Keith Handy 1.999

So you want to make an album? (part 11)

Installment 11: A whiter shade of perfect

I’ve now certainly scared most of you away from the very thought of making your own album. Congratulations on coming to your senses, and I look forward to hearing about your success in real estate, insurance, law, medicine, and any other path that involves wearing a tie and using a lot of spreadsheets.

“His greatest reward was… what? ‘More music’?? If I wanted ‘more music’ I’d go to the frickin’ record store. Beam me up, Scotty.”

For the few remaining noble nutcases among you who are either incurably determined, or just plain stuck to the proverbial windshield (”huh? ‘proverbial windshield’?”), I’ll do my best to scoop some useful generalities out of this otherwise self-indulgent tale.

Most independent recording artists are really just frustrated architects. We logically assume that we can’t decorate the windows before erecting the scaffolding, and certainly can’t do that until we blueprint the whole dealy. While it’s always better to “get off to a good start”, it takes some experience to know what a good start actually is. We have a rather one-dimensional concept of quality, with “crap” at one end and “perfection” at the other. When we finally acquire the means to do something “perfect”, we intuitively sense that there’s something wrong with it, and then we back off and try to somehow make it less perfect, and can’t explain why.

I think some people miss out on a valuable learning experience by never striving for perfection in the first place; I think you grow more as an artist when you go through this stage, and you will go through it in at least some aspects of your work. So let’s examine the idea of “perfection”, and get to know this color on our pallette, so we can decide for ourselves how, where, when, and to what extent to use it.

First, what is perfection in recorded music? Sure, music is an art, and it’s subjective; but when we put it down on tape (or bits, nowadays), we’re shooting for something beyond what we can crank out at a typical bar gig.

Pitch

The reason we hear certain combinations of pitch as harmonious, some as dissonant (creating tension that can “lead” to something), and some as downright pathetic, has to do with math and ratios. You can do some searching to learn more out more about this, but here is a key (no pun intended) thing to keep in mind: the math that we use to define “in tune” today is not the same math that caused those intervals to sound harmonious in the first place. Our modern system of tuning is a compromise. As such, when an exceptionally talented vocal group sings a chord by ear, the pitches will not be exactly the same as if you played that chord on a perfectly tuned piano; some of the notes will be “cheated” a hair to bring the pitches closer to a true ratio, making them actually more harmonious.

(So why don’t we ditch the compromise and go back to the old way of tuning? Because then we would lose our freedom to explore all those different keys. One key would sound great, and the rest would sound like crap.)

Rhythm

Rhythm also relies on simple-ratio math: dividing a measure into a certain number of beats, then dividing each beat into two, three, four, or more parts, leaving some spots empty, and filling other spots in. When drum machines became popular, something strange happened: drummers started playing like drum machines. The more exact these divisions were, the better. So why is it that when we listen to pre-machine drumming, we get the urge to “air drum” along, yet when we hear mid-to-late 80s electronic beats we tend to just hear the rhythm without feeling it?

Fidelity

The original objective of recording — “to make record of” — was to preserve sound. So naturally, the more accurately you can re-create the original sound when you play it back, the better — from a purely recording standpoint, in the literal sense of the word. This would be cut and dried, except that everyone has a different-sounding set of speakers, in a wide range of large, small, echoey or quiet environments, and sets his/her EQ (bass/mid/treble) differently. So even if you could achieve perfect fidelity, it would be worthless for all but one playback system.

Balance

Unlike the previous three attributes, the relative levels of sounds in a mix can not be evaluated in any cold, clinical objective way. They can be measured — two sounds can be compared to one another in decibels — but there’s no scientific reason why a 3 dB difference would be better or worse than a 15 dB difference; there’s no quantifiable target to aim for. It is, however, something that a neurotic perfectionist can lose nights of sleep over, because this is the presentation of your music, and this is where you make an artistic decision about what falls in the foreground, what falls in the background, and what holds the bottom and top together. Balance is almost visual, the art of seeing the sound composition in your mind’s eye… and it is deceptive. Your ability to “see” this composition becomes distorted as you repeatedly listen to a song, because your brain forms a sort of “after-image” as it adjusts to what you’re hearing.

