Return to Puget Sound - Summer 1984

your blogger working hard

Several things happened quickly upon my return to the Puget Sound area at the start of June 1984. I moved back into my parent's home and took a week off before seeking employment. One afternoon that week my brother Glen and I took his wooden rowing boat to the Arboretum and paddled around Foster Island. Coming around a bend we came upon a less than fully clad sunbather, who smiled charmingly as we tipped our hats and paddled on. Welcome home!

I figured that a relatively mindless office job would leave me free to do music the rest of the time. I went to an agency in downtown Bellevue, which sent me to interview as a typist at Ticor Title Insurance near the waterfront in Seattle. The supervisor mentioned that they were also looking for someone to fill a position as an "abstractor", which involved sorting through court filings for information relevant to the title industry and typing up abstracts in a species of typographical shorthand - "NWC" was "Northwest Corner", "NH SEQ NEQ" was 'North Half of the Southeast Quarter of the Northeast Quarter", etc. Short story made shorter, the super felt that if I could read music I could read legalese and I got the abstractor job. I worked for Ticor until the company was purchased by Chicago Title Insurance in 1991, and for Chicago until my retirement in 2021. I also picked up a coffee habit, largely by accident.

gluing down the sound board on the clavichord

On the musical front, I had met up again with Neal and Aaron and we decided it might be fun to try improvising on instruments we didn't know how to play for a few sessions. Unable to resist the pun once it arose we called ourselves Banned Rehearsal before we had even made our first tape, which occurred on June 24, the weekend after I started work.

I thought I might never be able to afford a place suitable for a piano so I decided to buy a build-your-own clavichord kit. I hadn't been at work long so my dad co-signed on a loan for $1600 and I was delivered of a box of boards, a full-sized schematic drawing, a thin book of instructions, and a sinking feeling that I had just wasted a wad of cash I didn't have yet. But thanks to my dad and some help from my brothers we got it finished a year later.

The Sprite

As the Banned Rehearsal project persisted odd little instruments began to amass. I commandeered my mom's guitar and autoharp, which had both been languishing unused for decades. On a whim I spent $200 on an old Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite - a little electric organ with chord buttons, drum rhythms that could all be played at once (great function!) and another button that dropped the pitch down almost, but not quite, a half step. This first appeared (if I am not mistaken) on Banned Rehearsal 10 of September 23, 1984, and quickly became a mainstay of our sound for years to come.

It was also during those first few months that we devised a way of having our (by then) weekly sessions even when we weren't all in town. We would each make a tape wherever we were (called Banned Telepaths) and would then mix them together later (using multiple cassette decks, two-in-one-out mixer cables, and a cheap Realistik mixing device. Truly low budget and low fi, but the method has served us well over the years through geographic displacements and the recent pandemic. This equipment also enabled us to create what we called the Stack-O-Decks so that we could play several sound sources at once into our session space (usually my bedroom) - another commonplace of our early sound. During one such telepath session Aaron picked up the guitar and came up with the first Sudden Song: Bickleton Burger.

It's rhythms, chords, and slide button

no pickles
no mustard
no ketchup
no buns
no meat 

it's a Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have 'em away
yes it's a Bickleton Burger
have 'em away 

no relish
no special sauce
no sesame seeds
no bacon
no cheese 

just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have it away
have it away

just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
have it away