Album Archives: Tales Of The Red Caboose

A few things happened along the way between this album and the last.

1) I made a live album a week before moving to Arizona called Every Hour On The Hour.  The only album that has not seen the light of day on CD.  No, I don't plan to release it anytime soon.

2)  I was in Arizona for about five months, basically fucking off and writing songs and working at shitty temp jobs.  I loved Arizona but alas the ones that have jobs don't pay for shit and there was a lot of running around to fill out apps and then trying to call back.  The closest I got to a job, was at a Discover place.  The lady seemed to like me and kept winking at me after every other question.  Somehow I didn't say the magic words.  Then to top it all off, my aunt kicked me out of the house.  Can't say I blame her, I didn't do very much but it did put a big strain in our relationship and she basically shut me out of her life forever.  We don't get along at all.

3)  Moving back to Iowa, I came to find out that it hardly snowed at all that winter. But Mark Concower, the guitarist on Every Hour On The Hour decided that he wanted to start up a band.  Soon after that he moved out of state and hasn't been heard since.

Tales Of The Red Caboose itself is my first full blown rock and roll record.  The intentions were good but Terry Bainbridge decided to record it on metal cassette tape.  At that time you had Direct Metal Mastering which was supposed to be the wave of the future.  In the way of low fi cassette to cassette recording, it didn't work, each overdub would muffle the sound and the difference of cassette desk speed didn't help much either.  So I ended up buying another cassette deck but still used the slightly faster Realistic as one of the decks, which once again slowed down the recording process.

I think the songs were good, the recordings not so much.  The marching band snare sucked, I could have gotten a better sound out of cardboard boxes.  On this album, I was working with the late Larry Maier on bass, one of the best players ever but had a bad drug habit that eventually cost him his life a year later.  Some of the recordings the vocals got deeply buried in the mix, and I had to rerecord Down Around And Back Again since the first take vocals were barely heard.

The album started around June of 1987 and concluded around August in the basement.  Some songs of note:  Girl From The Other Side Of Town,  I was going through Mount Vernon one day and seen a woman sunbathing with her top unbuttoned.   Just Enough Love was later redone for Forthcoming Trains and is the better version.  Closest Thing To Perfect, another song for the freshman harlot that messed me up for years to come, thinking she was the one that got away.  And each passing day reminding me that she wasn't.   Boys In The Band, was a rewrite of REM's Band Wagon but with a humorous side about playing in a band with like minded individuals that didn't show up for practice.
The Nailer, was a one note start of a song that ended up with a crazy Ted Nugent riff and The Who like ending.  Due to the recording error part of the drums got erased off.  Fool For Your Glasses is a song about me liking ladies with glasses.  Walk A Thin Line was influenced by Husker Du.  However the drum sound on this version sucked, so a later version was the full version and rerecorded drums.  And I think appeared on Travelogue, the live album a year later.

I recorded plenty of songs, and the majority of them made it on Tales Of The Red Caboose, the rest ended up on a compilation cassette called Collecting Beer Cans For Fun And Profit.  One of them, the ironically titled Long Story Short (at 9:22 the longest song I recorded at that time) is a bonus cut on the CD Version.  It was kinda of a run through of a song that had different tempos and feels and ends with a improvised ending.  A fun song but not fun enough for me to redo it any time soon.

If the recording was better Tales Of The Red Caboose would have been a nice followup to Waspipinicon Dreaming.  Instead it's a oddball curio of hard rock that could have done better but it does capture the moments of that time of the summer of 1987.  Not satisfied with the results, I would return back to the studio in the winter to try again with new songs and a new attitude, but still stuck with poor recording equipment.   Something that would dog me for the next couple years till we finally got a decent four track.  But that's later on.

Tracklist:

Down Around And Back Again (R.Smith) 3:15
Closest Thing To Perfect (Smith/Orbit) 3:39
Rain On The Brain (Smith/Orbit/Miller/Bainbridge)  5:43
Just Enough Love (R.Smith/J.Orbit) 3:40
We Could Be Together (Smith/Orbit) 3:03
It's Too Late (Smith/Orbit) 5:15
Boys In The Band (Smith/Orbit) 4:24

Girl On The Other Side Of Town (R.Smith)  2:37
Sweet Memory (Smith/Orbit)  5:05
Fool For Your Glasses (R.Smith) 3:30
The Nailer (Smith/Orbit/Miller/Bainbridge) 7:05
Walk A Thin Line (Smith/Miller) 3:00
Points Of Interest (R.Smith) 4:20
The Plean (R.Smith) 5:00
Long Story Short (R.Smith) 9:22 (CD Bonus Track)

Lyrics by R.Smith, Music credited to where indicated (C) Townedger Music Emporium 1987

Produced and Engineered By Terry Bainbridge
Recorded: Maier Studios June-August 1987
Co produced by Rodney Smith

Overdubs recorded August 28 through September 3, 1987 Maier Studios
Drum tracking by Keith Drummond and Stu Delonmore

Lineup for this album: Rodney Smith-Guitar, drums and vocals:  Jack Orbit: Guitar and vocals; Larry Maier-Bass   Andy Kyle-Bass on Closest Thing To Perfect.


Boys In The Band (Smith/Orbit) 

A slight variation of song titles, on the cassette and CD editions.

Released as Maier Records QMR-24388  (Released Sept. 15, 1987)