Steve Tibbetts / First
Album
In 1975 I had a sort-of girlfriend named Anne, and she had a sort-of boyfriend
named Tim (fig. 1), and Tim and I got to be pretty good
friends mostly because we admired each other. He admired my motorcycle that
I kept in my 3rd floor dorm room at Macalaster College and my exquisite ponytail,
and I admired Tim's beard, his IQ of 4000 and his Digitoke.
Bored college students were always looking for new ways to inhale in those days
and Tim, being a brilliant engineer and a pothead, invented the Digitoke. The
Digitoke was a modified air compressor with a bowl and screen arrangement on
the top that could hold half an ounce of pot. The rest of the machine was a
science fiction-like amalgam of blinking lights, keyboards, readouts, and a
hose that terminated in a gas mask-like device that was secured to the head
with elastic straps. Tim would invite his friends over, fill up the bowl and
use a keyboard to type in length of hit, proportion of air/pot mixture, and
strength of air flow. He'd strap the mask on his customer, grin his fiendish
grin, turn on the Digitoke, and play the flame of an acetylene torch over the
bowl. After we'd all had our turn we'd listen to Tim's state of the art stereo,
in silence. We'd listen either to some record on the Impulse label (Coltrane
or Pharaoh Sanders) or whatever new Mountain record Tim had. This went on for
a few weeks until we got bored again.
One fall evening in 1975 Tim stopped by my dorm room on a social call to find
me deep in the midst of my first multi-track experience. A friend named Scott
Stevens had lent me his Howard tape recorder. This particular Howard was a two-track
affair that had sound-on-sound capability. It was a little slice of heaven for
me, having been a fan of Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren's one man band recordings.
"I bet I could do that," I thought. I found out I couldn't, at least
not with the Howard, but Tim said, "Listen, I'm the proctor of the new
electronic music studio. I'm the only one they know who can solder, so the music
department offered me a work-study job. They have a four track. Do you want
to see it?" Well, sure. We went to look at the studio.
Macalaster, having a Scottish motif, had student bagpipers play at football
games and bagpipers needed somewhere to store their kilts. The music department
had kindly donated the kilt closet to house the new electronic music studio.
It was about five feet by ten, unventilated, and smelled like forty years of
sweaty kilts. It was wretched, but it had the sacred four-track (a Dokorder),
one microphone, a 4-channel mixer, an EML 101 synthesizer, and two Revox tape
recorders. It also had a note scribbled on a piece of paper and stuck up on
the wall: "It's all too beautiful." (From the Small Faces tune "Itchygoo
Park.") That's how it seemed to me. In spite of the squalor and sweaty
kilt smell it seemed like a dream about to come true. Tim played me a piece
he had written on the synthesizer called "Avalanche." The power and
majesty of it was overwhelming. Tim could tell I was smitten. "You should
work in here," he said. I agreed. I walked home feeling I was viewing everything
from a great height. "This is better that the Digitoke," I thought.
I finished up my art major, decided I wasn't going to be an art teacher, and
spent the fall and spring of 1975-76 in the studio. Unfortunately, I graduated
in 1976 and could no longer use it legally, so I used it illegally during the
summer of 1976. 1 would stroll innocently through the music department sometime
late in the day and prop open one of the inward-swinging windows on the ground
floor. At about 11pm I would ride my bike over with the "Mission Impossible"
theme in my head, slip in, and work until about 4. It seemed so mysterious,
clandestine, and daring. Up all night. Ride home at dawn. My secret work.
By late summer of 1976 I had enough music for an album but little chance of
getting a label to put it out. I did have a cover from my art major days and
a little money saved from my night shift job at Minnesota Public Radio, so I
found a pressing plant in Arizona that would manufacture 200 albums for $600
and I sent them my stuff.
About a month later they sent me the finished albums. I mounted an aggressive
ad campaign (fig. 2), sent flyers to my friends (fig.
3), and wondered what to do with 4 boxes of records. I gave one to my friend
Pig (fig. 4). Pig Munson. I don't know how he got the
nickname Pig. He took it home to Rapid City during Christmas '76 and played
it for his friend Bull (fig. 5). Bull's real name was
Kevin Bitz. Bull took it to San Francisco and played it for his friend, David,
who had the afternoon drive shift at KTIM in San Rafael. David and the
rest of the staff at KTIM put the album in heavy rotation. Suddenly I
was more popular than AWB, but not as big as Queen. That seemed right
(fig. 6 and fig. 7). Bull
invested $1000 to press and distribute the album in the Bay area, and that's
the last I heard from him except for two phone calls. The first call
was to tell me that television broadcasts of the Bay Area Bombers roller derby
team used "Jungle Rhythm" as their theme music. He called
me just as the broadcast was starting; "And now, the Bay Area Bombers take
on the San Jose Rockets..." There it was, the throbbing sound of "Jungle
Rhythm," and as Bull described it, footage of women in helmets crashing
into each other. The second call was to tell me that Clive Davis (then president
of Arista Records) might be calling me soon. I hovered around the phone for
about two weeks but Clive never called.
I sold enough of my first album to buy an eight-track recorder and set up my
own studio. I recorded my second album there (Yr) and collected about 200 rejection
slips from record companies for it. I put the album out myself and included
in the press kit selections from the rejection slips I'd cut up and reassembled
in a fit of wrath (fig. 8). 1 sent the album and
press kit to ECM and they thought it was funny enough to give the album a listen.
They were not interested in releasing it but they did send me a letter (with
the same strikeovers as the fake rejection letter [fig.9]
offering to do an album "their way." So we recorded Northern Song
in Oslo in 3 days, an album that I loathed at the time. That was followed with
albums recorded in my studio: Safe Journey (1984), Exploded View
(1987), Big Map (1989) and The Fall Of Us All (1994). Between
albums I traveled in Asia, sometimes working for study abroad programs (fig.
10)--(I have no idea what "director of health and well-being"
means). Sometimes I received small arts grants to study music abroad, or to
travel and record sounds to use in the studio.
Every now and then a writer will come to interview me at my studio. When they
walk in the door they usually look around slowly with their mouth slightly opened
and I always think they are amazed and thinking something along the lines of,
"It's all too beautiful," but no. They always interview me and then
go away and write a story that starts with something like, "In an abandoned
warehouse in a seedy neighborhood in a dark cramped room..."
The last I heard from Tim he was working for Canadian Bell. He's their resident
computer genius, responsible for the software that handles all phone lines in
Canada. He wrote me a postcard and said he found my last album "annoying"
(fig. 11). Pig is now Mark, and makes prosthetic limbs.
Bull disappeared. Clive never called.