Suffolk Office, July 1987

Awwww, now here's a recording I have much affection for! And you will too!  No question about it!  This is truly one of the greats!

These are the earliest tapes from the office space. July of 1987.  And what tapes they are!

These songs.....so many of them Life Out Of Balance perennials ("I Know Your Name", "Wintertime", "Is It Safe", "New Voice")....and they are just little babies here!  I mean, I know there are earlier LOOB tapes, but more than anything, this tape is like looking at baby pictures to me.  In the best way.  Let's put it this way: on this tape, "I Know Your Name" is not fully arranged yet!  "Wintertime" is not fully arranged yet!  That's how "way back" we're going!

But the progress we had made from just a month earlier.....  For me, these are definitive, prototype versions for virtually all of these songs.  In fact, that was the whole point of this particular rehearsal: to record everything to take stock of what we had, and what needed to be worked on.  I remember comping the best versions of each song into a sort of "album" and that tape was much-listened to by all three of us.  Feeling good about ourselves, we recorded our first four-track demo weeks later. At first this may not knock you out, but these tapes..... you can't tell the LOOB story without them! These tapes are crackling with ideas and energy.....and the pride of workmen, of craftsmen.  The improvement in musicianship from the last recorded rehearsal (June of 1987) is amazing.  And the material.....textbook Life Out Of Balance!  It doesn't get more LOOB than this!  In many ways, this is my favorite era!

LOOB in the Suffolk Office, 1987.

Ok, I started listening a while ago, so I'm just picking up where I am now, I have to write about "Heart and Mind"!  Yay!  I'm so happy to have these great versions.  Damn.  Love this song.  (I'm listening to this as I type...).  Oh my gosh, this is funny....we're making fun of the demo's backing vocal track, which was an in-studio addition, ah, it's a long story, I won't get into it.....Ha, now we're talking about the demo.....funny.   I've said elsewhere, I love "Heart And Mind", a song I never felt we got quite right in the recording studio, and these versions are closest to how I think of the song.

Hubie in the space, 1987. Behind him are two door ways.  The one on the left goes into the warehouses.  The one on the right enters into the reception area, and beyond that, the band lounge.  The camera is behind the drums; to the right would be the bathroom.

We give "Feast Of Reason" a really good try, but as you can hear - you need Ward! This one fell out of rotation soon after.  The first major casualty!  I mean...."Feast Of Reason"! Who would have thunk it! "Feast Of Reason"was Life Out Of Balance to me!  But I think this sounds great....a beautiful goodbye (other than me & Ted goofing around on the break).

"Mental Isolation" was a beautiful tune Hubie & Ted wrote together, we played it around this time, not much longer.  The verse to this song has stuck in my head all through the years and is something I am prone to sing from time to time when I'm walking. (I do all my best singing walking to and from work!)  It's not the only Life Out Of Balance song that has that distinction!  As I said, it was never considered a "major" song, just one that was lying around, but for me, it evokes this early era of LOOB for me as much as any song, I don't know why.  Makes me miss 'em!  This song was actually done better on the next rehearsal tape (autumn of '87).

 "I Paint", one of my favorite early songs.  Ted would later write a verse (which you can find here), and it would get a proper ending.  And then we attached "Pot Of Gold" on to it, our first foray into "seguewaying".

"Wintertime", wow.  I play a slightly different drum part in the breaks, very interesting.  A month later we recorded the definitive version of this song, one of my absolute favorites, I love everything about this song: the chords, Ted's sublime bass playing in the breaks, Ted's fantastic bass line during the verses, the way we gradually stack the harmonies for the "if the sun don't shine..." sections over the course of the song....the words, the meaning....the melody.....my drumming, Hubie's super tasteful rhythm playing, his chord voicings.....I think I've got it all covered on this one!  Those breaks are among my favorite things I've ever been apart of, in any band.