Why do we pursue perfection?

For a combination of right reasons and wrong reasons. We want our work to be good. We want it to be powerful, to move people, to transcend, to “come to life”, and to entice our audience into repeated listenings. These are all good reasons. On the other hand, we may be focused on the negative, trying to avoid mistakes, avoid out-of-tune notes, and avoid sloppy rhythms, in order to hopefully avoid criticism or rejection. When we operate from a mindset of avoidance, we become creatively constricted, and tend to forget why we’re making music in the first place.

So how do we reconcile with all this?

Simple. Just decree that Keith Handy is your lord and master, and send him $100.00 and a nice handwritten note saying “you are the best”.

Apart from that, the main thing is that this one-dimensional continuum, with crappy on one end and perfect on the other, is a gross oversimplification. I wouldn’t suggest trying to be “less than perfect” so much as re-examining your idea of what “perfect” actually means. Is exactly equal spacing between all the notes perfection? Maybe. In what way though? In what way do you really want your music to be perfect? Hopefully in the sense of the feeling you express through it. Rhythm has a “feel”. When you listen back to that rhythm, how does it “feel” to you?

Nuance is not random; nuance is expression. So when you play the notes a hair early, a hair late, a hair sharp or a hair flat, just be sure that’s what you mean. There will be times when you want rhythms that are metronomical and exact. Great! Use sequencers in those cases. When you need to record a great human performance, be the performance. Let it flow through you, and if the red “record” light is making you self-conscious, do a few more takes until you finally get swept up into the music and forget it’s even on.

When it comes to mixing, you home project folks have a huge advantage against the aural fatigue boogeyman. You can save the mix you’re working on, and come back to it with fresh ears… not just once or twice, but as many times as you need. This has been recommended a zillion times elsewhere, but in short: listen to your mix in the car, on your parents’ stereo, on your friends’ stereo, in your friends’ car, and so on. Listen to it immediately after listening to one of your favorite songs by another artist on the same system. Thought the bass guitar sounded a little quiet? Go home and bump it up, but not by too much; just 2 or 3 dB. Rinse, lather, repeat. Pay particular attention to what you notice the first time you hear it after getting away from it, from the instant the song starts.

Last but not least: hang in there. All is good. The statue is already in the marble. Just chip everything else away.

Next: ??

So you want to make an album? (part 10)

Installment 10: The whirlpool

Lately, one of my favorite metaphors for MAKING THINGS HAPPEN is that of a whirlpool. As a kid with your friends, you’ve probably walked around in the same direction in a circular swimming pool until the water built up enough momentum that it actually pulled you along. The first time around, the overwhelming inertia of the water is against you, and you have to fight it just to get around at all. With each consecutive lap, though, the water fights you less, and gradually aligns with your original idea. Before long, it becomes harder to stop than to keep going.

In retrospect, making Open the Window was just my first lap around that pool.

During those first six months of living in East Rochester with Jeff, between the Mind Mogging and the Renaissance Society-ing, I dusted off my incomplete cassette demo of my rock opera, Through Forbidden Black Doors (no, I haven’t done any other albums about ways to get in and out of buildings), and wrote some new material for it. In particular, I totally revamped what would have been “side 3″ of a four-side record, and in fact wrote what I think are a couple of the best songs on the whole thing, Scratched Off/Called Off and Do You Remember?.

To backtrack a bit, since I’ve sort of glossed over it in this series — I’d gotten my feet wet in actual home multitracking while recording TFBD demo #1, initially using borrowed 4-track portastudios (before finally getting my own) and borrowed drum machines. I had barely put down anything other than drum machine and synthesizer, meaning, no, not even any vocals. And though a few songs sound surprisingly close to their later versions, I would be lying if I told you that my cassette of this demo, for the most part, sounds like anything but total crap. I sent it to a few local theater people with photocopied sheet music for the vocals, thinking they’d be able to listen to the cassette, read along, and magically hear everything else that was in my head. No, of course I didn’t hear back from any of them.

I had been trying to push the idea of a TFBD stage show on the Society, which was essentially just a circle of friends, and made some headway actually getting people excited about it. I whipped up 4-track demos of the newer songs, and “completed” my old demo with a one-take vocal run-through, singing all the parts myself, both male and female, in our East Rochester basement — which had Jeff fearing that our neighbors would soon be calling 911.

