Today is my 60th birthday. And I wanted to do something special for the day, as a present to myself, and hopefully, for you. I am admittedly going to indulge myself, as it's unlikely I'll ever take this sort of opportunity again. I understand if this not what you come to this site for, but I'd love it if you'd choose to read through and listen, and love it even more if you'd comment and let me know what you think of any or all of this material.
I thank you in advance if you choose to indulge me - and hopefully, be entertained - by reading and/or listening to any or all of this post.
As 90% or more of what I'm going to share was recorded on Reel to Reel tape, this post even makes sense for the site!
I'm going to start with a few excerpts from my family's tapes from when I was a small child, talk a little bit about what I was exposed to and listened to in terms of influence and inspiration, and then move on to the point at which I started writing my own serious and comic songs. If the sound of a small child singing fairly idiosyncratically is not your cup of tea, you can jump down to the point where I am an adult, writing songs, after the little squiggles that look like this: ~~
Probably the earliest tape of me singing a song is from shortly before my third birthday. My family borrowed a tape recorder in order to make a full tape of songs for my beloved Uncle Harry. The recording was dominated by my sister and two of her friends doing a full-on folk concert for the first thirty minutes or so, but I was allowed to sing a song I knew from a children's record. My brother Bill introduces me and then after I get lost, encourages me to give it a second try.
Please note that even at three years old, I was already familiar enough with records to imitate a record getting stuck.
Download: Bobby - Be Kind to Your Parents
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You probably can't tell what I'm trying to sing, and if that's the case, you can hear the record I learned the song from, here.
At some point in the year that followed, my family recorded me singing three of my favorites, each of them, again, learned from records. These include "Tavern in the Town" as yodeled by Wally Cox on a 1953 hit single, "The Little Dutch Girl" from a kiddie record, and the nursery rhyme "I Love Little Pussy".
Download: Bobby - Tavern in the the Town, Little Dutch Girl, I Love Little Pussy
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For anyone who is interested, last year I posted a different clip in which I sang two of those same songs, from roughly the same time period. That's here. And the record I was copying, in singing "The Little Dutch Girl", as well as an amazing reworking of the same song, can be heard here.
Among my family's many, many reels of tape, there are literally hours of little Bobby (and later, grade school Bob) blathering, making jokes, recording records and TV, playing with friends, and doing almost anything you can name. Most of these are tedious to anyone outside of my family and a few friends, and even most of them probably couldn't take it. I am not excerpting those, with one very brief exception, one that makes me crack up. This is a short, short excerpt from a nearly 30 minute tape of me simply babbling into the microphone. I am about five years old here, and have a bad cold. I love the improvised song, the nonsense words, and the joy with which I provide the title at the end - perhaps the happiest way that word has ever been said.
Download: Bobby - Poisoned
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Also from age five, here is a tape my mother loved. In it, my sister Marcia is playing the title song from "The Sound of Music", and I sing the song as only a five year old could, complete with a vocalization of .the dramatic bass notes near the end.
Download: Bobby and Marcia - The Sound of Music
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One other ridiculous musical thing that I did that's worth mentioning. I wrote a suite of songs based on the TV version of "Batman", telling a brief, complete story about the relationship of Batman and Robin and their greatest case. I even went to far as to time myself singing each of the songs and put the lengths they should be in the spiral notebook where I wrote the lyrics. On multiple family tapes where I am around 9, 10 and 11, I can be heard singing bits and pieces of these songs, so to this day, I still know how they go. Sheesh.
And that's where I'm going to leave the early recordings, while pointing out that I have previously shared a recording of my brother Bill and me singing together here, and a tape of us chatting, here, both of which are from the 1965-66 era.
Photos of me (left) and Bill (right), both taken in 1966, shortly after the acquisition
of our first stereo reel to reel player, which is in both photos. On the far left behind
Bill is the Concertone behemoth reel machine that our dad had bought in 1952.
I'm about to skip forward by about a decade.
