Back to "The Future's On The Radio"
Add this to the menu of new experiences this month: this past week I found something of great sentimental value that was long lost and irreplacable. I don't know if I've ever had a comperable experience, finding something special and yet resigned the past. Some backstory is in order.
Music is, for me, both a passion and an occasional hobby. I'd always had an ear for music and had used the web to teach myself basic guitar chords. But while I could sing and play the pop songs transcribed at the old Online Guitar Archive, actually writing songs was more difficult. I had ideas, but making them gel was painstaking. I'd recorded songs and other...less definable material for years on anlaog four-track recorders since high school and only started using my computer to make music during the Summer of 1998. At first, I used the computer as a replacement for the four-track recorder - I'd record my guitar and a basic vocal and perhaps use the software to add reverb. Not being a gamer, the box I had at the time was much too slow to go beyond the basics.
A friend told me about Acid by Sonic Foundry (now Sony), a digital audio software tool with three crucial attributes. First, an audio file can be imported into Acid and then looped, repeated endlessly or in various pattens. A short drum pattern is repeated and becomes a beat. Other sounds are added and matched for tempo automatically. Secondly, the number of tracks (instruments, vocals, effects) in a composition is limited only by the hard drive and memory capacity. This dramatically increases the possibilities for combining tracks to create new sounds that sound and feel different from their individual components.
Finally, and most importantly, music is composed in a fashion that engages sight and sound interactively. This was a breakthrough for me. My aptitude for sound and rhythm not withstanding, the mathematical nature of songwriting isn't friendly territory to me. Those types of processes don't coalesce in my head without some kind of reference point. Acid provided this key element.
Once a reference by which to "see" the song was in place, other elements fell in line. Invariably, a song comes organically - lyrics evolve in my head as the sound of the song takes shape. It's never lyrics first and music second, or vice-versa - both influence each other and often if a track doesn't have lyrics by the time it feels done, it doesn't get them.
All the first tracks I did were bascially experiments to try to get the hang of working out the sounds in my head digitally by combining sound samples, processsing them, and editing them. I can't really call them "songs," more like sound collages. I was going for a particular kind of sound that had been with me since I'd moved to California. I wanted to make songs that sounded contemporary but not "electronic," songs that would sound at home both on a college radio station today and late 60's Drake format AM Top 40.
I grew up in Detroit where the legacy of CKLW and the Drake format was still strongly felt in local radio during the 80's. The Drake format, pioneered at CKLW, defined the sound of popular radio in a radical way in the 1960's and 1970's. Detroit's proximity across the river from CKLW's studio in Windsor, gave the city's musical talent - especially Motown Records - a disproportionally powerful influence as stations in other markets rushed to copy CKLW's sound and success. Hundreds of independent labels sprung up throughout the Detroit area that hoped to ride Motown's rising tide. These distributed vinyl 45's recorded in basements, garages, and rickety studios to stations across the country.
Stylistically, these singles were as diverse as the musicians that made them: Motown-style soul, pre-punk garage bands, traditional pop, country, blues. What unites these records is a certain sound, an ineffible "Detroitness" that's raw, gritty, a bit trashy, sexy, even slightly dangerous. There's an urgency to it, a rough finish at its most polished. Before I'd heard of the White Stripes or any of new Detroit bands that took up the mantle in the years after I left, I wanted to evoke this sound. I wanted it to reflect what I'd become: Detroit music in California.
The first "song" I recorded on my computer was my first attempt to get at this sound and over a couple weeks in 1999 it became "The Future's On The Radio." I'd become familiar with many of the obscure Detroit bands from the 60's and 70's back in high school, and I wanted to take some of the digital recordings of these 45's and mix them up and create beats and instrument textures from the fragments. Total failure. Nothing I did could make it sound like something other than Metal Machine Music. While I like noise experiments, I wanted something more accessible.
