My homemade recording of Love on Sale turned 50 years old in 2022. Love on Sale was one of several dozen multi-track songs I recorded in my college dorm room from 1970 to 1974, when I should have been studying physics, chemistry, fugacity, reactors and tensors. Or not — as I still managed to graduate and have a career in engineering.
I have my friend Lou Trott to thank for demonstrating how one could record songs of one’s own devise, track by track, on a sound-on-sound tape recorder. It was eye-opening, like someone showing you how to build an airplane and fly. Once I recorded my first crude song on Lou’s four-track recorder, I was hooked and I had to have a machine of my own.
Why am I sharing Love on Sale, out of the dozens of my recordings, as an example of my college output? Probably because it’s the only time in my life in which I semi-competently played guitar licks in the style of Chuck Berry. Back then, I was under the impression that great guitarists just made up what they played as they went along, everything improvised, nothing practiced. I was good at the “nothing practiced” part. My musical friends seemed to play licks effortlessly, and I envied them. Love on Sale was my first and last attempt to emulate them.
Besides, as one can tell on first listen, it’s evident that I had just changed the strings on my guitar to a lighter gauge and discovered that I could now bend them! Another meager justification for sharing this recording.
I have a great deal more to say about the recording at ART@CHC, where I have posted the audio along with far more historical context than necessary. I have freshened up the mix to sound like I think it might have sounded in October 1972, minus five decades of oxidation. It is what it is, a selection from my musical scrapbook.
