(Originally published on Medium)

MY FIRST RECORD

After thirty years of creating no recorded music, I’m in the midst of recording a new album. Anyone familiar with my past work might wonder- as I often do- why I’ve decided to do this now.

To answer that, I intend to write a series of pieces about this current project which is quite different to the experience of making records for major labels in the 1980’s and 90’s. Hopefully anyone who has enjoyed Guadalcanal Diary’s music and/or my solo stuff will find this series interesting.

It might also be useful for anyone who has thought of doing something similar, i.e., producing new music at a “less marketable” time of their lives. Alternately, it could be a grim cautionary tale. I just don’t know yet.

Let this little story serve as a prologue.

When I was six years old, my grandparents took me to an amusement park. Though it was a permanent attraction in the city, my memories are of a place like a seasonal parking lot carnival, meaning most of the rides were based on centrifugal force and so you were likely to get violently sick on them.

One ride was called something like the “Barrel Roll” or the “Spindle Top”. It was a big barrel-shaped thing which whirled it’s doomed participants around in a circle until the force pinned you to the wall, the floor dropped away and you threw up. The coolest part of this ride was that sometimes a kid’s lunch would hang in mid-air briefly. Completely worth the price of admission.

There was an an arcade on the property which had the games common to carnivals in those misty pre-video days such as shooting galleries with metal duck targets and those odd attractions that encouraged one to pluck a plastic duck (ducks again) from a nasty stream of water. I never understood that one. You could also spend time throwing a baseball at some lead milk bottles or throwing darts at sad balloons on a board.

But, in the midst of all this stood a booth. This was a booth where, for the mighty sum of 50 cents, one could enter and make a 2-minute record. A real record, like what The Beatles made. Insert two quarters, press the button, wait for the light, then take your shot at a spot on Hullabaloo or Shindig.

Approximately 10 minutes after the recording ended, the miracle happened. The mysterious guts of the machine began whirring and groaning and then out of a slot slid a shiny yellow 45 rpm record.

Sixteen years later, I made my first record with GuadalcanaI Diary It was a four song EP (on a short-lived indie label called EOD started by Atlantans Amy Meacham and Ron Bonds). It was a very special day for the band. There are not many moments which compare to holding your first record in your hands.

Having said that, I mean it when I say that the record I made some 16 years earlier was no less a dizzying experience. I clutched that disk of lemon-colored plastic in my chubby, sticky hands as if it was a circle of sparkling magic.

I kept it as the years passed. As I grew older it was a source of wry amusement but still a cherished possession that, as I stumbled through the chaos of life, I could put my hands on when needed.

Then one day, it was gone. Just gone. It never lived in a specific drawer or box. I just always sort of knew where it was. But it wasn’t there any longer. I’d dig, I’d reach, I’d grasp and flail. My hands remained empty.

Throughout my life, I have hung onto lots of unimportant things: clothing, 4th grade math tests, VHS tapes.

But not my first record. It’s gone.

I always dreamt that on that grand day when I finally begin to sift through the detritus which I had dragged through the years, I’d find the disc at the bottom of an ancient pasteboard box full of prepubescent drawings. That day came in 2016 when I sold the house I’d lived in for almost 27 years, but it wasn’t so grand: no record.

There remain a number of boxes biding time in a storage unit. The hope that one holds my first record lives on.

Shakespeare’s “Cardenio”. Orson Welles’ “Heart of Darkness” footage. Robert Johnson’s “Mr. Down Child”. My little record has nothing in common with those lost treasures, except that it’s lost. The comparison is to say that in my tiny cosmology, it is the one tangible object lost to me that I would most like to find.

The song I sang that day was a version of “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.”

Yep. “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” by Allan Sherman. It was a poplular novelty hit of the day and got a lot of airplay on our local radio stations.

The pinnacle of that performance was when I forgot the lyrics early in the song. I think it was right after the lines “I went hiking/with Joe Spivey/he developed/poison ivy”. I just panic-hummed the rest of the melody right into the playout groove.

Somewhere, there is a box. In that box, under some old social studies reports, is an old yellow record whose grooves hold my first recorded music.

Hello muddah. Hello faddah. Here I am. At Camp Grenada.