A few of us had been talking about ideas for stage direction and scenery. We’d gone around and introduced ourselves to various organizations in the area, including Arts for Greater Rochester, and we had a rehearsal or two on a couple of the songs… and then, close to the end of our six month lease, there was a quick falling out between Jeff and me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know exactly what caused it; I only know that I just sort of clammed up, and didn’t try to talk through anything or get the issues out into the air. Since we were the core of the Society, the Society in effect ceased to be. I think from my end, it had been an attempt to reap the benefits of being in a band while stubbornly refusing to be in a band.

A few hundred dollars in the hole (which seemed like a lot then), in need of a new vehicle and a place to live, and determined as hell to finally do a run of Open the Window, I signed up for a six-week lab rat stint at a hospital in Buffalo, letting them pay me quite a chunk of money to take a very small dose of experimental medicine. (This personal factoid freaks some people out, but it’s a controlled situation which is really more un-glamorous than unsafe.) To fill all the long intervals between my blood draws and vital checks, I’d brought along several musical toys, including my drum machine, and began programming rhythms for the songs on my follow-up “sister album”.

I didn’t have to try hard to make Unfinished Business an album; I almost thought of it as a bit of a time killer while trying to figure out what to do next with the rock opera. Most of the material was stuff that had fallen by the wayside from my high school songwriting spurt. The songs had an angrier edge, and unlike the harder-edged bits from Open the Window, didn’t try to justify their existence in some lofty context about healing or learning. This was just an unapologetic tantrum, and I found myself enjoying it.

Open the Window itself had an okay send-off for what it was. It didn’t make me rich or famous, but what I heard from people was generally that they were very impressed. I think there are some people who I haven’t seen in such a long time that, to this day, Open the Window is what they associate me with. I’m proud that I was so ambitious with it. Since then, I’ve officially declared the album “defunct” and “obsolete”, but I’ve remixed, recycled, and improved on nearly every song. Not only was it not a waste of time as far as the individual songs went, but it had the incredible effect of paving the way for all the more spontaneous, adventurous, and inspired recording that I would do next, and continue to do today.

When famous producers didn’t knock down the door of my cockroach-infested studio apartment, when the only interest small “labels” showed was in asking me to send them money, when the people who appreciated it most were the same people I already didn’t feel like I had to “prove” anything to — I had moments where I felt like it all might have been a failure. As time went on, though, I came to understand that the greatest* reward for my music would be more music.

By that criterion, Open the Window was a phenomenal success.

Next: Nope, I ain’t done writin’ this, not by a long shot. :)

*greatest “selfish” reward, at least. There may be an even greater reward in inspiring and encouraging other musicians and creative people in general, but my soul hasn’t fully advanced to that level of awareness yet. ;)

So you want to make an album? (part 9)

Installment 9: Don’t worry that it’s not good enough (yeah, right).

I tried to record my vocals using the same setup I used to record everything else: plugging a microphone into the cassette portastudio that I was only using as a mixer, and singing along to one DAT tape while recording the mix to the other DAT tape. I had a digital reverb, and I figured as long as I was careful setting the level, and did a decent performance, everything would be okay.

This is when I started to learn how difficult it was, at least with my voice, which I was still very self-conscious of and hadn’t fallen in love with yet, to get a vocal to “sit in a mix”. By that I mean “sound like it’s part of everything”, and not some voice that isn’t supposed to be there, superimposed over the top of canned, pre-existing music, like half-assed karaoke.

Even if I was careful, the level was still all over the place. Certain syllables would “spike” out over the top of the music while others would be hard to hear over the backing music. I wasn’t prepared to spend yet another few hundred dollars on a decent rack-mount type studio-quality compressor, so I looked into cheaper options: I found a compressor guitar pedal for only about $40 or $50 and, against the advice of the sales clerk, brought it home, optimistic that I could wring some usefulness out of it. It didn’t seem to do much, though, apart from adding noise. To be quite honest I doubt it would even have worked particularly well for guitars.

