

pop, classic rock, old pop, beatles
In my teens, I wrote songs like a madman. In one year, when I was 16, I produced 11 albums worth of material. During the 6 year period between my 16th and 21st year, I produced approximately 700 songs. I have a hard time believing that figure myself, but at one point in my early twenties I counted them up and it came out to something slightly in excess of that figure. Since I've long since lost all the recordings and most of the written documentation, I can't go back and check the figures any longer.
Now, admittedly, much of the material was truly, utterly terrible! It had to be; I started writing with a guitar in hand before I knew how to play chords! In fact, the first four albums were all noise, some of it very interesting noise -- at least we thought so.
I say WE because I wasn't working alone; my best friend Steve MacKay was my partner in musical mayhem. Our band was called Garbage and that pretty much says it all. In fact, we knew we were horrible and reveled in the fact. Our attitude towards our music was interesting. We thought we were geniuses, but we also were scornful. The attitude was similar to how we felt about movies. We loved cheese. Japanese horror movies, Charlie Chan flicks -- anything horrible, we loved.
As to our recordings, I knew every nuance of sound on those early tapes intimately well, because I listened to them endlessly. The first track we recorded was called Toilet Symphony. It had three principal parts. The first involved these soaring electronic sound effects we had recorded at The Ontario Science Centre; the second part involved sounds and music speeded up four or five times, so that it sounded like the flickering tinkling of a wind chime. The final portion was a native choral group chanting. You can see why that track -and indeed most of those tracks - are not now in existence.
Song Info
Track Files