A Dables Retrospective

Examining my entire music career album by album, track by track, from 2006-present day

[dablesretrospective]

Blog has moved!!

Due to Tumblr censoring some of my posts, The Dables Retrospective blog has moved to https://dablesretrospective.blogspot.com/

From now on, all future posts will be located at Blogspot, not on this Tumblr!

Dables Retrospective

A Dables Retrospective - Examining my entire music career album by album, track by track, from 2006-present day.

[dablesretrospective]

2013 - DAN - Honey Berry Surprise

The unfinished final album from DAN titled "Honey Berry Surprise". I consider this album unfinished because there was supposed to be about 6 or 7 more songs that were in the process of being written and recorded, but we never finished them before DAN broke up. These 12 tracks are the ones that were finished at that time. The first three DAN albums (Magic Mountain, The Whatever EP, & Grandparents Forever) were all recorded in Sid's Basement in Simpsonville, SC. Hence why they are nicknamed "The Basement Trilogy". Then he moved and we lost our spot to record and practice. But we persevered and kept trying to keep the project going regardless. So this album was recorded in 3 different locations throughout late 2010 & 2011: the first location was Sid's garage at his parent’s new house in a quiet neighborhood (in which the cops got called on us several times for being too loud---it was not an ideal location to have band practice), we basically had to wait until weekend afternoons or when Sid’s parents weren’t home, or we had to turn the volume down and play quietly which wasn’t conducive for DAN to be productive. We needed to jam LOUD. But we did get the following songs recorded there: “This Garage Sucks”, “Pants Meet Shit”, “If It Weren’t for The Beatles, I’d Be Dead”, “Dt Cop Doc”, & “Symphony of Drugstruction”. The second location we tried to record at was my parent's house in my bedroom (also not ideal due to the same reasons) but we did finish “Cookie Monster”, “Always on My Mind”, “Kill and Die”, & “Track 10 Again (This is)” there. The final location was at our friend Michael Keller's apartment in Fountain Inn, SC in which he used his equipment to record “Dude, Be Quiet”, “Doubt Everything”, & “Give Peace a Chance” there.

As I mentioned earlier, there were about 6 or 7 more songs that I had started by recording the drum machine and guitar parts at my house by myself with the intention of bringing them to Sid & Clayton to add bass and vocals to. We had a handful of practice sessions for these new songs, three of which I remember the titles being “We Opened for The Emotron” (which was supposed to actually happen but never did because we broke up before the show took place), “Generation Fucked”, and “What a Drag” before the band completely imploded because Sid and I got into a fight over a girl. He started seeing my ex-girlfriend (whom I introduced him to) which I didn’t take lightly. In retrospect, as I write this 14 years later I regret letting it get to me as much as it did. At the time I was under the delusion that me and my ex would eventually get back together since we were still friends and seeing each other regularly but was completely blind-sided when one day I went to Sid’s house for a visit and caught the two of them together. I felt very betrayed and hurt by this development and immediately wanted nothing to do with either of them and I ended the band on the spot. Unfortunately since Clayton was Sid’s best friend, he got caught in the crossfire and I stopped talking to him as well…DAN was over as far as I was concerned and I didn’t give a damn about the album we had been working on anymore. I decided to focus on Dables instead which is when I got together with Jake and Cody and we started playing shows and making albums with them instead. Which was much more satisfying artistically than DAN ever was because it felt much more collaborative and I didn’t have to harass Jake & Cody to practice and contribute towards the recordings like I did with Sid and Clayton. Once I stopped talking to them it became clear that most of DAN’s output was because of me anyway. I wrote probably 85% of the music and was by far the driving force behind the band’s existence. What little that DAN did accomplish happened almost entirely because of my actions. Sid & Clayton had no drive or work ethic and just wanted to get high and jam and were mostly only doing it because they thought being in a band was a cool. Which was fine at first but after almost 2 years of it I wanted to move to the next level and begin playing shows regularly which was never going to happen with DAN because I couldn’t get them to commit the time, energy, and effort needed to accomplish that. I was doing it because I have an insatiable drive to create music and art and don’t give a fuck who thinks it’s cool or good or not. They were both young (early 20’s), so I don’t fault them anymore for never taking DAN seriously. But at the time I was bitter about it. We only played two shows as DAN, one at a house show that went ok despite there being probably less than 20 people there, and once at The Hanger in Greenville, SC which was a total disaster because my guitar died and I had to borrow someone else’s, Clayton was hammered and could barely play his bass, and we just sounded like shit in general from lack of practice. One of the worst shows I’ve ever played and the people there clearly hated us lol…there was supposed to be a third show at a short-lived art collective/punk venue called Club Sammich with The Emotron but that never happened. I messaged with the venue and Emotron and both were fine with letting DAN open but I quit the band after the drama with Sid a few months before that show so I had to cancel and the song we were working on "We Opened for The Emotron" never got finished either. I do have a drum machine and guitar only demo of it somewhere though. Never recorded Clayton's bass part or Sid's vocals for it.

Eventually I got over it after Sid and my ex inevitably broke up and at Brittany’s (my girlfriend at the time) insistence I tried to rekindle my friendship with Sid & Clayton, and tried playing music with them again but unfortunately the damage was done and it wasn’t the same anymore. Despite an honest effort to get DAN going again in 2012, we hit what was the final nail in the coffin when Clayton got arrested for marijuana possession and was kicked out of Sid’s parent’s house (which is where he was living at the time) and moved in with his Mom on the other side of Greenville, about 25-30 miles away and he had no car so he couldn’t make the trek back to Simpsonville to practice. This on top of the problem that Sid’s Garage nor my house were good places to practice anyway since we both lived with our parents, plus things were awkward now anyway after the whole Sid and my ex debacle, even though neither of us liked her anymore. Sid was Brittany’s friend so when we broke up in 2013 he decided to publicly take her side and I was told by reliable sources he was talking a LOT of shit about me behind my back so after that our friendship was over for good and I haven’t talked to him or Clayton since 2013. They briefly played in another band together called People of Mars which has music on Bandcamp for those interested. Dables played a show with them 2 or 3 times while I was attempting to remain friends despite everything that had happened and they were absolutely horrible. Extremely lazy songwriting with generic, predictable chords and very bad vocals and clearly didn’t practice very often, very very sloppy playing. They sounded vaguely like a bad version of early Flaming Lips mixed with pop punk…they cleared the room out every time I saw them play because people just couldn’t stand it. The recordings I have heard from People of Mars aren't terrible, not really my cup of tea, but definitely better than they were live. It only lasted maybe two years or so as far as I remember and I don’t think either has done anything musical since. Sorry for talking shit but that's my personal opinion on their band after DAN.

Clayton also briefly played drums in Michael Keller’s band Satan in Bondage. We played a show together at Cabin Floor Records in which Clayton drunkenly stole some merchandise (a Frank Zappa beer bottle) from Cabin Floor Records which turned out to be something that was sentimental to the owner and not for sale. He and Sid had moved in with Keller at the time. I went over to visit and saw the Frank Zappa beer bottle with my own eyes sitting in their side of the house, Keller clearly had no clue about what it was in any way. But when the owner of Cabin Floor Records and others in the local scene started posting on Facebook about the stolen Frank Zappa beer bottle that went missing during our show there, Clayton ended up placing the blame on Keller and getting their band banned from Cabin Floor Records and ruined both of their reputations greatly. This led to Keller, Sid, and Clayton’s falling out and they moved out and haven’t spoken since then either. Clayton had also stole my microphone stand from that same show. When I got home I realized it was missing, and on that same occasion I went to Keller’s house to hang out and saw the empty Frank Zappa beer bottle sitting on Clayton’s table, I also saw my mic stand which I know was mine because I only had one and it had neon orange tape on the base to identify it with. I confronted him and he apologized and gave it back to me, but the fact that after he played a show he stole from the venue and also took equipment that clearly wasn’t his is bullshit. Loading up the mic stand in his car MAY have been an accident as he claimed, but when he got it home he should have realized it wasn't his and contacted the other bands to see if anyone lost a mic stand. He didn't do that of course, it was dumb luck that weeks later I went over there and noticed my missing mic stand with the neon orange tape on it! And it was super mega bullshit that he tried to tell people that Keller was the one who stole the Frank Zappa beer bottle when they were confronted about it on Facebook as well…Clayton wasn’t exactly doing well at the time and was drinking and using drugs heavily. I hope he is doing better nowadays. Although I haven’t spoken to either of them in about 12 years now, I wish them both well since we were indeed good friends at one point. I hear Sid is married nowadays and Clayton is divorced with a kid. Good for them, I suppose!

All that drama aside, back to the album! Sometime around April 2013 I realized I had 12 tracks that DAN had recorded before all this shit went down that had been sitting on a hard drive for a few years so I figured I would go ahead and release it to the public and let it be the final album by DAN. The title “Honey Berry Surprise” comes from the flavor of a blunt wrap I used to buy occasionally (don't remember the actual brand name, just that the wrapper said Honey Berry Surprise on it) and the cover art is a picture of my old cat Socks with the blue mountain bottle of Coors Light leaning against him. Socks had passed in 2012 and was in my thoughts often so when I found that old picture of him with a beer bottle resting on him with his eyes half-open, looking drunk, I thought it was funny and used it for the album art. Didn’t put too much thought into it other than I knew I didn't want to put any titles on the cover art and just let it be the picture of Socks without saying the band name or album title on it. Just an artistic choice that I thought would look cool, is all. Overall I do like this album and think it has some of DAN’s best work on it such as “Cookie Monster” and “Always on My Mind” but also some absolute stinkers that I can't stand to listen to like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Doubt Everything". Neither of those two tracks should have made the album (and they wouldn't be on this release at all if we had stayed together and finished more songs) but they were included at the end simply because I wanted to clean out the DAN vault and release literally everything I had that was considered a finished track.

“Cookie Monster” still makes me laugh and came about because I was often babysitting my young nephew Carlos at the time who loved to watch Sesame Street DVDs. One of them had the Cookie Monster song that goes ‘C is for cookie, tastes good to me’ on it and was rattling around my brain when I was working on recording DAN songs at home by myself. That song is mostly just me and was already finished when I brought it to the guys other than Clayton recording his bass track on it, which I also wrote and showed him what to do. Sid is not on that song at all. The lyrics "me and the tapeworm are best friends/he's squirming through me's intestines" is a reference to Sid and Clayton's old band Albino's song "Tapeworm". Doubt it's available anywhere online... I took those lyrics straight from their old song and sang them in the Cookie Monster voice just to make them laugh. “Always on My Mind” is the direction I wanted DAN to go in, with slightly longer songs that could be performed live. That one was actually collaborative other than the main riff which was something I had been playing around with for a year or two. Sid wrote the lyrics which I think contains a Fight Club reference (the lye and water line?). I love the line “this song’s way too long for a DAN song”…love that self-referential kinda shit. Much like “This Garage Sucks” which references Sid’s Garage we were recording in and our previous song “Livin’ in The Basement”. Probably one of the last ones if not THE last song we did because it mentions that Clayton doesn’t live there which means he must’ve already got arrested for marijuana possession and got kicked out at that point which was very near the end of the band. “Track 10 Again (This is)” is another one I did by myself at home and is a reference to the song “Track 10” from Magic Mountain. The joke is that it’s basically the exact same song, just with no distortion on the guitars. “Dt Cop Doc” was an inside joke between Sid and Brittany where they did movie trailer voices for a fake movie called Detective Cop Doctor. They wouldn’t stop doing that movie trailer voice while we were working on other songs and the mic was on so it got recorded and I slapped it on the album even though it’s not a song. “Doubt Everything” was mostly me and Sid messing around in the same vein as The Whatever EP. I think maybe Clayton added a few overdubs here and there on it but it’s mostly just me and Sid messing around with keyboards and overdubs so it all flows like one long song. Doubt Everything was DAN’s catchphrase that we printed on the liner notes of our first three CD’s when we made physical copies. There have never been any physical copies made of "Honey Berry Surprise".

Well, that’s it for DAN. It started in late 2009 as an excuse to smoke weed and make silly Ween-inspired songs with my buddies just to make us laugh and give us something to do and ended 2 years later in 2011, with “Honey Berry Surprise” being the swan song of leftover recordings released another 2 years after the band was already officially over. I do hate the way things ended between the three of us, but unless they both (especially Sid) apologize to me profusely for all the shit talking they did, I don’t see us ever reconciling. At least we got 4 albums worth of interesting and original music out of it! This shit still makes me laugh.

————————————

Released May 1, 2013

All songs written and performed by DAN All tracks recorded and mixed by David Walker except "Give Peace a Chance" originally written by John Lennon (duh) DAN is: David Walker-guitar, vocals, drum machine, keyboards Clayton Marks-bass, vocals Sid Id-lead vocals, keyboards

Michael Keller also contributed vocals, guitar, and keyboards to "Dude, Be Quiet" & "Give Peace a Chance". He also recorded and mixed both tracks. Brittany is on "Dt Cop Doc", "If It Weren't For The Beatles", and "Symphony of Drugstruction" making stupid noises in the background

Slackerpop Records© 2013

1.Dude, Be Quiet 2.Cookie Monster 3.This Garage Sucks 4.Always on My Mind 5.Kill and Die 6.Pants Meet Shit 7.If It Weren’t for The Beatles, I’d Be Dead 8.Dt Cop Doc 9. Symphony of Drugstruction 10.Track 10 Again (This is) 11.Doubt Everything 12.Give Peace a Chance

Download this album for free at:

[dablesretrospective]

2013 - Dables - Refuge

...And we're back! Not too long between blog entries this time! Less than a year is pretty good I'd say...so it had been several months since I officially released the Dables self-titled album with the full band and as usual I was making solo recordings in my free time, very slowly working on the next album when I got a Facebook message from a guy named Drew Smith telling me he loved the "Can't Not" EP I did which he reviewed on a blog called “Music You May Not Have Heard”. He told me he wanted to release a split album with Dables and a Chicago solo project called Otto Rollo on his small record label Sarcastic Magician Records. He asked me if I could do 3-4 songs that were similar to Can't Not, so I said sure, put my other projects on pause, and got to work recording some new material specifically for this. Of course, me being me, the final product sounded nothing like Can't Not.

I tried a little bit to emulate the foreboding experimental noise rock of Can't Not on the first track "Refuge" in which I enlisted my partner in crime Alex Murray to help me with it. The song came from us just jamming until we had the semblance of something usable, and he took the individual tracks home and added drum machine to it. I believe it is the ONLY time in my entire discography that someone else programmed the drums. In fact, the song was mostly written by Alex, all I did was play the keyboard on it and maybe contribute some ideas for the mood of the song. When he came back a few days later to show me the finished track, we jammed out another instrumental in a second vain attempt to emulate the sound on Can't Not. I remember having the idea to play something hypnotic and repetitive that day, so just like before he played guitar while I played the keyboard but this time I operated the drum machine, until we had another finished track. We both shared a mutual love for the Joel Schumacher movie Falling Down and had been talking about it while brainstorming a title for this new song, when I got the idea to record a sample from the movie and thus also became the name of the track. We re-watched the movie in order to pick a sample and settled on the rant at the golf course scene.

