Attentive readers will perhaps recall that I recently got back together with some old high school garage band pals I hadn't seen for ages. These are guys with whom I spent an inordinate amount of time in the 70s making defiantly low-fi DIY albums in a dank Jersey basement, which is to say about a decade before Guided By Voices honcho Robert Pollard did something similar in the late 80s/early 90s and thought he was so cool.
And we called ourselves The Weasels, which is a better fricking name, too.
Anyway, I haven't inflicted too many Weasels songs on you guys because, if truth be told, most of them don't really fit into the powerpop template as such, but I'm going to make an exception with this one because I think it does. In fact, when we were recording it -- which was somewhere around 1973-74 -- I definitely thought of it as our big Badfinger move.
So -- please enjoy "Only You (Nobody)." Written by long-time Weasel Glenn Leeds and recorded on the four-track Teac reel-to-reel recently acquired by fellow Weasel Dave "Heavy D" Hawxwell for an album aptly titled...
For the sake of the historical record, the personnel here is the aforementioned Dave on vocals and acoustic guitar, the aforementioned Glenn on the out-of-tune upright piano in Dave's living room, Allan Weissman on bass, and Mike "The Drummer" Sorrentino on one of those rare occasions when he graciously consented to keep the beat for us. The overdriven and highly compressed sound of my guitar solo was achieved by plugging the instrument into a Pioneer cassette deck with a built-in limiter; where the interesting tape delay (or whatever the hell it is) came from has been lost in the mists of memory.
Oh, and the flutes at the end, in emulation of the Mellotron stuff from "Strawberry Fields," are in fact actual flutes also played by Glenn, talented multi-instrumentalist that he is.