But first, a few words about musical instruments.
When I was six, I was dutifully enrolled with the same piano teacher who had been instructing my brother and sister. I was decidedly not the star pupil both of my siblings had been, and when I began showing signs of reluctance to practice, at age ten, the lessons stopped. By that time (fourth grade) was also taking trombone lessons and playing in the school band. I did practice the trombone, and got relatively good for my age, but nothing special.
By age fourteen, I was plunking on the piano so much that my mom again encouraged me to take piano lessons, which I did with much more enthusiasm, through age 19, getting good enough to be considered (but not chosen) for the senior concert at my high school. I also stopped taking trombone lessons at age 18. By then, my dad had taught my to play the ukulele (age 15 or so),. I was soon annoying everyone, everywhere, by playing and singing the few songs I had taught myself (mostly ancient standards). I even carried it around at school a few times and sang for what I'm sure was no one else's enjoyment!
Within a year, I had picked up the guitar - we had a gorgeous 1950's Gibson electric/acoustic model. I quickly figured out how those ukulele chords transferred onto the guitar, simply adding fingerings for the lowest two strings, and leaving me with an idiosyncratic, self-taught way of fingering chords, which I still use to this day.
And second, a bunch of words about the music and comedy in my home.
Music was all around our house and my life. My mother was a classically trained coloratura soprano, who worked professionally - very much part time, but professionally - from the early 1940's until the early 2000's. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, she won, or was a finalist in, multiple Chicago area vocal competitions, including one for which she won the right to perform in a recital in a downtown Chicago auditorium.
Here is my absolute favorite piece from her repertoire, a composition about which I've read, that some well known sopranos refused to attempt it, given it's challenges. It's called "Air and Variations", by Heinrich Proch, and it was the "big number" of her recital. This is from a session with her vocal coach around 1964, when she was 41. If you're not interested in the full five minute piece, I encourage you to listen to at least the last two minutes or so.
Download: Mary Fran Purse - Air and Variations
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Meanwhile, my sister, who is ten years older than me, had developed into an excellent pianist, and also a devotee of the folk music that was all the rage during her early teens. She had learned to play the guitar quite well, and had a wonderful voice. Here, she is heard in 1966, at around age 15 or 16, playing that 1950's Gibson acoustic/electric guitar, singing a song learned from a Kingsron Trio album, Señora. I think this is one of the loveliest things I've ever heard.
Download: Marcia - Señora
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Meanwhile still, my brother Bill, who is six years older than me, was developing significant skills on both piano and trumpet. He quickly developed a great facility in ragtime, classical and jazz, among others. Indeed, he would pursue a career as a musician, not only on those two instruments, but also as a composer and producer.
In 1973, when he was 19, my family borrowed a friend's reel to reel machine, with the purpose of copying some of what was recorded on our oldest tapes (on 10" reels) onto 7" reels, which were the largest we could then play. Bill was very excited to see that the borrowed machine had a sound-on-sound feature, which meant that we could make overdubbed recordings.
While the following example of three short piano pieces (all three in less than a minute), done with sound-on-sound that summer, are certainly not the most indicative of Bill's abilities or musical tendencies, they are among my favorite things ever recorded, and their whimsical style and arrangement had a huge effect on my own musical development. The sped-up solo in the first of the three is probably had more influence on the feel I try to capture in my own piano solos as any other recording.
Download: Bill - Three Sound-On-Sound Piano Solos
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But a better representation of what Bill was (and is) capable of is this recording of our High School's Jazz Band, playing a jazz chart Bill wrote as a 17 year old, titled Montreux Shout, a Downbeat award winner, I will add. It's heard here as recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1972, where the band was invited to perform. This is the second half of the tune - when it goes into the upbeat section about 20 seconds in, that's Bill on trumpet.