So I took a different approach. I scrapped the synthesis idea and built a track based on one of my all-time favorite 45's from the period, which I'd first heard at the house of a friend of mine that had more vinyl records than some radio stations. He'd gone to Allen Park High School, and one of the students that had gone there before him was Rick "Tim Tam Wiesend," who my described was one of Detriot's greatest stars that never were. He was the lead singer of a group called Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons, and that reached #76 on the national charts with a high-energy vocal pop song that he co-wrote with producer Bob Berry in 1965 called "Wait A Minute."
My friend played his 45 and I loved the song so much I had him dub it onto a blank cassette, which I eventually wore out. It became one of the songs I had to play for people. I played it for both my parents; neither remembered it. "Tim-Tam" Wiesend was a Frankie Valli acolyte who sang everything in a forceful falsetto as the Turn-Ons backed him up. In fact, the Turn-Ons were only vocalists. All the instruments on the few singles that the group recorded for Palmer records used uncredited - but extremely good - session musicians. The song was a modest success, but like a hundred other groups of their type around the country, they fell victim to the shady side of the record business, and never saw a dime of profit from "Wait A Minute" or any other single.
Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons never recorded an album, and they never toured very far. The group disbanded after a couple years. Around 1996, I found a copy of a compilation CD of garage music from Detroit like the Unrelated Segments, the Amboy Dukes, and others, and "Wait A Minute" was smack in the middle.
Once I'd scrapped the idea of combining sounds from several songs together, I settled on using a fragment of the the piano riff from "Wait A Minute"and the driving stomp that pushes it forward. To that I added the sound of a watery surf guitar, noisy beats in wide stereo, and some keyboard noodling and fashioned it into a track that retained "Wait A Minute"'s feeling but not its structure or melody. I did some test vocals with lyrics I hoped would evoke the feeling of "Detroit to California" without ever directly referring to it (I grew up listening to REM, you see). I usually express theme associatively, such as at the start of the song when "Wait a Minute"'s Detroit piano stomp is mixed with surf guitar before running squarely into a lyrics that start off musically quoting the Mamas and the Papas' "I Saw Her Again Last Night."
Once the demo was done, I put the song aside to listen to it for a while in my car and get to know it better. I started working on some other tracks and finished a couple before turning back to "The Future's On the Radio" to finish what I'd started. I punched up the final track, added some wah-wah guitar and some tambourine on the breakdown, and rerecorded all the vocals, and increasing the background vocals from two voices to five. I sang all the parts myself and tried to shotgun the harmony as best as I could.
I finished the track on a Saturday, and on Sunday my hard drive went crashed, and crashed hard, with grinding metal and nasty smell and the horrific sounds that accompany catastrophic data loss. I'd no daily backup regimen in place, and all the work I'd done to finish the song was lost, along with the work I'd done on the newer tracks. To say I was bummed doesn't adequately put into words the kind of frustration that comes about when creative work is lost or destroyed. There's emotions, expense, and time directly invested these things that creative people call their "babies." This was my first real attempt at a song, and while I still had the mixed-down demo form, baby and the blueprints were gone. Ouch.
The whole experienced harshed my music buzz to the point where I stopped recording stuff for a few weeks before I got comfortable investing my time in it again. And while I started on new material, I never went back to make any attempt to re-finish "The Future's On The Radio." I put the demo version on the CD I gave to friends and family for Christmas that year, and over time I got used to it enough I came to accept it as the final version of the song. But since I had been the only person to hear the final version, it always sounded slightly underdone. The breakdown toward the end was especially flat and uninspiring. I'd originally intended to send the finished track to Tim-Tam Wiesend, but after the drive crashed, I never felt the song was good enough to be the tribute it was supposed to be.
Fast forward about five years to last week, when I took time to clean up and consolidate my music project directory, which I'd transferred from my old system and combined with several previous backups on CD going back to when I first created the directory. There were so many different versions of various songs with various working titles in various states of mixdown that going through them took several days. And there, unlabeled, in this batch of mp3s, was a complete mix-down of the lost, finished "The Future's On The Radio."
