Bad Vibes Cassette Project
Originally posted May 27th - October 6th 2022. Edited, augmented and re-assembled March 10th 2025.
Too Much Of A Good Thing
Jun 7, 2022 and March 10th 2025
What beautiful light coming in to my attic this afternoon!
Bad Vibes was exhausting, so it’s no surprise that this process is, too.
There were 9 DATs, and amazingly, none of them were corrupted. 37 demos, outtakes and rough mixes, and 11 final mixes from Electric Lady Studios.
The Electric Lady mixes were rejected by Fontana, which is how we ended up going to LA to mix with Bob Clearmountain. Bob's mixes are definitely superior, overall, especially the two singles - Morning is Broken and So You'd Like To Save The World - but the Electric Lady mixes have their moments - they are much better than I expected - except Morning is Broken, which is pretty tragic...
The the germ of the project came early in 1992 when Adam Peters remixed Butterfly - the final single from Don' Get Weird OMB. I loved it. It took the song to a completely different place, and even changed its key! So I decided to see if Adam might be a good producer for me. I started work on song ideas in my exciting new studio in our Manhattan apartment in June. That's the first DAT.
The second DAT is from July, and it's our first experiments working together.
The 3rd DAT - 5 rough mixes dated Sept '92 - is, I assume, what we sent the record company, to get their blessing to continue and make an album.
Those songs were -
Love You So What
4MB
Morning Is Broken
Can't Get Arrested
Too Much Of A Good Thing
Dave Bates, my A&R man gave us the go ahead.
I took the rest of September and all of October off - our first child William was born on October 4th.
The next two DATs are rough mixes from recording sessions at RPM and Axis studios dated November and early December.
New material was written and recorded -
Fall Together
Mr Wrong
Boogieman (became Seen The Future)
Wild Mushrooms
My Way To You
Think About It (became For The Pleasure Of Your Company)
Holier Than Thou, (written in 1988)
Also a Cover of Tom Petty's Freefalling was recorded and two more songs - Brand New President and (working title) Campaign were recorded.
It seems Can't Get Arrested, which was for a while the working title for the album, was put on the back burner and the album started leaning in more of a rock direction, having started out more electronic...
We adjourned for Christmas and the next DAT, a collection of 11 tracks, was sent to Dave Bates, who rejected the track Brand New President (thankfully). I'd never had a track rejected before, so I recall this pretty clearly.
So, at the end of the year we had almost the whole album - every track which was ultimately in the final running order, except So You'd Like To Save The World, which I must have written over the holidays.
Recording resumed in the new year at The Magic Shop studios - my first time working there - I would return many times. So You'd Like To Save The World was recorded. I remember this quite well - I had to play the drums, because we couldn’t get a ‘proper’ drummer to get the feel I was looking for. I played the bass drum, by hand, and then overdubbed the hi hat. Once that was feeling right with my guitars, Dan McCarroll overdubbed the top kit after we’d got it.
Morning Is Broken still wasn't quite right and I think it was around then that we decided to have Anton Fier, the great drummer from the Feelies and Golden Palaminos, overdub full drum kit on top of our programming and loops. Recording was done at Electric Lady Studios in the famed Focusrite room. This finally pulled the track together, but it was a bit excessive, in terms of tracks used, and it took Bob Clearmountain's genius to finally make proper music out of it. I think our ears might have been exhausted by it by the time we tried to mix it.
Adam and I supervised the first mixes at Electric Lady Studios. Lloyd Puckett, who had engineered most of the recording sessions, engineered. I still have the back up DAT from the 1/2" tape the mixes were recorded to, and what seems to be a DAT of our first running order, which was -
Love You So What
Fall Together
So You's Like To Save The World
Mr. Wrong
Morning Is Broken
Wild Mushrooms (end of side 1, I assume)
Holier Than Thou
Seen The Future
Too Much Of A Good Thing
For The Pleasure Of Your Company (renamed between the mixing and the running order DAT)
My Way To You
Dave Bates rejected these mixes.
I wrote Radio City Music Hall (eventually a b-side) thinking it felt like a hit, and was semi-destroyed when people mostly disagreed.
Before the final mixes Adam and I returned to my apartment studio to record the Unhinged sessions - for b-side material. These are still my favourite recordings from the period -
The Slider (Bolan)
Mystic Lady (Bolan)
Vicious (Reed)
Messing around between takes we recorded some electronic sketches. I can't say who wrote them, maybe we did them together. The final DAT from the project was labelled MORRIS JARRE (sic). The sketches were given working titles -
Maurice
Jean Michelle
Thing 2/2/93
Final mixing was in the legendary A&M studios in Hollywood with Bob Clearmountain engineering. For The Pleasure Of Your Company was dropped and Can't Get Arrested was brought back. Bob was very much the boss and we simply went in in the morning, told him what we thought was important, and left him to it. We were more than a little blown away with how amazing he was, and how FAST! Also he's a lovely man. A happy end to a long, rather difficult project.
PS - I still think Love You So What would be a better opening track.
PPS - Many of the audio files here contain multiple tracks. This is because, when these were originally presented, on my Patreon page, it was impossible to post multiple audio tracks to a single post.
June 2 92 DAT Tape Demo Mixes
We moved into our palatial New York apartment in late 1991 and I hired builders and sound design experts to build a studio in what would have been the 3rd bedroom. I spent far too much and, as it turned out, the only recordings made there that were actually released were the Unhinged b-side cover versions.
I looks like I got started making demos and sketches of ideas in June of 1992.
From this DAT we can learn that before meeting with Adam Peters and starting work on what became Bad Vibes, I only had a handful of rough sketches, three of which would ultimately make the album, or a b-side.
D-Bb-F Sweeper became Morning is Broken.
Bottom To The Top became 4MB.
Do You Ever Wonder became Too Much Of A Good Thing.
D - Bb - F Sweeper
2 versions here - tracks 8 and 9 from the DAT combined to make one mp3. The second version has guitars.
Its all me on this -
Programmed in Opcode Vision
Piano, almost certainly Kurweil
Drum Loop - probably Sequential Studio 440
Synth - definitely Prophet VS - preset called Sweeper
Guitars - can't guess.
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