About..... "Words of Love"
So is it possible, after all these songs and tales of woe, that there could be a happy ending?
Well, if you are "Looking For Trouble", you`ll find her in this song!
The recording is one enhanced from a recording made years ago. Recorded on my getto blaster that allowed me to mix an extra input during a "Tape-to-Tape", so I could overdub a couple of times without losing too much quality.
The original recording was taken from a jam session with a guitarist from first band that I was in at college, "Arien Experience". So called because all the band members, bar one, was of the Aries star-sign. But for a while, the Jewish society kept ripping down our posters and at the time I really didn’t know why!
The guitarist had come round unexpectedly, in fact he`d only been once before. He had just been completely bored and thought he`d pop round to see if I was up for a quick jam.
As it happened, I was down pretty badly with the flu. My dog, Trouble, had also seemed a bit under the weather. But I invited him in, and said that I was a bit too hoarse to be singing, but we could go through a few songs. We had included "Words Of Love" on the band set list.
I only had one working input for my amp, so I played acoustic guitar and he switched between his electric and acoustic.
The problem was though, my dog kept trying to get some affection from me. Trouble kept jumping at me while I was playing. Eventually she got put out of the room, especially as we had decided to tape what we were doing.
That, was fatal. Because all she did was sit by the door and give a high pitched wine every so often. I put it down to her non-appreciation of my music, but she always did it when I had my amp on.
We carried on and recorded the practice, which actually went very well, and were quite pleased with what we had recorded. Though we had to do a couple of takes for some songs, due to a barking dog. Quite a few of my tapes have the same interruption. With me then shouting at her to shut up!
Since her death two years ago, those tapes and the short pieces of video I have of her are priceless to me.
I heard she had died at Easter, just as I was walking out of my Irish girlfriend's house after an argument. I was on my way home a week early to see my dog and mum.
The phone rang and I somehow guessed Trouble had died simply by my girlfriend's face and change of voice tone when she answered the phone.
I still went up to Yorkshire to say good-bye to her though, though was deeply saddened not to have been with her at her death.
That evening, after saying my good-byes to Trouble, I went out and had a cigarette and looked up at the stars, and in my mind tried to send a message out to her.
"Trouble, I know you`re out there now somewhere. Know that I loved you. "Always" A word I had taught her to somehow understand what I meant by it, whereby she`d come up and lick my nose in response.
And looking up at the stars I saw, for the first time, the Hale Bop comet, twinkling away in the sky. I`d looked for it several times in Bristol, but the stars were barely visible. At home, in Yorkshire, by the sea, the skies were clear of pollution. The comet was clearly gleaming it`s way across the skies.
A smile then came to my face. The news that weekend was the mass suicide of the "Heavens Gate" Internet group, who believed a UFO, was behind the comet and was there to whisk them away to another world.
I imagined them all on this UFO, taking off their purple suits and saying to one another in amazement. "We were right!", "It`s here!", " We made it!" , "Who brought this bloody dog?"
And so as I sorted through my various tapes in putting this CD together, I came across this old rehearsal tape. For that song, I`d even gone over it with some extra backing vocals, as my voice had been so weak on the day due to flu.
I was about to dismiss the tape due to it`s poor sound quality compared with my other material. But on playing it again, I suddenly heard Troubles high-pitched whine during the intro. Having already decided on the CDs name from the onset of doing it, it was only right that she should make an appearance.
It is one of the earliest recordings, of one of my earliest songs. In fact the earliest one on the whole CD. I song I wrote aged 13 about my first girlfriend.
An ex-girlfriend that then rang me out of the blue two months ago, the last contact having been six years ago. Just when I was trying everything I could do to get the poor sound quality of the recording enhanced. Life, they say, can be stranger then fiction.
I hope so. The name Grod Groddler and The Grodlings is the name of a fictitious band who hit the big-time, from an unfinished musical "Diary of a Millionaire", which I wrote aged 23. In the story the person writing the diary does so, because he believes it’ll be a record of his rise to success and glory.
In fact it becomes a history of mishaps and debts. Which his girlfriends reads and finds each failure the diary records, quite amusing. Real-life proving to show a different outcome to the heady predictions at the beginning. But she persuades him to sell it as a novel comedy item. Which in fact sets him out onto the road to fortune. Until he meets Grod. But that’s another story. And my next CD?!!
This Cd includes a Video MPEG of the only concert ever performed by "Grod Groddler & The Grodlings." Our final number was "Quiet Time". Being a quiet song, and one of my favourites, I was at first quite distraught when I heard the song was "ruined" on the video, by a barking dog during the intro. Then smiled and realised, maybe my "Trouble" isn't quite over yet!