Wednesday, June 26, 2013

JACK PALANCE BAND - "Heaven" - Practice Tape - 1999

   Way back before the turn of the century, I lived in a tiny little house one block away from the Georgia state line. I spent many of my days listening to the the tinny, north Georgia Christian radio broadcasts (only because it sounded exactly like what I imagined an alien transmission might sound like) and writing half assed songs to record on my tape player. I decided one day that I wanted my half assed songs to sound about 2% better so I borrowed my friend Mike Pack's 4 track recorder. When he handed it over, there was a tape inside and he said something like "I don't know what that tape is, but you can do whatever you want with it." It turned out that the tape was a JACK PALANCE BAND practice, which means I just listened to the tape over and over rather than recording my songs....come to think of it, I never did record those songs on the 4 track at all.
   Most of the tape consists of parts of new songs, crude inside jokes and stuff that appeared later on their full length LP. None of it was anything too essential until I got to the end. Until this point, I had only heard JPB play their now-classic song "Heaven" live at punk shows with shitty PA's. Even though they didn't have a proper recording of it at that point, everyone in the room still sang along with the line "If I saw the God they told me about when I was a kid, I'd punch him in the face for letting his children bleed!" I was pretty ecstatic to finally have a copy of the song to play over and over in my room. For a long time, I preferred this version over the one on their LP. I like how the band sounds excited and stoked on the song, because they're getting it down for the first time. I like how the band sounds like they're putting everything they've got into what they're doing, even though they're just playing for themselves in (most likely) the dark, grimy basement of a now-defunct soup restaurant at 7th and Cherry in Chattanooga, TN.
   I know it's only one song, but I'm not posting the other stuff out of respect for the band. Trust me, this is the best thing on there. Plus, this is my happening and it freaks me out.

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EDIT: For some reason, your metadata will list the album artist as "Bill Evans" and I have no clue why that happened. Oh well.

3 comments:

A Glasgow said...

Hey Greg, no comment about this post, stumbled on this site via a post you made about Impractical Cockpit. Just wanted to say hello, long time no see...

Andy G

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Anonymous said...

A cool find! I would like to hear the whole tape! I remember that was the thing back then. Having.piles of tapes of songs recorded. But.never used. Shit I have piles of tapes of un used songs haha!