10 posts tagged “nerves like eels”
This is another Nerves Like Eels tune recorded in the same session as tune #5. The combination of the 2 implies that all of our tunes were slow and moody, but I don't really remember things that way. In fact my wife insists that this recording is much slower than she remembers. Also some of the moodiness is injected by the forced-ness of the vocals. I must have recorded them much later when my voice was not in shape. As with tune #5 I wrote words and music here and the players remain Bill on guitar, Steve on drums and Kurt on the bass. I think the bass line makes this song.
Now that I have a place to put this stuff besides the upstairs closet/my hard drive I have begun to dig around to find more. This is probably the best recording from the ill fated final session with Nerves Like Eels. Some of the details are a bit sketchy here... The recording was done in Steve Evans' parents' basement in Littleton, CO in the summer of 1989. We used a Yamaha 4-track borrowed from Kyle Jones. I stupidly believed that I could operate a new recorder at the same time as I could play. It was extremely hot and my fuck-ups with the equipment did not help the situation. I am not sure when or how I put the vocals on, but I managed to further screw up some of the better tracks when I mixed the instruments onto less than 4 tracks while I squeezed my vocals onto the other tracks. Oh well. We broke up soon thereafter, but that was probably inevtible given our frustration with having excellent tunes and no real idea what to do with them. I believe I wrote this both the words and the music. (That means I put the chords together in the proper order. Everything else is Bill, Kurt, and Steve). I provide some guitar and the vocals while Bill Anthes plays lead, including the nice solo, Kurt Ohlen plays bass, and Steve Evans is on the drums.
Here is a thumbnail time-line for the bands under consideration here:
1985: The Decembrists -no not those Decembrists.
1986: minus bill
1987: minus bill, The Warlock Pinchers -yes those Warlock Pinchers
1988: Warlock Pinchers, Nerves Like Eels
1989: Nerves Like Eels
1990: Nothing I can remember
1991: Ditto for 91
1992: Autobody Experience
1993: Hop'd
1994: Hop'd
1995: Fletcher -there was another band of this name around at the same time in Boston maybe?
1996: Fletcher, Perry Weissman Three (PW3)
1997: PW3 -> and so on
This tune is from 1989. At that time I was playing in a band with my long suffering collaborator Bill Anthes, Kurt Ohlen, and Steve Evans. We were collectively known as Nerves Like Eels- a phrase I lifted from some friends of mine in the legendary Steel Pole Bathtub. This is also from an unreleased recording done in our living room (Bill, Kurt, and I were roommates) at 19th and Arapahoe in Boulder, CO. Somebody, Bill I think, had the bright idea to put his amp in his small, sparsely furnished bedroom with the volume wayyyy up. The results speak for themselves. We recorded the primary tracks live to a first generation Fostex cassette forur track (borrowed from Mark Brooks) via a radio shack 6 channel mixer and a number of borrowed mics. I used the last two tracks for my vocals, recorded in the bathroom naturally. Bill on guitar, Kurt on bass, Steve on drums, and myself on guitar and vocals.
