As we prepared this release, some material came to light that could't and wouldn't and shouldn't make it on the album.
I did some interviews in September 2021:
John Rogers in his part 1 part 2
Tom Boettcher from Brooklyn
Helena Rogers in Burien
Dennis White dropped by my studio
David Javelosa from Grass Valley, Ca
Eric's 2-hour show from 9/25/21 on KBFG 107.3 FM about the "Seattle Syndrome" lp
A few other recordings from John's garage
Private Book (only the words are the same, in this completely different version after Tom left)
Electronic Pop Smash (garage version)
We sent out a lot of tapes, and there's a bunch more songs. If you know of anything....
Very early & rough live show, recorded by cassette in the living room of Wallingford House where Tom & Eric & Judy & Sarah & Andy lived. It's not great, but we don't have much else. It was recorded on asuper-cheap Pacific Stereo cassette, which started going bad about 6 months after the recording. During the pandemic, I was cleaning up and found it, and squirted a pile of graphite powder lubricant and ran it back and forth 50 times, and eventually recovered these files. Hadn't heard it since 1982 at the latest. Not for the faint of heart...
We were on TV, only sort of. Some public-access TV studio in the nborth end of Seattle, unheated, early Sunday morning. Not sure when or where this might have ever been broadcast. The sound quality is not so good, but the performances aren't too shabby, and the version of Saigon certainly has the power that made it a show-stopper live (but the studio recording we did at Triangle failed to entirely capture)
Garbage
Saigon
Yow
Helena Is A Spy this one was
actually recorded first, but there's some
audio problems with studio feedback,
so we didn't remaster it into the 21st
century . It givesa pretty good guide
to how much magic remstering genius
Steve Turnidge has in his wand...
In the summer of 1988, Eric was living in California and Tom in New York, but we both happened to get to Seattle, and we were able to get the band back together and record some made-up-on-the-spot songs.
Tom brought in "Just Say No" already written. John recorded us in his Queen Anne studio, and they're not shabby, actually. Eric added the lyrics and singing to "Words By Words" in his own California studio later that fall.
Eric was reminded at this session that it was really fun to play with a drummer, and convinced his recording pals Charlie and Mike to form a live band, Mata Rata, and we covered Just Say NO.
And if you got this far, you might like browsing Mike Leech's site "Best Rock Photos". There's a couple in there of Student Nurse, about 1982. He wanted a lot of money to use them, so well, we'll just send you over. There are a lot of great photos from all kinds of bands that played in Seattle in the 80's.
" Hard-nosed, mean and ornery, he's building a new world... "