After he went home to mix this second track, I decided neither of those songs sounded much like Can't Not anyway, so I said fuck it and proceeded to write whatever came to mind over the next several days which became the other two songs "I Am The World" & "Inside My Head". I'm not really capable of sticking to a genre or mood when writing music, however a song comes out is how it comes out. I remember having no lyrics to "I Am The World" so I dug up an old poem from probably 7-8 years prior and made it fit. I also think "Inside My Head" has one of the best melodies I've ever wrote, I'm pretty proud of that song despite the fact that I left a mistake in the first chorus in which the vocals come in late in the final mix. I should have re-done the vocals but Dables is all about spur of the moment whatever-ness, and there was a deadline of a couple weeks to finish these songs so I never bothered to fix it. It bugs the shit out of me now though lol...I went over to Alex's house and we mixed and mastered these last two songs together and submitted all 4 tracks to Drew at Sarcastic Magician Records....I don't think he was too happy with the result since the songs sounded very little like Can't Not, but oh well. I've never been one to follow instructions or direction very well. He uploaded it to bandcamp along with the 4 Otto Rollo songs, and he chose the artwork, which is the blurry photo of the house shown below. I wasn't too excited about that artwork he chose so a few months later I released the 4 Dables tracks on their own with one of my favorite images from the original Nosferatu film and titled this standalone EP after the first track, "Refuge".

I never really spoke to Drew or David from Otto Rollo ever again so the project was kind of a dud. They are both nice guys and I'm glad to have participated in this project though. I remember Alex saying Refuge was the perfect title because that's what these tracks were. We were probably both pretty bummed on life at the time and working at our soul crushing jobs and dealing with crappy relationship issues so we used playing music together as a refuge from the monotony and depression of life. In fact, I believe the title was his idea. I like this EP, I think all 4 songs are pretty good. Nothing else to say about this one!

———————————— Released February 1, 2013

All tracks produced and recorded by David Walker. All tracks mixed and mastered by Alex Murray. Alex Murray - guitar, bass, drum programming on "Refuge", guitar and bass on 'Falling Down". David Walker - keys on "Refuge", keys, drum programming on "Falling Down", vocals, keys, guitar, bass, drum programming on "I Am The World" & "Inside My Head".

Slackerpop Records© 2013

Refuge

Falling Down

I Am The World

Inside My Head

Available for free download at: https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/refuge

Original cover art:

[dablesretrospective]

2012 - Dables - Dables

So we have finally made it to what was my biggest and most important release up to this point in my music career: The self-titled Dables album WITH A FULL BAND! Not just recordings of me playing along to drum machines by myself anymore! Probably a lot of people's introduction to Dables was this album due to seeing us play live around this time. For our first official album as a band, we decided to re-record our entire "Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam" demo so this is basically a vastly improved version of that demo (of which you can read more about in the previous blog post below if you want more backstory on how this album came to be).

I've already wrote about most of the songs on this album in previous blog posts, and the only new ones are "Negative Superman", "Casper The Friendly Ghost", and a brand new version of "Loop". Casper is simply a cover of a famous Daniel Johnston song, and "Negative Superman", although technically is an original song, was directly inspired by Daniel Johnston. I actually stole the opening lines from a short poem of his, but I wrote the rest of the lyrics and the chord progression myself. I consider it an expansion/new interpretation on an abandoned, rare song by Johnston as his version (of which the only similarities is the opening lines and title) was never officially recorded or released on any of his albums. It only exists as brief poem he reads at a live show featured in his documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, so it's not an official song. I wish I had written the phrase "in my head there is a negative superman" but the truth is I stole it from him. The rest of the song is all me though! Jake also laid down some awesome slide guitar on it that I absolutely love that really completes the track in my opinion.

Cody, Jake, and I worked very hard on this album for 4 months straight, getting together once or sometimes twice a week (usually on Thursdays after work) and slowly pieced it all together through tons of overdubs. The parts I remember the most was recording "Sleepytime" because we had an idea to record an alarm clock beeping (an obnoxious sound I truly loath because we used my actual alarm clock from the early 2000's that I used to wake up to in the morning for years and years before our smart phones became our alarm clocks), and also lots of overdubs of random sound effects like cats meowing, dogs barking, birds tweeting, bombs exploding, etc using various cheap keyboards...The "WROQ" radio sample you can hear in it was actually an accident when I was turning the alarm clock off during a take, I accidentally flipped it to the radio in which it played a split second of a commercial for WROQ Rock 101.1, a local classic rock station which we found hilarious since we all grew up listening to Rock 101 so we left it in the song. The noise part might sound like pure noise but it was actually meticulously rehearsed with some minor improvisation in it, and we generally played it the same way each time, usually ending our live shows with "Sleepytime" since it ends with a crazy noiserock freak-out. Great way to end a show. Jake always used a beer bottle as a slide on the bass during the "Sleepytime" noisy freak-out part which was a great and essential part of the song. At one show I literally started taking the strings off the guitar and swinging my guitar around by the loose strings while still plugged in, creating a horrible sound and usually our instruments would end up laying on the floor playing extremely obnoxious feedback to end the song and show.

Also, I don't really know why it ended up happening like this, but during this time period, Cody and Jake traded off bass and drum duties on various songs. I think it just started as a way to switch things up for fun while we were recording this album, but after a handful of shows we realized switching instruments during the show like that was a pain in the ass and created too much downtime on stage, plus Cody said he wasn't really comfortable playing drums live so we stopped doing that eventually and Cody stuck to bass and Jake to the drums. We unfortunately stopped playing "Sleepytime" altogether once they permanently stopped switching instruments at shows, and the replacement song we soon started ending every show with quickly became what is arguably our most popular track "The Legend of Legbaby". More on that song in a future blog post!

I also remember recording the track "Loop", which is something I like to do on multiple Dables albums where I create a repeating loop using my Boss RC-2 Loop Station pedal. There are multiple tracks confusingly titled "Loop" on 14 Songs, Stuff Volume 1, Pretty Ugly, Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam, and this album. The one on this album is by far my favorite of the loop tracks I've released because we were laughing our asses off the whole time making the Loop for this album. I've always been fond of ending my albums on an experimental or goofy novelty filler track that isn't a traditional "song" and this one is no exception. The 'Catmeow' part is a reference to something Jake used to randomly sing all the fuckin' time and became an inside joke so it ended up as the basis of "Loop". Also Cody was always saying YEAH BOIIIII because Flava Flav was a popular meme at the time so that also ended up being repeated 1000 times in this "Loop". I love how it ends with me pressing random numbers on my cell phone too. It's crap like this that gets us called "goof metal" in reviews lol...

I consider this version of "All The Retards Are Gettin' Married" on this album to be the best version of that song, as there are 3 different versions that exist on my albums. The origin of this song is in the "14 Songs" blog post, so go read that if you want to see what it's about...In my defense, this song was written in 2009 with this particular version recorded in early 2012, back when The R Word was said by everyone, everywhere, ALL the freaking time. It was said on TV and radio and in movies regularly, I've heard teachers at school say it and multiple bosses at my jobs use it, as well as friends with actual mentally disabled family members say it. In fact, I have a first cousin myself who although does not have Down's Syndrome, he is severely mentally disabled and I have heard his father (my uncle) use the word a long time ago while joking around. I doubt he does anymore though, and I try not to as well...it just wasn't a big deal in the slightest at the time. It just meant to refer to somebody or something stupid but once it started becoming considered a slur, we decided to retire this song from live sets completely which is kind of a shame because it's so much fun to play. We used to love to open with it back then and practically clear out the room, not because of the R Word in it, but because we say 'fuck' like 50 times in it and it ends with an extremely wild psychedelic noise jam, definitely not for everyone. It was kinda like a litmus test for us to see if you could handle the unique insanity of Dables and our demented sense of humor in our lyrics. Those who were expecting to simply drink beer at the bar and hear yet another safe and boring rock band at a show would be thoroughly confused and weirded out when we busted out "All The Retards Are Gettin' Married"! It was so much fun to confuse people who were used to only hearing things like Nickleback, Linkin Park, or classic rock cover bands...Those who didn't get it and hated us, HATED us passionately which I immensely enjoyed to antagonize them with songs like this...but those with an open mind and an appreciation for weird or original, interesting music LOVED us. I would hear the entire spectrum of love and hate from people after shows sometimes. Although if we ever played it live again, I think I'd replace the R word with 'moron' instead since that's what it was intended to mean anyway...Even though we liked to antagonize a boring stuck-up crowd with our weird music, none of us ever wanted to actually hurt anyone's feelings or have people think we are prejudiced or ableists who are making fun of people with Down's Syndrome. We're certainly not and that is not the goal of that song so I have no problem with changing one word to 'moron' since that's what we meant anyway.

I also really love Jake's keyboards in "Awkwardly Awkward". I truly can't listen to that song without busting out laughing at the epic faux-opera ending. This song came out PERFECT and is perhaps my personal favorite from this album. However, it is likely equally as offensive and non-PC nowadays as "All The Retards Are Gettin' Married" is, although we did play it multiple times in front of gay, queer, and transgendered fans and no one has EVER expressed any issues with it to us. Hopefully most people listening to "Awkardly Awkward" know we were just fucking around and being edgy & stupid on purpose and they take the goofy lyrics for the tounge-in-cheek dumbassery that was intended. In fact, the origin of the song came from us goofing around at practice one day while singing a parody of The Flaming Lips song "Bad Days", in which their lyric is "all your bad days will end" which we changed to "all my gay friends are gay", sung in the same tune and melody as The Flaming Lips song. We found our little parody of The Lips so stupidly hilarious it somehow got turned into an actual Dables song. Of course, "Awkwardly Awkward" sounds absolutely nothing like "Bad Days"...I actually consider it more inspired by a goofy mixture of a Pink Floyd and Queen song musically, with it's epic synth filled faux-opera ending and spacey guitars. The epic ending part was basically ALL Jake's doing. If you read this be sure to tell Jake how much you love "Awkardly Awkward", that song is kinda his baby.

I absolutely love the cover art for this album. That ABC Package Liquor store was very literally right next to Jake's old house, where we recorded this album at. Main Street Fountain Inn, SC! I mean literally his driveway shared the parking lot with this liquor store, it was like 30 feet from his front door. I got the idea to stack every single amp and speaker that we had and make a wall of amps in the liquor store parking lot (on a Sunday so they were closed of course...no booze on Sundays in South Carolina! Praise Jebus) and pretend to play a show in front of them. Cody's girlfriend Tiffany came out to take these photos of us playing in the liquor store parking lot in front of an obnoxious wall of amplifiers and we picked our favorite out of 30ish pictures that she took of us. Our mutual friend Adam Watson worked at that liquor store and was also in a band called Before There Were Gods with Jake and Cody and since he was there hanging out with us that day, we thought it would be funny if he looked like a homeless guy who wandered up to us randomly--as if the only person who came to see Dables play a show at a liquor store was a homeless dude. So he took one shoe off, held some old newspapers and a bottle of booze and slumped against the drums while we dabbled it up! I also should thank Cody's younger brother Jake Blackwell and our mutual friend Alex Cooke for helping to contribute amps and/or lug equipment around for us that day.

The final result of the album cover didn't quite look the way I originally envisioned it, in which I wanted us to be surrounded by an obnoxious amount of amplifiers and the shot to be from up high on a ladder, looking down on the band, but the photo we ended up picking I felt represented Dables pretty well even if you can only see a bit of the amp wall we built. So I have attached some of the unused photos to this post so you can see some of the other options we had for the cover art. Also notice the outtake pics with Adam's big toe in it, he had recently injured it so his toenail was gross and black, which we found hilarious but not quite right for the final cover art.

I ordered 100 copies of this CD from Discmakers and we eventually sold all 100, and I've made probably another 100 something copies myself by printing out the cover, burning the CD-R one at a time, and putting it in a slimcase which were also all sold or given away at shows. My friend Keller also made about 30 cassette tapes for this album as well, which also sold out. I remember when he gave me the cassette tapes, there was an issue with them where the audio was slowed down rather considerably. Enough to make the tapes unlistenable and therefore could not be sold at shows! This was barely a week before a big show so I had to painstakingly re-record every single cassette tape one at a time, in real time, using my crappy tape deck so they would be ready to sell at the upcoming show. It took for goddamn ever to re-dub those tapes because I only had 1 week to do it and was also working a full time job during the day but I managed to get it done and we sold them all! Even though he gave me faulty tapes, I still gotta give props to Keller for printing out the artwork and donating the tapes and cases to us. They were a big hit. I also remember my friends Brittany M and Ashley H made a ton of beaded bracelets that said Dables on them for us around that time which also sold very well. I wish I had kept one of those bracelets! I also didn't keep any of the cassettes and only kept 1 copy from the original run of the 100 Discmakers CDs for myself and Jake and Cody likely have a copy somewhere too, so there's roughly 225 or more copies of this album out there of which I believe makes "Dables" by Dables my most produced and best selling album of my entire small music career, at least in physical copies anyway. It got reviewed by Wes Gilliam on a popular Greenville, South Carolina based music blog We Are The Upstate which also resulted in several hundred downloads. Not too bad considering we had a budget of 0 and everything except the cassette tape copies was paid for by me personally and produced entirely by me and Jake at his house in our free time.

We also had two songs released on some compilations. "Negative Superman" was featured on a cassette tape release (also digitally on Bandcamp) of various local SC bands called "Delicious Defiance Fan Zine: Senseless, Shameless", along with locals like Rubrics, MEH, The Cherry Icees, Scamming Spree, Keller's band Satan in Bondage, and The Postmodern Penguins (whose guitarist ran the Delicious Defiance Fan Zine and also wrote about Dables for a short review in Maximum Rock'n'Roll Magazine...more on that in a later blog post for our next album).

"Paint The Town Brown" was featured on a digital-only compilation called "Un_Scene: Music of a Different Flavor" that was made by my good friend and future band mate in Trolls, Caleb Riley.

Overall, this album did well and I'm pretty proud of it and we had a lot of fun making it, although I would love to do a remaster of it someday to spruce it up a bit. You might also notice the tracklist on Spotify & Apple Music is missing 3 of the cover songs, and that's because it's just too expensive to release that many covers on streaming so I had to make the tough decision of cutting them all except for "Sorry Entertainer" because I consider "Sorry Entertainer" a truly essential Dables song that I believe we have played at every single Dables show ever, so it was worth the price of releasing that one on streaming, although I usually barely break even for the annual charges of having my music on all the streaming apps. Don't care, it's worth it! In this day and age if your music isn't on Spotify & Apple Music it's like you don't even exist! Although I do wish the 3 missing songs were on the streaming copy of this album, and if I ever start making money from streams (YEAH RIGHT LOL), I will re-upload it with the missing tracks. The full album with the missing tracks are all still on our bandcamp site though if you wanna dabble for free!

————————————

Released June 1, 2012

All music & lyrics written, performed, and recorded by: David Walker, Cody Blackwell, and Jake Garrett

Except for: "Sorry Entertainer", "Casper The Friendly Ghost", & "I Live My Broken Dreams" originally written by Daniel Johnston. "Effervescing Elephant"originally written by Syd Barrett.

Recorded from Nov 2011 - Feb 2012 at Deep Roots Family Records HQ in Fountain Inn, SC.