All this — combined with the fact that, in general, I really wanted much more power to mix and fuss with my vocals after singing them, when my ears would be free — led me to a sobering admission: I could get by, struggling with my insanity-inducing ping pong setup, up to a point… but that point had been reached and passed.

Mike Pinto had been excitedly telling me about the Fostex R8 he’d just purchased, which recorded eight tracks to quarter-inch tape at 15 ips, had noise reduction, and just plain looked cool. I was welcome to spend a few evenings using it in his converted basement. He’d actually built a little “studio area”, walled off from a separate control room, with a window in the middle — though it was far from soundproof. I could, if I wanted, copy what I had so far to two tracks on the R8 and use the six remaining tracks to freely play around with vocals (and a few other final-hour acoustic things).

Of course, then my project would no longer be “digital”. I worried about the pristine clarity I might lose. I had to think long and hard about this potential sacrifice, until the words of wisdom had fully taken shape in my quiet center: “Fuck digital.”

Listening back to the stereo backing tracks that I’d just transferred from my poor little DAT tapes to the first two tracks on my fresh new reels sitting on Mike’s R8, I was surprised. It didn’t sound horrible at all; in fact, it sounded quite good. There was hope.

I let Mike play engineer/co-producer, call out suggestions, and run the tape machine for most of my vocal sessions (it was, after all, his house and his equipment), but it felt kind of silly and unnecessary going back and forth between the two little rooms. I think it also felt a little strange letting him into the rather personal world in my lyrics, but I took it as a compliment when he told me the songs were getting stuck in his head. Being in someone else’s home also brought with it some of the time constraint factor normally associated with “real” studios; although money wasn’t going down the drain, I was self-conscious and didn’t want to impose too much, so I didn’t do more than two or three takes of anything.

Hyper-concerned about my inability to sing perfectly in tune, I devised a tedious poor-man’s method of pitch fixing: I brought home special “practice mixes” on a cassette, with all the music in the left and all the vocals in the right, and experimented with riding a pitch shifting effect (on a rack unit I’d also borrowed from Mike) on the voice. I painstakingly wrote down the amount of adjustment that sounded best to me for every word and syllable, then took the rack unit back to his studio and ran the original vocal tracks through that effect, while “playing” the knob, to an empty track. The pitch shifting gave the voice an unnatural “metallic” quality that I thought was cool at first, but eventually regretted, and most of the original, unprocessed vocal tracks have long since been erased over.

Although I did manage to mix down all the songs in Mike’s basement (mixed back to DAT tapes, of course), about a year passed before I was able to have a batch of professional-looking cassettes run off for the people. (I’m not sure what my exact rationale was for doing cassettes instead of CDs; maybe I thought CD players were still not ubiquitous enough.)

A lot happened in that year, most notably that I moved to Rochester with Jeff to be closer to the other musicians we were hanging out with, and try to get a strange organization we called “The Renaissance Society” off the ground. We also had a few false starts with a experimental band we called “Mind Mogger” — mostly strange, dark and dissonant improvisation, which we referred to as “mogging”.

Despite my re-involvement with Jeff, he was kept separate from Open the Window, and I sensed he generally wasn’t interested in what I was doing on my own. I was embarrased to still be toying with what I’d already mixed, trying to EQ it just right and create perfect crossfades between the songs (which would be so easy today).

Next: Letting go of the baby.

So you want to make an album? (part 8)

Installment 8: Digital ping pong

We take digital recording for granted today, but in 1990 it was still fairly new and unaffordable. Nonetheless, I wanted to be cutting edge. I wanted the “wow” factor. Although digital multitracking was out of the question, consumer DAT (digital audio tape) recorders — which merely recorded and played back in stereo, using small tapes similar to what some camcorders use now — were just starting to dip into the three-digit price range. In a flash of inspiration that was as regrettable as it was brilliant, I reasoned that with all of my cassette ping-ponging experience, I could certainly employ a similar approach using two DAT recorders. Then I could boast that my album had been recorded digitally.

I had to get two DAT machines right away so I could get to work, even if I had to “beg, borrow or steal” to get the money. Well, I didn’t quite steal, but having already received a few of those credit card offers banks love to tempt college kids with, I had a feeling more such offers would be in the mail soon. In fact, I think one arrived within a day or two of my epiphany. My parents had already warned me against the trappings of easy credit, so I did the smart thing: I rented a post office box, so they would never see my bills.