Download: The New Trier West Jazz Ensemble - Montreux Shout
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I was also getting exposed to a plethora of musical styles - nearly all styles of classical music, the folk music my sister loved and which my parents collected in recordings made off broadcasts of the legendary Chicago radio show, "The Midnight Special", top 40 music my brother played on the radio at night in the room we shared, literally hundreds of children's records, and the more adventurous pop and rock music that both of my siblings started listening to in the late 1960's. And that's just a start.
We also had a abundance of comedy albums, and in particular, the musical stand up (or sit down) of the day - Victor Borge, Tom Lehrer, Anna Russell, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, the Smothers Brothers, as well as a goodly selection of spoken word comedy, my favorite of which, then and now, was Shelley Berman. The humor and the music tended towards the intellectual direction, let us say. All of these influences combined into a fairly unusual gumbo of interests, styles and preferences in both music and comedy, as well as comedic music.
(I actually just this week came across an astonishing tape, in which I, at age about 11, sing Tom Lehrer's song "Smut" from start to finish, complete with his tone and little asides, clearly knowing the song by heart, backwards and forwards. There is absolutely no way I had any real understanding of what the song was about, the innuendo in almost every line, or the meaning of the word "slut", which is in the lyrics. The tape is badly recorded and not worth sharing here, but I thought I'd mention it, because of what it says about my musical and comedic upbringing, as well as perhaps a few other things. Let's jump forward now.)
While all of my peers were listening to Top 40 radio during those peak Top 40 years for kids, ages 12-17, I was listening to it almost not-at-all, instead tuned in almost entirely to oldies radio, classical music (particularly Wagner), and my family's dozens of home recorded tapes. I've since heard most of what was big during those years - 1972-1977, and I truly didn't miss much - what a fallow period for top 40.
What I did get into during that period was The Beatles (well, a rediscovery), Monty Python's Flying Circus and Dr. Demento. And I did what I've done throughout life when a new cool thing really got under my skin - devoted tons of my time to each of thsee three - collected everything I could, and became obsessive. A little bit later I became a huge fan of Queen, but to a slightly lesser degree. But those were my big four during and after high school.
Anyway, perhaps with all that mixed around in my head, in my mid-teens, I started to make up comic songs of my own. The first example of this was probably a truly ridiculous parody of all of the Bicentennial hoopla going on from mid 1975 through mid 1976. I wrote an entire satiric play about the phenomenon, complete with a number of Broadway-esque songs, including one called "Big Production Number". Having then recently learned to play the baritone ukulele from my dad, I imagined (and practiced) every song in the "show" being accompanied by that instrument. When we again borrowed that sound-on-sound capable machine in early 1976, I committed almost the entire play to tape, complete with multi-track recordings of the songs. It's sort of endearing, but not good at all, and I'm not featuring any highlights here.
But then the songs came pouring out. These were silly, usually made up almost entirely of non-sequiturs, and most were fairly similar, musically, fast and boisterous. My father had, by the next year, purchased a reel-to-reel machine capable of doing sound-on-sound overdubbing, so I was able to record multi-track performances of all of these non-masterworks, along with anything else I felt like committing to tape in a more complex arrangement than had previously been possible.
I reworked one of these early songs, "A Sailing Milk Moustache" in the mid 1990's, for my album "The Many Moods of Bob", which you can hear here. The words in the verses of that one are so aggressively stupid that when I sang them for that album, I deliberately slurred them beyond comprehension.
~~
But in late 1979, at age 19, I found myself very suddenly compelled to write something serious. What the lyrical inspiration was, I have no idea - it was almost entirely fiction, especially since the protagonist seems to be "looking back from afar" on young adult friendships and a romance (the latter of which I hadn't even had, yet). Musically and particularly vocally, this shows me to have been very much in thrall of Freddie Mercury, particularly the ballads from the then-most recent Queen album, "Jazz".
This is a very adolescent lyric, and I'm not making any great or even average claims for it, although I will note that I submitted this lyric in response to a poetry assignment in a college course I was in, and the teacher said "we have a poet in our midst", which was a great boost to my confidence. But it was my first serious song, and seems like a natural to share it in a post of this sort. I never did find a decent title for it, so it has forever been identified as "Untitled".