It was both shocking and satisfying to hear. I'd gotten so used to the half-baked demo version, that immediately the difference was apparent. I had no recollection of backing up any mixdown of the track nor did any turn up during painstaking (and sometimes teary) searches through temp folders and what middling backups I had. I was satisfied that, after a forced five-year absence, this first attempt at song production was pretty darn good for a guy who'd never been in a real studio.
I'd internalized the loss of the original track as a failure of my original goal. In fact, I had succeeded, but the track disappeared before I could decide that for myself. The mp3 I found is the only one that includes the final material and new vocals recorded after the demo version. After several listens, I think I've determined this was probably the second-to-last mix-down, since the vocals sound a bit tinny and I recall correcting for that in the last mix, which remains lost. But that's a small matter - the other elements are as I'd wanted them to sound: like a song from Detroit after several years on the West Coast.
Sadly, I can't send this to Tim-Tam Wiesend anymore. I found out the day after I located the lost track that he died after a battle with cancer in October of 2003 - well after I'd finished the track, but well before I'd found it after its loss. It's a bummer. I'd like to think that when I'm 60, some kid might find my trifles and trace back the inspirations at their sources. These bands lived large in my mind - many were guys like me from my neighborhood. They made music that vibrated with the very tone of the place I grew up in. I brought that music and that place with me to my new home, and I'm just passing it on.
Download:
"The Future's On The Radio (Lost Final Mix)"
"The Future's On The Radio (Demo Version)"
"The Future's On The Radio (Instrumental)"
"Wait A Minute" by Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons
This is the CD "Cover Art" that I did for the song. Click on it for a larger version. The image features Doron, though it's hard to tell.
Music is, for me, both a passion and an occasional hobby. I'd always had an ear for music and had used the web to teach myself basic guitar chords. But while I could sing and play the pop songs transcribed at the old Online Guitar Archive, actually writing songs was more difficult. I had ideas, but making them gel was painstaking. I'd recorded songs and other...less definable material for years on anlaog four-track recorders since high school and only started using my computer to make music during the Summer of 1998. At first, I used the computer as a replacement for the four-track recorder - I'd record my guitar and a basic vocal and perhaps use the software to add reverb. Not being a gamer, the box I had at the time was much too slow to go beyond the basics.
A friend told me about Acid by Sonic Foundry (now Sony), a digital audio software tool with three crucial attributes. First, an audio file can be imported into Acid and then looped, repeated endlessly or in various pattens. A short drum pattern is repeated and becomes a beat. Other sounds are added and matched for tempo automatically. Secondly, the number of tracks (instruments, vocals, effects) in a composition is limited only by the hard drive and memory capacity. This dramatically increases the possibilities for combining tracks to create new sounds that sound and feel different from their individual components.
Finally, and most importantly, music is composed in a fashion that engages sight and sound interactively. This was a breakthrough for me. My aptitude for sound and rhythm not withstanding, the mathematical nature of songwriting isn't friendly territory to me. Those types of processes don't coalesce in my head without some kind of reference point. Acid provided this key element.
Once a reference by which to "see" the song was in place, other elements fell in line. Invariably, a song comes organically - lyrics evolve in my head as the sound of the song takes shape. It's never lyrics first and music second, or vice-versa - both influence each other and often if a track doesn't have lyrics by the time it feels done, it doesn't get them.
All the first tracks I did were bascially experiments to try to get the hang of working out the sounds in my head digitally by combining sound samples, processsing them, and editing them. I can't really call them "songs," more like sound collages. I was going for a particular kind of sound that had been with me since I'd moved to California. I wanted to make songs that sounded contemporary but not "electronic," songs that would sound at home both on a college radio station today and late 60's Drake format AM Top 40.
