I’m still going through my songs made over the past few months, sorting them into albums, as if they’re a playlist on a radio show.
I’m planning to show some of those this morning, as I did yesterday, so I haven’t spent any time hunting up videos for the Bardo bus tour.
I think you will appreciate the songs I’ve managed to put together. I write very quickly, at a speed usually reserved for the highest-priced secretary, for which I have the U.S. Army to thank for making fast typing a requisite in the Agency, where I worked day and night, typing, typing and more typing.
So like I told my trick chief, it’s really fun to compose songs, even though the band is not live these days, and I’m using my skills acquired at the A&R departments of RCA, Columbia and Capitol Records back in the day.
What did I do for my money? I picked out hits for singers to introduce. The pay was lousy, but I made up for it by bringing my cameras with me to the studio and selling the photos to Chuck Laufer at Tiger Beat, or publishing them in the rag I was editing at the time, “Mod Teen”.
One thing you will definitely notice as we listen to these tunes is that they don’t all sound the same.
In the typical band, the songs will all sound pretty much the same. It takes a serious amount of orchestration to produce an arrangement for a song, and generally that doesn’t happen outside a studio or a concert with a full orchestra behind the band, like Deep Purple did so successfully.
If we were back in those days, I could definitely sell some of my songs, particularly “Bought and Sold” and “Alone in a Crowd” and “Lady Gray Day”.
Well, maybe one of you can get these songs in front of some singers. In the meantime, I’ll play them now and then, and you will soon be able to download them, I am assured.
The new songbook will take a while, because it’s me that has to do it, and I’m doing other things as well, so don’t be looking for the songbook anytime this week.
Damn, it’s almost Christm… I mean, Xmas. Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby