Track #5 is “Don’t Care About The…” which is the most personal song I’ve ever written, though that’s not really saying too much. It’s fairly angry, written about some friend and/or family problems that I believe are at least mostly behind us (this was recorded more than 10 years ago).
I play bass and guitar, and sing.
Listen to Don’t Care About The…
Track #4 on Robin Sings And/Or Plays is “You Set Me Free”. The verse text is taken right from Psalm 118:5-6:
In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free.
The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?
I play bass & guitar, and sing. The sort of chorus effect at the beginning is simply me singing the same thing twice. At the end of one line it becomes painfully obvious. I like the chord progression, especially the build up to the first key change.
Update: I played this song and another last night (Sunday) for the song writer’s group I’m a part of. Everyone was very gracious 🙂
Listen to You Set Me Free.
I often buy games for the Game Boy Advance without reading reviews first – when they’re in the bargain bin, and the game description on the box sounds promising enough. I’ve said often enough that my favourite genre of games are vehicular combat. Get in a car with machine guns, rockets, flame-throwers, and blow up other cars – I play/collect just about every game in this category.
So Demon Driver looked promising – the goofy title fits the genre, there’s a cool looking orange muscle car on the cover (like Dukes of Hazzard or Interstate ’76), and the back of the box states “Along the way you can collect power-ups to upgrade your vehicle and gather weapons to give you that extra advantage.”
Well, as soon as I started the game, the music told me this game wasn’t living up to the box’s promises. It’s goofy, reminding me more of some Casio keyboard experiments than anything inspired by horribly beweaponed muscle cars.
I played through a race in the game, and it seemed okay – typical scrolling overhead racer against 3 other computer opponents. But I didn’t notice any weapons, or other power-ups. Between races you can visit a shop to upgrade your car – but there are no weapons available there either. I read through the manual – no weapons mentioned there! There isn’t even a proper muscle car available out of the four vehicle choices – the only thing that comes close is the “GT” – more like a typical 90s sports car. So everything that interested me in the game on the box wasn’t in the game!
Well, I still like racing games in general, so I spent more time playing it. It has several other flaws. The 4 different vehicles really don’t differ all that much from each other. Until you buy some tire upgrades, the lack of grip when cornering is extremely exaggerated. If you end up right beside a track or wall, you can’t get away from it without causing a lot of damage to your car, because of how your car turns. You have to do 10 laps of every track, no matter if it’s really short, or really long – the long ones get extremely tedious. The computer cars offer very little competition – in almost all cases you can get ahead of them on the first lap, and even lap them later in the race.
The worst thing is the lack of a save option. Instead, you’re given a password, which in some games can be a reasonable substitute – but this is the worst implemented password system I’ve ever seen. The passwords look like this: “RK9BWLYCCWYL9VC6YH2M” or “MK9BWLYCCW7J4B#RMB2M”. You’re given one after every race, but you can’t see it (or another one) again until you’ve completed another race. So you’re forced to write that thing down after every race, or potentially lose your progress. It’s also obvious that the code used to generate those passwords is extremely simple since the passwords retain so many digits from level to level. The worst insult is that even that enormous password doesn’t save all the information. If you’re to resume the game, you’ll have lost all the upgrades you bought for your car!
Somehow, the rest of the game was still entertaining enough for me to persist through and finish all 32 courses. A couple of the later courses are somewhat tricky for the first couple laps, and I briefly thought I might not finish in first place. A few others are imaginatively designed, with multiple routes available for part of the lap, and extra coins to pick up hidden on back alleys.
So, the game saved itself from my initial impressions of being the worst game ever. But it still qualified for “generally lousy” and “most deceitful”.
Update: Here’s a spoiler, a pic of the “A Winner Are You!” screen. I retouched it a little, as my GBA SP screen is getting pretty gross, making it difficult to get a good picture.
In the early 90s I went down to Florida a few times to visit my grandparents Ed & Bea Harbron. They owned a trailer, and spent every winter down there. I went down on my own to visit them for spring break, probably in 1992. One afternoon we went to one of the huge flea markets around there.
One booth had a bunch of older computers and video games, and I bought two Timex/Sinclair 1000 computers there. I was interested in them because that was the model of my first computer ever, but I didn’t keep it then, which is a story for another time. The friendly lady at the booth also gave me some addresses for places still supporting the C-64, including Loadstar I believe. (Alex, there’s your C-64 reference :)) But I digress.
Another large booth/area at the market was selling plates and clocks and other things some peoples hang on their wall, the kind with really corny pictures on them, of Jesus and Elvis and the like. I was particularly struck by one part of the wall that had a Jesus plate in the middle, and an Elvis hanging on either side of him. I thought of Jesus and the thieves on the crosses, and that’s how this song got started.
The lyrics mostly come across as corny as the booth’s wares, but I really do like the general idea. I knew a good chunk of what I wanted to say, but my lack of skill in the writing/rhyme department didn’t help the song. Maybe a re-write would be a good idea.
Listen to Track #3 from “Robin Plays And/Or Sings” – Who Is Your King?.
So here we go, working through all the songs on “Robin Plays and/or Sings”. Track #1 was Meaningless Love Song, the first recording of me playing bass ever.
The second track on the album is “Love Is A Scalar”. I think this is the first song I ever wrote. I remember writing it in Mr. Crittall’s Physics class, though maybe Darren can help me remember if it was grade 12 or OAC – sometime around 1990 anyway.
As an aside, Mr. Crittall was one of my favourite high school teachers. He was exceedingly laid-back. My most memorable moment in that class was when he walked up to Darren and me during class and asked “You boys ever seen a thousand dollar bill?” more casually than I thought possible. He pulled out two of them, and several hundred dollar bills as well. He ran a side-business installing swimming pools, and apparently a customer had just paid him in cash.
