The Smoking Meatwhistles
All-Time Christmas Favorites (featuring rock and roll guitar!!!)
The beginning of the story of the Christmas tape...
In 1989 or so, Jim and Tom had been playing in an improv band called Deafcon with Gary P. and a whole cast of other folks, (Rob, Joe, Brian, Steve, Cal to name a few), based at WUSB Stony Brook, Greenpoint and Massapequa, NY. As Deafcon was an "improv only" band, when Jim and Tom decided to start rehearsing Christmas songs for WUSB's annual Christmas show, it was shelved in favor of Jim inviting John K. in on trumpet and random selections from John's Christmas songbook for the live radio broadcast. The result was "The Salvation Army Tape" which has been lost a long time ago and included embryonic versions of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "The Little Drummer Boy" originally rehearsed in Tom's parent's basement. Another thing which happened in Tom's parents basement was Tom and Jim's Fostex 4-track recordings of "The Theme From Courageous Cat And Minute Mouse" and "The House Of The Rising Sun." The project was named either the Meatwhistles or The Greenpoint Meatwhistles but no other 4-track recordings were made. That was pretty much the end of the Christmas thing for a while.
Sidebar...
Tom and sometimes Jim continued on with Gary and Deafcon and it's subsequent improv permutations - Psychoacoustics and after two Art-Noise Marathon performances at Stony Brook (including Jim Durso and Margaret) by 1992, The Exploading Jazz Commode with a stop along the way for the acoustic guitar. electronic drums and spoken word of Maureen Moisture And Her Wrinklerods which featured Gary on a few songs. About a year later, Gary and Tom moved to Long Beach and started another improv band, The Moodsetters with Ken K, Ken B and sometimes Jim, Dan, Paul and Jay. Somewhere in there, Jim was trained to record professional audio in an abandoned 7-11 in Farmingdale, of all places.
The Project begins...
In 1995, Jim and Tom decided to resurrect the Christmas idea by creating a full multi-track recording on their twin Tascam cassette 4-tracks and mixing in controlled doses of improv, Jim's tape experiments with Manhattan Rubber and the lounge music both had recently discovered. On March 22nd, a demo recording of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" was done at Uncle Beans Studios and the project was officially started. A pattern quickly emerged, with Jim programming drum parts starting on Thursdays and recording and bouncing the bass, rhythm guitar, keyboards and all the percussion on Saturdays, Sundays, Monday mornings and Wednesdays. Jim would then get into his car on Wednesday night with a bag full of guitar effects and have at least one song, sometimes two for Tom to lay his melody part on top of while Jim heaped on even more percussion in the background. We played with the formula a little, where Jim would lay down the melody on keyboards beforehand and leaving one or two rhythm parts for Tom to play. By Thanksgiving it was done, just in time for the Christmas retail season and the day that department stores and malls turn on the Christmas Muzak. The tapes were either given away or sold for cost ($2), mostly at their workplaces. At least 100 were passed out by Christmas. The tape never received general release due mainly to ignorance of licensing and copyright issues and because of artwork problems. The original tape was handed out on stock Maxell tapes with handwritten labels and photocopied three-fold covers made by Jim on an IBM 8086 PC (and in '96 re-made on a Brother word processor) and featuring himself on Santa's knee in 1968 on the cover pictured above.
Production notes...
This album was recorded between 03/25 and 06/08, then a break until between 06/28 and 07/12 and then another break until between 09/10 and 11/1. Jim manually prepared two master tapes in November, one for him and one for Tom, by simply recording from his four track and following rehearsed and scripted mixdowns onto metal cassettes in a Sony consumer model machine, two times in a row and hitting pause when the song was over.
All guitar parts but one were recorded through a live amplifier of some sort - Gorilla and Peavey mostly but also a Sony boombox once and another time a Sony home amplifier rigged up to a MOSFET pedal and a car-door speaker from Jim's old '73 Mustang. Bass, keyboard and electronic percussion parts were recorded through an Ibanez guitar compressor and either an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man or a Boss half-rack reverb unit for ambience.
Jim's drawer full of guitar and bass effects - Boss, Electro-Harmonix, DOD, Ibanez, etc - were extensively used for this recording, almost to the point of a different distortion box for each song. At least twice, Jim played the effect while Tom played the guitar. A Boss Dr. Rhythm 550 was used for most "drum" parts but programmed in such a way as to include some "mistakes" (lapsing into other time signatures) and always in conjunction with at least one percussion instrument playing ride parts, twice bringing out the cheap cymbal from Jim's Wrinklerod days from the closet.
Post-Meat notes...
Tom and Jim joined Gary and Dan from The Moodsetters in January 1996 to begin recording as The Unqua Drill Boys, this time spoken word with Bill and within a limited improvised setting. Later that year minus Bill the same group re-united as The Exploading Jazz Commode - later re-christened The Progressive Jazz Commode - meaning Moodsetters minus Kens. The Moodsetters (sometimes with guests such as Paul, Jay, Phillipa and once again Jim Durso) continued recording, appearing on WUSB and giving live performances up until the "last show" at the Conklin Barn in Huntington - September 9th, 2001 - reunited with Dan and Ken. In there somewhere were Patty & Patty's Moon Pearls, recorded & joined by Tom & Jim and also Gary, Paul and Ken K. Ken K moved to Florida and Gary found Sandy/Hannah and a few others. In a few months, Jim and then later Paul and Tom and sometimes Jay or Joe were back in the fold with Sandy and Gary and recording as The Center For Hearing And Dizziness, continuing The Moodsetters tradition of improvisation to films. After 2003, new membership included Brian and Adil and live performances performed with some of the above.
In 1996, Jim once again remixed the Christmas tapes, this time using a Korg unit and it's compression algorithms. Most of the mixes of the songs posted on this site, with a few exceptions, are from that version of the album and mastered to CD-R on February 28, 2001. At some point in the next few years, we may give these tracks a ground-up rebuild from the original four tracks and some other unused mixes which now due to random access and digital storage can all be brought together better than we could do on a linear cassette back in '95 or '96. The digital transfers you hear here represent some of Upholstery Supreme's first attempts at that sort of thing, glitches and all..
Thanks,
Jim and The Upholsterers Supreme
Photo credits include Phillipa, Debbie, Nicole & possibly Patty or members of your family.