I grew up in Detroit where the legacy of CKLW and the Drake format was still strongly felt in local radio during the 80's. The Drake format, pioneered at CKLW, defined the sound of popular radio in a radical way in the 1960's and 1970's. Detroit's proximity across the river from CKLW's studio in Windsor, gave the city's musical talent - especially Motown Records - a disproportionally powerful influence as stations in other markets rushed to copy CKLW's sound and success. Hundreds of independent labels sprung up throughout the Detroit area that hoped to ride Motown's rising tide. These distributed vinyl 45's recorded in basements, garages, and rickety studios to stations across the country.
Stylistically, these singles were as diverse as the musicians that made them: Motown-style soul, pre-punk garage bands, traditional pop, country, blues. What unites these records is a certain sound, an ineffible "Detroitness" that's raw, gritty, a bit trashy, sexy, even slightly dangerous. There's an urgency to it, a rough finish at its most polished. Before I'd heard of the White Stripes or any of new Detroit bands that took up the mantle in the years after I left, I wanted to evoke this sound. I wanted it to reflect what I'd become: Detroit music in California.
The first "song" I recorded on my computer was my first attempt to get at this sound and over a couple weeks in 1999 it became "The Future's On The Radio." I'd become familiar with many of the obscure Detroit bands from the 60's and 70's back in high school, and I wanted to take some of the digital recordings of these 45's and mix them up and create beats and instrument textures from the fragments. Total failure. Nothing I did could make it sound like something other than Metal Machine Music. While I like noise experiments, I wanted something more accessible.
So I took a different approach. I scrapped the synthesis idea and built a track based on one of my all-time favorite 45's from the period, which I'd first heard at the house of a friend of mine that had more vinyl records than some radio stations. He'd gone to Allen Park High School, and one of the students that had gone there before him was Rick "Tim Tam Wiesend," who my described was one of Detriot's greatest stars that never were. He was the lead singer of a group called Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons, and that reached #76 on the national charts with a high-energy vocal pop song that he co-wrote with producer Bob Berry in 1965 called "Wait A Minute."
My friend played his 45 and I loved the song so much I had him dub it onto a blank cassette, which I eventually wore out. It became one of the songs I had to play for people. I played it for both my parents; neither remembered it. "Tim-Tam" Wiesend was a Frankie Valli acolyte who sang everything in a forceful falsetto as the Turn-Ons backed him up. In fact, the Turn-Ons were only vocalists. All the instruments on the few singles that the group recorded for Palmer records used uncredited - but extremely good - session musicians. The song was a modest success, but like a hundred other groups of their type around the country, they fell victim to the shady side of the record business, and never saw a dime of profit from "Wait A Minute" or any other single.
Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons never recorded an album, and they never toured very far. The group disbanded after a couple years. Around 1996, I found a copy of a compilation CD of garage music from Detroit like the Unrelated Segments, the Amboy Dukes, and others, and "Wait A Minute" was smack in the middle.
Once I'd scrapped the idea of combining sounds from several songs together, I settled on using a fragment of the the piano riff from "Wait A Minute"and the driving stomp that pushes it forward. To that I added the sound of a watery surf guitar, noisy beats in wide stereo, and some keyboard noodling and fashioned it into a track that retained "Wait A Minute"'s feeling but not its structure or melody. I did some test vocals with lyrics I hoped would evoke the feeling of "Detroit to California" without ever directly referring to it (I grew up listening to REM, you see). I usually express theme associatively, such as at the start of the song when "Wait a Minute"'s Detroit piano stomp is mixed with surf guitar before running squarely into a lyrics that start off musically quoting the Mamas and the Papas' "I Saw Her Again Last Night."
Once the demo was done, I put the song aside to listen to it for a while in my car and get to know it better. I started working on some other tracks and finished a couple before turning back to "The Future's On the Radio" to finish what I'd started. I punched up the final track, added some wah-wah guitar and some tambourine on the breakdown, and rerecorded all the vocals, and increasing the background vocals from two voices to five. I sang all the parts myself and tried to shotgun the harmony as best as I could.
