Major major blast from MY past..

Every so often, I get reminded about my "young" days in the music biz.

I got an email today from a guy I haven't heard from in well over 20 years. He was the bass player from this band I did a lot of work with in the mid 80's, called Dog Body. They were a local outfit (Lincoln, NE), and did about half originals and half "deadish" covers. I worked with these guys in between whatever road work I had with other bands.

They had a really excellent lead player, and had a pretty good following. They threw annual microfestivals on a farm outside of town, and we gigged around the midwest for a few years.

At any rate, Keith put up a facebook group, and has managed to track down the whole band (except the drummer, thus far).

One of the other guys found several shots of the band, some gig posters, and even one of newsletters we used to send out (that I put together in an alpha test version of the first version of Pagemaker, which would completely ignite the desktop publishing phenomena on a first generation Mac Plus).

There's some live gig shots, as well as some shots in the studio (maybe the only ones left in existence as I didn't even have a camera in those days). Wow we were young.

Ye Olde Photos

And...

Keith even found some old live soundboards with me mixing. Quite frankly I'm amazed how good this stuff was considering the time it was done. I'd forgotten that I used to mix stereo live (common place these days, but back then was practically unheard of). I also used a ton of outboard gear to process the guitars, vox and drums, which was pretty rate in those days as well.

So..

Not Fade Away

(I Want to Live In) America

Midnight Hour

Crying shame there aren't any of the originals. That's where these guys really shined. Leeker was a really excellent songwriter, and a brilliant guitarist. When he was doing his own thing he was close to Mark Knopfler good. I've got their originals on 1/4" Half Track reel to reel, but have no means of transferring it unless anybody has a Studer B77MKII laying around in an attic?

At any rate, it's really a treat for me to see that some of this stuff survived the years, and that most of the guys are still around.