Download: Bob Purse - Untitled
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(Incidentally, unless otherwise noted, all instrumentation and vocals on my "produced" tracks are done by me.)
Very quickly after that, I was recruited by another student to join his Beatles sound-alike band, purchasing from him a John Lennon style Rickenbacker and assuming, naturally, the John Lennon role in the group. This did not last long (although we won a couple of talent shows during those months), and eventually, the bass player and I split off, began writing our own songs together, and started looking for drummer and a lead guitarist.
We went through the first drummer quickly and then found a second, better drummer, and, eventually, a guitarist. That band lasted longer than the first one, but not by all that much (the entire process from the first invite to the breakdown of the last lineup was perhaps 18 months).
But between the three of us (and a friend) we did write enough songs to produce an album's worth of material, which we recorded in the living room of my parents home during the winter of 1981. We had not yet secured a lead guitarist yet, so the bass player overdubbed lead guitar parts, and both the drummer and I played piano, where needed. Here's one of the earliest songs that the bass player, Scott, and I wrote. Typically, as in this case, he came up with the chord changes, and I wrote the words and melody. It's easy to imagine that this song came out of two guys whose initial connection was over the early songs of the Beatles.
Download: The Commonwealth - Where You Going?
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We also recorded a song that wasn't technically in our "live" repertoire, a song I had written on my own nearly a year earlier and quite unlike anything else we included on the "album" or indeed, than anything I had written up to that point. At that moment, I certainly considered my best song yet, and like most of my serious songs to come, was based on my own experiences.
Download: The Commonwealth - Another Friend
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Concurrently to all of this, I was also engaged quite often in recording completely improvised humorous songs, in two separate incarnations - with my then-oldest friend Andy, and with a then-relatively new friend, Paul (more on Paul, later). Andy had a remarkable facility for improvising very detailed and often almost visualize-able descriptions and stories off the top of his head (not surprisingly, he went into visual arts), all the while, managing to make everything rhyme AND be funny. I would play the piano, and offer up my own improvisations, often quite good, sometimes not, but rarely matching what Andy seemed to do effortlessly. We quickly grew into a formidable improvisational unit, if I do say so myself, each of us understanding the other, musically and improvisationally.
The following is not quite the best of our work - that "best" would almost by definition be something where Andy was the dominant vocalist - but it does feature some good stuff, some fun interactions, and even a bit of soulfulness. I also love the point at which Andy realizes he's said something about the sun shining at night, and the way we play off of that.
In sharing this, I understand that there's an element of "you hadda be there", or at least that it helps to have known one or both of us, or our work together. But enough people have heard and enjoyed this over the years for me to choose to share it. Plus, a post of this sort without a mention of my work with Andy would be incomplete. This is an edit of a longer piece, and it's from 1980. Andy's voice is heard first, and I'm the first one to sing (my stuff's okay, but when he starts to sing, it's amazing stuff):
Download: Andy and Bob - The Rain (edited version)
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I also shared that particular choice because...... MAN did I love the chord progression I made up for the backing to that piece. I was set on using it again in something more serious. But after the band broke up, having gotten into the habit of writing with partners and for a band sound, I pretty much stopped writing songs for nearly a year.
But then life handed me a situation I felt compelled to write about, including a couple of different relationships that were painful in that moment. And rather than hurt feelings and expose other feelings in ways I didn't want to, I got extremely poetic and vague, attached the whole thing to the chord progression from "The Rain", and in pairing those chords and that lyric, I wrote what I still believe to be the best song I've ever written or ever will write.
The song dates to the spring of 1982, and this recording dates to the first time I was able to use professional equipment, which was the summer of 1996, in my brother's home studio. I shared this once in a previous post on my other blog. I've since changed the name of the song, and I can't see doing a post like this and not including what I think is my finest moment. Here is "Too Long Ago".