When I found that I wasn’t coming up with a satisfactory way to create a percussive foundation for the songs, an offer came in for another card — presto, instant drum machine. Somehow my parents didn’t think to ask how all this electronic stuff was being financed. Personally, my conscience was less troubled by the additional debt than by the scandalous fact that I was using a drum machine at all.

As a mixer — just to mix whatever new part I was overdubbing with whatever was already on tape, and record the output of that to the other DAT machine — I used the inputs and outputs of a cheap 4-track cassette portastudio. So, yes, my pristine digital sound was repeatedly going through a rather cheap device, but surprisingly it didn’t impact the sound much.

What made DAT tapes a pain, more than anything, was dropouts. Unlike analog tape, where you might hear the sound get a bit muffled for a moment where some of the iron oxide has worn off the tape, DAT players stuck zeros between good samples wherever it couldn’t read the data, making an obnoxious digital “zipper-like” ripping sound. All it took to cause a dropout on a DAT tape was to leave the tape in pause for a few seconds. For this reason, I bought a lot of tapes and avoided re-using them.

It’s often the people you meet in the least likely settings that make the biggest contribution. I had already made substantial headway on several songs by the time Mike Pinto, a customer at my part time workplace — I think he generally went there to get cigarettes, but I can’t remember for sure — decided to get into a conversation with me about recording music. I think he was interested in using one of my DAT recorders to mix his project down to (which I think he and his friend Aaron had been recording to a borrowed 1/2″ 8- or 16-track machine, I forget the specifics), and in exchange he would hook me up with a version of Cakewalk that ran on DOS — just a MIDI sequencer, no audio capability back then — which he dutifully photocopied the manual for, page by page.

What Cakewalk looked like on a monochrome monitor.

Mike had only been using it for drum parts on his project, and had it slaved to a sync track on the tape machine, so that it would automatically be in sync with his overdubs, even if the tape was started in the middle of the song. (I would have just recorded the drum machine straight to the tape, unless they really thought they were going to change the drum part later on.) At home, I installed it on my father’s prehistoric IBM compatible “Zenith Data Systems” computer, and only needed to buy a relatively inexpensive MIDI card to hook it up to my synthesizers and drum machine. It actually worked, believe it or not. I used that computer, with that version of Cakewalk, for nearly a decade.

As I was now able to quantize (auto-correct timing of notes), modify, and perfect all of my keyboard parts before committing them to tape, I became less and less of a keyboardist and more of a “part composer”. And this didn’t bother me at all. Meanwhile, since I had to play my own guitar parts, initially with borrowed guitars (I think I used Mike’s Stratocaster — or something resembling a Strat — for all the guitar parts on Open the Window; thanks again, Mike), this is pretty much when I started to become a guitarist.

I tried to improvise a little, but on listening back to an improvised solo, I could tell I wasn’t ready. Especially since the nature of my ping-pong setup didn’t allow me to record over (”punch in“) parts of my performance; I had to do the whole thing right in one continuous take, or not do it at all.

In some cases, the solution was to fake the guitars. A heavily-distorted guitar can be reasonably faked by running a keyboard through distortion. Sometimes to simulate a fast or otherwise difficult guitar part, I would sequence it on Cakewalk, and painstakingly edit the sequence to create vibrato, pitch bends, and whammy bar dives. For one “solo” in particular, I fed the playback through a wah-wah pedal in addition to distortion, and just stood there rocking the pedal back and forth with my foot while the Zenith did all the fancy fretwork for me.

I did do a healthy amount of actual guitar playing, though. I distinctly remember spending hours sitting through the whole length of a song over and over just to put down an overdub that might only last twenty seconds. If one note sounded “off” to me, I’d run the whole song again. I’d hunch over the guitar, in an extreme state of concentration, and just stare closely at the exact frets my fingers needed to be on. One time I was having trouble with accidentally hitting open strings while playing a lead part, so I stuck a piece of cloth under the strings near the headstock to keep the open strings muted.

Things were going slowly and tediously, but generally I was able to achieve results that I was satisfied with, until I came to an impasse: the vocals.