Woooooo, squeal louder! We turn in a ferocious version of "I Hear A New Voice".  I remember at the time thinking this would be the obvious opener of our first album (that never got made!) .  Can you imagine? You plunk down the money for the album, bring it home and drop the needle on this!  I hear a new voice, indeed!  The third version, man , listen to Ted's bass and  Hubie's vocal!  Ha, we're all talking psyched up at the end.  Fuck!  We had a whole album right here!  We knew it too, damn! 

"Stayin'"! Yes!  This song crops again on this rehearsal, with the drum intro we later put on it.  "Stayin'" started as a new song of Hubie's, in the earliest days of the Suffolk Office.  Unlike most of Hubie's songs, it didn't quite "take off" and - after laboring on it for a bit - Ted & I started singing the chorus to "Stayin' Alive".  Now we had a song!  This is one of the great things about Hubie - he never came in and started dictating "play this, play that", the songs were loose enough, sometimes not written enough, so that we could all pitch in ideas.  He was never that precious about anything, and when he was, it was for good reason, he'd put his foot down and since he didn't do it that often, it carried weight.  Anyways, rather than saying "No, no, you're ruining my song by singing 'Stayin' Alive'", he cracked up and joined right in....and that, my friends, is the story of "Stayin'"!

"Phobia" - Ha!  The idea here was to not count in....we'd be all calm and wait for the cue (basically, Hubie taking in a breath) and come smashing in all together.  So funny.  I loved playing the instrumental break in this song.  We played it straight through the early Frank era.  This (like many of these songs) are from what I call "The Phone Call Batch", where Hubie played me, like, ten classics right in a row, over the phone.  I still have the piece of paper with my notes I was taking, AS HE WAS PLAYING.  I wish I could find it!!  (maybe it's gone by now, but I had it for years).  The batch was "Phobia", "I Paint", "Inside Outside", "Wintertime" , "I Know Your Name" and "New Voice" might have been in there.  Each song I was thinking, wow, can't wait to play on that one.  I knew exactly what I wanted to play on each one of those songs from the second I heard them, I could hear the whole album in my  head immediately!  Don't quote me, but I believe this was the song we opened with, at the one gig we played as a trio, December of 1988.

You had to keep your eyes on Hubie in those days....

"Wack A Doo"!   This was made up and played at this one rehearsal only if I remember correctly! And though maybe that's a good thing, believe me, we had as much fun doing "Wack A Doo" as anything, ever!  And the tape catches us doing all the arranging and writing on the fly. In a way, "Wack A Doo" is a sort of precursor to "What You Say" if you think about it (though why would you want to!)

.....or you might end up like this.....

Amazingly, right before "Sooey Suzie", Hubie plays the chords to "Something's Falling Apart"!  I knew that it wasn't a new song when we started playing it out in 1990...but I didn't realize it went back this far!  "Sooey Suzie" was another little ditty that was just something we goofed around with.  By this point, we knew we had laid down on tape most everything we knew and were just searching around for the last remaining scraps.  I strangely used to spell it "Siouxie Suzie" (as in "Siouxie and the Banshees"), also "Suey Suzie", but I believe it is supposed to be "Sooey Suzie", perhaps "Sooey, Suzie".....as in a pig call, something which fascinated this era of Life Out Of Balance!

Wow, well...that was a beautiful two hours!  I am...proud!  Proud of us, proud of myself, proud of Hubie and Ted, those guys sound great on this, Hubie does some great singing.  Not to mention these are all his songs.  All of us are contributing ideas, giving orders, and taking suggestions, no ego, all in service of the music at hand. 

Ted trying his hand at everyone else's instruments....

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Ok, now I really must say a word about the so-called "Suffolk Office".  First off, we didn't call it that. I think Ted had an office sign that said "Suffolk Office" in the space, and used it in writing at some point.  That's when I adopted it, for labeling purposes. We just called it "the studio", "the space"...

I think it was through Sean (Poole, brother of Hubie, and major friend of LOOB) that we got this space. Sean.....if you're out there....mountains of love and gratitude are due to delivered your way, sir!  What a hook up.

