This retrospective includes tracks from the very first Mighty Feeble release, the MF2 - Smarter Than The Door cassette, plus sulkfly's curated selections from his nascent three years as a songwriter - the boombox years. All proceeds of this release will be donated to NARAL Pro-Choice America to protect abortion access across the country, to ensure that women can control their own destinies by having access to affordable contraception, and to hold anti-choice politicians accountable and demand that lawmakers trust women.
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What you have here are the fifty-nine least embarrassing songs out of the hundreds recorded by a prolific teenager finishing high school, starting college, with obviously too much free time on his hands. These were originally self-released on the cassettes “Days To Come,” “Mouthpiece,” “Empty It Is,” “Smarter Than The Door,” and “Missing Songs and Such," which were given away or sold for a couple bucks at a performance.
Frankly, I didn’t really feel that these tunes needed to be dug up again; that it would be fine for them to only exist in shoe boxes at the back of old friends’ closets, or in random junk bins at thrift stores, or decomposing in a landfill somewhere. But then my dear friend Mike reminded me how much some of this old music meant to him, and dared me to come up with an archival release for the recently-resurrected Mighty Feeble label. Needless to say, I gave in.
My influences at the time will be obvious. Guided By Voices, Sebadoh/Sentridoh, Wire, Minutemen, Residents. . . what I learned from these artists was that short songs were better than long ones, that it was okay to play a few wrong notes, that sound quality was not important, and being mysterious was better than being straightforward.
I always paid more attention to the musical elements, the guitar parts, the chords and the melodies, than I did to the lyrics, which I would frequently improvise on the spot, based on mundane things such as standing around waiting for the dorm’s elevator to take me up to the fifth floor, perhaps after buying a cinnamon roll from an undependable vending machine, pining for crushes at faraway colleges, how the dining halls were closed on Sunday nights, and having to go into campus town to have dinner alone, being particularly fond of a Chinese place on Welch Avenue where I would always order the “Hot Braised Chicken,” lemonade on the back porch in Ottumwa, the residence hall rules regarding Christmas trees, a hole in the knee of my favorite pants, the thin walls and loud music of neighbors, the mortality rates of A-Team members, etc. . .
The summer after the last of these songs was recorded– I don’t actually remember which song was the last, but I do know which was the very first, and that is track 20, “Sybilline,” named for a tall redhead two years older than me; I can still remember the absolute rush of realizing I could use two boomboxes to make a multi-track recording all by myself– but anyway, that summer for some reason Mike Hoff lent me his Tascam Porta07 4-track tape recorder, and the boomboxes ended up in other rooms of the house, probably tuned only to talk radio for the rest of their lives.
That same summer, 1995, I met Mark Morris, who somehow already had one of my tapes, and would soon become a friend, inspiration, mentor, and muse for much of the music I'd make in the future. This collection is dedicated to him.
For the 4-track era and beyond, visit
grgptrsn.bandcamp.com.
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Sulkfly’s How-To Boombox Recording Guide:
You’ll need two boomboxes and two blank tapes, preferably chrome type II.
Place tape #1 into boombox #1, which should have the nicer built-in microphone (this might be the one you borrowed from your brother and never gave back).
Press the play and record buttons simultaneously, count to four, and play a song. Don’t get too fancy, though– save that for the next layer. Press stop when you’re done. Hopefully you haven’t made too many noticeable mistakes. And hopefully you didn’t get interrupted by the phone ringing (see track 54).
Put tape #1 into boombox #2, and put tape #2 into boombox #1. Now you’ll be playing along with, or singing over, the part you recorded earlier, so make sure you arrange the speakers of boombox #2 such that there’s a nice balance between your guitar playing of the past and your guitar playing of the present. You won’t be able to adjust this later.
Theoretically, you can repeat this process and add as many parts as you want, but the tape hiss really starts to build up by the third layer, so try to keep your songs simple. (And maybe thirty years later, you’ll decide that the original layer alone works the best and so tape #1 was really all you ever needed.)
Once you have a bunch of finished songs, you can determine the best sequence and copy them all one by one onto tape #3, which you will dub over and over again to make copies for your friends, who will treasure them for years to come.