To get further aside, I actually had seen and even owned a thousand dollar bill briefly a year or so earlier. I bought my Amiga 500 with cash, and had deliberately asked for a thousand dollar bill at the bank just so I could take a picture of me with it before I spent it.
Back on topic, this very short song is subtitled “A Geek’s Love Song”. Somewhat interestingly, it has no guitar – just bass and drum machine – and I guess you’d have to classify it as a polka! I really don’t know why songs I write often end up sounding like genres I don’t listen to, or even despise.
Listen to Love Is A Scalar.
Exactly 10 years ago today – January 18th, 1996 we had a really big blizzard in Thunder Bay. It was so big that work closed down, and I got to stay home. So I spent the day recording and piecing together from other recordings my one and only “mostly-solo album”, called “Robin Plays And/Or Sings”.
As you can probably guess from the title, every track on the album involves me playing instruments and/or singing. Of the eight tracks on the album, a couple I’ve already posted about: Heads Up! – “Meaningless Love Song” and Darren & Robin – “Quarters (on the Sidewalk)”.
I do have stories I want to tell about each of the other tracks, so I won’t throw all the songs up at once, but I’ll try to do one every day or two.
Here’s another song in bad taste. Written, sung and accordionized by Mike, electric guitar’d by Richard, drummed by Shroom (just snare + tamborine?) and bass’d by me. The song is a parody of Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”. Well really, it just uses the tune from “Buddy Holly” – it’s not like it’s making fun of “Buddy Holly” or anything. It’s about some friends who made an unusual name change when they got married.
This recording was made at the same time as “The Living Room”, and again wasn’t multi-tracked or edited or anything – just two live takes, and this is the second take.
One bit of trivia, I’ve been spelling accordion as “accordian” for years, and a friend and google just pointed out that I’d been wrong – but an awful lot of other people spell it wrong too judging by the hits on google.
Even though we played many more songs, I think that’s all the Morons recordings I have.
Listen to 993.
“Mike and the Morons” is yet another band I was/am in. We’d play parodies, “Weird Al”-style, which were written, and sung by Mike Hurlbert. As usual, I’m on bass, and the original line-up had Darren “Shroom” Foulds on drums, and Richard Pepper on guitars. We went through a few line up changes over the years in the drum and guitar department, sometimes due to availability, and sometimes due to Mike’s perception of the relative ability of the willing musicians he knew (or maybe the other way around).
Mike actually got us some good gigs, the best of which were performing at the Thunder Bay Fringe Festival each summer from 1999-2001. People actually paid to see us do a few songs, mixed with some comedy routines, loosely held together in a “Late Night with David Letterman” talk/variety show theme. In addition to bass duties, I’d occasionally act or do narrator type roles. My best lines were “Sorry” and “Three to one”. I guess you’d have to have been there. (They really did get some good laughs).
I may have named the band – I’m pretty sure it’s derived from “Mike and the Mechanics”, as one of the first songs we played together was a parody of their “The Living Years” song.
Here is that song, called “The Living Room”. I’m pretty sure it was recorded in my dad’s basement, though possibly it was at Richard’s apartment on Brodie St. It wasn’t multi-tracked, just recorded through a regular cassette recorder, though the mix is fairly good considering.
The song is about studying for exams, and like many of Mike’s parodies, has a solid theme and some good lines. My favourite is definitely “Though the place looks like the aftermath of a giant sonic boom, as those pizza crusts and things you’ve bust fill the Living Room”.
Listen to The Living Room.
At least, I’m pretty sure all this was recorded in Kevin’s garage probably in ’94 or so. I’m on bass, Shroom is on drums, and I’m not sure who’s on guitar. It sounds above Kevin’s level at the time (he has since improved), but below Brian Dunn’s. Maybe it was Dave Wolframe? Any suggestions are welcome.
(Un)fortunately, the vocals weren’t recorded on their own mic(s), so they’re mixed in with the drum track, and often a bit too quiet. I seem to have had some fun playing bass on some of these tracks, like He Has Made Me Glad once it gets going.
I’m not going to drag this out into a bunch of posts. A few people will want to hear the whole thing for nostalgia, and I suspect the rest of you really won’t care to. So here’s all 10 tracks – I’ll dig out the proper CCLI number if anyone important enough complains.
Listen to:
1.Glory and Honour To God
2.Good To Me
3.He Has Made Me Glad
4.I Will Not Be Shaken
5.Light The Fire Again
6.Lord I Lift Your Name On High
7.No Eye Has Seen
8.The Servant King
9.The River Is Here
10.You Are My All In All
A.k.a. “Happy Birthday Ron”. I think Darren and I decided to make a tape for Ron for his birthday, so we recorded us playing/singing a medley of mostly Neil Young songs. I have no idea why we thought this was a good idea. Presumably this was back around ’94 or so.
The songs, in order are: “The Needle and the Damage Done”, “Harvest Moon”, “How Many Roads”, “Like A Hurricane”, “Old Man”, “Sweet Home Alabama”, “Forgotten Years”, “Heart of Gold”, “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” and finally, “Happy Birthday (sort of)”. It adds up to a bit more than 14 minutes, and a lot of it is pretty awful, but it makes me laugh.
I’m pretty sure Darren and I both played the guitar, passing it back and forth between songs, pausing the tape as we did so. Then we sang along to our recording through the wonders of multi-track recording. And then finally we added an electric guitar track, probably again taking turns depending on who knew the song/riff better.
Listen to An Evening In March.