I finished the track on a Saturday, and on Sunday my hard drive went crashed, and crashed hard, with grinding metal and nasty smell and the horrific sounds that accompany catastrophic data loss. I'd no daily backup regimen in place, and all the work I'd done to finish the song was lost, along with the work I'd done on the newer tracks. To say I was bummed doesn't adequately put into words the kind of frustration that comes about when creative work is lost or destroyed. There's emotions, expense, and time directly invested these things that creative people call their "babies." This was my first real attempt at a song, and while I still had the mixed-down demo form, baby and the blueprints were gone. Ouch.
The whole experienced harshed my music buzz to the point where I stopped recording stuff for a few weeks before I got comfortable investing my time in it again. And while I started on new material, I never went back to make any attempt to re-finish "The Future's On The Radio." I put the demo version on the CD I gave to friends and family for Christmas that year, and over time I got used to it enough I came to accept it as the final version of the song. But since I had been the only person to hear the final version, it always sounded slightly underdone. The breakdown toward the end was especially flat and uninspiring. I'd originally intended to send the finished track to Tim-Tam Wiesend, but after the drive crashed, I never felt the song was good enough to be the tribute it was supposed to be.
Fast forward about five years to last week, when I took time to clean up and consolidate my music project directory, which I'd transferred from my old system and combined with several previous backups on CD going back to when I first created the directory. There were so many different versions of various songs with various working titles in various states of mixdown that going through them took several days. And there, unlabeled, in this batch of mp3s, was a complete mix-down of the lost, finished "The Future's On The Radio."
It was both shocking and satisfying to hear. I'd gotten so used to the half-baked demo version, that immediately the difference was apparent. I had no recollection of backing up any mixdown of the track nor did any turn up during painstaking (and sometimes teary) searches through temp folders and what middling backups I had. I was satisfied that, after a forced five-year absence, this first attempt at song production was pretty darn good for a guy who'd never been in a real studio.
I'd internalized the loss of the original track as a failure of my original goal. In fact, I had succeeded, but the track disappeared before I could decide that for myself. The mp3 I found is the only one that includes the final material and new vocals recorded after the demo version. After several listens, I think I've determined this was probably the second-to-last mix-down, since the vocals sound a bit tinny and I recall correcting for that in the last mix, which remains lost. But that's a small matter - the other elements are as I'd wanted them to sound: like a song from Detroit after several years on the West Coast.
Sadly, I can't send this to Tim-Tam Wiesend anymore. I found out the day after I located the lost track that he died after a battle with cancer in October of 2003 - well after I'd finished the track, but well before I'd found it after its loss. It's a bummer. I'd like to think that when I'm 60, some kid might find my trifles and trace back the inspirations at their sources. These bands lived large in my mind - many were guys like me from my neighborhood. They made music that vibrated with the very tone of the place I grew up in. I brought that music and that place with me to my new home, and I'm just passing it on.
Download:
"The Future's On The Radio (Lost Final Mix)"
"The Future's On The Radio (Demo Version)"
"The Future's On The Radio (Instrumental)"
"Wait A Minute" by Tim-Tam and the Turn-Ons
This is the CD "Cover Art" that I did for the song. Click on it for a larger version. The image features Doron, though it's hard to tell.
Hi there. I was surfing the web and googled my dad's name. Fortunately enough, I came upon this website and was so moved by your thoughts on my dad's record. My father is Rick Wiesend.. "Tim Tam" as he's known. It makes me feel so good to know that there are people out there that remember my father for the talent he was.. I know I do :) Thank you for this.. it really brightened my day.
Tiffany Wiesend
I also listened to your tracks.. I definitely appreciate the songs... they capture the same sort of feeling as Wait a Minute.. and I can tell you worked very hard on them. My father would have been incredibly flattered and impressed by your work... and actually I know he's in heaven being flattered and impressed :) Thanks again for this.
Tiffany Wiesend ('Tim Tam's' youngest daughter)
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