Dables is: David Walker - lead vocals and guitar on all tracks backing vocals on 11 & 12

Cody Blackwell - bass on 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 drums on 4, 5, 8, 9, 14 backing vocals on 1, 2, 3, 6, 8 lead vocals on 11 & 12

Jake Garrett - drums on 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 bass on 4, 5, 8, 9, 14 backing vocals on 8 & 12 steel guitar on 4 keyboards on 8, 9, 12

Deep Roots Family Records© 2012

1.All The Retards Are Gettin' Married 2.Paint The Town Brown 3.Boredumb 4.Negative Superman 5.Piece of Rock 6.Love Headache 7.Sorry Entertainer 8.Effervescing Elephant 9.Sleepytime 10.Hey Sid 11.Every Day is a New Day 12.Awkwardly Awkward 13.Casper The Friendly Ghost 14.I Live My Broken Dreams 15.Loop

Download this album for free at: https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/dables

[dablesretrospective]

2012 - Dables - The Couch Family

I discovered the book "Sang Branch Settlers" by Leonard Roberts (also published as "Up Cutshin and Down Greasy") in my Dad's closet (as well as a huge cd-wallet full of Couch Family music) as a kid and found out about my great grandpa Dave Couch and my great great uncle Jim Couch and their coal-mining, moonshining, Kentucky mountain hillbilly lives and the hundreds of folk, bluegrass, and traditional country songs and hymns they recorded in the early 1950's. I learned how to play several songs from the book and with the help of my friends and family ultimately created this album as a tribute to the music of my ancestors.

The first 10 tracks are my interpretations of the songs of The Couch Family: the songs of my family, performed and recorded by myself and my friends. The last 10 tracks are the original recordings from the 1950's, performed separately and together by Jim Couch, Dave Couch, and Frank Couch (Jim's son), and was recorded by Professor Leonard Roberts in the hills of Kentucky while writing his book 'Sang Branch Settlers', on a single track reel-to-reel.

Listen to small things like roosters crowing and children playing nearby throughout the original recordings as these songs were recorded quite literally in the hills of Kentucky, out on the front porch, sippin' on moonshine.

This album was recorded in 4 different home studios throughout upstate South Carolina from Dec 2010 - Sep 2011 thanks to the help of my friends Alex Murray, Micheal Keller, Jake Garrett, Cody Blackwell, Daniel Neely, and the moral support of my parents John and Susan Walker, and several others.

It is a honor and privilege to carry on the music of my family, and was a wonderful experience to find so many people willing to help me bring this idea to completion.

PS - “Sang branch” is slang for ginseng. The couches were ginseng farmers as their main source of income (as well as coal mining, making and selling moonshine, and being bluegrass/folk/country gospel musicians). In fact, my Grandpa Robert moved to South Carolina to escape the same fate as his family—working in a coal mine and being an alcoholic. That’s how I ended up being born in SC.

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Released March 1, 2012

All music performed and recorded by David Walker. All music mixed and mastered by Alex Murray. Additional Music Performances: Will The Circle Be Unbroken: Alex Murray-guitar Daniel Neely-guitar Micheal Keller-percussion,production Icy Mountain: Alex Murray-guitar,percussion Daniel Neely-guitar,percussion Micheal Keller-percussion,production Willow Garden: Micheal Keller-production Old Dan Tucker: Cody Blackwell-guitar,vocals Jake Garrett-banjo,vocals Cock Robin: Alex Murray-guitar Micheal Keller-guitar,vocals,production Daniel Neely-guitar,vocals  

Slackerpop Records 2012

1.James A. Garfield 2.Moonshiner 3.Will The Circle Be Unbroken 4.Icy Mountain 5.Willow Garden 6.Old Dan Tucker 7.I’m Alone in This World 8.Those Brown Eyes 9.Cock Robin 10.Jack Was a Lonely Cowboy

Download this album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/the-couch-family

[dablesretrospective]

2012 - Dables - Can’t Not

Not too much to say about this short, very experimental EP. I recorded it in 2 days, then uploaded it online on Day 3 with the intentions to specifically share it with a Facebook group called “Un_Scene: Music of a Different Flavor” that I posted in a lot which was moderated by my buddy Caleb Riley (later vocalist of Trolls, also of CCOC & Jericho Bros). It was a group based in South Carolina but had members from all over who shared the weirdest and most experimental music they could find with each other. Stuff ranging from harsh noise like Merzbow or Hanatarash, obscure IDM/EDM stuff like Squarepusher or various ambient projects, or stuff like Sun City Girls and The Residents. I also remember discovering Bubblegum Octopus from that Facebook group. A lot of members uploaded their own experimental or oddball music too. So I wanted to make something that would fit that bill that the members of that group would enjoy or find interesting and it was a total success! A lot of people in the Un_Scene group absolutely loved it, including a guy named Drew Smith who ran a moderately popular blog called “Music You May Not Have Heard” and tiny indie record label Sarcastic Magician Records who enjoyed my Can’t Not EP so much, he commissioned me to make another EP for his label that would be a split with another experimental artist from Chicago named Otto Rollo. I will write about the outcome of that in a later blog which ended up being called “Refuge” and came out in 2013, a year after this release.

Additionally, I tend to refer to this album as my “Lortab album”, because I was basically bombed on Lortabs the entire 3 days I was working on it lol…

As for the songs themselves, not much to say… ”Storm’s a Brewin’” was simply an experiment with tremolo picking with a flanger pedal on with a few samples of a thunderstorm thrown in.

“Sang Branch Settlers” was a riff I had been playing for a few years at that point as a warm up song that I played when I practiced my guitar. I finally decided to record it and set some drum machines to it. The title comes from a book written about my great grandpa Dave Couch and his family. He and my great great uncle Jim Couch were bluegrass/folk musicians who recorded some music in the 1950’s and who were also moonshiners, miners, and grew ginseng (aka “sang branch”). Later on in 2012, I recorded an entire tribute album to my ancestors The Couch Family, that I will of course go into detail about in a later blog.

“Def” was an experiment in recording everything with the input turned all the way up, as hot as it would go, to overdrive the sound and put it extremely ‘in the red’, meaning all the levels were maxed out completely. Then I simply put compression on it so it would be somewhat listenable. Titled as such because listening to this loud, obnoxious track might make you go deaf…

“Detective Cop Doctor” was an inside joke with my friends Sid and Brittany, a running gag where we would pretend to narrate a shitty fake movie trailer…as in “COMING THIS FALL TO THEATERS NEAR YOU…He’s a DETECTIVE…He’s a COP…but he’s also…A DOCTOR. He heals crime while arresting it!” kinda shit…Technically Brittany came up with that joke so I titled this track after it to make her and Sid laugh. The joke itself did end up getting recorded as a skit called “Dt Cop Doc” on the DAN album “Honey Berry Surprise” so check that out if you want to hear it. The song itself is an experiment in playing the bass while messing with the tuning pegs. Somehow it ended up kinda making sense and sounding slightly like lazy stoner metal…

“Can’t Not” is probably the most normal or straightforward track on here, and I was babysitting my 8 year old nephew Carlos later that night and I recorded him yelling into a microphone with heavy delay and reverb on it and slapped a looped sample of it at the end of this track. No reason, just experimenting & shit…nowadays he is 20 and plays bass in a country music band. I tried to show him some metal bands and stuff like Ween & Primus but he gravitated towards country with a little classic rock being as wild as he gets with the music he likes. Oh well…nothing else to say about the last two tracks really. “Stay at Home Dad” is a loop pedal experiment and “Scat” is also a loop pedal experiment with vocals only.

Years later when I uploaded Can’t Not to all the steaming services, I added some extra tracks from all 3 of my “Stuff” compilation albums to fill it out because I never uploaded any of the 3 “Stuff” albums due to having too many cover songs, which makes it too expensive to do so. So that’s why if you check out “Can’t Not” on Spotify or Apple Music, there are several extra songs, that I will write about in a later blog when I get to the album they originally came from.

The title itself doesn’t mean anything, I just liked that it was an odd double negative. I think it came to me from thinking about the They Might Be Giants song “Don’t Let’s Start”. I just liked the mush-mouthed nonsense of it.

The album art was straight up 100% stolen from online. I tried to figure out who the original artist is and have been unsuccessful tracking them down. Oh well, I have made literally 0 dollars from “Can’t Not” so they aren’t missing out on anything. Sorry I stole your artwork, buddy! But I really do love this weird ass image you made of little kids in Disney character masks in front of a burning car. Fuckin’ badass lol…don’t sue me please!

All in all, for the minimum amount of work I put into this album, I believe I accomplished all of my goals with it and I like it, except for “Scat” which makes me cringe and should probably have been left off the album, but oh well, too late for that.

————————————

Released on January 12, 2012

All music written, recorded, and performed by David Walker.

My nephew Carlos Garcia was sampled on Track 5 “Can’t Not”.

Recorded in Jan 2012 in Fountain Inn, SC in 2 days.

Slackerpop Records 2012

1.Storm’s a Brewin’ 2.Sang Branch Settlers 3.Def 4.Detective Cop Doctor 5.Can’t Not 6.Stay at Home Dad 7.Scat

Download this album for free at:

[dablesretrospective]

2011 - Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam (demo)

Hey yall! Only a 4 month gap between posts this time! The boredom must be setting in strongly...

This is my first demo with the live Dables band (me, Jake Garrett, & Cody Blackwell), called “Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam”. Released online in late January 2011 (exact date unknown), & we also made 75 CDs that were given away for free at our first show on March 17, 2011. They were CD-R’s in a colored slim case with printed artwork, which I paid for and hand-made entirely by myself.

This album (and band lineup that would end up lasting to this day! That’s 12 years so far!) came about because Cody Blackwell from my old band Death Mullet & Mr. Waffle had recently moved back to good ol’ Fountain Inn, SC after living in Savannah, GA for several years.  Within maybe two or three months of him moving back, we got together with our other good friend and ex-bandmate from Death Mullet, Jake Garrett, who presented the idea of the “24 Hour Album” to us. 

Basically, his idea was to record an entire album’s worth of songs in exactly 24 hours or less, from start to finish. That meant writing the songs, learning the songs, recording the songs, and mixing the songs all within 24 hours and releasing it immediately as well...I’m not sure how many songs exactly make up an “album”, but both Jake and I had plenty of experience with home recording so we figured we could get at least 7 or 8 songs done in 24 hours, even if it sucked. In fact, it didn’t matter to us at all if it was going to be terrible or not, we just thought the challenge of trying it sounded like a fun idea. It was 100% just about having a good time jamming together since it had been several years since the three of us had played music with each other. Cody was living in Georgia, I was busy with my band DAN, and trying to get Wuss off the ground, or playing solo shows as Dables, and Jake was busy with his bands The Blueroots and The Nitecrawlers (and probably others too that I can’t remember lol...dude has been in SO many different bands) so it was a big deal for us to be playing music together again since we were all in our first real band ever together (Death Mullet) and we had also played a few shows as our side project Mr. Waffle back in the day too.  These were the guys who were on stage with me at the very first show I ever played, which was literally also their first show they had ever played too. Hell, the 3 of us all played our first 7 or 8 shows that we ever played in our lives together. Jake has probably played like 500 or more shows by now, and Cody has played his fair share as well, but all of our first 7 or 8 times ever playing in a band on a stage was with each other. So we were having a blast hanging out again and jamming again after almost 4 years without doing so.

The only problem was it sounded pretty difficult to actually write that many songs from scratch that quickly, so I figured I would just dip into the solo Dables catalog for the songs since I already knew them and most of them were pretty simple to play.  So that’s pretty much what we did, and I was super excited to be playing Dables material with an actual band for the first time ever too! It almost felt like I was hearing these old songs I wrote for the first time, and it was awesome.

We eventually re-recorded actual versions of all of these songs (done the right way, not fast as possible like this crazy ‘24 Hour Album’ thing) several months later for what would be our first real album together in 2012. I will go into more detail about these songs when I write the blog entry for that album later on...The older Dables songs that we learned in mere hours were “All The Retards Are Gettin’ Married”, “Boredumb”, “Paint The Town Brown”, “Piece of Rock”, “Love Headache”, and “Hey Sid”. All of them already existed as tracks on previous solo Dables albums, but had never been played with a full band before. “Sleepytime” was mostly already written as well, but had yet to be recorded at that point so that one went quickly. Especially considering it’s only 3 chords, and then you just play a bunch of random noise, and that’s the whole song, hahaha...we did end up polishing the hell out of Sleepytime much later on and actually writing specific parts for the noisy ending instead of just playing whatever like we do in this recording of it...I was really into Daniel Johnston and Syd Barrett at the time, so we also did “I Live My Broken Dreams” and “Effervescing Elephant” since I knew they would be easy and go fairly quick. After we finished recording all of these, the last one we did with Cody was “Loop 4″, which is just us fucking around with my loop pedal and then he went home but Jake and I continued trying to get more tracks recorded after Cody left so he quickly wrote “Every Day is a New Day” and “Awkwardly Awkward” literally on the spot, both within an hour and I played the drums on them, despite definitely not being a drummer. But somebody had to do it since this wasn’t a “band” yet with set roles, so we were trading off instruments like crazy during these times. Jake mostly plays drums for Dables, but on this demo he plays guitar and on the first album he plays bass on several tracks while Cody plays the drums, but we stopped doing that after a year or so and settled into Jake always on drums and Cody always on bass.

The recording went rather quickly because all 3 instruments (guitar, bass, & drums) were being recorded on a single track, not individually, with us all playing at the same time. So if 1 person messed up, we all had to start the song completely over. We mic’ed everything up properly with decent mics, I think 4 of them on the drums, and 1 on each amp, and then ran it all through a mixing board so it would then go to the Tascam Portastudio on just a single track. So it’s essentially just a recording of the room sound, and it’s all being pre-mixed directly onto the track so it shouldn’t completely suck (we did spend some time on making sure the pre-mix sounded relatively decent before recording anything) but we didn’t care if there was bleeding, or minor mistakes, or fuzzy lo-fi quality, we only had 24 hours here...since all the instruments were recorded onto a single track, there wasn’t much mixing you could do so once that was all done, we did all the vocals on separate track. No overdubs whatsoever. No time for that shit on the “24 Hour Album”.  It was amazing to watch Jake come up with the lyrics to “Awkwardly Awkward” and “Every Day is a New Day” pretty much off the top of his head.  He played a simple chord structure that I could mostly follow on the drums, we practiced each song 4 or 5 times each, and then he recorded the vocals afterwards without writing any of the lyrics down at all and they both came out great and absolutely hilarious, I especially love Awkwardly Awkward, but I’ll wait until the blog entry for our first real album where we re-recorded much, much better versions of all of these songs to go into detail about the songs themselves.

I then went home and stayed up late doing the best mixdown of these songs I could considered there was only 2 tracks per song; the vocal track and the pre-mixed music track. I put the tracks on my computer into Cakewalk, edited them a little bit, and exported the finished wav files. So that was it! It might sound like crap and is totally 100% rushed demo-quality stuff, but the three of us accomplished our goal of the “24 Hour Album” and learned and recorded 13 songs in a single day. On December 5, 2010 to be specific!

We got together again a week later to listen to the final product and decide on what to call the “album”. They didn’t care much what we called it, so since we were recording and jamming all of this in Fountain Inn, South Carolina and it was mostly old Dables songs, I named it Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam, which we actually billed ourselves as at our first show playing these songs a few months later. For some reason I can’t remember, nobody wanted to just call it Dables so we decided that we’d call the band something different every show, always Dables and ‘The Something Something’...This lasted for 5 or 6 shows I think until we finally decided that this was an actual band now, not just a thing we did for a goof like the 24 Hour Album was. Some notable names we played shows as that I can still remember were Dables & The Scuba Diving Maniacs. Dables & The Goddamn Beach Boys. Dables & The Weebles (But They Don’t Fall Down).....While we were there, we re-formed our other old jam band project Mr. Waffle, and recorded 3 additional tracks! “There Are Police Across The Street”, which I actually kind of like because of how weird and funny it is, was pure improv and was also true, I could see multiple cop cars with flashing blue lights out the window at the house across the street while recording the vocals. “The Return of Mr. Waffle Part 1 & 2″ were us jamming on some old Mr. Waffle riffs and ideas, using the same setup of “everything going through a mixer to a single track” lazy-ass strategy as the 24 Hour Album.

