This is a repost from my old blogging software, Movable Type. I figure, given my planned posting of some old Wayward Sun tunes, it would be good to give a little background here and there.
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February 28, 2003 The Genesis of Wayward Sun
Ever been interested in how the terrifically obscure East-coast band, Wayward Sun, got its start? Read below to find out more. I’m trying to make it moderately entertaining, but it may not be so to anybody but me 🙂
Wayward Sun, or Two Guys and a Dead Cat
I have a thing for cats. I like them alive, I like them dead… I just think they are cute, fluffy, and the name “cat”, rhymes with enough other words that it’s pretty convenient at some point to have a cat in most songs.
One day in the summer of 1988, my buddy Jon Brusco and I were chilling in his garage. I’d just bought a really cool new electric guitar. It was a ?Mako? brand that I’d picked up at Victor Litz, the local guitar store, for about $75. I was freaking EXCITED, man. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet have an amp for my guitar, so Jon plugged his bass into his amp, and I plugged my guitar into the second input jack on the amp and we plugged away. The song of the day was an innovative little ditty I’d proudly entitled, “Fred the Cat”.
Fred Fred the Cat Fred was Dead On the welcome mat
Whoah, Fred. Fred the Cat. Fred was fat That was that
Fred. Fred. The. Cat. (end with flourish, attempt at soloing, rolling around on the garage floor on the back, etc.)
In case you’re interested, the chord progression was D minor, G major, C major, A minor. Make up a tune to match that chord progression, and you’re probably pretty close to what I sang in at least one of the rounds of singing this song. Jon and I were in stiches over it. Well, at least I was; he laughed politely a few times.
Anyway, so we’re chilling in the garage, and we figured out that we wanted to make a band. Of course, the first step in making any garage band is to figure out a really cool name. We tossed around some ideas we thought were cool, stuff like: Flying Butt Monkeys Artistic Nonsense Mud Scrapers Satin Knights Heinlein Lookalikes Football Umpires Wayward Sun Overdue
We eventually decided it was a toss-up between ?Satin Knights? (from a Moody Blues song, “Knights in White Satin”, if I recall correctly), and “Wayward Sun” (a play on “Carry on Wayward Son”, by Kansas). Like all good things that needed deciding, the best choice to make the decision for us was Jon’s Mom. In my opinion, she was the epitome of all things Good and Wise. I thought she was pretty, too, and for a 15-year-old, pretty was pretty important.
“Hey, Mom, I,” Jon began, then had a thoughtful look and restated, “I mean, ‘we'” he corrected, grinning at me, “have a question for you.” “What’s that?” she replied, shutting off the vacuum cleaner she was using on the upstairs hallway rug. “Umm, we’re trying to decide on the name for our band. It’s a choice between Satin Knights…” Jon began, “…and Wayward Sun,” I concluded. “Which one do you think is better?” asked Jon earnestly. Jon’s Mom had a thoughtful look for a moment, then spoke slowly. “Satin Knights sounds like somebody that wants to get you into their beds. Wayward Sun sounds like a disobedient child. Given the choice between a disobedient child and someone trying to seduce me, I’d take the disobedient child.”
Thus the band was born: Wayward Sun it was!
We practiced that summer, and I wrote a theme song for the band. One of these days, I’ll get an .ogg stream up on my weblog so that people can listen to it, but since the original sources appear to be permanently stuck in Ben Schuman’s grandmother’s basement, they will probably be pretty poor quality rips from one of the crappy tapes we made. Maybe one day I’ll fly back East to pick the tapes & original recording deck up to try and re-master the stuff.
Unfortunately, I’m out of time for the weblog today, so I’ll continue this story in another entry later.