Debris Slider
10-30-2004, 05:15 AM
With the rerelease of CRCR we now know a few more WZ songs existed prior to the WZ recording sessions. This got me thinking: how many/which WZ songs are leftovers (maybe not leftovers, more like early sketches) from the extremely productive 92-93 years?
I've always wondered if the WZ songs that showed up during the CRCR tour were just not recorded, or written in the four or five months between the recording session and the tour. So I took a look though www.wonderllama.com's collection of 92-94 bootlegs and together with the CRCR rerelease put together a timeline of first known appearances. Keep in mind these are relative dates; the CRCR tour covered a lot of ground (40 shows in 40 days during one leg) and bootlegging was sporadic, but the setlist remained relatively consistent
Early 93 with Gary Young:
Flux=Rad (Louder Than You Think)
5/10/93 Sacramento
Grounded
Motion Suggests (ms. wonderllama has a question mark next to this, but I'll throw it in)
Aug-Sept 93 Random Falls NY w/Mark Venezia
Kennel District
Pueblo
2/26/94 BBC Session
Brink of the Clouds
Pueblo (first public performance)
Easily Fooled
3/02/94 VPRO Session
Fight This Generation
3/08/94 Berlin
Black Out
Brinx Job
3/28/94 Northampton
I Love Perth
4/06/94 Chapel Hill
Best Friend's Arm
It seems the first leg of the tour ended in May, as there are only two recorded shows after this, a festival and a radio session in June and July respectively. After a few shows along the Pacific Rim they head back to America for a short fall tour, concluding a few weeks before the WZ sessions took place.
8/08/94 Tokyo
Half a Canyon
Kennel District (first performance)
9/24/04 Lawrence, KS
AT&T
10/17/94 Boston
We Dance
Grave Architecture
The WZ recording sessions were from Nov. 14-24 at Easley Recording Studios in Nashville with Doug Easley - and "Feb. 10-14" at Random Falls with Mark Venezia. The mixing sessions were Dec 2-5 and Jan 2-5 by Bryce Goggin. But, there's no indication of year on the Random Falls sessions. Wowee Zowee was released on April 11th 95; February is pretty late to still be working on the album, although still a plausible time - it'd have to be sent to the presses and such almost immediately though. The album is mixed pretty consistently, there are no songs that sound dramatically different, so either the mixing is plain enough not to seem distinctive, the February sessions were simple overdubs stealthily inserted, Goggin was called in for last minute mixes and simply uncredited, or the February sessions were actually recorded in 94 and would likely consist of the batch of songs played on the first leg of the tour. Or this is bullshit along the lines of Here being recorded at "South Makepeace Studios" in Boston.
The back sleeve of the Rattled by the Rush single lists the songs as being "made to exist" and is copyrighted in 95, though I don't think that refers to the recording date, as the single was released before the album, on 3/30/95. There's no recording information on Father to a Sister of Thought, but it was released on 6/27/95. I can't detect any real sonic differences in these songs, either, but even if they were recorded in different places any professional engineer/mixer should be able to hide that. I don't know if the fact that the Rattled by la Rush single has songs that were previously performed is important or not - the conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that they were recorded either in Feb 94 or were CRCR-session outtakes given a good mixing, but there's no real reason to believe that.
Going out on a limb, I even checked the BMI songwriter's database for information. They don't list dates, but every song has a number. I don't know how the numbers are assigned, probably chronologically, but they are in groups depending on the album, so it seems that SM sent songs an album/single at a time to be registered. The WZ SM songs go from We Dance at 2032726 to Half a Canyon's 2032754, skipping a few numbers (Flux=Rad is the only one outside the pattern, 2032778). Spiral's songs are Kennel District 2032707 and Western Homes 203270. The Rattled by la Rush single's songs are consecutive from 2063559, and the Father to a Sister of Thought songs are Kris Kraft 3841225 and Mussel Rock 3841451, the numbering likely due to different writers. To add more to this confusion, the Pacific Trim songs are numbered lower (Give it a Day 2118590) and not in sequence, and the 2/26/94 songs not assigned a number already have higher numbers - Tartar Martyr 4285020, Sutcliffe Catering 42996108.
