Just in time for the 5th year anniversary of the death of Richard Kilgore, comes a digitized version of the first demo cassette the band did in 2004.
Released for clubs and booking agents only, the ep contains only halfway, or less, finished first versions of these songs. True underground punk classics!
This one's for the GORE~!
Bootlegger - 4 For The Road.
1. Fire Of Creation
2. Psychosomatic
3. Lindsey Dawn
4. Machine Pistol
I did this quick mix one night after practice so we could have a demo to send to clubs. Don't have any interface to get the music into a computer in stereo, still don't. Then though I mixed by hand through a mixing board, so it had to be recorded to stereo. Mono demos suck. So I went to a stereo cassette deck and our drummer Ken took the tape to a friend of his with a studio and he digitized this for us. That little drop out in Lindsey Dawn are one of those tape things people used to hate. Hell my digital stuff still does crazy stuff like that...
None of the songs have finished or mixed guitars, all of those are pretty much scratch. I know Lindsey Dawn has just the scratch and an acoustic. It eventually had five guitar tracks. Machine Pistols has just the scratch, which are the first takes of any of the songs. Funny thing a couple of them this is as far as it got since just a few weeks after this, the mixing board we had decided when and how it was going to work and eventually none of this album, except one or two songs, ever got finished.
A couple of these versions is all, unless I go back and ever finish the guitars this stuff, which could happen but probably will not, is what will be the final versions. I'd not release this today without the guitars being finished and mixed higher. At the time, it's all we had to try and book some gigs with. Since I just found this on an old mix CD and it's for the Gore, you'll get it hear it. I felt a few tears when I found and first listened to this. I didn't know where, or if recordings of this demo even still existed. Now I calling it 4 For The Road as a set because this demo was to book our earliest gigs, and we had planned to tour the album.
Later never came though. Even when Kilgore died in 2011, except for this version of Fire Of Creation, which eventually had one more guitar, the main one for the song, plus a couple of other songs not on this early demo, would be all I had ever liked well enough to consider complete. The equipment problems, and there were many, halted finalizing and finishing a good full release of this album until that time. I cursed that mixing board and a couple of years after Kilgore passed I gave the damn thing, still not working half right, away.
You can hear Kilgore on some backing vocals and his bass parts pretty good here, I think two later were re-recorded. So these versions cannot ever be the same. Machine Pistol has his vocals, as does Psychosomatic. When Kilgore died, his vocal recordings are no longer on any of the the track masters. He took his backup vocals with him. That sounds just like the Gore, and he and I both are laughing our asses off about it!
I know the bass and vocals he had finished on Fire Of Creation. You'll never hear it on any future mixes there since we redid those sections completely a week or two later. Fire and Machine are two that are closest to finished, except for some things than the scratch guitar we used on all this for me to do the vocals. Vocal are what I was working on when I did this mix for a demo that night. You call tell I had the guitar parts down to hear myself singing better. Well, if you want to call it singing. On Psychosomatic I went back and redid ALL the vocals later before we finished recording the whole album, and this demo version has the much better takes.
Finding it for that lost version, and Lindsey Dawn, which never did get finished or released, gives me two versions of two songs I prefer to what I decided on later. Machine Pistol never had the studio takes released in any form as far as I know, ever. That song you can really hear Kilgore's bass and backup vocals clearly. I know we redid the bass on Dawn later on as well. So this is another finding of something lost. Which is really why I'd release this half finished stuff. It represents something we lost, that is worth having.
Long Live Bootlegger, and Long Live Kilgore!
Todd West - December 2015