Saturday 8 September 2012

SOB - Demo


Glenn Bickham got in touch with in August about a few tapes he dug out of his basement, and among them was this little beauty. This stands as THE best re-use of a tape that we've ever seen. A Canadian Tire Vic-20 tape? Heck, yes!

That said, the great idea doesn't mean that the tape has held up well over the years (we put this tape at 1993 or 1994). But the low quality tape and questionable housing mechanism gave the CCPS engineers nothing but grief when we went to play it, it was full of wow and flutter and started emitting the most amazing mechanical squealing. So, we turned to a hint we read on the interweb and threw the tape in the CCPS beer fridge overnight. And, lo and behold, it worked! Thanks to the magic of thermodynamics (or something? we're not big on physics), we managed to get this to play, worry-free.

Oh, yeah - the music. SOB was an early incarnation of Wrong Floor, and this was recorded in their basement.

So, file this formerly squeaky tape under all ages punk.

2 comments:

Glenn said...

While I realize the recording is terrible, that is what makes it charming to me. A lot like Minor Threat's early work, raw with a real basement sound. These are the names I have given to these on my own digital recordings. Only Track One and Track Four are confirmed by later releases.

Track One - Bun in the Oven
Track Two - Unknown
Track Three - No Way Out
Track Four - Part of the Pie
Track Five - The Cabin

The thing that stands out most to me on this is just how good Darren Llyod was (and likely is) on the drums. Love the jazz drumming influence he brought to the table.

Thanks for the tunes, kids. Still loving them today!

Rob Floor said...

This tape was taken from the Shepard landfill in a box of unwanted cassettes. Tracks were recorded with a 10 dollar ghetto blaster. This was the first demo we handed out to clubs in an attempt to get gigs. Amazing as it is, it worked.