Appliances-SFB: More Than Enough

I'm trying to finish getting all those Appliances-SFB clips up on the YouTubes. I think, after this one, I have four more to go, and then I'll be done. Yay! Three out of the four that are left are covers of other people's songs, and I'm trying to get permission from the writers, although I don't know if it's necessary. There are an awful lot of videos on the YouTubes of people playing songs written by other people, and I seriously doubt that they all got permission from the authors.

Well, then. Here is "More Than Enough", written and sung by guitarist William Siebecker while Tom Laskin takes over on guitar. If you can understand the words, you'll find that, even though he wrote the song during the reign of The Greatest President In Our Nation's History™, Ronald Reagan (believe it or not, I succeeded in writing that without barfing - anyone who knows me is aware that I consider Ronald Wilson Reagan, a.k.a. Insane Anglo Warlord, to be among the worst presidents we've ever had and it is his policies which have culminated in the mess we're in right now), or possibly during the reign of King George I, the song is still relevant. That's kind of a sad statement, but it's true. Enjoy!

Appliances-SFB: Washed Up

Next up from the Appliances-SFB video archives is "Washed Up". For any music geeks reading this, in this song we get a little fancy-shmancy with a meter of 5/4 for most of the song and switch to a sort of swung 4/4 during the choruses. I always found this song to be a lot of fun to play.

Some of you readers have commented that I don't need to make excuses for the audio quality. Okay, I hear you. I guess I just wanted to make it clear that this is an old recording and I did the best that I could with the source material. In my opinion, the bass is mixed a bit too loud relative to the other instruments and the keyboard and guitar not loud enough, and this is not my doing. This is just the way the show was mixed when it was taped how ever many years ago it was. I wouldn't want anyone to think that because I was the bass player I made it louder than everything else. So. Enough of that. I won't mention it ever again. Happy?

Washed Up...

Appliances-SFB: Mr. Ugly

This one was probably one of our most popular songs. What more is there to say? Call me Mr. Ugly...

Appliances-SFB: The Pest

Hello, everybody. I haven't been posting much in recent weeks. I'm still alive, although sometimes I wonder about the definition of "alive". Recently, much of the energy I would normally have for blogging has been devoted to getting all the darned Appliances-SFB footage that recently came into my possession formatted and edited for posting on the YouTubes. I tried to do it myself for awhile and got very frustrated with the lack of information available on how to make it work, so my brother enlisted the aid of someone who knows more about this sort of thing than I. Nothing came of that, for reasons I don't fully understand, but it sounds as if real life got in the way, so I'm back to doing it myself. One reason I'm putting them on the YouTubes is that they allow larger files than Blogger, so the quality can also be higher. In addition, posting them only here on Enriched Geranium seems to be frustrating those few people who are looking for A-SFB videos on the internets and they are having trouble finding them. Due to my lack of knowledge on the subject, and possibly due to the shortcomings of the software I have found that doesn't require laying out any cash, it's a very slow process (truly slow, I have to let the computer run over night just to load one song before I can edit it and add titles and all that), but it's coming along. I have succeeded in getting almost all the clips that I have posted here up on the YouTubes (just search for "Appliances-SFB" if you're so inclined) and now I have a new one, too, just uploaded tonight. Hopefully, someday soon, I will be done with this project and get on to something else. I think I have eight more to go. It will be good to have them all up there for posterity, but it's a tedious undertaking.

So, here for your enjoyment is Appliances-SFB performing "The Pest".

Appliances-SFB: The Squire

Time for another installment from Appliances-SFB.
I bring to you "The Squire".

Appliances-SFB: Rockin' in the Free World

We didn't do very much material by other people, but here's our interpretation of Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World. If you weren't aware of the fact that Young wrote this song during George H. W. Bush's term in office, you might think it applied to George W. Bush's reign of terror. Not much difference between the two. Only such catch phrases as

"a thousand points of light" and "a kinder, gentler..." differentiate one Bush from the other. I suppose one might also argue that HW was mean and smart while W is mean and stupid.

Since it's the day after Thanksgiving as I post this, and people are prone to talk about those things for which they are thankful at this time of year, I'll just say that I'm thankful that soon (but not soon enough) we'll be seeing the backside of the worst and most criminal president this country has ever had. Here's to hoping he ends up doing prison time for his crimes.

On this song, William Siebecker takes over on vocals while Tom Laskin joins in on guitar. I particularly enjoy Siebecker's vocal improvisations on the last verse and chorus. I also find it a bit frustrating that, in all these videos, Siebecker's guitar is too low in the mix and it's hard to hear what he's doing much of the time. I always felt he was (and still is) a brilliant guitarist and ought to be mixed up front. Oh, well. It was a low budget undertaking (like, free) and I'm glad that this document of the group exists, so I shouldn't complain.

A great song by a great songwriter. I don't know if we did it justice, but here it is.

