(Click here to visit Rotary Ten on Bandcamp.)
So a few years ago, my old friend and bandmate Greg gave me a box of cassettes to sort through. Some of these were “official” releases by our old band, Rotary Ten, and some were board recordings of live stuff…and radio interviews…and practice space recordings…and acoustic sketches… It was a heavy box.
I took the box home and found some software that would convert all that tape to AIF (uncompressed) format relatively quickly. I got to work, with the aim of surprising Greg and Scott (my brother, also in the band) with a ridiculously exhaustive “Rotary Ten Box Set” just in time for the holidays. I didn’t really take the time to mix or polish the stuff, just cut the audio files into tracks and grouped them chronologically by cassette release. The result was an 8-disc monstrosity, including three double-disc versions of cassettes that were initially, at their longest, 8 songs.
Like most creative folks, I find my early work to be pretty embarrassing. So needless to say, I had to take a years-long breather from listening to any of it again. But I remembered being intrigued by the arc of our progress, as songwriters and performers. And, surprisingly, I found myself more into the poorly-executed, super-early stuff from late high school / early college than I was into the post-grad stuff.
Before any of us were legal, while we still lived with our parents (at least during breaks), we just wanted to sound like R.E.M., and our romantic heartache had a sweet, sad tint to it. We attempted a jangly sound in spite of not having a guitarist, and we leaned on traditional song structure, with plenty of vocal harmonies and a fairly clean approach.
But things changed after college, and though there is no doubt we learned to sing and play better, there’s a sort of claustrophobic, imploding quality to the stuff we were writing. Grunge was in full swing that year (1993-94), and I think in general it was acceptable to be as loud and negative as possible. But while we mainly trucked in we-get-it angst, we got very good at it during that grueling upstate winter, and the live tapes from the period bear this out.
All of this is just one member’s opinion, of course. But slowly I’ve been compiling two succinct/distinct discs. One compiles the best of the early, sweeter Rotary Ten (with drummer Brian Schulenberg). The other compiles the best of the later, angrier Rotary Ten (with drummer Chris Solt). Stylistically, there is overlap in each direction (“I Am in a Coma” is not a happy song, and “Furious” has some of the jangle of the early stuff), but I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.
Plus, from a sonic standpoint, I’ve taken the opportunity to discover that Garageband CAN be used to “master” songs–just basic leveling out and EQ-ing, but the difference is, so far, amazing.
Still, however compiled, remixed, or re-contextualized, I can’t seriously imagine anyone who wasn’t there at the time being interested in this stuff. If you’re one of those people, cool. If not, you’ll have a chance to preview before you buy, as is the going practice here on the site. Stay tuned….