Download: Bob Purse - Too Long Ago
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I continued to write songs for the next year or so, but as almost all of them were for a band that I didn't have, and that I was only hearing in my head, I made recordings of very few of them, at the time, not having the instrumentation I wanted.
One song that was appropriate for the instruments I could play at had on hand was a quiet little thing inspired by the three part harmony sound of Crosby, Stills and Nash", and specifically, the song "Wasted on the Way". My song bears no particular similarity to that song or, really, to their style, but I wanted to do something with delicate three part harmony. I was very happy with the song, and the vocal arrangement, which only moves into three part harmony in the last third. This is from late 1982.
Download: Bob Purse - In the Corner of a Room
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Here I am, sometime around the time I wrote these songs, 1982 or 1983,
photographed at the best piano I've ever played, which sat, mostly unused,
in the auditorium of my college.
As I mentioned earlier, I had two different musical duo partnerships. My tapes with Andy ended (with a break of 17 years, anyway) when he finished college, but my work with the aforementioned Paul, which began in 1978, continued, at varying frequency, but without any real breaks, right up into the early 2010's, when he essentially retired from our improvised work. If Andy was the master of visualized, descriptive improvisation, Paul was (and is), a master of the bizarre, of the non-sequitur, and of the off the wall. On this point, I come closer to matching him than I did matching Andy at his skill, although Paul has always remained better at it than me.
Over the course of the years, Paul and I got to be extremely good at putting together imaginative, unexpected and at times just plain weird improvisations. And again, we learned to gauge, predict and read each other extremely well. That we are both multi-instrumentalists (his primary instrument is violin) also added to our diversity.
Our improvised work is so esoteric, that without a more proper introduction and multiple examples, I can't really share it here. However, just as with Andy, I simply cannot make a post of this type without including the work I did for 35 years with Paul. So here's what I have: on three occasions, in 1984, 1985 and 1990-91, we wrote and recorded album's worth of produced, multi-tracked, thought out recordings, under two different names, and distributed the results to friends. Here is the lead track from that 1985 collection. We had borrowed a tiny "Casiotone" keyboard from a friend, and using the "Samba" setting, put together the following track, wrote uncommonly odd lyrics for the resulting track ("forlorn nights with endless blimps", for example, which remains one of my favorite lines of lyrics by anyone, ever), and sang it with gusto.
Download: Room Temperature - Homecoming Samba
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On my own, though, at this point I had stopped writing my own songs, at least for the moment. In mid-1983, I had rediscovered folk music, which fit in nicely with the progressive political education I was getting in my Human Services course of studies at college. As I had earlier with Monty Python and the Beatles, I swallowed up entire large segments of the folk genre, snapping up albums left and right, quickly obtained a 12-string guitar and learned tons of songs which I then directed into my nascent work with children.
My initial obsession was with The Limeliters, whose leader and spokesman, Lou Gottlieb, was a true Renaissance man, and probably the funniest person ever to perform onstage under the guise of a musician, rather than a comedian.
But I really fell head over heels for Pete Seeger - both his music and his activism - and stopped writing songs almost entirely. I did, however, study Pete's 12-string guitar style obsessively, picked up what I could by rote, and became a far better guitarist than ever before. While I had learned a lot of things when I was in the rock and roll band, and had never previously really wanted to play anything but rhythm, I remained fairly limited. But now I learned all sorts of things like walking bass-lines, rudimentary finger picking and lots of more complicated strums. I never came close to being a virtuoso, or even a virtuo-so-so, but I got pretty good.
When I did resume writing songs, it was with a vengeance, but it was also with a laugh - I wrote around two dozen songs from age 25-30, all but two of which, if I'm recalling correctly,were funny songs (or, songs meant to be funny, or strange or lighthearted, or whatever, as your mileage may vary...).