Appliances-SFB: Stop F#ckin' Around

Warning! Although most of our songs were obscenity free, this one is not. NSFW! At least, not if the F-word is a problem. No nudity or other potentially offensive images, though. (Sorry)

This song seemed to be a real hit with most of our audience. Maybe it was due to the fact that it was so sensitive. I don't know.

Appliances-SFB: #2

Here's the second installment of the Appliances-SFB which is called, coincidentally, "#2".

One thing that might not be readily apparent to people who are new to A-SFB is that, in my opinion, our music was full of humor. That's not to say that we considered ourselves to be a joke, but we also didn't take ourselves, or the genre, very seriously. At the time, there were an awful lot of bands out there who appeared to be quite serious about the whole "rock" or "punk rock" image. White pancake makeup with black eye-liner, or whatever. Occasionally we would "dress up" (I believe there are some photos of me in leopard spotted stretch pants floating around somewhere- $5 on the clearance rack in the women's department at some store or other - how could I resist?), but it was in the spirit of having a good time rather than trying to be particularly cool. Don't get me wrong, we liked to "Rock", but we were also aware of, and enjoyed, the silliness of it all. I, for one, never felt particularly cool; I always felt like an outsider even among the people for whom we played, but I enjoyed playing and the people who came to hear us were almost always nice people.

I tried to use iMovie's built-in graphic EQ to bring the bass down and accentuate the guitar and keyboards. I think it helped some, but there's only so much you can do to fix a stereo mix, particularly when you're just throwing a file into some software and clicking on stuff, hoping for the best. It seems to me that some video quality was lost in the process, and I don't know what the explanation is, aside from the fact that I've read that iMovie is a "lossy" video format, whatever that means. I'll have to look into that.

So, here's A-SFB playing #2. Once again, the performance is not perfect, and I only have myself to blame for that, but I always tried to play spontaneously. If I had written parts that I played the same way every time, or if I was a better musician, maybe I wouldn't have made so many mistakes, but at the time I felt that it was better if I didn't know exactly what I would do on any given song on any given day. There was a basic structure to a song and I tended to try to play around with that structure without ever having my part set in stone. That's still pretty much my approach to playing music, for better or worse.

Appliances-SFB: For Kids' Sake

As any regular readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware, I once played in a group called Appliances-SFB. For me, playing with A-SFB was an experience unlike any I've had before or since. Once drummer Meredith Young joined the group, we played with the same personnel for, I think, 16 years or so. When a group plays together for that long, it develops a level of familiarity which can resemble musical telepathy. Every show we played was an experiment in chaos. Sometimes we were able to control the chaos, sometimes the chaos controlled us, and in those cases we would follow it and see where it led. The end result was sometimes brilliant, sometimes not, but it was always an adventure and an awful lot of fun. Well, whatever, it's all ancient history now.

I recently acquired a copy, on DVD, of a video made in, I think, 1991 for the show Alternative Playground on Madison's public access station, WYOU. I thought it would be easy to edit it into individual songs and post it on the intertubes. Hah! I assumed it would be easy to find people who knew how to perform such feats of digital wizardry. Hah! I had no idea how difficult it would be to figure out how to transfer from DVD to any other video format. At first, I didn't even know it was necessary. In the absence of actual instruction, advice or information, through trial and error I have finally, I hope, succeeded in getting one song edited and encoded in a format where the audio and video will actually play in sync once uploaded. (From the previous sentence, you might surmise that other attempts were made which were less than successful. If so, you are correct.)

It's not the best performance, and I'm not entirely sure what the videographers were attempting to achieve, but here it is in all its imperfect glory. I hope to post other songs from this session as I get around to editing and encoding them for the intertubes. For the time being, this is, as far as I know, an Enriched Geranium exclusive. I hope you enjoy Appliances-SFB playing For Kids' Sake.

[Note: Appliances-SFB was a LOUD rock band. As such, it simply isn't possible to achieve anything remotely resembling the live experience unless you play this loud. Very loud. Ear-splittingly, chest-thumpingly, wall-rattlingly loud. I know, we're all older than we used to be (funny how that works) so don't hurt yourselves. Since this recording was mixed for television back in the days before home entertainment centers with surround sound and stuff were very common, if you listen to it through a good sound system, the bass will be louder than it was intended to be relative to the other instruments. Using the vocals as a reference point, I think the bass is too loud, the drums just about right and the guitar and keyboards too quiet, but, unfortunately, that can't be helped.]

Appliances-SFB are/were:
Tom Laskin: vocals
William Siebecker: guitar
Meredith Young: drums
Bill Feeny: keyboards
Ed Feeny: bass

Unfortunately, I don't know the names of all the people responsible for the making of this video. To the best of my recollection, Frank Miale was one of the producers/mixers/somethingers. There were others. My apologies to all those who are uncredited. If I find out more names, I will add them.