Next: Mr. Pinto saves the day, again.

So you want to make an album? (part 7)

Installment 7: They haven’t said much about “making an album” yet. When do you suppose they’ll get to that?

To be completely objective about it, there wasn’t one particularly traumatic event in my life in the period of time from 1990-91. Even the death of a close relative was more about guilt and religious issues for me than “loss”. Internally, though, I was tense, desperate, manic, and teetering on the edge of a breakdown. I felt very isolated from everyone around me, as if the more important my message was, the more foreign of a language it was being translated into in mid-air. The gross oversimplification I’ll permit myself is that I was essentially “asking” everybody the same “question”, worded in widely varied (and often non-questionlike) ways, and not getting a real answer anywhere. It didn’t matter whether the context was religion, sprituality, heaven & hell — career, working, money — friends, love, girls, loneliness — ethics, morals — I was now a blank (albeit very guarded) sheet of paper, and nobody knew what to write on me.

Some thought they knew, and tried. Besides the obvious flashback of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, there were the more subtly dismissive suggestions that if I just went out and did the things other people do, I’d be fine. It was probably my own insecurity that tacked “you have nothing unique to offer the world” onto that. And in all fairness, I doubt I was asking the question in a clear way.

So what question am I talking about? Let me put it this way: If there had been a book called How To Be a Genuine Artist on Spaceship Earth and Still Be Functional — that was the book I needed. Please, somebody, write this book. It would be useful to me even today.

Lacking such an ideal guide, I settled for meeting a few times with a counselor and reading a few new agey self-help books about guilt and spirituality. These were the least awful of resources available in my suburban bubble, and they at least helped me to begin to re-establish my sense of identity in a positive way.

Maybe at some point I’ll be able to describe that odd gap of time in a linear way, but linearity is probably not all that important. As I’ve said, most of what was happening to me was internal, but I can list some of the external influences on me. Rather than calling them “positive” and “negative”, I’ll call them “disorienting” and “re-orienting”, because they all played an ultimately positive role in shaping my adult self.

Disorienting:

• Death of a religious relative, followed by a very clear “message” one year later.
• Infatuation with an immature girl in an art class. At the time, this drowned out everything else, but only because this was the most aesthetically pleasing of my issues and therefore kept on top of the stack. (It helped distract me from a non-issue, which was that I felt out of place in a visual art-related class — a clear indication that I was insecure in my identity.)
• The loss of contact with friends, particularly those I’d been playing in bands with. Attempts to coordinate even short-term projects (the basis for friendships, of course) seemed doomed from the get-go.
• The feeling that Christianity was following me around and trying to convert me. Never mind that I could have more quickly skipped past that channel on the telly. Also, the possibility that rock music might be “evil”. I’ve since come to believe that labeling such a wonderful thing as “evil” is about as evil as you can get.
• Repeated watching and re-watching of a TV dramatization of Brian Wilson’s breakdown. I knew little about the Beach Boys prior to this.
• Poor communication (both ways) with my family about important stuff such as life purpose.
• Anxiety and panic attacks in general.

Re-orienting:

• Counseling sessions and self-help books.
• Brent Bambury’s “Brave New Waves” radio show (I could pick up a Toronto station on an old boom box left behind by the construction workers, but not on anything else) and the amazing variety of then-obscure music I was collecting as I taped all the shows.
• Movies that inspired me at the time, such as The Fisher King.
• A rebirth of my songwriting muse, first with Lullabye For a Fallen Angel — and then even more so with If You Were Mine — both which I can be critical of now, but in the context of that time were an explosion of musical and personal self-assertion.
• A chance conversation with Mike Pinto, a customer at the Convenient Mart where I rang folks up part time. Mike was recording an album in his basement. He liked to talk about astral projection, and his hero was Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad (the musician, not the dog).
• Being asked by Jeff, who had also left school, quit his band, and moved back in with his mother, to join a just-for-the-money type cover band, similar to Up Front, with a horn section and whatnot. I learned later that at least one other member was initially resistant to Jeff bringing me in, because he had a perception of me as a “loose cannon” — his exact words — from what little he knew of me at Fredonia.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I wrote up a rudimentary track list for Keith Handy: Open the Window. (Cue scene of Python-faced fish in tank suddenly becoming alert and interested.) I wasn’t initially going to include the newer songs, but then I realized if I was going to be “vital” I had no choice but to include them, and even kind of center the theme of the album around them.

