The Lazy Magnet

In 1994 the noise rock band i played drums in, Cocks In Love, broke up. I decided to go solo, stole a disused nylon string classical guitar from my high school band room and proceeded to rip off Lou Barlow as hard as humanly possible. I recorded on one of these:

I would record one pass onto a cassette, rewind and put the cassette into the other tape deck, play that tape and play live along to it while recording onto a second tape. The resulting fidelity was rather poor, but I quickly figured out that I could "mix" levels by placing my mouth, rather than the guitar, closer to the built-in mic.

I filled a 60 minute ToneMaster cassette 

 

with simple songs recorded in the open air. I colored the lightbulbs in my room with green, blue and red markers. My bed frame was broken. I had the Black Flag "Wasted... again' poster on my wall. You could hear the ocean waves breaking through my open window at night during the summer.

Prom 1994

When it was finished I made dubs for friends and would also go to Newbury comics in Boston and walk up to people while they shopped, telling them that I had made a tape and that they should buy it. This actually worked most of the time :)

In the winter of '99-'00 I re-recorded the songs using an 

alesis SR-16

alesis microverb 4

Tascam 424 mkII

and Marc Mancini's fender guitar. I was crashing at his apartment in Attleboro, MA having no where else to live at the time. He was newly sober and would go to meetings everyday, sometimes I would go with him, just to watch. I'm pretty sure all the gear belonged to Marc, come to think of it. I can't remember why I thought it was important to make new versions of the songs from the first tape five years later.

The name Lazy Magnet literally bubbled up (i can still vividly recall the sensation) out of my consciousness one afternoon in 1994 while sitting quietly at my desk. I wrote it down, later decided it should be the title of the cassette and then eventually decided it should be the name of the entire project going forward.