#dables

[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!