songs and he raised the bar so high, you know, like, that, uh, even though I obviously had like a lot of ideas and I just didn't, they, they were still developing. So, but that was what, that just, that period, this particular tape that I sent to Mark and, and that collage in particular is like really like one of my first real little statements, you know, so.
I, I could really feel the amount of work you put into it. It's so artistic. I, I felt like I was laying on the floor of a dark room in like MoMA or something or like, you know, some modern art museum where they're like, oh, we're going to play this like crazy noise collage now and this, and this exhibit is just listening, you know, and I really did. I kept thinking this would be really cool if everyone was like just laying down on cushions in some black room where this music was just playing and you were, because it sort of was meditative to me.
Like, I was able to sort of feel different things and kind of go to different places while listening to it. Um, I think it's also a good reminder, Lou, that look at all that effort you put into something. Yeah, and having no idea if it would ever lead to anything. I wish I, that's all I did.
Sometimes I wish I didn't stop doing that, just making tape collages and working things into these kind of soundscapes because it changed pretty quickly after that because I, I kind of felt like I had to streamline what I was doing in a good way. I mean, in order to write, to begin to write songs for Dennis or Junior and, um, and I didn't, I guess I had the sense that nobody cared and it wasn't something I could be like, Hey, Jay, well, here, here's what I'm working on, you know, because I don't know, because all of those parts, like all those sounds coming in another were like integral to the piece to me. And they were all like little bits of the radio and I like the fact that it reminds me, there's a little part portion of that where it says, Topal did it and Topal was a toothpaste. I was like, oh yeah, Topal did it.
Well, and also I think you just knew that that that was not for dinosaur and that's fine. This was like a separate creative outlet for yourself. It was good at the time. I just knew that it was, you know, yeah, I just translated it.
Yeah, I think that's fine. It was a separate creative thing you were doing. It was my bedroom thing. It was your bedroom thing.
Yeah. And I think that, um, you know, I'm just thinking that you, you've actually been intrigued and curious about creating texture and soundscapes. I think your whole life, like I think since you discovered making these tape collages, like I think that that's never left you, you know, is your desire to create these worlds of sound. Yeah, but that I got really obsessed with writing songs too.
You know, so it's like, when I did the both, when I did songs and soundscapes together, it's kind of just like a blip. Well, I feel like that was the folk implosion a lot of it too, you know? It is. But the way that I was doing that was like I literally had two portable tape recorders running into one tape recorder and playing them at the same time.
And I mean, it was really involved. Yeah. And it took a lot of effort and a lot of time, of course, I had nothing but time. I was coming home from school.
You know, that would have been probably my, the beginning of my senior year in high school when I was doing that. Well, I'm glad you didn't have a smartphone to distract you. And I'm kind of glad too. It's like, I didn't, I mean, I, I, like, look at that.
You just, I wasn't smoking weed or drinking. I was straight edge. I was like, I had a lot of energy. I was very, you know, I didn't really, I didn't do that stuff until later.
And when I did, the first, what was kind of cool, because when I did start smoking, we, you know, after I got out of high school, when I would go back and listen to my, these old recordings, it was really inspiring. And it kind of did actually inspire me to continue. And it made me, I mean, because I did, you know, it really kind of like, it helped me realize that I did have the spirit of creativity and that I really did have something of my own, you know, to share. And yeah.
Tiny tunes Tuesday terminates for today. Thank you for listening.