Maybe that should be the smell of used record stores? With my local used record store still closed up for the virus, I will have to settle for the “store” part. Just a quick walk up the street near my house by a local used record store, the smell is unmistakable. I spent many days leafing through bins of records looking to increase my collection without blowing my meager teenaged budget. New record stores did not have the same scent – old cardboard infused with particulates from someone’s home… Maybe some ancient cigarette smoke and mold… Maybe a little pet dander mixed in there. Nevertheless, today I was immediately taken back to a day when I found History: America’s Greatest Hits. By the time I bought this album, The Captain and Tenille had ruined Muskrat Love, imho. Not like the original version was that much better but maybe the guitars made it better.
That’s the thing with this album – guitars. The vocals are great but everybody remembers the intro to Ventura Highway and the moody strumming that starts Horse With No Name. Very popular but what really grabbed my attention was Don’t Cross the River. 12 string guitar picked in a rolling pattern like a banjo giving the song the movement of a fast river. This was going to be the song for my first recording attempt! At the time, I had bought an extra cassette tape deck from one of my younger brothers and figured out how to ping-pong between the two decks, and with my trusty old Realistic mixer, was able to create something like multi track recordings in my basement! What magical time!
I figured out how to create a basic rhythm and layer on additional guitars to build the song. Finally, I tried my hand at vocals. As I worked, the first recorded parts would get buried and hiss would gradually envelope the previous takes. This limited how many times I could ping-pong before the copies lost fidelity and ruined the whole effort. There was also the issue of tape speeds being ever-so-slightly off between the machines. If I did it right, I could mitigate that but the hiss was another issue that would have to wait until I could afford a real multi-track recorder (cassette, again) sometime later!
All of these efforts had me playing parts over and over on my guitar not only to get it right before “laying down” the tracks but to get all of the various guitar parts recorded and re-recorded in the process. That was some serious practice time!