new news about old songs: san francisco demos 1987

Keith and Charles - infrared double exposures overlay

Keith Ullrich:

Finally. It’s about time the ten songs Charles and I recorded in 1987 come out to play. There’s a long story how they’ve come about, so if you care to multitask you’re welcome to

continue reading the tale here with me while listening to our San Francisco demos here...

Looking through my archive I don’t see much of anything we’d written about these songs—just titles, a few recording notes, and absolutely nothing about the non-standard guitar tunings we made up.

Composed between late 1985 and mid-1987 in the San Francisco Bay Area, we rehearsed and played these often, both of us coming to practice with new ideas for songs as well as tweaks to ones we thought we’d already finished. Occasionally there were opportunities to play live, including an invitation to open for '60s blues artist Danny Kalb at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage.

Charles Anderson and Danny Kalb jamming in El Sobrante, CA - Nov. 1985

In the spring of 1987 Charles and his family were preparing for a long visit with friends in West Germany. Thinking we might forget a lot during the break we set up a demo recording session a week or two before the flight. This session became our notepad then, capturing not only what seemed impossible for us to write down, but also the sometimes heartfelt, and other times just plain raw, emotions and energy these songs still have for me today.

Our engineer, Richard Wahlberg, offered to record us digitally, which was fairly new at the time with many studios still recording mostly analog. The setup was simple: we sat almost face-to-face with a single stereo mic between us plugged into a Sony PCM-F1 Digital Audio Processor; then the processor, encoding at 14- or 16-bit 44.1kHz, sent data on to a Sony Beta VCR. We recorded one song after another live to tape, sometimes going back and trying again on a few, hoping to get a better version if we felt we could do it.

After the session we had our Beta digital master and a couple audio cassettes Richard made for us. But because we didn’t own a PCM-F1, or even a soon-to-be-obsolete Beta VCR, there was no way for us to access the digital data. So we made copies of our songs for friends, for ourselves, and copies of copies from the first-generation cassettes. Over the next couple of years we worked on other music and sound projects, but then got really busy with work, family, and other stuff, with me returning to Southern California in late 1989.

In mid-2002 I had a mild panic attack, remembering the Wahlberg digital master and thinking it was too late to ever get to the data from that session. I was sure, that fifteen years later there wasn’t going to be a single working PCM-F1 available on the planet, but I was wrong.

In Illinois, Brent Jessee Recording had a couple PCM-F1s and a lot of other professional equipment to rescue all kinds of media believed lost to time and obsolescence. For a very reasonable fee, Brent edited the digital audio and produced CD-R masters and backup copies for us both. For that, I am forever grateful... but then we just couldn’t find the time to deep-dive into the discs as work, our families, and other art/music projects all took precedence—so it would be many more years before we would get a chance to revisit our rescued songs.

After retiring in late 2021 I took my time setting up a small studio at my beach apartment. There I began working, slowly, making new music as well as reviewing music I made in the eighties... some solo stuff, but a lot made with friends too. Going through selected cassettes and some reel-to-reels I see there’s a lot of digitizing to do eventually, but with the Wahlberg demos I thought very little needed to be done—and in a way, that was true, but the more I listened I realized a bit of clean-up was necessary (see remastering notes below).

Keith and Charles, c.1980

So here we are, mid-autumn 2024. Thirty-seven years from that day in May the two of us sat down with our guitars, facing that single stereo microphone... and now, here today, I can remember all the hours we spent in the studio, and I still love all of these songs. I just can’t remember how to play any of them.

-Keith

Charles Anderson:

I’ve been playing guitar for over 50 years and except for those initial lessons at Pedrini Music in Alhambra CA, which taught me to read music some and appreciate classical guitar, I never spent any time learning music theory, or the circle of fifths, or cool chord progressions and riffs. I bought books and otherwise learned how to play songs but jamming with others was not something I felt comfortable doing. And forget about soloing over a I-IV-V.

I was experimental with the guitar and I did a fair amount of song writing, but none of it was with any real technical knowledge (theory) of what I was doing. What I did have however, was an ear for what sounded good. Because I didn’t know any theory it often took me longer to get to where I wanted to be, but I knew it when I heard it. It was a kind of “hunt-and-peck” approach to playing guitar.

Then I changed high schools between my sophomore and junior years, and I met Keith. I don’t remember the precise circumstances of our meeting but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with my going steady with Linda Lightfoot, who was in theater with Laura Weiss, who was going steady with Keith. At some point we each discovered that the other played guitar. Not only that, it turned out we had a similar approach to playing. I wrote a song for a high school talent show. Keith came up with a complementary guitar part and my new girlfriend played flute. The song was a typical, teen-angsty story about getting old and dying, but that experience cemented our friendship and gave birth to a lot of music projects that included guitar, synths, and objects with dubious musical qualities. (The girlfriend dumped me a year later but I didn’t consider that a commentary on the music projects.)

Performing at the Pumpkin Festival, Temple City, CA - Nov. 1976. Photo by David Ullrich

I don’t think Keith will mind me saying that my lack of music theory knowledge was matched by his. Like me however, he has a good ear and we both had patience while the other found the right sound to go with what we were playing. We started messing around with alternate tunings and a whole new world opened up for us. We landed on one in particular and our compositions took off. Neither of us could tell you what key we were in and we might even be hard-pressed to tell you to what notes we tuned the strings! I firmly believe that what we lacked in music theory however, we made up for in sound that was interesting and complex.

Our compositions reached their apotheosis in the set of songs on this album: San Francisco Demos 1987

I will forever be grateful to Keith for resurrecting these recordings from a digital dumping ground. His remastering of the tracks has brought a lot of life to the music that was not most optimally recorded. Listening to these tracks again after many years makes me realize that so much of my current playing style was honed during the period we created this set. Listening also forces me to give ourselves a pass for not knowing any theory. We couldn’t tell you the key, but we could play the shit out of it, whatever it was.

-Charles

Keith's notes on the 2024 remastering:

As these tracks were recorded live (no overdubs, no corrections) an effort was made to maintain the integrity and overall sound quality of the originals while making some improvements using a minimal amount of effects-processing—so just the usual limiter, compression and EQ, with a bit of stereo re-balancing as well. No reverb, noise reduction, or other effects were used.

During EQ I dropped some of the low-end as our guitars were boomy and boxy sounding from our shifting positions in front of the stereo mic; then I increased the high-end a little boosting the brightness of both instruments.

Lastly, I’ve tried to bring out Charles’ vocals as much as possible (limiter and compression helped a lot here), but again, sometimes mic location and our positions to it determined what was recorded.