I wrote enough that I completed three entire album's-worth of songs, one a year, in 1986, 1987 and 1988. These "albums" only existed in my head and on the cassette tapes I compiled them on (from the original reel to reel multi-tracks), but I did distribute those copies to a few friends. And the following five tracks (all but one an original) are from those collections.
What helped is that, in 1986, my dad bought a new reel to reel machine, and handed down the old one to me, which moved to my bedroom, and which, again, could do sound-on-sound. This made it extremely easy for me to record songs, which in turn inspired more songwriting.
The very first song I recorded, after being given my very own reel to reel machine, was pretty much a throwaway - a tune called "Fishing", which I'd improvised with Paul a few years earlier, over a neat chord progression I'd come up with. The song itself is just about nothing - just a two line nonsense rhyme, and then the same chords meant to accompany any improvised lyrics that those present would like to sing. But boy, did I LOVE the sound of the track I recorded. It had the feel of the Caribbean music I was soon to come to adore, a lilting beat and a catchy recorder solo, in addition to a vaudeville vocal delivery and a ridiculous and pointless lyrics (which even referenced Orson Bean), which are always a good thing in my book. Here's "Fishing":
Download: Bob Purse - Fishing
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A few months later, using that Casiotone keyboard again, I put together a full story-song, with some truly odd twists and turns, but fully coherent within its own world. And if its own world seemed to be something out of a nightmare, well, that was the point, as the song was called "Dream Sequence". Again I gave it a Caribbean flavor (much more mechanized here, by default), and maybe for the first time, included a keyboard solo, which I think is quite catchy, and which, right before the end, a musical quote from my favorite Beatles' single. I was particularly happy with the backing vocal arrangements, where they pop up. The long first line of the first bridge ("I left there....") is a wonderful example of a turn of phrase which uses seems to say far more than it does.
Download: Bob Purse - Dream Sequence
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Over the years, I've written several songs which, like "Fishing" (above) were largely meant to be a frame on which to hang a chorus, which could then be amended with whatever verses one wanted to add, improvised or written, largely because I was regularly taking parts in parties where such songs would add to the merriment (more on that later).
The best job I ever did of this came after I dreamed that I was holding a 45 containing a song called "I Won't Sleep On Your Big Side of Beef", by a group called "Dog". The very next time I recorded with Paul, I suggested we improvise a song to that title, and eventually, as we moved through it, a chorus and melody came into being. There was a dog in the room when we recorded it, and the song was supposedly by "Dog", so I improvised a rather nasty verse about dogs.
Over the years, this quickly became a go-to song to perform where our friends were together, during which time anyone who wanted to could submit a four line verse. In 1988, I decided to record a produced version of the song, complete with my Louis Armstrong style vocal and a backing group of vocalists, as well as a revved up guitar solo. This was at the point that my middling 12-string guitar abilities were at their (relative) zenith, and it's nice to have a recording capturing what I could do in those days - strumming, walking bass-line and soloing. I left in some of the verses from the original improvised version, including the one about dogs.
Download: Bob Purse - I Won't Sleep On Your Big Side of Beef
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Around this same time, I got a perfectly bizarre idea, one which will help indicate to you how my mind works: How would it sound if Walter Brennan, around the time of his hit "Old Rivers", did a rendition of "Helter Skelter"? Well, if you've always wondered the same thing, do I have a recording for you! I love the complex nature of this thing - I put in a lot of bells and whistles to make the structure of it align with the structure of the original, if (certainly) not the style. Where there are backing vocals by The Beatles, I put in backing vocals, and where there's a solo, I put in a solo. The only thing missing is the fade out and fade in. And again, as with "Dream Sequence", I made a musical reference to my favorite Beatles' single, and this time, also threw in a musical phrase from a favorite McCartney solo song.
When I grabbed the original reel for this recording, I was astonished to find - via the notes I always make when I record - that I recorded this song, complete, as well as "Side of Beef" in two days.