I always was chauffeured there by Ted or Hubie, I couldn't even tell you where it was, or how to get there.  However, Hubie has provided me with the address:  Oval Road in Islandia!  Doesn't ring a bell with this space cadet, embarrassed to admit it since I was there a hundred times but nevermind. Here it is now.  It makes me fume seeing cars parked there, quite honestly.  Don't they know that the very spot at which they sit and work, Life Out Of Balance, long ago, played "Easier Said Than Done?"

How dare they

It didn't look quite like this, but you get the idea.  Just imagine only two cars in the parking lot.  I can't believe we never threw a party there, or a gig, we always talked about it...I mean, we could have had RAVES there if we wanted to, that's how much space we had.  We probably would have lost the spot, though....and the world would have been deprived of "Stayin'"!  Major good times were shared by exactly three people.  John Russell came and completely overhauled my drums, he was one of the only visitors.  I think Howie rehearsed with us there at the end. 

Let's take a look inside, shall we?

Welcome to the space! If you look to your left, you will see Mike!

There I am... next to the Ladies' Room, 1987.  Here's what my view looked like then:

That's what I initially saw.  But the following year, I moved to right beside that room which housed our PA bins.

See? Incidentally, this is before John Russell put the tom-tom mounts on correctly.  So, now this would be my view:

Right behind the guys is the doorway into the warehouses....you'll see in a second....

These shots of Ted in blue shirt/Hubie in white shirt are from summer of 1988. The others are fall of '87.

Let's go into the warehouse, shall we?

One of the two giant warehouses.  There's another one beyond the archway.  The camera is more than halfway into the room.

An uneasy truce! 

Then there was the lounge area!  "Come on in", Ted says!

Soda, too!

Ted had the white chair....

Hubie had the beanbag....

and I had the air mattress.  And the caved-in chest.

As I've said elsewhere, the night we had to move out, we lock up for one last time, drive away....and Ted stops at a light, looks at me...and I swear the baby gorilla had tears in his eyes.  I can't be sure because I did too! There was a slight sense of "we blew it", we're never going to have this again....people don't even know we had this space!!!! What will become of the band? What will become of all these songs?

That all changed quick when Ted managed to get us a space that - if not surpassing - very much equaled the Suffolk Office, at least in terms of getting major work done, playing some of our best music, and having some of our best times together!  But that's for another post.

In the meantime, let's go back, way back....practically to the beginning....in some ways, it IS the beginning.....these tapes were the first evidence I, at least, had in my hand that, wow, we had a lot of good songs, we were a good band, we were a band, hell, we've got an album here! We had a ways to go, sure.....but it was tapes like these that kept the three very different amigos from walking away ........that....and one hell of an amazing rehearsal space!!!!

This tape snapped and I spent quite some time repairing it.  This is the third tape from 1987 to snap.  One tape - which contained the only full recordings of "Breath Of Life" - was not salvageable.

Suffolk Office, 7/87
I Know Your Name
Easier Said Than Done
Easier Said Than Done
Easier Said Than Done
Difficult Dance
Inside Outside
Inside Outside
Heart And Mind
Heart And Mind
Feast Of Reason
Mental Isolation
Mental Isolation
I Paint
I Paint
Is It Safe?
Wintertime
Wintertime
I Hear A New Voice
I Hear A New Voice
I Hear A New Voice
Stayin'
Stayin'
Phobia
Phobia
Wack-A-Doo
Sooey Suzie

Hubert Poole - guitar, vocal
Ted Schreiber - bass, vocal
Michael Goodman - drums, vocal

recorded on a two-track cassette deck

download here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/hcxoeh4yl5exka7/1987-07+Suffolk+Office.zip

or, if you prefer, Dropbox link....this link will expire within a few weeks:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i40tqobhu2jrmqi/1987-07%20Suffolk%20Office.zip?dl=0 

(as far as me & Ted's sobbing, it was nothing two Twin-Cheeseburger platters couldn't cure.)