When it came time to upload this “24 Hour Album” to the Internet, I thought I might as well include the 3 tracks from the second jam session at the end of it, although I suppose that makes it not technically an album that was made in 24 hours because of those 3 extra tracks that were recorded on a different day...But I bet if you add up all the time we actually spent working on it (1st session was from about 4 PM - Midnight, with another hour or two spent mixing and editing them into the finished wav files. 2nd session was 3 or 4 hours of jamming, then took less than an hour to edit and mix them down), this entire thing, 16 tracks worth of rockin’ tunes, was created with about 14 or 15 total hours of work so in my opinion---MISSION FUCKIN’ ACCOMPLISHED, DUDE. WE MADE AN ENTIRE ALBUM IN 24 HOURS! YEAH BO!

After Christmas and the New Year came and went, I released Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and although we called it an ‘album’ at the time, it is very clearly just a quick demo of questionable fidelity now, and fairly pointless to listen to since we re-recorded far superior versions of all of these songs later on. But it was an important or notable enough demo to warrant this entire blog entry here on my ongoing ‘Dables Retrospective’ series, since it was the birth of Dables as a real band instead of just me and a drum machine, like it had been up until that point.

Nowadays I cringe at this recording, and don’t like it much at all other than “There Are Police Across The Street” still makes me laugh and there’s some good riffs in the Mr. Waffle jams...But I can’t say that we didn’t have fun making it, so much so that right after we released this sometime in January 2011, we started having regular band practice every Thursday and were playing shows within 3 months after recording this. Which it all went pretty strong, we rarely missed a Thursday practice and/or get together and played a show about once a month or so from 2011 until it slowed down in 2016, and then we went on hiatus in October 2016 for the next 3 years. We got back together in 2019 to record a new album, which we finally released in December 2021 called “108 Years” and is definitely our best work. We don’t get together or play shows nearly as much as we used to, but we all enjoy playing and hanging out with each other so much, and have been friends over 15 years now that although we may take long, extended breaks without getting together to play music, I believe that Dables will never truly end and that Cody, Jake, and I may very well play music together in some capacity for the rest of our lives. You never know when the bug bites us again and the planets will suddenly align, and we are playing together as Dables again. I’ve been writing and fine-tuning songs and stockpiling ideas for Dables again lately, just waiting for the right moment to call up the dudes. We’re all in our mid 30′s now with stupid adult problems and responsibilities so band things definitely happen slower and are harder to organize now, unlike when we were all like 23, 24, 25 when we wouldn’t dare miss a Thursday practice or we’d gladly play a weeknight show and get home at 3 AM after getting paid 32 bucks for the gig and you also got work in the morning. That’s a bit more challenging when you’re 36 and overweight with IBS & shit now lol... But never say never because Dables is basically a life sentence for us, especially for me. It was my first real music project and it will someday be my last.  I tend to focus on other projects lately but Dables is always on the back burner and will never actually end, and I will always come back to it in one way or another.

One last thing...The cover art for this demo is simply a picture of the been-there-forever local Drug Store in Fountain Inn on Main St.  It is on the exact same street where Jake’s house was, where this demo was recorded, about 3 or 4 miles straight down the road from where he lived. I found the picture online and used it as the album cover just to get a cheap inside-joke laugh out of Jake and Cody, who I knew would recognize it right away because that sign has been there, completely unchanged, for at least since I first moved to Fountain Inn in 1998, and it was a location mere miles away from where the music was recorded, so I thought it worked great for the cover art. No titles of the band or what this is, just FOUNTAIN INN DRUG CO. PARKING IN REAR.

————————————  

Released late January 2011 (exact date unknown)

David Walker-guitar,vocals,etc Cody Blackwell-bass,vocals,drums Jake Garrett-drums,vocals,bass

Tracks 10 and 11 are- Jake Garrett-guitar, bass, vocals David Walker-drums

Track 3 written by Syd Barrett Tracks 5 and 6 written by Daniel Johnston

-All music produced by David, Jake, and Cody. -Recorded in a single session on 12/5/2010 between 3:00 PM and 11:53 PM. -Exactly one pint of whiskey was consumed. -There was also a second session for the last 3 tracks (14-16) a week later on 12/12/2010.

1.All The Retards Are Gettin' Married 2.Boredumb 3.Paint The Town Brown 4.I Live My Broken Dreams 5.Sleepytime 6.Piece of Rock 7.Effervescing Elephant 8.Love Headache 9.Hey Sid 10.Every Day is A New Day 11.Awkwardly Awkward 12.Sorry Entertainer 13.Loop 4 14.There Are Police Across The Street 15.The Return of Mr. Waffle Part 1 16.The Return of Mr. Waffle Part 2

***Download a zip file of Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam (demo) here:***

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RSzfzhVkqowAAl8c6wunc7leUY7fi0S3/view?usp=sharing

If the link doesn’t work, shoot me a message or email me at [email protected] and I’ll send it to you directly!

[dablesretrospective]

2011 - Wuss - The Demos From Hell

***Download a zip file of The Demos From Hell by Wuss here:***

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sKsV0aMEKYG3daEM-T5vnvrYC1SROs01/view?usp=sharing

In the Summer of 2009 I wanted to start a “real band”.  Dables was still just a solo project at the time, DAN had just started but had a specific direction of writing novelty punk songs and my experimental noise rock band Closet Monster had just broken up. I was still hanging out with Alex (guitarist from Closet Monster) all the time and we decided we wanted to start a new band together with the idea of it being a “real” band that just played heavy rock.  No more drum machines or experimental noise jams or gimmicky bullshit, this time we wanted a full four piece band with a real drummer. I was set to play rhythm guitar and vocals with Alex on lead.  We wanted it to be a stoner rock with a psychedelic and heavy edge but not full-on metal or psyche rock, but somewhere in between.  We were heavily influenced by stuff like Tad, early Flaming Lips (first 5 or 6 Wuss songs we wrote were directly inspired by the first 4 Flaming Lips albums), Cave In, Electric Wizard, Helmet, The Melvins, Neurosis, Clutch, Thin Lizzy...

So I set to work at slowly writing songs for this new psychedelic stoner rock band we wanted to start even though we had no bassist or drummer.  I wanted to wait until we had written some good material before even trying to seriously find a drummer or bassist.  In order to remember the songs, I started making demos with *ZERO* intentions of anyone besides the band hearing them and they were to be used as reference points only.  I had also decided to call the project Wuss. No reason really, just thought it was a great name for a stoner rock band and after searching online there were no other bands with that name so Wuss it was!

Both the writing of demos and the search for a drummer went extremely slowly with our jobs and spending the majority of free time working on Dables or DAN stuff.  In other words we were lazy as fuck when it came to Wuss. Many messages sent online to potential band mates but nothing ever came to fruition.  Our biggest hurdle was not having a good practice space since by Fall 2009 I had moved back in with my parents and Alex was still living with his, both in neighborhoods where loud band practices would of probably got the cops called on us repeatedly.  So whoever was to be our drummer had to also provide a practice space of some type and ALSO want to play the kind of psychedelic heavy stoner rock we wanted to play too so we were kind of asking a lot.  Before I knew it an entire year had passed since originally getting the idea to start Wuss, and we had still not found a drummer or a bassist but I had amassed over 20 rough, mainly instrumental demos that unfortunately very few of which Alex had even recorded any of his lead guitar parts on.

It wasn’t until November 2010 that our old band mate from Death Mullet, Cody Blackwell moved back to town that things started finally happening. We got in touch with Jake Garrett (also from Death Mullet) to see if he wanted to jam again since Cody had moved back to town.  My initial plan was to try to coerce them into joining Wuss but Jake was more interested in trying to do a “24 hour album”, meaning he wanted us to try to record an entire album in 24 hours. So I ended up teaching them a handful of Dables songs that had never been played with a band before instead since they were easier to learn and were completely written. Most of the Wuss songs still didn’t have any lyrics and they just didn’t seem that interested in hearing my Wuss demos anyway. They were both more familiar with Dables songs like Boredumb and Love Headache. Since we weren’t doing Wuss (yet), Alex didn’t come to these jam sessions. We got together and jammed 4 or 5 times and on Dec 5, 2010 spent the whole day recording 10 tracks for the “24 hour album” and called it “Dables & The Fountain Inn Jam” which I will go into more on the next blog entry but eventually this “hey man, let’s try to record an album in 24 hours” idea that Jake had evolved into Dables becoming a real band that is still going 11 years later!

Anywho, I was still somewhat trying to get Wuss off the ground with other people since I wasn’t sure where the “24 hour album” thing was going to go with Jake and Cody or how long it would last.  But I hadn’t given up yet because I knew some of these songs had a TON of potential to be really good if re-recorded with a band, so a few years later several of the songs from the Wuss demos became Dables songs  and eventually the full band version of Dables evolved to become very close to the original  sound I had envisioned for Wuss: psychedelic grunge/stoner rock. If you want to know the way I heard these songs in my head, check out “Intergalactic Death Farm” by Dables which is pretty damn close to how Wuss was supposed to sound, only without Alex’s guitar leads. More on  that in future blog entries.

The Demos From Hell never received any kind of official release.  Most of the songs were uploaded to myspace as soon as they were recorded  and around the time I released Stuff  Volume 2 by Dables in February 2011, I also compiled all the demos for Wuss  into a collection I called “The Demos From Hell” and uploaded them to a file sharing site called megaupload (I think?) which I shared on all my social media sites online to see if anyone was interested in learning these songs  with a full band...unfortunately it never happened.  By the time 2012 rolled around I started focusing on Dables and had officially given up on the idea of Wuss entirely and deleted the demos from the Internet.  So aside from myspace, having the link to the megaupload zip file (which was only up for a year or so), or having one of the literally less than 20 burned CD-R copies that I made for friends or potential band mates, these songs have been completely unavailable to the public until right now.

Since these are mostly instrumentals, I don’t have much to say in a track-by-track breakdown like I’ve done in other blog entries, so I’ll just comment on a few of them.

“We’re All Fucked” This song will *FINALLY* be released in a new recording on the upcoming album from Dables titled “108 Years”. It’s a song I’ve been trying to resurrect ever since Dables starting writing heavier material around 2013-2014 or so and it took until the end of 2021 for this song to reach it’s full potential and be released with a full band playing it. It just didn’t feel right re-recording and releasing this song on any of my albums until “108 Years”, it just would’ve felt out of place on any of our other albums...This song was directly inspired by The Melvins, specifically their Houdini album. I wrote a heavy riff and some nonsensical lyrics that had uncomfortable words & negative imagery. “Open up a gas can and take yourself a big whiff” was from something this kid said to me in 9th grade. I remember him turning around in his desk and telling me about how when he can’t get any beer or weed he would just “go out in the garage and stick your head in the gas can and take like 10 huge gulps of air”. I found this hilarious and sad. No clue what became of that kid.

“Psuedoslacker” I had actually written the main riff for this song for Closet Monster on the bass. At every one of our shows we would jam out on that riff. Alex liked the riff so much he took it and fleshed it out and turned it into this recording (he plays every instrument on this track) which I think he wanted to use for his solo project World of Giants instead of for Wuss.  However things were pretty open and free-flowing back then and I figured since I technically came up with that main riff and it was something we both “owned”, that we could turn this into a Wuss song, so after he gave me a copy of the track, I recorded some vocals on top of it without involving him which I now realize kind of rubbed him the wrong way although I do remember him being perfectly fine with this becoming a Wuss song once we got a full band together. I think it was more he was annoyed that I put my not-so-great-and-too-loud vocals on top of it, but I never considered this particular version of this track to be anything but a demo for us anyway which was merely a reference point for learning the song with a band. Makes me very sad that that never happened with this track, it’s one of my all time favorite songs that Alex ever recorded and deserves to played with a full band.

“A Sweet, Satisfying Death”, “Songs About Girls”, “Xenocide Doesn’t Bother Me”, “Looks Like Rain”, and “A Resounding No” These 5 tracks all eventually ended up as Dables songs, all on our 2019 album “Intergalactic Death Farm” in their final versions. If you wanna hear crappy instrumental demos of those awesome songs from Intergalactic Death Farm, well here ya go! Once I get to the blog entry for that album, I’ll do a more detailed analysis of these songs.

“Chainsmoke”, “Small Talk”, “Way Too Late”, and “The Moth” Have all come close to being turned into Dables songs and still may eventually if they can be re-written better. I haven’t completely given up on these songs being re-recorded someday, but so far haven’t been able to get them to sound right with the band so they remain as lo-fi instrumental demos for now.

The last thing I have to say is that I don’t know who drew the cover art.  It’s just something I randomly found online and slapped Wuss on it...sorry I used your artwork without permission whoever you are, but rest assured I didn’t make a single penny from this hahaha...

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"Released” in late February 2011 (exact date unknown)

All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker "Psuedoslacker" was performed and recorded by Alex Murray, parts co-written by David Walker, vocals and lyrics by David Walker

Recorded sporadically from mid 2009 through late 2010 in Greenville, South Carolina and Fountain Inn, South Carolina

1.We're All Fucked 2.Pseudoslacker 3.A Smiling Piece of Plastic 4.I Seriously Fucking Hate You 5.She'll Fuck Anyone 6.Aloof Like A Noose 7.A Sweet, Satisfying Death 8.Songs About Girls 9.Chainsmoke 10.I Am The Wind 11.Light My Butt on Fire 12.Xenocide Doesn't Bother Me 13.If I Ever Get To Heaven 14.Looks Like Rain 15.Small Talk 16.Your Face is A Porno 17.There is No Right and There is No Wrong 18.Way Too Late 19.A Resounding "No" 20.The Moth

***Download a zip file of The Demos From Hell by Wuss here:***

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sKsV0aMEKYG3daEM-T5vnvrYC1SROs01/view?usp=sharing

If the link doesn’t work, shoot me a message or email me at [email protected] and I’ll send it to you directly!

[dablesretrospective]

2011 - Dables - Stuff Volume 2

Annnnnnd we’re back! Once again it’s been a long time since I posted one of my “History of Dables” retrospective posts where I examine my albums track-by-track, about 2 years this time since the Song of Pain post.  I’ll try to write these more frequently so that maybe someday I’ll actually finish and get caught up to the present day…  So here is the next release after Song of Pain: Stuff Volume 2 from February 2011. Not a whole hell of a lot to say about this one as it’s not a proper album, just a collection of leftover songs I had recorded in 2010 during the Pretty Ugly & Songs of Pain sessions or around that time period.  When I record an album, I almost always end up with a bunch of tracks that either won’t fit on the album or are only half-finished or mainly just aren’t good enough to go on an official album so I tend to just sit on them until I have a bunch, and then release a compilation of them, which I have creatively (haha) named the Stuff series and here is Volume 2. I couldn’t come up with a good name to call the first compilation of unused & unreleased material I had recorded back in 2009 so I figured the album is just a bunch of random stuff anyway so might as well be literal and call it STUFF! On to the songs…

1.Pee Oh’d An outtake from the Pretty Ugly sessions, trying to write one of the “ugly” songs. Thought it was kinda sloppy and wasn’t up to par with the rest of the album so I left it off. The title is a play on the phrase “pissed off” aka P.O.’d.

