Being a culturally sophisticated fan of this blog, you'd rather listen to rare out-takes and demo recordings vs. slick professionally produced music, right? I know I would. Therefore, to celebrate the 1st anniversary of Bloggy-Blog, I'm tossing in a bonus
Podcast. [For those of you without pods... no worries. You can listen too.] Today's Podcast containts 4 tracks from an unfinished CD project called
"Explode on the Scene" by Dick Edgemont, which I attempted to Produce (or 'Spectorize') in 2002.
The back-story on Edgemont is appropriately as shadowy as the man himself. He's one of those legends, like Daniel Boone or Bigfoot, whose legacy has been shaped mostly by local yarns and few verified facts. Trying to sift the fiction from the myth is enough to make you want to throw up your hands and run screaming in a zig-zag pattern into the horizon.
Dick Factoid: Dick Edgemont was an integral shaper of the fledgling suburban lounge lizard scene centered in and around the city of
Torrance, California. There he shared the pale spotlight with other small-town acts like Gil Bernal, Herbie Tepper's "
TNT", The Romans and other yokels showcased in dubious cocktail hideaways with neon titles like: "The Hot'n'Tot", "
The San Franciscan", and the "
Open Hearth". Dick's strong suit was his nimble solo trumpet stylings, along with composition skills that would give Herb Alpert night sweats.
Edgemont was also a soloist in the rough-and-tumble game of life. Although he was often spotted with a variety of floozies hanging on his arm, his dalliances were always stormy and short-lived. For years Dick's performances were interrupted by a string of humiliating encounters with a mysterious platinum blonde. She'd rush the stage, shoving a flaming hairpiece into the bell of his trumpet, often triggering the automatic overhead sprinkler system. Later in his career, Dick would only make unannounced appearances, always slipping out the back way and never saying much except, of course, through the language of his music.
Finally in the mid-80s, in front of an audience of five Torrance waste management engineers, Dick played an unusually spirited trumpet improvisation. That's when something truly otherworldly transpired. In an exuberant spasm, Edgemont had chanced upon a note outside the musical scale that nobody had ever heard before. This errant note apparently violated something in the laws of physics, rending the fabric of spacetime and causing Dick to vanished into thin air (leaving only a smoking shoe behind), never to be seen again!
Then in 2002, Edgemont Estate representative and music impresario
Richard Alan Crane and I hashed out a deal which had me "producing and finishing off" a batch of Dick E tracks of an unknown vintage. Indeed, there were several dusty
reel-to-reel tapes stored away in a hat box --originally engineered by
Richard Derrick, who also played a smooth brush drum kit on many takes. Naturally, I threw myself into this project utilizing my humble home studio; even fiddled around with various graphic concepts for the CD.
Unfortunately, "
Explode on the Scene" turned out to be the kind of uphill endeavor that I couldn't quite surmount. That's because pasting studio overdubs over live takes just didn't fuse cohesively with the spirit of the thing. There were, however, various bright spots, including solo guitar work provided by Mr.
SS Seatbelt.... and a other moments which stay true to the "Edgemont ethic".
So click
HERE and enjoy four never-before-released Dick Edgemont CD tracks captured in their various stages of decomposition. Or don't.
Mister Mother Superior:
amour betrayer
