Dr Frank — The Way It Sounds Like
So, what we’ve got here is RAD-007–3, a strictly limited cassette release of the now semi-legendary, originally thrown-together-on-the-fly-now-weirdly-set-in-stone compilation of random live solo recordings known as The Way It Sounds Like.
I put it together, at first, as a slap dash CDR to sell on a solo acoustic tour of Europe that I did with Kepi in the Fall of 2012. We home-printed a bunch of, fold-over “covers” and would make ten to fifteen discs on Stefan’s laptop in the car on the way to each gig. We probably unloaded around a hundred of them in all. Its purpose was to be a souvenir item for people who went to those particular shows, a purpose which was served, and then pretty much to disappear and fade away thereafter, which it pretty much did. However, I do get regular requests to make it available, which is what I’m doing now. (I put a digital version up on bandcamp a couple of years ago for a brief time as well. It seems to work best when it pops up for a bit and then goes away.)
They’re all live solo acoustic songs from a variety of sources, basically whatever I could lay my hands on in the few days before flying to Italy for the tour. Some are live on the radio performances, where I just brought my guitar into the studio and strummed them out; some are live from a hand-held recording of a rather wild show I did at the Living Room in New York City; some are from an author appearance at Moe’s Books in Berkeley; and one, a cover of “Goody Goody Gumdrops” was actually recorded over the phone for a web series called the Switchboard Sessions. The sound and performance quality varies (so this is fair warning of that) but that’s life, and they are what they are, and it is to be honest pretty much what I sound like live solo acoustic, mostly. If you’re into songs per se, there are some good ones here, including the only released version of that weird, perennial favorite “Cingular Wireless (Worse than Hitler)”.
Why on earth, you may ask? Well, partly it’s in aid of the project I wrote about here, of trying, where feasible, to create things to trip over rather than simply upload them into oblivion. Cassettes are funny and absurd, but also practical and inexpensive and quite well suited to to this material, which wouldn’t really work on vinyl. And peremptorially scattering it to the virtual winds seemed way less appealing than simply manufacturing a small number of plastic playable tchotchkes and making them look as nice as we could. We figured, why not? If you want it, you got it! If not, well you’re no worse off than you were to begin with, surely. Everybody wins. Sort of.
Not only that, but the maniacs at Sounds Rad have are bundling the cassette with a USB cassette player, just in case you don’t have anything to play it on, along with a collection of Dr Frank / MTX / Sounds Rad related stickers to customize it.
viz.:
There’s also a whole mess of new products and accessories and packages of varying combinations thereof.
As you may have noticed, we’re using the inlay design of my Jason Ingrodi custom acoustic guitar (based on the original Show Business Is My Life artwork) as a logo for all this stuff. Pretty neat idea, I thought.
That’s a shirt design.
And here it is in enamel pin form:
We’re gearing up to what will be (we hope) some interesting Dr. Frank releases in the future, so this release is part of laying the groundwork for that.
Anyway, the songs are: I Just Wanna Do It with You / She Turned Out to Be Crazy / I Don’t Need You Now / Danny Partridge / Sorry for Freaking Out on the Phone Last Night / King Dork / How’d the Date End? / I Wanna Ramone You / Jill / Goody Goody Gumdrops / Knock Knock (Please Let Me In) / Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend / I Wrote a Book about Rock and Roll / You Today / Cingular Wireless (Worse than Hitler)
You can order starting Wednesday (and I’ll update the link here when it becomes available.) Just think of this as a preview of an imminent future.
UPDATE: orders are live and here is the buy link for the cassette and all the other stuff. Go nuts.