2.Adam’s Jam 1: Untitled One night my buddy Adam Young from Closet Monster came over for some beers and we ended up recording three goofy tracks for fun, all of which appear on this release, and all of which were essentially improvised on the spot. This one is probably the most musical/listenable one of the bunch and features Adam on djembe and vocals! Sadly this impromptu session ended up being the last time me and Adam ever recorded together and we kind of fell out of touch over the years. No real reason other than life just hit us both fast and hard in our mid 20′s and we just drifted apart as people do and slowly stopped hanging out together. No biggie, it happens. He’s a a good dude and a brilliant painter and was always open minded as hell to the weird musical ideas I would come up with, last I heard he’s doing very well but isn’t really playing music anymore nowadays.

3.Blow Yer Nose Just a noisy rocker slacker pop jam. I accidentally recorded the drums and main guitar riff too “hot” (microphone input was turned too high and the track is too loud and is distorted and clips some) and couldn’t fix it without re-doing it but I was too lazy and had spent enough time on this track as it is, so I just said fuck it and mixed it down quickly so I could move on to a different song, so the mix is pretty bad and full of various issues.  I do like the guitar lead that comes in about halfway through the song though, other than that, meh…don’t care much for this one. The “I ate some turkey and cheese again today” line was basically lifted from a Butthole Surfers song that says “I ate some cheese and rice today”. I changed it to turkey and cheese because I ate turkey & cheese sandwiches at work basically every day at the time.

4.Go Away Inspired by the band Wavves, who recorded his first two albums (which were both fairly new at the time) with purposely over-driven, hot, “in the red” tracks so that the very recording itself sounds distorted, dirty, loud, and messy. Rather obnoxious sound and production style really…but I liked the sonics of it and wanted to try my hand at that style and even swiped the way he has over-driven vocals singing a “woooo” kind of lead part on a lot of songs, so I used that too.  See songs like “No Hope Kids” & “Wavves” for an example of the over-driven vocal melodies I’m talking about.  That’s all I remember about this one other than the third verse describes a dream I really had where I was eating ice cream as my teeth fell out of head and where I also tried to have sex with someone who turned out to be a zombie. Good times.

5.Love Headache This one was actually recorded after Pretty Ugly & Songs of Pain had been released, so I suppose it was more intended to go on a proper album as it’s a song that I think came out really well, but I think I was just excited about it and wanted to release it asap instead of sitting on it until I had enough material for a new album so I slapped it on Stuff Vol 2 and released it early.  It later got re-recorded with a full band on the self-titled Dables album released the following year and was a staple the first few years of our live shows, played it at every show.  I was inspired by the simple chords and bass-y vocals of Beat Happening and wanted to write something like that, but more rock n roll instead of their twee style, so I was more inspired by their songwriting formula than their actual sound.  I’m proud of this one and I still think the lyrics are pretty funny. It’s about that kinda headache you get that’s caused by love gone wrong. The frustration that a sordid relationship can cause.

6.Keller’s Closet My buddy Keller had literally setup his recording equipment in a spare closet in his apartment.  It was extremely narrow but was deep enough to cram a tiny table, a 16-track Portastudio, and a small amp in. If you went in there with a guitar on, you had to be careful and could only turn in one direction otherwise the guitar neck would hit the wall. That’s how tiny this closet was. Amazing he was able to cram everything in there and it was deep enough that exactly 3 people could fit in there with a few inches to spare, so it was pretty damn cramped.  I was hanging out with him and Sid (from my other band DAN) and ended up putting together this little experimental noise track with them both providing vocal noise that was layered with plenty of effects while I made guitar noise and then pieced all the parts together into a single track.  Named the song after the spot in which is was recorded in, obviously.

7.Mononucleosis Ween cover from one of my favorite Ween albums, The Pod.  Recorded just for fun sometime in late 2010 probably.

8.Song for Russell Been dreading writing about this one but here goes…this is a song I wrote after my boss at the gas station, Russell Folk, committed suicide.  We were good friends and I considered him a kind of mentor and he was, to this day, still the best manager I’ve ever had. It was also the first time that someone I was close to passed away.  Other than my great grandma who I barely knew that died when I was 16, I had not experienced having someone I knew pass away.  Russell was the first and it was very sudden and out of nowhere.  He was in his mid 50′s, had worked at that gas station since it was built in the early 90′s, and had recently survived colon cancer and was supposedly in remission. When I first met him he was working full time and going to chemotherapy twice a week. I thought he had been doing better , but I suspected he never told me the true extent of his health issues and the pain he was dealing with on a daily basis.  I also later learned from the district manager that supposedly he had stolen a few thousand from the safe and was nervous about it. I think his health issues and fear of losing his job over the theft contributed to him taking an overdose one night and taking his own life.  They said he had taken the entire bottle and got in bed so it was not by accident.  It was my first day back from a 2 week vacation and when I got to work the district manager was there instead of Russell which had never happened before so I immediately knew something was wrong. She told me he was just found in his bed a few hours prior. I hadn’t seem him in 2 weeks since I was on vacation. Had no idea when I said goodbye on my last shift before vacation that it was the last time I would ever see him.  Since I saw him literally 5 days a week (I usually worked second shift and he worked first so he would leave a few hours after I came in usually and he would always be there to help with the weekly delivery of stock from the truck every Sunday) we had become pretty good friends so needless to say I was devastated he would do this.  The district manager dropped this bombshell on me as soon as I walked in and then expected me to then run the register during the 6 AM morning rush without so much as 5 min to gather my thoughts about it. Since Russell had been there since the 90′s, every single customer knew who he was and that he wasn’t there like he usually was so of course they started asking me where Russell was. Things like “Where’s Russell? You give the old man the day off, huh? Hardy har har…” Then I had to tell them the news. Me, a shy and anxiety ridden 23 year old who was making 9 bucks an hour, who had no previous experience with the death of a friend, who had also JUST learned about his passing, it was now MY responsibility to inform every single customer about Russell’s death? Which of course led to ‘what happened’ questions in which I had to say it was suicide by overdose. I couldn’t do it.  After about an hour of having to explain Russell’s passing over and over to damn near every customer I walked out. Didn’t tell the district manager who was in the back counting money shit.  Just got in my car and drove home crying about Russell. I couldn’t handle the responsibility of having to tell someone about Russell every 5 min as people inevitably came in and asked about him.  I was just not emotionally equipped to deal with that.  The district manager called me about 45 min later and I just told I was too upset by it all to have to be the one to inform the customers about Russell. I also told her that I’m going ahead and quitting as I saw this a sign to move on from the gas station as well.  Later that day I wrote this song to help work through my feelings. I didn’t put too much thought into it, just wanted my thoughts on paper and writing music is how I deal with things. Honestly though I don’t think this is a good song, the music is far too basic and my vocal performance is rather sub-par. I don’t really care though, I was not trying to write a hit or anything complicated, and was literally just using it as an outlet for my emotions. I didn’t care if anyone ever heard this song and had no intentions of releasing it as I did it just for me, just to occupy my mind.  I only wished that I had told Russell how big of an impact he had on my life, so I wrote about that.  I looked up to him and thought he was just such a cool and experienced person.  I was very shy at 20 years old when I first started working there and he helped me come out of my shell and learn how to talk to customers in a retail environment without having so much anxiety. He told me “just pretend that the customer is your old friend you’ve known forever and talk to them naturally and just be yourself” which is advice I still use today when talking to clients at my job.  He showed me how a manager SHOULD be.  He gave me my first “big boy” job as Assistant Manager and was the first person at a job to entrust me with real responsibilities which meant a lot. He was also funny as hell and was a hippie stoner back in the day and told me a lot of hilarious stories from his youth.  I also admired his work ethic as he could be very lenient and easy-going with a lot of things, but when it came time to work he would get shit done and he helped instill that attitude in me as well.  He was also the first person I was close to that was gay.  Of course I had met plenty of gay people in my life but had never been close friends with any until Russell.  If I had any lingering homophobia at the time from growing up in a strict Southern Baptist household and being surrounded by toxic masculinity and immature people going to public schools in the deep south, Russell helped open my mind and unlearn and dispel all that bullshit and be more understanding and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community . He showed me that people of different orientations or gender identity are not weird or bad or anything, they’re just people. Just human beings like myself, just living their lives.  They are no different than I or anyone else I’ve ever known other than what they like or how they feel is different from my personal preferences.  Prior to meeting Russell, I used to use slurs like f** all the time with my friends and anything I didn’t like got called “gay” and I didn’t respect the struggle they dealt with or understand they were born that way. I had written songs (see DAN) that could be taken as making fun of gays.  That was not our intention (our bassist later came out as bisexual) though, we thought we were just being funny or satirical with our edgy and bizarre humor.  I was just ignorant though, and being such good friends with a gay man in his late 50′s made me more accepting, understanding, and open-minded so all that ignorant homophobic behavior became a thing of the past.  So it’s safe to say that Russell had a big impact on my life in many ways.  I’m sorry your song is so lame Russell, but I also think that you’d probably think that was funny that you died and had a song written about you that was kinda lame.  Of course the reason it’s so simple and lame is I didn’t really intend for anyone to ever hear it, but still…I think I was just putting anything that was technically “finished” that I hadn’t yet released on this compilation album, so I reluctantly slapped this track on here despite me not particularly liking it but I also didn’t feel right re-recording or re-writing it or adding additional instrumentation to it because it was ONLY written as an outlet for how I was feeling the day that Russell died and revising it in any way wasn’t something I wanted to do, so it is presented “as is”. RIP Russell Folk, miss you dude.

9.Adam’s Jam 2: Depth Perception Another track during the same session with Adam Young as mentioned in Track 2. This one is clearly two drunk dudes goofing around.

10.An Exercise in Irritation Outtake from the Pretty Ugly sessions while writing the “ugly” portion of the album.  Merely an experiment with irritating sounds as the title suggests.  Too obnoxious and annoying for the actual album so I left it off.

11.An Exercise in Retardation 1 Another outtake from the Pretty Ugly sessions while writing the “ugly” portion of the album. Pretty stupid and pointless track.

12.An Exercise in Retardation 2 Same as above. This time though it’s all vocal noise! A few years prior I almost recorded an entire album of this kind of bullshit. Inspired by Mike Patton’s “Adult Themes for Voice”, I had recorded several tracks that had no instruments and were just a microphone hooked up to several effects pedals using only my voice.  I was going to call it “Insipid Vibrations”. Might just be the most unlistenable recordings I’ve ever made.  This stupid track was just more of that Insipid Vibrations vocal noise junk that even though I know is essentially unlistenable, I still put it on this collection anyway so that you can suffer too if you want to.  So therefore I think the title is appropriate.

13.I Love How You Love Me A Phil Spector cover.  I always like juxtaposing two completely opposite things in my music, like putting this straight-forward singer/songwriter folky love song right after the extremely obnoxious “An Exercise in Retardation 2″.  Technically I heard Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel’s version of this song first before knowing it was an old Phil Spector song.  I mainly recorded this just for practice and just to have something to record that day that would be easy after having just finished the more complex arrangements of Songs of Pain.  Not much thought was put into this track. It’s just a song I liked and helped to pass the time to record as making recordings is what I do for fun.  I record so much stuff, especially during this time period, that not everything is intended for an audience and is mainly just me practicing my hobby of making recordings at home.  So lots of times I’m just having fun and messing around and recording whatever I feel like at the moment which results in some of it technically being releasable, like this track.

14.Fade Away Kind of the same attitude and origin as the previous song. I was just writing and recording whatever comes to mind with no thoughts whatsoever of what a listener might think.  This song was actually written several years prior during the 4-track cassette tape days (2006-2008) but was never recorded because it was too simple and just lazily written.  I was going through some old notebooks for some ideas and came across it and decided to attempt to record it.  It didn’t come out so well and is pretty sloppy. I gave up on it pretty quickly and probably spent an hour on it at the most.   Slapped it on Stuff Volume 2 anyway apparently…the lyrics were inspired by a Neil Young song that says “it’s better to burn out than fade away” (which Kurt Cobain also famously used in his alleged suicide note) which I’ve always disagreed with. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fading away.  It’s the natural progression of things, everything fades away into oblivion eventually.  It’s normal.  Burning out dramatically should not be preferable to the perfectly natural act and indisputable fact that everyone and everything eventually fades away. I don’t think that fact should be viewed as negative and we shouldn’t be afraid of slowly fading away because ultimately everything must move on; all things must pass.  The first verse is also inspired by an old girlfriend who one time dreamed I did something nefarious (don’t remember what exactly) and was then kind of mad at me. Not actually MAD at me, more like just grumpy and annoyed with me over something I didn’t even do! Which I found hilarious and eventually made it’s way into some lyrics.

15.Facenose The “world’s worst song”.  I was hanging out with my buddy Keller, who wrote and recorded songs himself as Satan in Bondage. He wasn’t a skilled guitarist and wrote extremely simple riffs that were then recorded on cheap equipment.  I love the guy so I’ll just say I don’t exactly sit around listening to Satan in Bondage…so one day I was being a dick and playing guitar at his house and he had been playing some rather dumb and very simple riff on guitar for the past 20 min and I got annoyed with it and started making fun by imitating his riff by playing this equally terrible riff.  I was like “Look, I just wrote the next Satan in Bondage song!” and started playing this song and yelling “face! nose!” along with it. Keller is my boy and we have the same sense of humor so ripping on each other this way was no big deal whatsoever.  We often would make fun of each other’s music and everything else really so it’s all in jest.  The term “facenose” was an inside joke that started between me and Cody Blackwell (from Dables live band & Death Mullet). We were getting fucked up one time and were turning the word “shitfaced” into other body parts and bodily functions. Like instead of saying “I’m shitfaced”, face became nose or foot, like I’m shitnosed, or I’m shitfooted, or shit became fart or puke as in I’m fartfaced or pukefaced…eventually it morphed all the way to just “I’m facenosed” which we found hilarious and still use as a term for getting super drunk or high. This inside joke got spread around our friend group so Keller knew about “getting facenosed”.  Months and months later, just to make Keller and Cody laugh and probably I was also bored as hell I ended up recording that little stupidly bad riff I played while making fun of Keller and it then became known as “the worst song ever written” and sometimes someone will play it during band practice just for a laugh or to obnoxiously get the others’ attention about something. Facenose!

16.Adam’s Jam 3: Gingers The third track from that same session mentioned on tracks 2 & 9 with Adam Young. I think it came from us beat-boxing and messing around with effects pedals like two drunk idiots and thinking we could turn it into a song. I do remember it was the last thing we recorded that night as by that point we were both too hammered to record anymore.  Also the “gingers have souls” meme video had just come out so Adam was quoting it.

17.Awesome Sound Another Ween cover.  I based it on their live version of it instead of the version that’s on The Pod.