So, to sum things up so far: at least 15 out of 21 WZ+Bs had been performed before recording began, with the songwriting stretched out over about a year and a half, in three rough groups. The first half of 93 saw Flux=Rad, Grounded, Motion Suggests, and probably Kennel District and Pueblo - although Pueblo was the only one to really be performed over the next year. They all had lyric revisions but the song structures were mostly the same by the time they were recorded. Next we have Brink of the Clouds, Easily Fooled, Fight this Generation, Brinx Job, Black Out, and Best Friend's Arm appear after the four month break, and played extensively throughout the tour. Last, another chunk of songs appears after the mid-tour break: Half a Canyon, AT&T, We Dance, and Grave Architecture. We Dance and a bit of Half a Canyon later show up demoed on the
Dancing with the Elders split in 95, so who knows what else exists in demo form. This isn't definitive evidence for when each song was written, naturally, but if there were other songs written at the time, why play only these? (Have to learn them, naturally, and probably not a lot of time to learn new stuff in the middle of a tour, but whatever...)
The songs not performed until the WZ sessions are Rattled by the Rush, Serpentine Pad, Father to a Sister of Thought, Extradition, Western Homes, False Skorpion, and Mussel Rock. Impossible to know right now if they were already written or made in the studio, although considering much of BTC was supposedly written on the spot in the studio after a week of rehearsals, I wouldn't say no. I also wonder if there is another huge cache of unreleased songs like there was for CRCR and supposedly are for BTC. From the end of the S&E tour (late June 93) to the recording of CRCR (Aug-Sept 93) isn't a lot of time for two discs worth of songs to be written, but I'd assume there were a fair amount of songs written after Slanted, even after Watery Domestic (11/25/92) and Trigger Cut (8/14/92) took the good ones (Elevate Me Later, Range Life, Unfair, and an extremely early Starlings of the Slipstream appeared in October 92; Cut Your Hair, Newark Wilder, and Fillmore Jive appeared towards the end of the tour in June. I'd kill to hear an early version of Fillmore Jive.) Written (especially in the studio) doesn't mean fully fleshed out though, as disc 2 shows. Stray fire, the only unreleased WZ song out there, sounds like it could be just a demo. There are also a lot more previously written and performed songs on WZ than there were on CRCR. But now I'm not really saying anything
anymore, and this is just idle speculation.
One more set of numbers: CRCR sessions produced 34 songs, not counting the vocal variations in 5-4, Strings, and Kneeling Bus, but including songs that showed up later, in an undetermined amount of time not lasting more than two months. BTC produced 21 released songs (so far, and I'm not including the three songs on the Spit on a Stranger single because I don't remember if they're from the session or not, though I'm pretty sure they're from 1996) in 15 days, plus supposedly a number of songs that SM said in a recent Billboard magazine interview to be "better than the ones on the album," although the way it's worded it might include the b-sides, some of which are better than a few songs on the album. The 21 released songs in 15 days matches pretty much exactly the WZ time frame. The only songs performed prior to recording were Stereo (which was actually played from the beginning of the WZ tour and is a good candidate for an early unreleased version), Blue Hawaiian (1/24/96), Painted Soldiers (2/02/96), Starlings of the Slipstream (waaaay back in 8/92 and reappearing on 2/10/96), No More Kings, Fin (4/17/94!) and Shady Lane (6/26/96). Nigel appeared at the 7/28/96 Cat's Cradle show they did at the tail end of the BTC recordings, and hopefully is recorded. Note that Flux=Rad is the only (known) Wowee Zowee song previously written that wasn't performed on the CRCR tour. Keeping in mind the appearance of most of the BTC songs after their two tour breaks, and not immediately after the release of WZ, it seems that Stereo is the one most likely for an early version, with Fin and Starlings also possiblities for resurrection. Anything else is impossible to say.
