I really thought building this site would be a miserable endeavor. Exploring the detritus of The Previous? Our band failed after all. But did it?
A part of me screams “YES IT DID!!!!” GET OVER IT!!!”
And then I listen to the Previously Yours playlist embedded into this site, and I rate my work on the scale of all the other songwriters of my generation, and I feel pretty confident that I am one of them.
As unfulfilling as the journey may have been (for decades at a time) it has also been unencumbered by commercial influences (or aspirations) which may have made it a more accurate picture of its time. If corporate rock sucked as much as Kurt Cobain’s t-shirt said, then this Olympia/LA band did not suck. On the subjective level, this is of course for others to judge, should they get the opportunity, but we were never corporate and we still aren’t. Maybe we will be someday. I hope not but it could happen I guess.
When I was a kid this other kid (who’d beaten me up earlier in the year) sold me a bag of baseball cards for $5. They were precious at the time and have only become more so over the years Mostly from 1967 thru ’75. Willie Mays. Hank Aaron. Pete Rose. Nolan Ryan.. I often wonder what inspired this kid to make the sale. Guilt? Ignorance? Did it have anything to do with me or had he a different reason for unloading such rare treasures on a Saturday afternoon on the same Lincoln Elementary playground where he had punched and humiliated me. I didn’t know, and until writing this just now, I haven’t even ever wondered about the why of it.
My point in re-counting this memory is; the sensation of being handed a bag of rare treasures I sort of deserve and yet I don’t have to work that hard for, is how I feel working on this project. As the elder version of the kid who made most of this music (and all the mistakes), I know why he did it the way he did, as wrong headed as it was, and now there’s this document that tells the story that leads directly to me, where I am, as if I’ve been trailing gunpowder all these years and, having lit the fuse sometime in the mid-90’s…it’s finally catching up with me.
BOOM!