18.Way Stoned I must’ve actually been super stoned at the time because I have virtually no memory of recording this track.  I imagine I had been listening to Sleep or Electric Wizard that day and was just messing around with stoner metal riffs and half-ass recorded this song.  I don’t think I really wrote anything in particular and instead just jammed until I had a few stoner metal riffs, then I pressed record. Then I went back and attempted to put drums on the sloppy tempo of what I just recorded. I then grabbed a notebook full of unused lyrics and sang the one and only verse from some old lyrics and improvised the “set fire…get way stoned…” lines.  This track sounds like it could’ve been an actual song if I had just put some actual thought into it instead of just goofing around with sloppy stoner metal riffs. Definitely another instance of me recording a song without much regard to the listener and mainly just entertaining myself for a few hours.  I remember when I was digging through the vaults for unreleased tracks to put on Stuff Volume 2 and finding “Way Stoned” after having completely forgot I even recorded it at all.  I was hearing something I wrote that I don’t really remember writing.  Pretty sure it actually happened very quickly, within an hour or two from the start to a finished track while I was very stoned.

19.Stuff Another noise experiment recorded shortly after the Songs of Pain sessions.   Just had the idea to try to do something percussive but with no actual drums or drum machine. Thought I could beat on the side of my dresser drawer, put some effects on it, and loop it as a percussion/drum beat.   Who needs a drum machine anyway!?  So I tried it then played some psychedelic guitar riffs over top of it. The hi hat sound in it was actually an accident and is from the loop pedal. It has a few drum beats and hi hat patterns built into it to help you keep tempo. The volume knob for the hi hat had mistakenly still been turned up when I pressed record on the loop station pedal so the hi hat started playing and became a part of the recorded loop. By that point it was too late to get rid of it without starting over completely and recording a new loop of me whacking the side of my dresser which I didn’t feel like doing so I just left it in.  The track came out rather annoying and pointless anyway so onto the very end of the Stuff Vol 2 compilation with you!   This track is so clearly not album worthy and so much belongs at the end of a b-side compilation named Stuff Vol 2, that I decided to even name it just “Stuff”. It doesn’t deserve a better title lol…

The cover art for this album is a little doodle I made in MS Paint that was supposed to be the logo or mascot for a new band I was trying to start with Alex Murray called Wuss. I had just started writing these heavy, more aggressive songs in a psychedelic grunge style that were intended for a full four piece band to play and not for my Dables style of a one man band bedroom recordings with drum machines.  I wanted to write some music specifically to play live with a band with two guitarists.  I wrote quite a bit of material throughout 2011 and used this face from the cover art as the cover art for a demo compilation for the Wuss songs called “The Demos From Hell” that I gave copies of to Alex and other potential band mates and had no intention of releasing to the public. The demo was meant as a blueprint or guide and starting points for the full band to learn, not as anything meant to be heard by an audience.  I liked the logo of the little weird looking 8-bit guy so much that I ended up using it as the cover for Stuff Volume 2 as well! But not until 3 or 4 months after it’s initial release online.  The original cover was just a photo of me covering my face and obscuring most of the camera with my hand and had “Dables Stuff Vol 2″ written on it in a boring, plain font.  It was lazy and uninspired and I didn’t really like it so about 3 or 4 months later I came up with idea to make a new cover using the logo from the unreleased Wuss demo which I liked much better.   Several of the songs from the Wuss demo would later be turned into Dables songs with the full band, such as The Void or some tracks from Intergalactic Death Farm since Wuss sadly never came to fruition.

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Released February 15, 2011    

Stuff Volume 2 comprises the outtakes and leftover recordings from 2010.  

All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker Slackerpop Records 2011

Additional musicians: Adam Young - percussion & vocals on 2, 9, 16 Sid Shurer - vocals on 6 Michael Keller - vocals on 6

Tracks 7 and 17 are Ween covers Track 13 is a Phil Spector cover

1.Pee Oh’d 2.Adam’s Jam 1: Untitled 3.Blow Yer Nose 4.Go Away 5.Love Headache 6.Keller’s Closet 7.Mononucleosis 8.Song for Russell 9.Adam’s Jam 2: Depth Perception 10.An Exercise in Isolation 11.An Exercise in Retardation 1 12.An Exercise in Retardation 2 13.I Love How You Love Me 14.Fade Away 15.Facenose 16.Adam’s Jam 3: Gingers 17.Awesome Sound 18.Way Stoned 19.Stuff

Download album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/stuff-volume-2

[dablesretrospective]

2011 - Dables - Songs of Pain

I began writing and recording this album almost immediately after my previous release “Dables Plays Daniel Johnston” in Oct 2010. The original intention was an EP of 5-6 songs, all keyboards, drum machines, and vocals, no guitar whatsoever. Also with an emphasis on nothing being programmed and all keyboards and drum machines be played live by hand, recorded by layering different tracks of each. No software or sequencers, just me playing the keyboard by hand, and no programmed drum beats, all drums were to be played with my fingers on the pads on the drum machine. After recording 5 or 6 songs using those rules, I decided to just make it a full length album and add a few more songs that would use guitars but no keyboards as sort of an opposite flip-side to the first half of the album. So it could be almost like 2 albums in one, the first half being synth driven sad pop songs and the second half be guitar driven sad pop songs.

As for the lyrics…I was about to turn 25, still broke and working at a gas station and living at home with my parents again, and had just officially broken up with my long term on-again-off-again girlfriend after she started seeing a close personal friend of mine.  So my way of dealing with it was to write songs about how I felt at the time, and looking back 8 years later it seems over-dramatic and cheesy, but it was heartfelt and honest. Nowadays, I cringe at a lot of the lyrics on this album, but I also can’t deny that was definitely how I felt at the time during those first few months after the breakup which is when all of these tracks were recorded.  I am also totally proud of the instrumentation and music on this album as well as most of my vocal delivery (just not so much the lyrics anymore lol). This album also marks the first real time that Alex Murray (from Closet Monster, Death Mullet and his project World of Giants) mixed and mastered everything. I took all the individual tracks from this album to him, and he mixed them on his gear while I dictated how every little detail should be (but ultimately I’d say he did all the actual mixing work and I was just another set of ears to assist).  I personally think he did a fine job, and he ended up mixing, mastering, and sometimes playing guitar on my next 4 albums. I’ll also take this moment to admit this album was obviously inspired by Daniel Johnston, including the title which resonated with me to the point I felt I had to use it as it described this collection of songs perfectly.  Anyway, on to the songs…

“Embracing My Insanity” A short intro piece I wrote and recorded from start to finish in just a few hours. Just a song about how everyone is a little bit crazy sometimes.  I remember once seeing a guy on Facebook who filmed himself eating a bowl of cereal while listening to this song.  Don’t ask me why.

“The Ballad of Lazybones” This was a re-working of a poem I wrote several years previously.  It’s about being depressed and questioning the universe’s existence.  Lazybones was a nickname my Mom called me sometimes since I spent a lot of time sleeping in late (I worked swing shifts at work! All 3 shifts all the time! I was constantly tired). Also has a reference to my old band Closet Monster.

“You Will Forget Me” Just a sappy song about depression. I like how Alex has the vocals start quietly in the right channel and then build to a stereo mix.  He said it was because of the opening lyric “…hiding in my hole”, as if the singer of the song was literally hiding in a hole, conveyed by starting the vocals quietly and “in a hole” in the right channel only.  This song slightly broke my rule of no programming music by using a loop pedal. I still played all the parts by hand, they just loop on top of each other using the pedal. I also remember Jake Xingu covered this track and it was really good, but sadly the last time I asked him he has lost his copy of it. =(

“Hotel Room” Literally recorded entirely in a hotel room.  I was feeling down and needed some solitude from everyone for a day, so I checked into a local cheap hotel and brought along my 8-track, keyboard, and a microphone. Wrote and recorded the piano part almost instantly, after only 2 or 3 minutes of messing around on the keyboard with headphones on. It’s like the melody just beamed into my head without me having to think or write it hardly at all. I think I only did 2 takes of it and the 2nd one was perfect and is what you hear on this recording. Then I recorded the vocals in the bathroom, also writing the lyrics just a few minutes before recording them, they came very easy.  I really have had a few ant farms in my life, and I realized the third time that all you really do is watch them dig tunnels and eat until they die. It seemed so futile and almost cruel to get a pet ant farm, because all you do is watch them die.  Interesting tidbit though, when an ant in an ant farm dies, the other ants will carry his body to a specific place they keep all their dead, in a pile as far away from them as they can get inside the container. You then have to pull out the dead ones with tweezers so they don’t rot as well.  Anyways that’s Hotel Room.

“It Just Gets Worse” Not much to say. Short track, I believe it was the second track recorded for this album (The first being The Ballad of Lazybones).  Probably my least favorite on this album. Whatever.

“Best Friend” This song, along with Hey Sid, and The History and Death of most directly is about the breakup.  I cringe my head off at this song now, which is a shame because it’s one of my favorite compositions I’ve ever written. Lots of changes and interesting resolves. Plus, I used a toy accordion on it. The drums also broke my no programming rule, these drums were programmed because I couldn’t get it to work right playing the beat live with my fingers on the drum pads. Sometimes you have to compromise ideas for the greater good of the album.

“Hey Sid” This was where I abandoned the idea of doing a keyboards and drum machine only EP.  Don’t really remember why, but more than likely I was probably just playing guitar, came up with these chords and melody and ended up recording it and writing about the breakup some more since it occupied my mind pretty hard during the first month or two afterwards.  So I said fuck it and decided Songs of Pain was going to be 10 tracks, the first half the keyboards & drum machine tracks, the second half folky guitar songs. Hey Sid is the only electric guitar song on this album with drums though. The rest are all acoustic with no drums, so in my mind this song acts as a segway between the keyboard portion of the album and the acoustic guitar portion. Personally, I prefer the version that ended up on my self-titled album Dables with the full band.  

“Feeling Close to Throwing Up” An older Dables song, written in 2008 and re-worked into this version.  I always wanted to re-record this song since the original in 08 was sloppy and badly recorded onto cassette tape. This version has slightly different lyrics and a completely different ending then the original. Just a song that I felt kept with the theme of “songs of pain”.

“The History and Death of” The cornerstone of the lyrical themes on Songs of Pain.  This song was me putting it all out there, and just telling my version of the story. I’m sure her version of events is probably different.  Who knows? Definitely inspired by Daniel Johnston. I figured he wrote about things directly from his life (albeit slightly exaggerated) in a plain and straight-forward manor and I wanted to do the same thing.  Just lay it out flat, don’t try to be metaphorical or overly lyrical.  And it ended up being over 8 minutes long.  Long-winded? Sure, but I’m mostly proud of this song even though it’s a little cringy for me now.  This was the only track that Alex didn’t mix. Mostly because I did my own mix of it at home, because the song was so personal, and I liked how it turned out and didn’t feel it was necessary to do a different mix of it.

“You Will Find The Love You Seek” I wanted to end the album on an upbeat and hopeful note.  After 9 songs full of depression, sorrow, drama, and heartache I thought it necessary to write about how I hope everyone, myself included, will find the love they seek, no matter what the obstacle, some type of love will always find them…..annnnnnd yet another song inspired by Daniel Johnston. Duh.

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Recorded during Nov & Dec 2010 in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

Released on January 5, 2011 All music and lyrics written, performed, and recorded by David Walker. All tracks mixed and mastered by Alex Murray. Slackerpop Records 2011 1. Embracing My Insanity 2. The Ballad of Lazybones 3. You Will Forget Me 4. Hotel Room 5. It Just Gets Worse 6. Best Friend 7. Hey Sid 8. Feeling Close to Throwing Up 9. The History and Death of 10. You Will Find The Love You Seek

Download album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-pain

[dablesretrospective]

2010 - Dables - Dables Plays Daniel Johnston

Wow, it’s been 4 years since I wrote my last entry on the history of Dables albums. I’m reaching new levels of lazy slackerdom...  This is my tribute to one of my favorite songwriters, Daniel Johnston. Of who’s artwork (the “Hi How Are You frog”) is forever tattooed on my arm.  This album was recorded roughly around the same time as that one, and completed just a few months after the release of Grandparents Forever. It was recorded between August and October 2010, and officially released on Oct 30,2010.  Recorded the entire thing by myself, in my bedroom at my parent’s house in Fountain Inn, SC. Mostly while they weren’t home too.  For this one, I’ll just repost what I wrote in the liner notes for this album, if you ever managed to get your hands on a hard copy, I made at least 80 or so of them, maybe more over the years. The following was written by hand inside the liner notes booklet of the CD. The “guy” I was addressing was actually Michael Keller of Satan in Bondage as he was the first one to receive a finished copy of this album. I had hand-drawn the cover art, complete with full liner notes and various doodles, and gave it to him with no intention of it being the final artwork. After he told me how much he liked the entire hand-drawn package, he convinced me to just go ahead and use it for the final version.

           What’s up guy?  They say the way to beat writer’s block is to write through it, even if it sucks.  So when I hit the “wall”, I played through it.  I got bored, depressed, stoned, and out of ideas until I realized there are tons of great Daniel Johnston songs that lots of people think suck, so I tried to re-do them in my own sort of way.  This album was mainly recorded during a manic week or listening to nothing but Johnston albums, I played the ones I liked and didn’t mix anything for over a month. Well, there was supposed to be more songs but I lost them during a power outage in a storm.  OK I’m out of stuff to say. Hope you like this CD man! Long live the Johnston!                                      -David Walker 10-28-2010

A few more tidbits to add, the liner notes also said “I’ll give you a dollar if you can figure out what the sample in the beginning of Casper is!”. It’s from O Brother Where Art Thou. No more dollars for a correct guess, haha. I remember Lousy Weekend was the first one I recorded for this album and I think Funeral Home was the last one.  Another big impetus that made me want to record this album was most of my friends (besides Keller) pretty much hated Daniel Johnston due to how lo-fi and sloppy most of his music is.  This also existed as an attempt to get some of my friends to realize he’s a genius songwriter, thinking if I recorded a better fidelity/quality version of his stuff, with emphasis on his great melodies and lyrics, that I could help convince some of those people that he doesn’t suck.  In the end, I don’t think it worked too well as I think most of those same people, still think he pretty much sucks lol. One time someone came up to me at a show and told me they loved this album and that they found it in a public library. As in it is an item in the CD section that you can check out from the library. I assume it was one of my hand-made copies that somehow made it’s way to being donated to a library. No clue on earth who did that or how it happened, I’ve asked around about it a few times and everyone I have asked said they know nothing about this. Very odd, but also pretty cool I guess. I forget where the library was, but somewhere in Greenville probably, possibly Easley.  

In 2011 and again in 2013 I played a show billed as “Dables Plays Daniel Johnston”. It was a solo acoustic guitar show, played AS Daniel Johnston. I’ll repost the original description I used for the flyer here:

In the vein of Beatlemania, Dables Plays Daniel Johnston is a Daniel Johnston tribute performed completely in the character of Johnston, culled from his 80's-early 90's famously awkward and weird acoustic guitar shows. Clean shaved, skinny, shaggy hair, wearing his own t-shirt, and promoting himself by full name constantly, Johnston was known for being extremely nervous on stage and talking awkwardly about his religious beliefs, or apologizing profusely after messing up lyrics to his songs, sometimes ending them early out of frustration. He would play the guitar a little too hard sometimes, or miss notes while singing and occasionally flub a lyric or two, and every now and then really appear that his about to have a nervous breakdown right before your eyes, normally after he thinks he played "badly" in his mind. He often bows after songs, and says the titles and usually the year or album they are from and always kept his sets very short, 5-6 songs tops. David Walker of the Greenville, SC grunge/folk/stoner rock act Dables, tries to recreate all of this to maintain the awkward, emotional, personal, sometimes poignant and sometimes funny and overall entertaining performances of Daniel Johnston.