I've always wondered if the WZ songs that showed up during the CRCR tour were just not recorded, or written in the four or five months between the recording session and the tour. So I took a look though www.wonderllama.com's collection of 92-94 bootlegs and together with the CRCR rerelease put together a timeline of first known appearances. Keep in mind these are relative dates; the CRCR tour covered a lot of ground (40 shows in 40 days during one leg) and bootlegging was sporadic, but the setlist remained relatively consistent
Early 93 with Gary Young:
Flux=Rad (Louder Than You Think)
5/10/93 Sacramento
Grounded
Motion Suggests (ms. wonderllama has a question mark next to this, but I'll throw it in)
Aug-Sept 93 Random Falls NY w/Mark Venezia
Kennel District
Pueblo
2/26/94 BBC Session
Brink of the Clouds
Pueblo (first public performance)
Easily Fooled
3/02/94 VPRO Session
Fight This Generation
3/08/94 Berlin
Black Out
Brinx Job
3/28/94 Northampton
I Love Perth
4/06/94 Chapel Hill
Best Friend's Arm
It seems the first leg of the tour ended in May, as there are only two recorded shows after this, a festival and a radio session in June and July respectively. After a few shows along the Pacific Rim they head back to America for a short fall tour, concluding a few weeks before the WZ sessions took place.
8/08/94 Tokyo
Half a Canyon
Kennel District (first performance)
9/24/04 Lawrence, KS
AT&T
10/17/94 Boston
We Dance
Grave Architecture
The WZ recording sessions were from Nov. 14-24 at Easley Recording Studios in Nashville with Doug Easley - and "Feb. 10-14" at Random Falls with Mark Venezia. The mixing sessions were Dec 2-5 and Jan 2-5 by Bryce Goggin. But, there's no indication of year on the Random Falls sessions. Wowee Zowee was released on April 11th 95; February is pretty late to still be working on the album, although still a plausible time - it'd have to be sent to the presses and such almost immediately though. The album is mixed pretty consistently, there are no songs that sound dramatically different, so either the mixing is plain enough not to seem distinctive, the February sessions were simple overdubs stealthily inserted, Goggin was called in for last minute mixes and simply uncredited, or the February sessions were actually recorded in 94 and would likely consist of the batch of songs played on the first leg of the tour. Or this is bullshit along the lines of Here being recorded at "South Makepeace Studios" in Boston.
The back sleeve of the Rattled by the Rush single lists the songs as being "made to exist" and is copyrighted in 95, though I don't think that refers to the recording date, as the single was released before the album, on 3/30/95. There's no recording information on Father to a Sister of Thought, but it was released on 6/27/95. I can't detect any real sonic differences in these songs, either, but even if they were recorded in different places any professional engineer/mixer should be able to hide that. I don't know if the fact that the Rattled by la Rush single has songs that were previously performed is important or not - the conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that they were recorded either in Feb 94 or were CRCR-session outtakes given a good mixing, but there's no real reason to believe that.
Going out on a limb, I even checked the BMI songwriter's database for information. They don't list dates, but every song has a number. I don't know how the numbers are assigned, probably chronologically, but they are in groups depending on the album, so it seems that SM sent songs an album/single at a time to be registered. The WZ SM songs go from We Dance at 2032726 to Half a Canyon's 2032754, skipping a few numbers (Flux=Rad is the only one outside the pattern, 2032778). Spiral's songs are Kennel District 2032707 and Western Homes 203270. The Rattled by la Rush single's songs are consecutive from 2063559, and the Father to a Sister of Thought songs are Kris Kraft 3841225 and Mussel Rock 3841451, the numbering likely due to different writers. To add more to this confusion, the Pacific Trim songs are numbered lower (Give it a Day 2118590) and not in sequence, and the 2/26/94 songs not assigned a number already have higher numbers - Tartar Martyr 4285020, Sutcliffe Catering 42996108.