Download: Bob Purse - Helter Skelter
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At some point when my friend Paul had been living outside of the Chicago area, I had written him a letter in which I pretended to reminisce about our old times at "The Pineapple Den" - this was the sort of nonsense that filled our correspondence. That led me to writing an entire poem about this "legendary" place, which I then turned into a song. I asked my two best pals (and they are my two best pals to this day), Paul and Stu, to sing and revel on multiple overdubs, so that we'd have what sounded like a bar full of vikings singing the chorus to my sea shanty styled song. I added a piano solo, played much in the way (if not the ability or complexity) of my brother's sped-up solo that I shared near the beginning of this post.
Download: Bob Purse with Stu and Paul - The Pineapple Den
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And then the songs stopped again for a few years. What happened? Well, I got married in 1988, and the kids arrived in 1991 and 1993. Comic songs started up again in 1995, and virtually everything in that genre that I've recorded since can be found on my online albums, "The Many Moods of Bob", which I linked earlier, or on "A Few More Plans", which can be found here.
One other aspect of my musical and performing career that I want to include are the dozens of parties I've held, and that friends have held, bringing together my music and comedy loving friends. These have been evenings of prepared and improvised music, prepared and improvised comedy, and a mixture of the above. Some of them have been christened as being part of a series of "Evenings with the Illuminous Ras", a name which I will not explain here. (But if you've ever exchanged e-mail with me, that name might sound familiar.) These parties started in 1984, and aside from about a ten year gap while we were all in our 30's, and doing "other things", they've continued, at least occasionally, ever since.
The true nature of these parties will be difficult to truly explain here - they have included entire evenings where fake song titles (and the corresponding fake recording acts) are submitted by everyone, then pulled out of a hat and improvised by some of those present, game show parodies, live group performances of favorite old songs, a recurring bit called "The SMAR Hour" in which ridiculous coffee-house style poetry and stories are read, several telethon parodies to raise money for out of work and out of date actors, and that's just a start. Most of the most memorable moments would not make sense all that well here, but I am going to include four examples of the more "normal" side of things, normal being a relative word.
First, in 1990, my two best friends, Paul and Stu, and I, teamed up with my mother to rehearse and perform three songs as done by The Weavers, in arrangements as close to the originals as possible. Updating the group name, we jokingly called ourselves The Loom Operators. I (naturally) sang the Pete Seeger parts. Ronnie Gilbert's alto parts were far too low for my mom's soprano voice, however - she lost her voice by the end of the third song! Here's our rendition of "Poor Howard's Dead and Gone".
Download: The Loom Operators - Poor Howard's Dead and Gone
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The Loom Operators, Summer, 1990:
Stu, Paul, Mary Fran (mom), and Me
That's my beloved 12-string guitar
Download: Illuminous Ras - Don't You Just Know It
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From the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. For another party, in 2004, I prepared a backing track to be used in a live performance of one of my half-dozen song-poem related records, Norris the Troubadour's inexplicable "Mary Ann McCarthy", the original of which you can hear within this post. Playing an additional keyboard part over the track, with my great friends Stu and James on guitar and ukulele, I led the assembled group in a performance which - true to the half-assed nature of song-poems, got off the beat and away from the backing track a couple of times, leaving sounding more than a bit woozy.
Download: Bob Purse and the Ras Ensemble - Mary Ann McCarthy
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Finally, that same 2008 party as "Don't You Just Know It", Stu, Paul and I resurrected the Loom Operators name, this time joined by my daughter Wendy in the Ronnie Gilbert role, and did two more Weavers' songs. From that party, here is "When the Saints Go Marching In".
Download: The Loom Operators - When the Saints Go Marching In
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Speaking of my daughter, I really shouldn't have gone so far along in this post with barely a mention of my family. I'll rectify that.
