Music/Studio Photos

The front cover of Receiving. I always think of this version as a rushed and not well thought out or developed version. I was really just ready to get something done, and the guy who was originally helping me do a cover decided to play games and keep my stuff hostage for a while before he declared himself done with the project because of a piece of broken gear he wanted to attribute to me, but that he got stuck holding the bill for.

This is a 2011 quick attempt to illustrate the general feel I wanted for the CD cover. That isn't to say that it looks anything like the first digital versions of it in early 2000 with the other guy's work. But it was supposed to be dark and stark, with a big bold picture of a radio telescope from the Very Large Array. At the time though I did not know these were radio telescopes (I had the guy looking up satellite dishes) and I did not know these particular dishes were part of the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Worst of all, Google didn't even exist when we were looking for images to work with.

Finally, in 2011, I drove out to New Mexico and one destination was the Very Large Array, where I was finally able to get my dish images that were mostly what I was going for. My camera was far better suited for the job than anything in 2000. Until it fell and hit the dirt and jammed the lens barrel. End of tour!

I feel better about the back of the thing but this entire version was not what I had in mind originally. If you want to get a solid idea of what I wanted to convey, you'd have to see Bon Jovi's CD Bounce.

Inside credits. I sort of liked the idea of presenting the list as if we were a band, but the reality is that in the final mix, I don't think there are more than a couple instances of two people playing much of anything at the very same time. Rebecca and Dawne singing onto the same mic might be the only instance. Receiving is a wonder of multi-track recording, and particularly on a small format, 8 track recorder that was used to bounce and arrange in clever ways.

It is mildly amusing to see old email and internet links, isn't it? Especially since they both expired within about a year after the CD was pressed!

Oh, what a list. I am still kind of touched about my grandmother, but almost as quickly as this CD was pressed in late 2001, my life changed drastically away from music making and indeed from doing the kinds of audio tech work that I did. In the wake of 9/11 a lot of that work dried up. With that and with Kelli arriving on the scene, this list of people (certainly including family members too who just months later turned on me in a huge way) turned into a historical curiosity.

I was at the Art Institute of CA when I finished the graphical part of this CD. In retrospect, I think I made some sucky decisions, like using full color printing on the CD face, which I was warned about. Obviously I can't redo the CD face, but I have had ideas to change the sleeve art. I doubt anyone cares but me.

Richard Meltzer reviews Magnificent Meatsticks

This is the review that the old rock critic Richard Meltzer offered upon hearing the Magnificent Meatsticks on mp3.com. I was having fun reading his totally off topic "reviews" of artists in the San Diego Reader, and upon making some of the worst music I ever made in the MagMeat, I wrote to the Reader and offered our tune "Richard Meltzer" for review. It is a very very rude thing that is far from pretentious, except for the fact that it addresses a famous reviewer by name and offers him to "f*ck me up the ass!" The review was in the printed Reader just a weeek or two later!

On the surface, the connection to Receiving may not be clear, but after buttering him up with the MagMeat track, I dared offer my CD for review. Read on...

And now the follow up to the MagMeat review... a review of my songs, bound for Receiving some months later. It is hard to tell if RM ever gets serious, but I don't think I represent the dinosaur rock and roll industry so I will take what he says as some compliment, even if he was just guessing his way through it without actually hearing more than a few seconds.

Finally, I decided after several years of ambivalence and an admission that these boxes of CDs are just stuff to store and move, it was time to blow them out. Lacking the patience or even the conviction to sell them, I found that I was better able to just give them out to people at work and elsewhere. But even that wasn't fast enough to blow through the remaining 250 or so; I had to speed it up. So I took a case with me to work and for several days I sprinkled them around town in high traffic areas.

Some were left on steps of apartments.

Others left on walls and barriers...

Some were left in Downtown in the Gaslamp quarter.

All in the hopes that these would fall into the hands of people in a random way that I could never manage. There was something about loosing my grip on the project that had been mine to micromanage for a decade.