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frankportman
Jul 18 2018 · 3:42 PM
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https://youtu.be/2gyHZgatkX4 Minor secrets of chunks of a couple of live songs from September, 1995: "Last Time I Listened to You" / "I Love You but You're Standing on My Foot" The Wōdnesdægs pile up, don't they? I've got 58 videos on my channel, most of them live snips revealing minor secrets in celebration of the dark god who rules the day: https://www.youtube.com/user/drankf. So the world is worn away. Anyhow, what we have here are substantial fragments of two songs from September, 1995 which Jenifer recently excavated from an old VHS tape and was kind enough to share with me for the archives. She wasn't sure what venue it was only that it was a Berkeley party, but I suspected it was at the UC Berkeley co-op Cloyne Court and I was right. Here's the flier: https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/866325526880579584. The dates check out, 9/23/95 before midnight, 9/24/95 after. I have fond memories of that night, in fact. It was outdoors, on this rickety stage in a kind of backyard area that was jam packed with extremely drunk Cal students. MTX, Hi-Fives, Nar, and Sheephead. $4.00 ($1 off with suit). The Bomb Bassets were listed on the flier but crossed out, not sure why. (Did the Bomb Bassets ever play live? I can't remember that either.) Too bad the songs are truncated but you work with what you got. This is the only record of that night that I'm aware of. And there's something rather charming about the singing along from the videographer as well as that great Les Paul Jr. P-90 guitar tone, which triumphs over any and every sound and production challenge. Sometimes you know a good song when you have it before you without quite being able to demonstrate specifically why it's good beyond a reasonable doubt, and "Last Time I Listened to You" is perhaps one of those. Maybe it's the shouldn't-work-but-it-somehow-does factor and its concomitant element of surprise that does it. Possibly I'll have more to say on it in some future "minor secrets" installment if I find a good full version somewhere, but to focus on what's here: that guitar solo is really something else, and perfect for me because it benefits from a bit of sloppiness and slidy-ness. And the biting brittle tone of pure, non-effected tube amped P-90, it benefits from that too, obviously. I'm also quite fond of how the key changes migrate back to the original key while seeming to keep going "up." That's the kind of thing a person can only stumble on when he has no clue what he's doing, seems to me. Both songs appear on 1992's Milk Milk Lemonade album, though a version of LTILTY came out a year earlier. But I distinctly remember the feeling that playing such songs was really reaching back into the distant past, reviving something long-forgotten... I guess three years is a long time in the life of a band, and a lot can happen in three years, even if it's only a whole lotta nothin. If I'm not mistaken, Love Is Dead had been or was in the process of being recorded but not yet released. Kind of curious as to what the rest of the set might have been. Anyway, thanks be to Odin, and to Jenifer, and to the rest of the audience for this stuff, such as it is. I'll be back next week, most likely, with something else to blather on about.
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The Mr T Experience - chunks of two songs live at Cloyne Court, Berkeley, 1995

Substantial fragments of two songs, "Last Time I Listened to You" and "I Love You but You're Standing on My Foot" (both full titles wouldn't fit in the YouTube title bar.) Jenifer excavated this from an VHS tape, the only document I've seen of a very memorable show featuring MTX, the Hi-Fives, Nar, ...

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