Album Archives: Purseyors Of The Truth 1990

Sometimes an album doesn't work.  The intentions are good and songs are recorded and put together but the whole thing just fall short of expectations.  This is one of those albums.

1990 was a oddball year of sorts.  I kept getting derailed by bad choices in dating women.  The year before, a disastrous reunion with a high school sweetheart, the next year wasn't much better.  Somehow I was taken by a strip dancer from Denver named Melissa.  My best friend may have talked up a great story about me and somehow she either felt sorry or obligated to chat with me a while. The story has been told time and time ago, and probably seen multiple times on Maury or Jerry Springer.  Melissa I would say was more of a Plain Jane.  We laughed together on some of the jokes and she did give a bit of attention to me when I has hanging at Dancer's Ranch (in 3 locations).  But it was easy to see that I was getting too hung up on this woman.  Even going to the Flower Shop to buy her flowers, only to have some other dude give her a twice more and her spending more time with him.  I think I wrote a song about it called Love's Not Here.  I do know one day in Coralville she told me about the tragic death of Stevie Ray Vaughan and she was crying and we hugged each other tight.  The last time I saw her was a couple weeks later and she got mad and was screaming at somebody and stormed off.  Even though she gave me her phone number, I spent more time talking to her answering machine.  Love wasn't here for sure.

Purseyors Of The Truth (the actual title) was a play on the words Purveyors and perhaps we should have used that word instead.  It was a very confusing album done under stressful situations. Dave Crossant and I were having disagreements, Geoff wasn't fitting in either and how anything got done is beyond me.   With a new producer Neil Delanie, it was kinda like growing pains in what direction we wanted to take this.  Certainly, the friction with Melissa was showing in songs like Star! and Reason To Believe, but also in life itself with Hard Time Have Begun.

We started recording the album in August of 1990 up till when the four track broke down, to which the Fostex got destroyed in a rage over how the record sounded.  Perhaps the problem was that we never did record things right with that four track in the year and a half I had it.  The direct recording on tracks continue to bleed into one another and there's no separation between guitar, vocals and drums.

That said, the songs were actually quite good, especially Eternal Youth  which was a tongue in cheek song about me looking younger than my years.  Even at age 29, I still looked about 5 years younger, to which I credit living in the basement for so many years to keep looking younger beyond my years. Violence, a 7 plus minute song is interesting for the primitive punk garage rock beat and the same chords repeated over and over.  And of course, Star!, to which Diggy Kat, my long time music buddy and A and R person the past few years calls it one of the best five Townedgers song ever recorded. Which is open for debate.  And says he loves the album.

For for myself, while it has moments, it really feels that something is missing.  In 1991, on the newer four track, I re recorded most of the drums which turned out to be a bigger mistake.  Once thought that the original drum tracks were long gone, turned out to be the four track had dirty heads and cleaning them revealed otherwise.  Perhaps a remix and reissue might be in order but Purseyors Of The Truth is not one of the go to albums.  Soon after, Dave Crossant went back to Minnesota and the Flywheel and I moved on.  Soon after that, Melissa would be out of my life except for a chance meeting a year later.  More about that when the right moment comes along.

Songs:

Hard Times Have Begun  5:14
Star!  6:38
Nothingness  4:19
Violence  7:27
No Confidence Man (Smith/Crossant)  3:50
Freeway Surfin' 3:43
Eternal Youth  5:24
Tomorrow's Little Girl (Smith/Redding)  3:38
Always Something (Smith/Miller)  4:12
Reason To Believe (Smith/Redding)  4:15
You're Not Alone  (Smith/Orbit)  5:20
Three Sedona Red Rocks  5:38

Songs written by Rodney Smith except where noted (C) 1990 Townedger Music Emporium

Recorded at Maier Studios, Marion IA  August-September 1990
Recorded by Bob Kastaballa and Ned Jackson
New drum tracks recorded November 1991 by Richard Dennanbaugh
Freeway Surfin and Violence are the original drum tracks

The band: Rodney Smith, Geoff Redding, Dave Crossant

Produced by Rodney Smith and Neil Delanie

Issued at MRK-24585
Reissued on CD as MRK-25235 2004