Overall both shows went really well, both being well-attended and people seemed to enjoy it. A few people at the first one, I heard afterwards had no idea who Johnston was and thought I was really like how I was acting on stage, all weird and awkward, (Well, I am like that BUT…) and they had no idea I was doing a character. Hilarious! I remember at the second one some guy booed me while on stage and yelled out “mental illness isn’t funny! You suck!” in a quiet yet loud enough for me to hear voice. It was not my intention to make fun of Daniel Johnston, I thought that people could tell how much I admire and love the man due to my commitment and knowledge of his music, but there must’ve been 1 or 2 who didn’t get it.  It’s supposed to be funny and a little uncomfortable. That’s how the real classic Johnston shows were. I was attempting to re-create that, so people could see what I think it would be like to attend a Johnston show in the 80s or early 90s. Well, that wraps up just about everything I can think of to say about the “Johnston era” of Dables.

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Released October 8, 2010                         All music performed and recorded by David Walker. All songs and lyrics written by Daniel Johnston. Slackerpop Records 2010

1. I Live My Broken Dreams 2. Grievances 3. Casper The Friendly Ghost 4. Lousy Weekend 5. Tell Me Now 6. Devil Town 7. Go 8. Get Yourself Together 9. Running Water 10. Never Relaxed 11. I’ll Do Anything But Breakdance For Ya, Darling 12. Psycho Nightmare 13. Sorry Entertainer 14. True Love Will Find You in The End 15. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down on Your Grievances 16. Funeral Home

Download this album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/dables-plays-daniel-johnston

[dablesretrospective]

2010 - DAN - Grandparents Forever

For my next album we have my band DAN’s second album titled “Grandparents Forever” that was released April 2010.

Basically this was just a continuation of our first album Magic Mountain, although we moved away from a punk sound, going more for a psychedelic sound and trying harder to write funnier songs. The whole idea was to write short songs, usually only with one or two riffs, that just get straight to the point and hopefully would both rock and be funny. We were basically just trying to entertain ourselves. Not really a whole lot else to say about this album. “Livin’ in The Basement” is probably my favorite DAN song, and it’s about how Sid and Clayton lived in Sid’s parent’s house basement, where we recorded about 95% of this album (the rest was recorded in my bedroom at my house). 

“Bubblegum and Kicking Ass” is another one of my favorites and is basically just a They Live reference.

“Cody’s Moving Back to Town” features a voicemail my friend Cody Blackwell left me informing me that he was moving back to Fountain Inn after living in Savannah, GA for the past 2 and half years. I recorded the entire song by myself. I was stoked that he was moving back and shortly after he came back, we formed the current lineup of Dables.

“John Lennon’s Uncircumcised Penis” was inspired by the cover of John Lennon’s Two Virgins album.  It is also the most played & downloaded song on bandcamp and it brings my site a lot of traffic. People looking for pictures of John Lennon’s dick I guess. Not surprisingly the second most played/downloaded song is “Super Anal Party”. Go figure.

Immediately after finishing this one, we started working on another album that was going to be called Honey Berry Surprise (named after a blunt wrap) but it never got finished. We played two shows as DAN. One house show that went ok, and one show at The Hangar in Greenville that was awful.  My guitar’s input broke on the first song and I had to borrow someone else’s and the sound was horrible and there were maybe 10 people there. That’s about all there is to say about Grandparents Forever. I hope you listen to it and laugh as much as we did while recording it.

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Part 3 of "The Basement Trilogy" Recorded from Sept 2009 - Feb 2010                                                                

Released April 2, 2010                        All music written and performed by DAN All tracks recorded and mixed by David Walker Slackerpop Records 2010

David Walker-guitar, vocals, drum machine Clayton Marks-bass, vocals Sid Id-lead vocals, keyboards

Our buddies who helped: Tucker-background vocals on "Lazy and Proud" & "Some More Stupid Shit" Shelby-background vocals on "I Threw Up Off The Porch" & farts on "Disco Amoeba" Cody-voicemail on "Cody's Moving Back to Town" Brittany-background vocals on "Super Anal Party"

1.Livin’ in The Basement 2.Meditations by DAN 3.Bangin’ My Head on The Mic 4.Hacky Sack With Kittens 5.Lazy and Proud 6.Applegrassfart 7.Oreo Brownie 8.God Knows Why 9.I Threw Up Off The Porch 10.10 11.Those Fuckers Lied About The Weed 12.Bubblegum and Kicking Ass 13.Disco Amoeba 14.Cody’s Moving Back to Town 15.I Drank a Beer 16.Get Off Yer Phone 17.Nancy Botwin 18.Some More Stupid Shit 19.John Lennon’s Uncircumcised Penis 20.Concerto in D Minor ala Sid 21.Vaseline Groove 22.Super Anal Party 23.Obama is Black 24.We Don’t Need No Drummer 25.Pure Fucking Agony

Download this album for free at:

https://danband.bandcamp.com/album/grandparents-forever

[dablesretrospective]

2010 - Dables - Pretty Ugly

Time to get back to what I created this tumblr for, which was blogging liner notes for the CDs I have released as Dables in order. This is Pretty Ugly, my 4th album and definitely the first Dables album most people heard because shortly after it came out is when I started performing regularly. During this era, 2009-2010, I was still performing solo, but instead of just playing improvised noise or electronic music, I started playing songs more songs from my albums using a set up similar to Ween or Big Black. I played electric guitar and sang while my Tascam Portastudio was plugged straight into the PA, playing the pre-recorded bass and drum machine parts. I played my first “electric” show this way in December 2009 in Fountain Inn, SC at a house party with Coma Cinema and it went over extremely well. I played mostly songs from the “14 Songs” album, and a few from this disc.

Released on February 3 2010, this album was conceived as a concept album to mix pretty pop songs with ugly noise songs. The idea was to go back and forth, first track being a pretty pop song, the next being an experimental or weird/off-putting/ugly noise song. The cover illustrates this concept with combining the beauty of a sunflower, placed in an ugly toilet. That is also actually my real toilet, from my parent’s house, with plastic flowers inside of it. I took the picture and sent it to my friend Victoria Ferrer, who runs The Black Lodge, a subculture get together at various local clubs. She edited it for me, writing the text on it and coloring the background around the toilet black, and turning the flowers red instead of yellow, and I think she did an absolutely fabulous job and I love her for it. My friend/occasional-partner-in-crime with Slacker Pop Records Micheal Keller, of the band Satan in Bondage, helped me put together the inner artwork including the lyrics, and he paid to help me print and make over 50 physical copies, and he helped distribute it so I also owe a huge thanks to him. Listening back to this album reminds me of what was going on in my life at the time. I was working at a Kangaroo Express gas station, and came in one day to find out my store manager and good friend Russell Folk had committed suicide the night before. I was extremely shocked and upset by this and I ended up walking out on my shift, and quitting the job on the spot. It was my first day back from a two week vacation and I couldn’t handle the responsibility of having to be the one to tell customers who came into the store who were asking me, “Where’s Russell?" all day so after about an hour of my shift, I just up and left. I went home and wrote "Song For Russell”, which didn’t make it onto this disc but ended up on a future one called “Stuff Volume 2”. I spent the next two weeks frantically recording songs to help escape from the depression caused by the death of such a close friend. I had known Russell for over 2 years, and saw him about 5 times a week and we had become very close. This disc is most definitely dedicated to his memory, and I recorded it as therapy to help cope with my first experience of death. Besides my great-grandmother, who I wasn’t very close to, Russell was the first person I knew well to die. I still miss him very much, and this disc will always remind me of him. Anyways, on to the songs themselves.

‘Boredumb’ is one of the most popular Dables songs. It has been performed at every single show since that first electric show December 2009. Funny that this one is such a fan favorite because it took me less than hour to write and record it to completion. However this song is sort of a loose rip-off musically of Flies on My Dick by Ween. It has minimal guitar, slow, plodding drum machine, monotone vocals, and quirky lead guitar breakdown just like that song does. Although I like to think I did my own thing with that formula and I wouldn’t say this song an out-right rip-off, just inspired by the formula of Ween.

'Sober and Bored’ was the first track recorded for this album and the title and music itself was inspired by The Boredoms.

'Hang Around’ came out extra poppy because The Beatles remasters had just came out and I was listening to them non-stop and wanted to do a song with “doo-wahs” vocals on it. Besides a short, sloppy, semi-solo on the song “Who Are You?” from Slacker Pop, this track was the first “real” guitar solo I ever put on a song and I’m still pretty proud of it and I think I nailed it on the second take. Prior to this, I was pretty opposed to doing guitar solos.  Never performed an electric version of this song live before, but I’ve played it at acoustic shows several times.

'Live Forever’ was my attempt to emulate The Melvins, although it sounds little like them. The odd lyric “I want to lick your knees” was inspired by a porno I saw where a girl was blowing a guy and said “I wanna lick your knees” and proceeded to lick his kneecaps for a few minutes. I thought that was odd and hilarious so I put it in this song. The lyric “I want to see the end cause you know it will start again” means that if a person were to live forever, they would witness the collapse of civilizations and empires, only to see them get rebuilt and start again.

Along with a fellow local band Hollow Body, 'An Exercise in Isolation’ as well as portions of 'Boredumb’ was later put on the soundtrack to local independent film, “WTF?”, a horror/comedy film made by Firefly Ink Productions about a group of people on a road trip who’s car breaks down and the person who picks them up off the side of the road who proceeds to slaughter them. Clips of the movie are available on youtube.

'This is Nothing’ was a bit of a jab at the poor work ethics of my fellow bandmates in my side-project DAN, about how they wanted to play shows really badly, but weren’t dedicated enough to practice regularly. Needless to say, DAN broke up about 6 months after Pretty Ugly came out after only playing 3 shows together, all but 1 were a disaster. Although we eventually made up and became friends again, after another year or two we fell back into the same drama and I haven’t spoken to either of them in about 7 years now and don’t plan on it either...but if either of them happen to read this, I have no hard feelings toward Sid and Clayton (there’s been too much drama and we can’t get along with each other anymore but I’m not mad at either of them) and I think the music we made together in DAN was some of the most creative and fun songs I’ve ever been a part of, and I’m proud of the recordings we made together and I wish them luck with their recent project, People of Mars.

'Loop 3’ is the third installment of tracks I create using my Boss Loop Station. The first one was on '14 Songs’, and the second was on 'Stuff Volume 1’. This is probably my least favorite and is definitely the laziest one and in hindsight should’ve been left off this album entirely. Loop 4 appears on the most recent self-titled album.

“She Don’t Dig Me” was the last song recorded for this album. This song was lyrics written probably 2 years prior that I never put music to. I lifted the vocal melody of this song from Get Me by Dinosaur Jr, although in the end it turned out  Listening back to it, the audio quality on this track is embarrassing, and I remember being very frustrated with mixing it, and eventually giving up and just releasing it as-is, with several glaring technical mistakes, that hopefully nobody can notice but me.

'108’ was an older recording, recorded shortly after finished 14 Songs, but was saved for this release. At 9 minutes and 32 seconds it is the longest track I have ever recorded.

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one pretty song, one ugly song. back and forth. that is the concept of Pretty Ugly. love and cringe as much as you can.                                                            

Released February 1, 2010                         All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker Track 15 is a Daniel Johnston cover

1.Pretty Ugly 2.Boredumb 3.Did You See? 4.Sober and Bored 5.Hang Around 6.Live Forever 7.An Exercise in Isolation 8.An Exercise in Stupidity 9.This is Nothing 10.Loop 3 11.Mind’s Gone Blank 12.An Exercise in Laziness 13.Afterglow 14.She Don’t Dig Me 15.True Love Will Find You in The End 16.108

Download this album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-ugly

[dablesretrospective]

2009 - DAN - Magic Mountain

The next release I put out on Slackerpop Records was in the early Fall of 2009: my new lo-fi psychedelic punk band DAN’s first album “Magic Mountain”.

The impetus for this was I had recently got kicked out of my cousin’s house after a major argument and asked to never come back. So I did the logical thing: moved back in with my parents out in Fountain Inn which sucked. Living with my parents pretty much killed my ability to record anything because they wouldn’t put up with the loudness for too long, so I started spending a lot of time at my buddy Sid’s house, hanging out in the basement of his parent’s house, where we could be loud most of the time so I started jamming with him and his roommate Clayton. They were two unemployed stoners, living rent free, so it was perfect for me to come over pretty much anytime I wanted and smoke up and play music. “The Basement” was a stinky, cat-infested, no air conditioning, hippie dungeon. At least 50 different people came through that place and got fucked up and jammed with us during the 2 years that they lived there in whence we recorded 3 full DAN albums. The original idea was that each song should be short, maybe one or two riffs, and be over before the listener can realize that we suck. DAN was our excuse to get high or drunk as hell and try to make each other laugh. The quality of the recordings wasn’t so important as the desire to just play music and joke around trumped it. So from July-Aug 2009 we had cranked out 25 tracks of hippie punk madness. The most amazing one to me is the last one “Television Rots The Mind Yet Again”, in which all we did was hold a mic up to the tv and flipped the channels and the result was amazing. The cover art is from a real shampoo magazine ad I saw online. It is meant as a parody of sexist bands who put naked women on their album covers, as a shallow way to try to sell more copies. We thought what's more sexist, shallow, and stupid than putting JUST the boobs on the cover? Don't show her face, or anything else at all, just the tits...that way, it's guaranteed to sell! When we released the album on myspace in Fall 2009, the following is what we wrote for DAN’s biography.

DAN is three stoned guys armed with a Tascam 8 track, a drum machine, and a few guitars and microphones who strive for the most obnoxious sound they could possibly make. It's dirty punk rock with all the fat cut out. If you don't get it, then go fuck yourself. Let me clear some shit up right now, DAN is not anyone in the band's name. We are named after John Goodman's greatest role of all-time, Dan Connors from Rosanne.

It all started mid 2009 when a local freaky musician known as Dables got together with the punk/funk/lo-fi psychedelia weirdness of Albino and over many bong hits and beer cans, potato chips, and camaraderie, the three guys: David Walker, Sid Id, and Clayton Marx decided to form a new band.

This brings us to the two DAN mission statements:

1.) We aims to piss you off. We want you howling at the sky in anger and turmoil after listening to DAN. We want to upset the rest of your day with horribly catchy racket that you can't get out of your head no matter how hard you try. We want your ears to bleed and we play LOUD AS FUCK.

2.) We aims to write whatever the hell we want. If we want our songs to be 6 seconds long, then by god we will write a 6 second song about titfucking. We heed to no religion, sex, orientation, race, or culture. We hate them all and we think those who don't laugh at themselves sometimes are assholes! We will never be censored for any reason, despite those who may think so. They can suck it! We will write whatever kind of genre we will feel like, we will fart in microphones and call it music if we see the need to do so, which is a good idea and we should put fart songs on the third album.

