Tag Archives: nostalgia

Nope… You really CAN’T get there from here.

I remember a Sunday so long ago, the concept of Sunday was a new one… this special day when no one worked (in those days my mom worked weekdays and my dad was off on Tuesday and worked Saturdays).

On this day we were driving out to the country — the outskirts of the then-small city of Orange, California — to pick up friends of my folks and then driving up to the mountains at Big Bear.

In those days, Orange was mostly orchards and farmhouses, spreading out from a tiny downtown built around a turn-of-the-last-century roundabout (a traffic circle, if you will). Besides some fruit packing plants there wasn’t much to town except the children’s hospital I’d been born in.

We met up with another car load of young adults and, leaving Orange, we drove down two lane roads for hours until, sometime long after noon (another slightly hazy concept — I think remember someone on the picnic explaining that it meant the sun was directly overhead) we arrived in what I recall as a big valley meadow between two sets of snow-capped mountains.

I don’t remember too much about the picnic but this is what I do remember — even though it seems oddly dreamlike:

After we’d been there a few hours and the sun was edging down toward the mountains I now know to have been in the west, we heard a long, low roar echoing out of the mountains behind us. A visceral, beastly roar…

Everyone froze and the girls — I swear this is what I remember — got scared. I think someone said something like, “Well, maybe that’s the Big Bear they named this place after.” A couple of the guys wanted to go see what it was. But a couple of the girls seemed genuinely frightened and one of them seemed panicky, insisting that we pack up and go.

And we did. As the adults hurriedly packed up (the scared girl was sitting in the back of one of the sedans and refused to come out even to help pack up) I remember looking down at my arm and seeing the little bumps around the hairs on my arm. Someone said they were “goosebumps” and that was a new one to me, too. I don’t remember much else except that it was long after dark on Sunday night when we dropped my folks’ friends off.

To this day, I still wonder what the hell that sound was. And, sometimes, when the memory seems really vivid, it can still raise goosebumps and I can still feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

NEW VERSION of the brand new song from last week…

It takes a while to find each new song, often as not, and this one is no exception. I’ve been rolling around some changes (I’ve wrestled with the “lots and lots of lots” issue but I’m sticking with what I wrote for now).

This version was actually recorded earlier in the week. The vocals are still somewhat awkward. Some of the guitar work is, too. But it’s pretty different than the first, fingerpicked version and I think it’s worth putting up, capturing a different aspect of the song… I think it suggests where I want to go a little better. I’ll probably rough it out with a fleshed out version with drums, bass, and more guitars in the coming weeks…

A Land So Far Away

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Sunday, April 29, 2007

lyrics
A Land So Far Away

I was born so long ago
between some forgotten wars
times were different then I know
it’s the one thing that’s for sure

There were cows across the road
I can still feel the dairy smell
where it’s only houses now
and they stretch all the way to hell

and back then I never thought
I would ever hit the road
but before I knew what was what
there was nowhere else to go

ch and right now I know I want
to find this place called home
I don’t know where it is
and I don’t know where to go

I was born between some wars
between the mountains and the shore
in a land so far away
you just cant
get there anymore
I saw the world there’s a lot to see
and sure I was impressed
lots of hope lots of fear
and lots of girls undressed

lots of bar rooms lots of dreams
lots of lifelong friends
lots of pals you’ll always love
and never see again

ch right now I know I want to find…

I was born so long ago
between some forgotten wars
times were different then
it’s the one thing that’s for sure

and back then I never thought
I would ever hit the road
but before I knew what was what
there was nowhere else to go

ch and right now I know I want
to find this place called home
I don’t know where it is
and I don’t know where I have to go

I was born between some wars
between the mountains and the shore
in a land so far away
you just cant
get there anymore

2007-04-29
(C)2007, TK Major

A Land So Far Away

Tape Decks I Have Known

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And, now while we change servers, we’ll hear this lovely organ interlude…

[Update: the move went almost perfectly. It was eerie. Anyhow… no music this post. Your ears needed the rest.]

Nostalgia: Tape Decks I Have Known

Yes, before women and the bottle… I had another love…

I’ll spare y’all the 3340-S’s and 3440-S’s, the Series 70 1/2″ 8, or the 40-4 that is, I think, my last remaining reel machine. (All those were TASCAMs by the way.)

We’ve all seen our share of most of those, probably.

But yesterday I was pondering this picture I’d earlier stumbled across on the web of (an instance of) the first tape machine I did an overdub on, circa 1964, Sony TC630. (It belonged to my “rich” cousin and it was an object of great envy on my part. But he was also generous enough to loan it to me a few times, including to do the preprogrammed music for my grandparents’ 50th anniversery party, for which I also recorded my mom dueting with herself on “The Anniversery Waltz” — my first overdub.)

While I pondered the glory that had been the TC630, half-watched on the TV was the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 DVD of The Crawling Hand.

I looked up from the photo of the TC630 just in time to see one of the characters in the movie opening a small tape recorder… it took a second but I realized it was a copy of the same, no-name, no-capstan $20 battery powered tape recorder I got for Christmas in 1962 — my very first tape recorder.

The Machine That Started It All for Me

About halfway through the message he’s taping to tell his girlfriend and her professor uncle that he’s turning into a monster he goes into monster mode and smashes the poor little machine (How poor was it? So poor it couldn’t even afford a capstan. Buh dum.)

Or tries to smash it. The plastic top goes flying right away — but it was made during the waning days of the overbuilt-metal era of Japanese transistor consumer electronics — and no matter how the teen-monster kicks and stomps it, it remains amazingly intact…

Around the beginning of my senior year of high school I pulled my savings together and bought my own stereo 7″ reel deck, a Sony TC-250a… it was $119, fair trade, IIRC — and it was NO TC630… you couldn’t even record a single track at once — just what was effectively “joint stereo,” so there was no overdubbing possible. That would have been nice but I didn’t play an instrument then and I mostly wanted to make my own mix tapes and… you know… stuff.

My first plug in tape recorder, also a Sony, a little hazy on the number, was a 5″ reel transistor-tube hybrid machine (transistor recording preamps and tube power amp). I HAVE seen a picture of it on the web but foolishly didn’t save it — and haven’t seen one since. It had a molded white heavy styrene top and a coral colored grill and underpan. I really loved that thing but sold it for something like $3.50 at a yard sale in the early 70s. I guess sometimes you gotta let go. The kid who bought it probably had a lot of fun. I hope.

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