When I was a kid, one of the first records I had was a beaten up 45 of "The Peppermint Twist" by Joey Dee and the Starliters. I don't remember exactly how I got it, whether it was in my mom's pile of records, or if my friends took it out of a old broken Rock-Ola jukebox that was sitting in their basement (which was decidedly the source of my pre-teen exposure to "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" and Alice Cooper's "Elected")
This is going probably to sound anachronistic to you young 'uns, but even as late as the late seventies, we would dance to the Peppermint Twist in my parents basement, playing on an Electrohome fold-n-play-type turntable. This particular 45 was unique in that the song was quite long, so they divided the song into part one on the A-Side and part two on the B-side, with a fade down and fade up. I imagine now that the LP version is just one continuous track, but I was too young to ask such philosophical questions of my 45s. I just remember having to go over to the turntable, flip the record over and resume dancing. We did our best to entertain ourselves, particularly since the Atari 2600 had not been invited yet.
It's Christmas Time (", again") so I figured it was time to choose another song from Christmas Record for myspace since it's out there and _is_ a Christmas Record. Great Adventure is probably my favourite song from there, although it's probably its most tenuously Christmassy song. I love it most of all because Erin saved my ass.
I was over deadline for Christmas delivery of the EP, and this was the last track that needed to be done. I had written 90% of the song, but couldn't figure out how to end it, and I still needed to send the track to Jim Brantley for him to add guitar.
We went to Bob Evans for sunday morning breakfast, and I had to finish recording the track and upload it that night -- with Jim still to shred! -- so I was really stressing out and probably not the greatest breakfast company. Erin finally gave me a what up and I confessed I couldn't finish the song. I was desperate for some great dramatic gesture, a few steps away from whipping out some deus ex machina or non-sequitur to put the damn shaggy dog to sleep.
Erin looked at me and sighed and said, "End it the way the real story ended. We bring our groceries home, make sandwiches, watch some bad American TV and go to bed." She was so right that I broke into tears at the Bob Evans lunch counter. I wish she'd stop reminding me about that.
Great Adventure was nominated to the semi-finals of the Socan ECHO Songwriting Award this year and lost out to a hip-hop track by Abdominal, though the competition included Chad VanGaalen and the Besnard Lakes. So I guess that's something. Winners never quit, quitters never win, blah blah blah.
Some of you may know that Myspace has a 5MB cap on song uploads. If you encode an MP3 at the common bitrate (128k) you get 4, maybe 5 minutes of music. Since "Great Adventure" is 8+ minutes long, I tried uploading it and Myspace's server's kept rejecting it, even when I tried encoding it at a horribly low 96k. I couldn't bear the thought of it sounding so so crappy, so I figured I'd borrow a trick from Joey Dee and split it over two sides.
Merry Christmas (and/or whichever holiday you observe. I vote for Decemberween.)
dB
P.S.: I had fun doing the fades just like The Peppermint Twist, although Joey Dee lets out a wicked shout on the fade of his A-side that I wouldn't dare to recreate.