My Secret Career 8a: The 4-Track ‘95, or Onion Plays A Solo

Sidebar: I believe I got the nickname “Onion” from a  kid in elementary school who said my name sounded like “Bread ‘n onion”. It stuck. To the point that in high school soccer games, teammates would call “Onion, I’m open” when they wanted me to pass the ball.

This is the story of the terrifying moment when I first attempted a guitar solo.

I had been gifted the Tascam 424 4-track (see the whole story in My Secret Career 8b) I had barely touched it. It intimidated me.

I have never been a lead guitar player. In The Mahoneys, the other guys would encourage me to rip off a solo during rehearsal but I literally didn’t have the first idea how to do it.

You have to remember, I didn’t spend hours and hours learning to play. I picked up the guitar with the sole idea of writing songs. I would hear a melody in my head and then attempt to accompany myself. I didn’t attempt a scale until I was 27 years old and had been playing full time for five years. 

But the day came when I left a space on a recording where a guitar solo might rest.

Several takes and nervous breakdowns later, I came up with the following. But you’ll have to listen to the whole song to hear my shaky lead debut. It’s a solo approximately three seconds long.

Such A Place, from 1995’s “Beauty Is Ordinary” by Onion.

My Secret Career 8b: The TASCAM 424 4-Track, Circa 1995

Fecund Youth is no more. But Justin and I continue to collaborate. After a year at American University, Justin returned to attend URI so we saw each other frequently. Or rather, infrequently, as I was thoroughly ensconced in production after production in the theater department and Justin was heavily involved in his fraternity and actually having to study.

Somewhere in here he made a purchase that was to utterly transform my secret career. He bought a 4-track home recording unit. I know it was a TASCAM, I believe it was the 424. Seemingly out of nowhere he had recorded an album: The Z-Digs “Scared Crows”. It’s incredible.

We cut a few tracks together, here and there, with me singing his songs, but my focus was on acting. I can honestly say that during this period I had no intention of pursuing music. I hadn’t learned to play guitar yet, I wrote poetry but the melody machine that runs 24/7 in my head hadn’t come to life yet.

But then I went to France and the removal of the theater department as my daily routine meant that I had creative energy to spare. And that was that. From that moment on a great deal of my psychic energy was devoted to the excavating and building of songs. For good or ill.

Cut to ‘95. Off to grad school, Justin gave me the TASCAM 424 4-track. The ramifications were immediate and long lasting. 

For one thing, everything I had recorded to that point had either been with a live band, or in someone else’s studio, or even more crude, into a boombox.

Now I could build songs track by track. For several years even this capability intimidated me and mostly I stuck to hitting record and strumming and singing at the same time. But here and there I would attempt to layer in a second guitar, a harmony vocal, a tambourine hit by a pencil…

I was stuck in this phase for seven years. I didn’t have a drum machine so I couldn’t build beats. I was limited. 

What resulted was a claustrophobic sound, the sound of someone trying not to bother his neighbors, the sound of someone hiding. I began to tire of my own process. All I wanted was a band. I had one for a time in NYC  in ‘95 but it fizzled out after one show. I didn’t realize it at the time but I would never have a band again.

I have a hard time listening to this era of my catalog. I was so unhappy. Every song is another way of saying so but hidden in elaborate cyphers, as if I was afraid of revealing myself to even myself. 

I imagine myself as my only fan, listening to the new album and thinking, “How could he know? It seems like it was made just for me.” 

In almost every respect, it was.

Here is “Beauty is Ordinary by Onion”.