Next: offbeat technological solutions, and how college dropouts pay for stuff.

So you want to make an album? (part 6)

Installment 6 (to the tune of “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie): Goin’ solo, goin’ solo, goin’ solo, solo for good

By the winter of 1990, Episodes had come infuriatingly close to finishing album #1. We had final mixes of five songs, and rough mixes of two others. Altogether, there were three songs by myself, one song co-written between myself and guitarist Garrett Lechowski, and three songs by the other guitarist, Scott Helfrich. The aborted album never had a title — not even a working title. We never had any idea what would have been on the cover.

The disintegration of a band is an emotional event, and everyone will remember it differently, so this is only my take. Oblivious that anything was amiss, I received a phone call from drummer Thom Delooze, who explained that he was giving us a courtesy/warning call to let us know he was leaving the band and moving to Boston for a (non-musical) job offer. The call started out politely enough, but devolved into an ugly argument about money, and by the end of the call he was threatening to go out of his way to saddle the rest of us with a negative reputation and make it “impossible” for us to get gigs.

More puzzled than concerned, Scott, Garrett, and I gave their friend Chris Michaels a crash course on Thom’s drum parts to get us through our final gig at Fredonia. He did a fine job, but was not interested in joining as a member, partly because he sensed that there was negative energy between the three of us. I’ll admit that the day before the gig, Scott and I were having a rather flippant (and I thought therapeutic) conversation within earshot of Chris, and apparently aimed some of what we said at Garrett — who, by the way, is a fantastic person, and whatever I said about him, I know I didn’t mean in a truly spiteful way. In any case, words were relayed, wounds were opened, and things were taken hard. Before long, Garrett announced that he was done with Episodes, and the few attempts Scott and I made to regroup with a new bass player (Scott and Garrett had previously alternated handling bass duties) left me cold and unenthused. So, that was the end of Episodes.

Since the studio engineer was a friend of Thom’s, it didn’t occur to us that we might be able to salvage the sessions. As a result, other than cassette-quality copies, nothing remains. Judging from the cassettes, though, little was lost. Certainly not any spontaneity or “magic”. I also never thought Scott’s songs and my songs had any kind of yin/yang relationship, or would have benefitted in any way from residing on the same album together.

Bandless for the first time in years, I placed an ad in the Buffalo newspaper looking for creative musicians. I wanted it to be open-ended, so I didn’t specify what instruments or what kind of music. In mix tape fashion, I tossed together a quick demo cassette, alternating between my Episodes tracks and various home demos, and drove my ‘81 Monte Carlo all over the general Buffalo area to meet everyone on my list of responders. It was the musical equivalent of speed dating, and every bit the absolute disaster you would expect it to be. If I was willing to mentally re-visit all the freaks, hacks, and dabblers I encountered on that adventure, it could spawn an uncomfortably hilarious and horrifying side-series all on its own. Strangely enough, the image that sticks out most in my memory is of a clean-cut, ordinary-looking guy in a clean, nice house. He put my cassette in his boom box and played it at such a low level that we could barely hear it — forcing me into the awkward position of having to ask his permission to turn it up. He sat silently and expressionlessly throughout. At the end, when I asked if it was something he was interested in, he said “sure” in a rather polite and automatic way. As soon as I returned to my car, a line went through his name.

The idea of not being in a band at all was terrifying, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s probably one of the top five factors leading to my onset of anxiety attacks in the summer of 1990. I won’t begin to list all the ways I avoided facing up to it, but eventually we have to meet ourselves. Without the “of band X” tag.

I know I was sorting out a lot of heavy stuff over the next few years, and it’s still hard trying to pin it all down, frame it neatly, and bridge the gap between Episodes and Open the Window with something readable. I’m thinking as hard as I can right now, and I can’t remember deciding to do an album as Keith Handy. It’s like I blacked out while a part of me went into a deep freeze, and the only way I can remember it is by re-experiencing something painful…