In 1988, as mentioned earlier, I married Gina, and truly, none of the rest of all this would matter if I hadn't had her in my life for the last 35 years, the last 32 of them in marriage. She hasn't come up in this post, because I'm writing all about my musical life, and, well, she doesn't much share in my musical passions - in fact, it's probably true that we don't overlap much on our individual interests and passions. But we've been best friends since long before we were married, we make each other laugh, our individual strengths and flaws compliment each other in ways that make us stronger individually and together, and there's nowhere either of us would rather be than with the other. AND she puts up with my insane collecting and the hodgepodge it makes of some of our home.
In 1991, the aforementioned Wendy - now named Sage - came along, and Molly appeared two years later. Gina, Molly and Wendy/Sage have brightened my life in ways they could scarcely imagine - I find true joy in each of them.
Both of my children have displayed musical talents, playing various instruments through high school, although neither one pursued it after that. They are now 29 and 26, and they are both bright, thoughtful, funny and loving adults. They have also participated actively and memorably on not only some of my recordings, but at every one of those parties that we've had, since they resumed in 2004.
As I wrote when I posted my album "A Few More Plans", it took me 19 years - from 2000 to 2018 - to record the 19 tracks on that album. I was living life, parenting, engaging in other passions, and occasionally finding time to write and record a song or two, mostly comic songs.
(As an aside: through all of the years reflected here, I was, of course, first, going to college, then graduate school, and then working. I've not involved my work life in this story, as I don't think is relevant here, but I will acknowledge, as I have a few times in posts through the years, that I have a degree in psychology and have worked in the mental health field for almost 30 years. The need to have a job (particularly one which is an hour's drive away) has also impacted the amount of songwriting and recording I've done.)
More recently - really, since about 2011, I have occasionally returned to more serious songwriting, and have a plan to put up an album (double album length!) of nearly all of the serious songs that I've ever written (at least all of those I consider worth recording), under a title I've wanted to use for 30 years, "Songs of an Emotional Socialist". I don't mean socialist in the political sense - although I'm all for that, too - but "emotional socialist" meaning I'm someone who uses my songs (and other venues) to express my feelings openly and widely, and equally among anyone who will listen.
With that in mind, I've recently been revisiting songs I wrote in my 20's: those I heard, back then, with a band song in my head, but no band to play them. Now that I have every instrument in the band in a Midi keyboard, I've finally started recording those songs.
Here's one I wrote around age 22 or 23 - the title is "What Does It Mean?". In a rarity for me, I don't think I was writing about anyone in particular, and certainly not my own life or acquaintances, which was what I did almost all the time at that point (hence, the whole "emotional socialist" thing). But this is an exception. I recorded this a couple of years ago, with not only the midi keyboard, but also my dad's old Gibson guitar, which is the instrument on which I wrote the song.
Download: Bob Purse - What Does It Mean?
Play:
And I'll finish with the song that my friend Stu tells me is his choice for the best thing I've written. In 2011, I finally bit the bullet and wrote a song about a difficult moment in my life, the occurred when I was 18 - an emotional scar of a moment, and one that I'd known I wanted to write about for 25-30 years. It came out in a song called Shadows, which I also recorded that year. And here it is.
Download: Bob Purse - Shadows
Play:
And that's where things are now. I think I have about five or six more old songs to record in order to have the collection of serious material ready to go. These songs are mostly from my twenties, including at least a couple no one else has ever heard, and also including one I wrote for my wife on our 30th anniversary, which no one outside of my immediate family has heard.
The most recent "musical" picture of me, taken for a couple of different purposes
where someone wanted a photo last year. That's my Midi keyboard. The computer
program I use to put together Midi tracks is on the right, and my current
reel-to-reel machine is behind my head.
It's unlikely that I'll produce a post remotely like this again - this was self-indulgent enough! - and if you've made it this far, I truly and deeply thank you for indulging me. But if and when I do record more music, I will probably post it somewhere, and will undoubtedly point you in its direction.
Thank you again. I hope you found something to enjoy here, and perhaps a whole lot to enjoy. Please comment if you have something to say about any of these tracks.
Bob