So, to sum things up so far: at least 15 out of 21 WZ+Bs had been performed before recording began, with the songwriting stretched out over about a year and a half, in three rough groups. The first half of 93 saw Flux=Rad, Grounded, Motion Suggests, and probably Kennel District and Pueblo - although Pueblo was the only one to really be performed over the next year. They all had lyric revisions but the song structures were mostly the same by the time they were recorded. Next we have Brink of the Clouds, Easily Fooled, Fight this Generation, Brinx Job, Black Out, and Best Friend's Arm appear after the four month break, and played extensively throughout the tour. Last, another chunk of songs appears after the mid-tour break: Half a Canyon, AT&T, We Dance, and Grave Architecture. We Dance and a bit of Half a Canyon later show up demoed on the
Dancing with the Elders split in 95, so who knows what else exists in demo form. This isn't definitive evidence for when each song was written, naturally, but if there were other songs written at the time, why play only these? (Have to learn them, naturally, and probably not a lot of time to learn new stuff in the middle of a tour, but whatever...)
The songs not performed until the WZ sessions are Rattled by the Rush, Serpentine Pad, Father to a Sister of Thought, Extradition, Western Homes, False Skorpion, and Mussel Rock. Impossible to know right now if they were already written or made in the studio, although considering much of BTC was supposedly written on the spot in the studio after a week of rehearsals, I wouldn't say no. I also wonder if there is another huge cache of unreleased songs like there was for CRCR and supposedly are for BTC. From the end of the S&E tour (late June 93) to the recording of CRCR (Aug-Sept 93) isn't a lot of time for two discs worth of songs to be written, but I'd assume there were a fair amount of songs written after Slanted, even after Watery Domestic (11/25/92) and Trigger Cut (8/14/92) took the good ones (Elevate Me Later, Range Life, Unfair, and an extremely early Starlings of the Slipstream appeared in October 92; Cut Your Hair, Newark Wilder, and Fillmore Jive appeared towards the end of the tour in June. I'd kill to hear an early version of Fillmore Jive.) Written (especially in the studio) doesn't mean fully fleshed out though, as disc 2 shows. Stray fire, the only unreleased WZ song out there, sounds like it could be just a demo. There are also a lot more previously written and performed songs on WZ than there were on CRCR. But now I'm not really saying anything
anymore, and this is just idle speculation.
One more set of numbers: CRCR sessions produced 34 songs, not counting the vocal variations in 5-4, Strings, and Kneeling Bus, but including songs that showed up later, in an undetermined amount of time not lasting more than two months. BTC produced 21 released songs (so far, and I'm not including the three songs on the Spit on a Stranger single because I don't remember if they're from the session or not, though I'm pretty sure they're from 1996) in 15 days, plus supposedly a number of songs that SM said in a recent Billboard magazine interview to be "better than the ones on the album," although the way it's worded it might include the b-sides, some of which are better than a few songs on the album. The 21 released songs in 15 days matches pretty much exactly the WZ time frame. The only songs performed prior to recording were Stereo (which was actually played from the beginning of the WZ tour and is a good candidate for an early unreleased version), Blue Hawaiian (1/24/96), Painted Soldiers (2/02/96), Starlings of the Slipstream (waaaay back in 8/92 and reappearing on 2/10/96), No More Kings, Fin (4/17/94!) and Shady Lane (6/26/96). Nigel appeared at the 7/28/96 Cat's Cradle show they did at the tail end of the BTC recordings, and hopefully is recorded. Note that Flux=Rad is the only (known) Wowee Zowee song previously written that wasn't performed on the CRCR tour. Keeping in mind the appearance of most of the BTC songs after their two tour breaks, and not immediately after the release of WZ, it seems that Stereo is the one most likely for an early version, with Fin and Starlings also possiblities for resurrection. Anything else is impossible to say.