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Released September 5, 2009

Part 1 of "The Basement Trilogy" Recorded in Simpsonville, SC in Sid's Basement in the Summer of 2009         All music written and performed by DAN All tracks recorded and mixed by David Walker

David Walker - guitar, vocals, drum machine Clayton Marks - bass, vocals Sid Id - lead vocals, keyboards Our buddies who helped on “Magic Mountain”: Jeremy-we used his expensive 7 string guitar on Tracks 7 & 8 Adam, Zach, Justin, Shelby-made vocal noise on Track 16 Keller-inspiration for the bands featured in Track 23 T - marijuana supply for entire album

1.Quantity Over Quality 2.Waffle House 3.God, Jews, and You 4.Adam Sandler is A Punk Bitch 5.All We Did Was Cry 6.The Duke of Huffing Paint 7.Soda Came Out My Nose 8.I Love God 9.Gay Balls 10.Track 10 (This is) 11.All My Heroes Overdosed on Drugs 12.The Naked Ugly Truth 13.Pittsburgh Massacre 14.Token Reggae Song 15.Puck Feter Frampton 16.Zach’s a Bitch 17.You Put Me on The Spot 18.Never Goin’ Outside Again 19.Playing With A Bag of Weed in My Pocket 20.Les Go Get Hi 21.Stuff and Things About Items 22.Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide 23.The Following Bands Suck 24.Tree Squirrel 25.Television Rots The Mind Yet Again

Music videos for this album can be found at: Dables - YouTube

Download this album for free at:https://danband.bandcamp.com/album/magic-mountain

[dablesretrospective]

2009 - Dables - Stuff Volume 1

This album is a compilation of leftover songs and recordings made during the 14 Songs sessions that I thought didn’t fit well on that particular disc and is the last thing I recorded when living in Greenville with my cousin Kenny. It starts with “The Results of Boredom” split into 2 parts. This was the last thing recorded during these sessions and was really just a musical experiment done out of boredom, hence the title (which I got from a poem I wrote when I was a teenager is kind of a summary of how Dables started in general: the results of being bored) and me playing with the loop pedal and an attempt to layer as many dissonant guitar parts as I could.  Only part 1 is an actual “song”, written rather hastily with lyrics literally describing my day (woke up, ate some cereal, smoked a bowl, and wrote the song) and a few stolen lines from Butthole Surfers songs. It goes straight into part 2 which is pretty self-indulgent noise.

“Everything Is” was an old recording of a Neutral Milk Hotel song. “Whalesong” was supposed to be part of a split EP I was doing with my friends Albino, but I could never come up with a vocal melody for it so it ended up on this disc with no vocals. “Zero Amounts of Shit” is an older Dables song, and I tried to do an electric version of it that came out pretty shitty but I put it on this cd anyways. “Loop 2” is a guitar loop, the second in on ongoing set of loops that I create, so far there have been 4. “Happy Go Lucky Me” was recorded in two takes just as a warm-up, and I wasn’t going to release it but I liked the solo at the end so I put it on this cd. It’s a old 1950’s song that I heard in the John Waters movie Pecker and as soon as I heard it, I knew I had to learn how to play it. “Jam With Kenny” is exactly that, me and my roommate Kenny were just fucking around late one night, drinking and recording silly shit and this one of the 2 or 3 songs we did that night and essentially the only listenable one. Also it was one of the 5 or 6 songs, along with a few from 14 Songs, that were recorded before the robbery that I luckily had backed up on my laptop so I felt it was necessary to put it out since not many tracks recorded before the robbery survived. Tracks 9-11 were done in a single evening with my friends Albino whom in the next few months I formed a band with called DAN. Those tracks were the first time we ever recorded music together and are songs that they wrote, except for a Butthole Surfers song that I engineered and played drum machine on. “Thighfatslap Jamboree” was a free form jam that we were wayyyy too stoned during but I thought it was hilarious, if barely listenable, so I tacked it on this disc too, mainly just to make Sid, Clayton, and Keller laugh.  This definitely isn’t my favorite Dables album, and even though it’s just leftover recordings and partly unfinished jams, it is what it is, and hopefully someone out there will at least find it humorous.

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Released June 15, 2009

Slackerpop Records 2009

All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker  Track #3 written by Neutral Milk Hotel Track #7 written by Paul Evans Track #9 written by Butthole Surfers Tracks #9-11 are by Albino: Sid-vocals and other stuff Clayton-guitar, backing vocals Keller-bass, backing vocals Dables-drum machine, guitar, backing vocals, production 1.The Results of Boredom, Part 1 2.The Results of Boredom, Part 2 3.Everything Is 4.Whalesong 5.Zero Amounts of Shit (demo) 6.Loop 2 7.Happy Go Lucky Me 8.Jam With Kenny 9.The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave 10.Uhhh 11.Thighfat Slap Jamboree

Download this album for free at:

https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/stuff-volume-1

[dablesretrospective]

2009 - Dables - 14 Songs

Put out this album in June 2009. About 5 months had passed since Slacker Pop came out and I had finally managed to buy new guitars and a new digital Tascam Portastudio, the one I still use today, this time the fancy one with a million Gigabytes hard drive and a built-in cd-burner and the day I got it, I started recording.  This album was supposed to be called ‘The 108 Conspiracy’, and when I had completed a bunch of songs for it, I gave a demo just called 14 Songs to my friend Alex with this hand-drawn cover, and he said I should just put it out and call it that, so I did. The original 108 Conspiracy was pretty much this album, with a few more songs, the song '108’ which ended up on my next disc, Pretty Ugly, and a few more that never really went anywhere. I just figured, too many people will be asking me what the hell does the 108 conspiracy mean, so I thought fuck that, I’ll just call it 14 Songs because I’m lazy. All in all, it came out pretty good and this album is all over the place.

It starts off with 'All The Retards Are Gettin’ Married’, a song I wrote when I worked third shift at the gas station after dealing with an obnoxious and drunk redneck couple who had just got married, and were out drunk driving at 2 in the morning, the song isn’t really about them at all, they just inspired the title and theme of the lyrics.  It’s a loud, harsh, psychedelic song which I still play live with my current band and is one of my personal favorites. After that is 'Armageddon Bible Study’ which was a track I discovered on my computer that had been saved as a backup file that I had recorded from before the robbery, that featured my cousin Kenny and Alex Murray doing whipits and saying weird-ass shit into the microphone. I sampled that over an instrumental keyboard jam and thought it was pretty good even though the ending kind of rips off A Nightmare on Elm Street’s theme song (not intentionally though). Next is 'Fluffy Bunnies’ which many people have told me is their all time favorite Dables song, and I think is the 1st song I recorded for this album.  'Eat Acid and Listen to The Boredoms’ was just another instrumental guitar riff driven song that has nothing to do with it’s title, I just thought it was a funny title. 'Psychedelic Mess’, 'I Have Nothing Important to Say’, 'My Brain Itches’ and 'The Generic Song’ were all really old songs that I just re-recorded, trying to get them to sound better. 'Mountain Dew’ was a lot of fun to record, a really great, old traditional song that’s been performed by tons of artists throughout the years. 'Ughhh…’ was kind of a last-minute addition, and was actually from my old cassette tapes, recorded in probably late 2007 or so, just a bunch of weird vocal noise because I was listening to too much Mike Patton at the time.  All in all, I feel this is a pretty solid album, and I’m still pretty proud of it. In 2010, they even played a radio-friendly version of 'All The Retards’ on 93.3 The Planet’s Upstate Unsigned show, and Twisted Todd really got a kick out of the title while he struggled over how to pronounce Dables which he eventually got right!! Thankfully I have that recording on a tape somewhere.

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Released June 1, 2009

Slackerpop Records 2009

Recorded in early to mid 2009 at Closet Monster Studios in Greenville, SC.                     All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker Track 2 vocal noise by Alex Murray and Kenny Walker Track 14 is a Syd Barrett cover song

1. All The Retards Are Gettin’ Married 2. Armageddon Bible Study 3. Fluffy Bunnies 4. Eat Acid and Listen to The Boredoms 5. Psychedelic Mess 6. Love Will Rise Above 7. Mountain Dew 8. Loop 9. The Blazin’ Sun 10. I Have Nothing Important To Say 11. My Brain Itches 12. Ughhh… 13. The Generic Song 14. Effervescing Elephant

Download this album for free at: https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/14-songs

[dablesretrospective]

2008 - Dables - Slacker Pop

This album should of never existed. I never planned for it to.   Towards the end of Closet Monster, in the Fall of 2008, I came home from work one day to my trailer that my cousin Kenny and I lived in off of White Horse Road in Greenville, and discovered that we had been robbed. They stole quite a lot of stuff from us.  They got pretty much every single piece of musical equipment I owned as well as lot of other stuff.  The only thing they left was my acoustic guitar (THANK GOD, because it was my first that was a gift from my Mom, and the one I learned how to play on), my drum machine, one effects pedal, and the cassette deck Tascam Portastudio which they didn’t steal because they thought it was just a tape player or something probably.  That was all that was left.  They got 3 guitars, my new Tascam 8 Track recorder, which had about 20 or so songs on it that are all gone now that I had only owned about 2 months, two amplifiers, my PS2, all the games, and tons of my roommate’s stuff. Not only were we robbed, but they TRASHED our place too. They took a tub of butter out of our fridge and spread it throughout the house for some reason.  The couches were smeared with butter. The walls, the floors, the carpet, my bed…Every single drawer was pulled out and its contents scattered. They tipped over our bookshelves and dvd cases and basically ran amuk throughout our house. We both worked third shift at the time, and we figured it was someone who lived nearby that noticed both our cars are gone 5 nights a week, from 11 PM-7AM, so we never recovered any of our stuff.

They didn’t get my laptop though because my room was so messy and it was buried under a pile of dirty clothes. THAT is the reason that Slacker Pop exists. Although I had been recording songs as Dables since 2005, I hadn’t “officially” released anything beyond a few random demos and mix cd’s that I gave out to friends, but nothing that I was comfortable with giving out to the general public just yet. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t recording and writing like a madman still, trying to make something worthwhile that people outside of my personal group of friends would enjoy.  I was working on what would’ve been the first official Dables release, “Pretending To Be Asleep” as well as “Powerglove Bitchslap”, and I had made considerable progress but wasn’t quite finished when I had been robbed, thus bringing any music production or playing shows to a halt.  I sulked for a while and even considered just letting Dables end because I had been at it for 3 years and had made pretty much no real progress as a solo artist, especially since I no longer had any musical instruments and I was too poor to afford new ones.

But then I figured, since I still have my laptop, I have a ton of songs on it (some not quite finished or just demos) already done, the songs that would’ve composed Pretending To Be Asleep as well as several other albums, and I thought, well I could just make a compilation of sorts and put that out as Dables first album! So that’s what Slacker Pop is.  It is the songs that survived before the robbery, and it was finished and put online as my first official Dables CD, released on Christmas Day and was the third official release on Slackerpop Records, which at the time was still named EES Records (Everything Else Sucks), but obviously this album became the inspiration for the name change of the label that wouldn’t come for another year or two.

The title came to me when I was browsing through a local band from Charleston, Ko’s myspace. The band is now called Company, but they had under their ‘sounds like’ section: “strummy, jangly pop rock by lazy slackers”. Personally I don’t think that describes Company’s sound all that well but it made me realize that my music was essentially pop music by a slacker and for fellow slackers, hence a new genre that I dubbed Slacker Pop. A quick Google search showed there was no band or anything using the term and since it fit my sound so well, I decided to use it.  The cover of the album is a double joke that most people don’t get. Not only was it a stick figure drawing of me at the time, but it was supposed to resemble a lollipop. A slacker guy that looks like a lollipop. A slacker lolliPOP that looks like me and also describes the genre of the album.  I also made the cover just black on white because it used less ink to print out, so it was a little cheaper to make copies which I made roughly 100 of entirely by myself. Printed it at home, cut out the cover art with scissors so it would fit in a jewel case, and burned and labeled the CD-Rs one at a time. It took forever but it gave me merch to give away (I rarely tried to sell my hand made copies, I preferred to just give them away at shows and record stores or wherever for promotion).

I started saving my money, and thankfully since it was the end of the year a big tax return helped me to eventually buy all new guitars and recording equipment, and Dables got right back on track within a handful of months and in a weird way the robbery gave me the motivation to continue to pursue my music.

While I’m at it, I may as well answer the most commonly two asked questions about Dables. First off, it is pronounced “Day-bulls”. If it was different it would have two b’s in it like the actual word dabbles! Secondly, it is a portmanteau of the words “David’s Bullshit”…DAvids BULLShit…Get it? No? Ok…well in early 2005, for the very first time ever, I tried to record a few songs by myself using Sound Recorder, Free Wav Editor, and the truly crappy built-in microphone on my computer monitor. I had about 6 terrible, horribly basic, nonsensical “songs” that I burned on a CD-R. Not knowing what to call it, I just wrote “David’s Bullshit” on the CD with a sharpee. Gave a copy to maybe 3 or 4 friends just for a laugh. It wasn’t until my birthday on Nov 8 later that year (turned 19) that my then-girlfriend bought me my first cassette deck 4-Track Tascam Portastudio. Took me about a year to learn how to use it and by early 2007 I made my first demo called “I Want to Vomit on You” and I needed a name for the project so I thought it would be funny and oh-so-clever to combine the two words I wrote on the last CD-R I made, David’s Bullshit into one and spell it Dables. I made it official by then changing all my online usernames to Dables too lol. I remember really liking that it was a one word band name, both because I thought it could double as a stage-name for me and that it was a single word band name like a lot of my all-time favorite bands such as Ween, Primus, Devo, Gwar, Clutch, Tool, Nirvana…I loved that aspect of it so it stuck. I recorded an absolutely absurd amount of songs on that cassette tape 4-track and made so many demo albums but it wasn’t until Slacker Pop at the end of 2008 that I considered my music good enough for an official release. All the best stuff (and just as much god awful stuff too) from those cassette tapes made between 2005-2008 were eventually released to the public in 2018 as a 4 volume series called The Early Days. I’ll do a write up blog for those albums too eventually.

Either way I consider Slacker Pop the first official David’s Bullshit album...Or you can just call it Dables for short.

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Original mix released December 1, 2008 Remastered version released Oct 10, 2024

Recorded in two different home studios, one in Fountain Inn, SC and the other in Greenville, SC throughout 2007-2008.

All music written, performed, and recorded by David Walker. Tracks 10 features Alex Murray on guitar . Track 2 is originally by Ween.

Slackerpop Records© 2008

1.Welcome To The Record 2.Love Will Conquer All 3.Paint The Town Brown 4.Is it Cold Outside? 5.I’m Sleepy 6.Stardust Memories 7.Celebrity 8.Nightmare City 9.Everyone Loves God 10.Brain Vice 11.In My Dreams 12.Brown Eyed Angel 13.Yeah Ok 14.Nothing Should Ever Be A Big Deal 15.I Still Love You 16.Szandora 17.Half Off Jesus Face 18.You Must First Understand Pain 19.Growin' a Beard 20.Outro (Slacker Pop is Dead, Long Live Slacker Pop)

***UPDATE IN DECEMBER 2024*** This album was completely remastered and re-released in October 2024. The updated album art is shown below. I decided to remove 4 tracks that were on the original release and replace them with much better ones. "What You Think I've Become", "Nothin' But the House Rent", "Who Are You?", "Livin' in a Dream", and "Vodka Jam" have all been removed from the 2024 remaster of Slacker Pop. Livin' in a Dream & Vodka Jam can both be found on Free Emerald State Volume 1, so Google that if you want to hear those. What You Think I've Become was re-recorded with a full band in 2013 for the Deep Roots For Sale album. The other 2 tracks I have decided to remove entirely so unless you have an original copy of the old version of this album, then those tracks aren't available anywhere else. You aren't missing anything tho, trust me.

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE AT: https://dables.bandcamp.com/album/slacker-pop-2024-remaster-2

Below is the original artwork from 2008: