Rose’s word zone

today i'm gonna talk about another ween bootleg! well, actually, this one isn't a bootleg. in fact, it's the first side of their 1988 release "The Live Brain Wedgie/WAD Excerpts", which as the name suggests consists of live material on Side A and fragments from their WAD era (which were the first writing sessions for the album that became GodWeenSatan) on Side B. specifically, the live material is from a live show they did in May of 1988 at the always wonderful City Gardens in Trenton.

song-wise, we actually have the full setlist for this! for a while i think it was believed that only what was recorded for the vinyl was played since it's a round-ish 10 minutes, but at some point the entire setlist wound up in circulation. and it rocks!! i haven't heard the songs not on Live Brain Wedgie and I don't really espect to, but judging from their live renditions at Maxwell's c. 1987 + Pranzatelli's c. 1989 in the case of Red as Satan it was probably pretty rockin'. as far as I know, the only song with missing live footage from their pre-GWS years is Boobs, since they've only done it the once on record.

recording-wise? it's a damn good soundboard! crackle permeates the copy that I have, and some of the louder tracks (ESPECIALLY You Fucked Up) get a bit distorted, but it's nothing that fully breaks my immersion, i imagine the crackle is probably cause it's a pretty old record anyways.

performance-wise? at least to my ears, this is a huge step up from Maxwell's about half a year earlier. dean goes pretty crazy on the pedals in Nippy Wiffle and the yelly-noisy outro of I Drink A Lot, and gene sounds waaay more into songs like Refrigerator and Jelly. hell, i think this show has THE best recording of Jelly period, though I guess that comes from the other two (that I know of) being a sloppy version from 1985 and the other being the Maxwell's show where the first verse starts a few bars too early. oh yeah, the version of I Like You rocks too, and the solo in the middle of Nippy Wiffle this time rocks - I'm not sure if it's a quote from something as it is in Maxwell's (with the bit of Third Stone), but if it's not it's one hell of a cool lead.

oh yeah, also there's some funny banter where Gene introduces I Drink A Lot as Nippy Wiffle and dean goes "no it's not, this song's called I Drink A Lot". i dunno why that got a lol out of me, but it did.

anyways! as a show, this is probably THE best representation of their early stuff. part of me wishes they reheated some of these in studio versions, but i dunno how well stuff like I Drink A Lot would fare amongst, like, Wayne's Pet Youngin' or Never Squeal or the duo of Licking The Palm and Mushroom Festival. if you can track down a copy, i highly recommend it - it's one of my fave things from the period where they were still kinda figuring stuff out and were leaning more into the punk side of stuff.

aside from the ween show review though, i got my friend tenille to do dreamwidth-y stuff there! she's one of my coolest friends and i enjoy talking to her a lot, if you dig my posts you'll probably enjoy her writings. i'm gonna go for a walk now, up to a local liquor store and back. not for liquor though, i have a few winning scratchoffs (a whole four dollars!!!) and also i just kinda enjoy the air y'know?

hope you're well. be bold with your love. never let the bad team tell you what you're living for.

today was pretty good!!! i won a couple bucks on the lottery (eight bucks from a $1 scratch off and five bucks from a $3 scratch off) so even though it's like, pennies in the grand scheme of things i'm a little happy about that. i've been gambling less recently but i don't wanna let winning a couple bucks cloud my judgement so i'm just like, not gonna let it.

beyond that, my band put out a new thing on FAWM! it's a rock song i wrote a few days ago from old music, like super old, 15 year old me old. lyrically it's sort of in the same vein as my song Overgrown which you probably haven't heard yet, weird trauma stuff related to suburbia and family things i can't talk about here. i actually wrote a live intro to overgrown on the 6th inspired by TMBG's songs Spine/Spines (which work as intros to the songs Memo to Human Resources and Au Contraire) recently! it does weird chord stuff i can't explain, i do like a ♭VI V i thing in B except instead of a minor i it's a major I and then i go around to make it sound like it's gonna resolve in D but then it goes back to this, and then it starts doing stuff in regular B minor and then i do a ♭VI V movement to lead back into the I which goes into overgrown.

i have no idea if any of that makes sense. i hope it does!!!!

uhhh i'm also gonna start taking walks today, or i guess when it stops raining (it's been raining basically nonstop for 5 days straight), because all i've really done for the past few months is write songs and apply to jobs and although that's fun that also comes with the caveat of me having done fuck all. and i feel sad about that and i forget i can take walks in my weird part of californian suburbia sometimes. so i'm gonna start doing that again!!!

i dunno how to end this. maybe i should start actually using the icon feature. also not my atom bomb by logan whitehurst rocks. that is all

lying in bed listening to my friend Juno’s cover of weird al’s hardware store. it rocks. i love her music.

didn’t really do too much today - I was gonna record a session of miserable Uno in Roblox with some of my friends but I felt really bad today, so I postponed it until next week. i feel cruddy about that but oh well, not much I could do. i feel better now though!

also, I called jay and we watched YouTube and talked about music stuff. i love her so much.

i should start doing more things. the day after tomorrow’s Sunday which is usually when I try to fit in a Bunnythumbs session. bunnythumbs is a thing my musical inspiration and internet friend Marc came up with, basically you record a song out of nothing within a 90 minute window with a few (or no) goals of your choosing. last week I tried using my recently acquired mandolin and a key change I’m not used to, and I was able to do that, which I’m happy about! not sure what I’ll do this week. maybe something keyboard related.

OH! also FAWM is next month. I’ll be doing that with Jay as part of our band/musical collective the Everfree Forest, so keep an eye out for that! it’s gonna rock.

love on ya.

it’s like 11 pm on a Tuesday as i start typing this. I’m cross legged on the floor of my bathroom - normally when I’m in this position it’s for demoing guitar + vocal stuff that I think the reverb of the room would complement, but I don’t really feel like doing that, i haven’t written any new stuff in ages. i did buy a mandolin online today though!! it’s arriving next week or maybe early this week. i borrowed a mandolin from a friend once and I had fun, and then they smashed it so that kinda ended my brief mandolin arc. but I’m hoping with one of my own it’ll give me more chances to use it in stuff. it seems fun. my friend june used one in a song once.

today I called jay a few times, talked to my friend juno (no relation to june) who writes wonderful songs as a Slight Threat, and walked a friend through installing mixcraft since they were having some trouble recording stuff in audacity. they’re kinda new to music but I see some talent in them. i see talent in everyone, actually. i feel bad dunking on “bad musicians” as I used to tend to because i think anyone can write a good song, it just takes some time speaking as someone who wrote garbage for like a year until it clicked. i think this might suit its own entry actually but not tonight.

aside from that I didn’t really do much. lost my phone a few days ago, so that sucks - I’m gonna be getting a prepaid card for the one I lost a year and a half ago and only recently rediscovered soon, if I find the old one I can back up the stuff on it anyways.

oh!! wait! when jay and I called we worked on a tentative instrumental recreation for an old song of ours (working title Howard Be Thy Name). she wrote the music and some lyrics for it twoish(?) years ago based on an idea I had for a post-apocalyptic scenario where Howie Mandel is worshipped as a god of luck and abundance, but it didn’t really go anywhere because we were too busy with other stuff. but she brought it up in a call and I was struck with motivation, so I did a brief 4-track version (drums, pad, bass, synth string) based on the only mp3 I had and then we added some keys and chiptune synths and sampled guitars to it. when she gets a new laptop I think this song’s gonna turn out spectacularly, the harmonies and chords in the original demo go insane - it’s mostly A minor stuff but it gets across an atmosphere hard to explain.

i love writing songs with her. i mean, obviously i also love her romantically, but like… she clicks with my songwriting in a way I can’t explain. the songs we write together are always the best. the songs SHE writes are the best. i love her so much.

yay queer people!! see you whenever, wherever. hope you’re doing well in these scary times.