Reclamation Tape #7: Of the Hump (Rusty Bidet)

Public domain poetry has often been the source of lyrical inspiration when mine own has run dry, and this tape has more than its share of dead poets represented. 

But, since the purpose of this project is to find forgotten and unrecorded songs, this tape must be seen as a lost cause, regardless of the many gems it inspired (most notably, the timeless "Talking Dog" - which did NOT rely on some fusty Victorian for its lyrical brilliance). 

"The DJ's Pity" manifests itself here in numerous versions - not all bad, but of such an overwhelming variety that the very fecundity of the idea may be its own undoing, as I have no stomach for sorting through all the many variations. 

Reclamation Tape #6: Straight in the Desert (Green Was My Aftershave)

This tape returns us to the era I'd most wanted to re-investigate, and the rewards are for real.

It doesn't really get going until side two, but once there, we discover the epic "Story of Some Dead Guy," composed around the time of my enrollment in the songwriting course that I shamefully dominated while attending Temple U. This song alone is worth the entire tape.

The indefatigable "Norman's New Pain" first appears here, too, to be picked up in a later tape, and which refuses to accept its initial designation as O'boy offal. I'm still not convinced it warrants a new version, but it makes an enthusiastic case for itself.

Reclamation Tape #5: Dragoneering (Painless Surgery)

If ever this project was going to go completely off the rails, it would've been here. Dragoneering offers only "Out of the Loop" for further review, while numbing my ears with waves of electric buzz caused by some technical glitch somewhere in the ether.

Hard to listen to, but it does introduce an element of surprise (the pun here will be obvious to serious O'boy/Chuck Zak devotees) by complicating my songwriting timeline: some songs I had guessed were from earlier in my career actually seem to bump up against others that I had tagged mentally as coming from one of my many, later phoenix-like resurgences into artistic viability.

At any rate, this tape seems to come from an earlier, largely infertile period, a supposition confirmed by its dearth of good tunes.

Reclamation Tape #4: Hapless Bid (Stag Motor)

The project threatens to enter a deep rut here, with another tape that offers no gems worth further versioning.

My Iraq War triptych is here, though, so it's not as if Hapless Bid is of no interest historically. There is a large amount of blank tape on side two, however, which complicates the idea that this is a complete tape. While the lawyers work out the details of where this tape belongs in the library (possibly destined for a bottom drawer marked "lacunae"), we can safely move on to the next candidate.

Reclamation Tape #3: Escarole! (Impersonal Correspondence)

This tape represents the more challenging aspects of this project, as its yield of quality unrecorded tunes was far lower than the previous tape.

Judy's lyrics dominate the worthiest bits here, many of which still await a proper demoing, but which are already accounted for in my list of "to do" songs. There are a couple of ideas here which did make it to the big leagues, poem-based songs from the likes of Lord Byron and at least one stone classic of O'Boy neo-Merseybeat genius ("Before & After"). Sadly, no takeaways for this project, though.

Reclamation Tape #2: Crab Stanzas (More Muttoncore)

Now I've managed to whipsaw in the other direction, with a tape I estimate to be from circa 2010, surely one of the latest in this series of tapes.

But this is closer to what I was looking for: not mumbled half-ideas from 1997, but completed (or nearly so) songs that never received even a rough demo beyond these tapes. Big finds are: "People Playing Games," "Did You Ever Get the Feeling?" "Counting Cans," "One Cloud Over," "Ulysses," and the verse of "i take the bus every day" - (lowercase indicating a song with no official title).

Something pleasant that this tape helped confirm is that my songs have gotten better over the years. I'm not trying to recapture some golden age from my youth, because my golden age is still on the horizon (the one in front of me). It's pointless to ignore the powerful role that mortality is playing in this project, goading me to direct my otherwise fathomless energies into remaining immobile on the floor, gargantuan headphones atop my head (Samson SR950s), while inching my way through these tapes (some of which will be substantially more tedious to endure than this one).

Ok, yay Crab Stanzas, and yay 2010!

Reclamation Tape #1: Random Ideas Whilst Lounging (Creativity Blooms)

So, I chose to begin the project here although I guessed (correctly) that this tape predated that era that I was most interested in re-mining.

I may have been too eager to anoint these snippets as being worthy of follow up; I have an awful lot of these marked down for further review. But really, I think there are just two serious takeaways from this tape: "Looking for Angels," and the partially uncovered "Reno."

Doubtless, there are other good ideas here, but no better than what I could whip up today, so why bother?

Reclamation Tape #16: Solid Waste (Stew-Fueled Miscalculation)

This was something of a disheartening experience, not only because of the dearth of decent tunes, but because my casual mention (barely heard in a palimpsest-y portion almost completely recorded over) of John Geilgud's death marks this tape with cruel precision as having been recorded (at least partially) in May 2000. That's a while ago.

There are some lost studio efforts in here, including a completely forgotten song we will refer to as "Anisette" - which isn't worth recording again. There's a proto version of "End of the Reel" which has the title "Steps" here, and different lyrics.

Otherwise, the only unrecorded songs with any bounty on their head are "In defense of all I ever believed," which I remember a bit, and "California," whose lyrics I actually wrote down in one of the two codex that serve as my lyrical guide through this journey. The former earned one check mark as a possible future patient; the latter, none.

Reclamation Project

After a brief ten year lull, I'm reviving this blog to track the ongoing Chuck Zak Reclamation Project whose goal it is to rescue unrecorded and forgotten gems from the Oxford Boy past and bring them to some kind of wholeness.

This effort consists of trawling through the mountain of worktapes I've managed to hold on to these past two decades, even while I've surrendered just about everything else to the abyss. These tapes are all titled on their case, with a subtitle on the tape itself. I'd like to at least post once per tape, though now that I'm fully 16 tapes into the project, I have to consider grandfathering in some of these recordings.

At least, I want to find the recordings of a few particular songs I know I've written and get them down in a more professional manner. If, in the course of that effort, I discover other tunes I've completely forgotten, that will be gravy.

Ideally, I'd love to resurrect the feverish productivity I enjoyed when last this blog was active. If I lower my recording standards, and commit to at least a decent recording of guitar/vox, that might be possible. But it would be criminal to ignore full productions altogether, as my skills in that area have only gotten better over the years.

Another important goal is to rerecord as much of the half-assed versions of good songs I've put down, the raw files of which were lost in the infamous hard-disk crash of 7/2007. Songs like "Another World" or "Your Hell" which suffered various fatal flaws - easily remedied if I had only remembered to back up those files before the drives died - and which now exist in only infuriatingly imperfect versions.

We'll see...

The sybilline

From the geographic center of heartbreak [2400 e. Dauphin, apt. c] comes the Sybilline.

The song is admittedly unworthy of the subject, but it's a start...