Thursday, August 8, 2013

The Great? Lost? Yeast? Song?

While going through the old cassettes, I found a few Yeast? ones.  Yeast? was one of my old bands and released a couple of 7" singles in the 1990s (one of which apparently made it to Northern Ireland, where it's now for sale on eBay).  The band started as just a solo project called Yeast (the question mark was added after we discovered there was already a band called Yeast on C/Z Records; we had already been using the name and no one else in our area seemed to have ever heard of the other band anyway--apparently it was a popular name for a band).  Dave from The Angry Housewives helped me record a few songs on his four-track, and the project later evolved into a band when Dave and our Lenin Spoonful buddy Damon joined in on the music.  We also picked up another guitar player named Chris since I was still getting the hang of the whole play guitar and sing thing and Chris could cover me if I flubbed anything.  Mainly, the band performed songs I wrote, but the others occasionally brought in a song, and we even jammed up something together once in a while.  We played around Ohio and Pennsylvania USA in the early 1990s for a few years, but, by the end, the four members of the band were all living in different cities (Chris had left before the first 7" and we forged ahead as a power-trio for awhile, then added our pal Drew from Pogeybait for the tail end of the band) and the logistics just got too hard to manage, so we called it a day by playing a last show in Akron in 1995.  A few years later, I made a cd-r retrospective of the band and fit our best stuff on it.  I left out "Happy Tears" though, much to Damon's dismay, who always liked the song.  We only recorded it once, for a demo tape we used to get gigs at local bars.  It was one of the earliest songs we played as a band, but as we got better songs, some of the early ones dropped out of the repertoire.  "Happy Tears" was one of them.  It was written about a comment that Michael Jackson made about how he cried "happy tears" (Jackson seems to have used the phrase in the song "Heal The World" as well).  This version of the song features the original quartet of Yeast?  It might not have made the cd, but, hey, it's on the Internet now.  That's not bad considering that the rest of the cassette's tracks are going to the landfill.  Don't cry though.  Everything ultimately does.  At least it was fun though, so if you must cry, please cry happy tears.  

1 comment:

  1. This track has (or will shortly be, depending on when you are reading this) been moved to https://soundcloud.com/user-719949092/happy-tears?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

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