HomeSHAPESHIFTER….. VOLUMES 3 AND 4…..LINER NOTES
Prior to 9-11-2001 I was touring with a very good 4 piece band….all the Musicians were intuitive and adept at their instruments and I was playing the Music I had always wanted to play……….Jazz.
The band and myself improvised on every song……no two performances were ever the same……….we played old Jazz standards on electric instruments…we played Blues….R&B……….some Country and Western……………just the stuff we liked to play and we enjoyed the hell out of it……which is important to me……..how can I play a song well if I don’t enjoy playing it?.........and if I don’t enjoy it……….How can I expect an audience to enjoy it?.............
My response to those who wondered why I didn’t play all the old QMS tunes was this…”If you want to hear that…..go play the record………I’m not the same musician I was 30 years ago……I have changed and those songs no longer satisfy me……If I played them I would be lying to you and there only a certain number of times you can go on a stage and bull-shit the audience before God starts to take away a little piece of your Soul”……….
QMS was a Jazz band from the very beginning anyway……..we never knew what the hell we were going to play and I think that had something to do with our audience appeal…..the audience could sense that there were a group of men on the stage who were gonna jump off a musical cliff and they wanted to go along for the ride………….and I personally did not want to disappoint them…….and to be completely honest I don’t think I can play a song the same way twice……..maybe I took too much Acid….who knows?
I never used a set-list…………and sometimes I would change the key or tempo arbitrarily just so everyone was on their toes and wide awake…..sometimes I would play a song that nobody in the band had ever played before……and 99% of the time it was magnificent……”Ettione Moi” that was my motto…..”Astonish Me”………..Sometimes the band would find such a cool deep groove that I wouldn’t play anything…….just listen and be astonished………..why jump in the middle of a good thing and fuck it up?
Quicksilver was “back in the pocket”….working regularly and beginning to pull ourselves out of the mud when 9-11 came along……..and just like that…..POOOF…...everything changed……..no more shows to play………consequently……….no more band………no money to cover the overhead at my recording studio which I’d had for 20 years……absolutely ZERO………….it was unbelievable……..I tore the Studio apart by myself….no help from any of my friends….in fact not even a word…..they all came and got the stuff they had stored and left the stuff they didn’t want so I could haul it away and they just never spoke to me again……….all except for my manager Ron Polte who had managed QMS from the beginning…..I did it all at night with no electricity because the parking lot was empty……it was very strange sometimes…..climbing around on those 22 foot ceilings with nothing but a flashlight…….kinda like a Horror Movie……..
By Halloween I was finished... I took everything home a truckload at a time and piled it in my yard…..then the County told me I had to move it out of visible sight because I was fucking up the property value of the neighborhood….so I did that…sold my 24 track recording machine…..my mix-down Console…most of my playback speakers for a penny on the dollar………..and then I got really pissed off at Music in general for about 3 years……..I never wanted to touch another Musical instrument for as long as I lived…….I tried that………I have tried it before………and it never works for me…….I always come back to the Music….it is what I do best and seems to be the most beneficial thing for myself and everyone else around me…..when I pick up my guitar or sit down at a Piano….all my pain goes away…..it never fails.
During the time I was fortunate enough to have the Studio I recorded everything….I wrote songs profusely…recorded them…….and recorded every rehearsal……..I tried to write a new song every day and for a while I actually did it…..I would go in the morning with a Musical idea and go home sometimes 18 hours later with a recording of a song………….a lot of the time it was just me playing everything……but I did it so I could play it for the other musicians ……that way they could get some idea of my original concept…….and we could go from there…..I never told anyone what to play….I just said “Play what you feel in your heart and that will be right”…………and it usually was.
Some of the tunes we recorded are lost forever…………but in the last year or so I have been going through all those tapes and come up with about 500 hours of very good Music….some of the best playing I ever did in my life is on those tapes…..not that I won’t play better again………but at the present time I have to get them onto CD’s and out to the public who wants to hear it…as limited as they are……there are still a group of fans who actually like to hear me play!!!
The third Disc in the Shapeshifter series is all original demos I did when the songs were “Born” …Oddly enough I like a lot of them better than the finished product……but you can be the judge of that……..it is mostly me playing everything on Keyboard and Guitar……..but it has a certain “charm” that got lost in the mix somewhere, at least in my mind anyway…….but like I said you can be the judge of that.
The fourth Disc is composed of mixes of the songs from Shapeshifter which Michael Lewis and I re-mixed without any vocal tracks and just added some guitar tracks and keyboards and weird fucking noises to make an instrumental version……...it’s kinda neat in it’s own way….for those of you who have never experienced recording………there is a point when you are mixing a track …..before you add the vocals that is so fucking cool you just want to stop right there and leave it alone………that is what the 4th disc is.
After I get those 2 CD’s up and finished….which is getting very near…….I have 14 more that are comprised of Live shows and Live Studio cuts from rehearsals with all the jive-ass bull-shit and snappy comments left in…….Actually Rehearsal is not the right word to use…..we never actually rehearsed………….we just practiced “playing together” there’s a big difference.
There are a lot of repeats of songs…….but when you have 15 different cuts of “Nica’s Dream” for instance……..which are all good and all totally different…….which ones do you throw away? All that Music will be released in it’s own time cause I don’t want to “Flood the market”……know what I mean??.......and then I can on with the business at hand which is recording all the songs I have written and never got to record….and they are still inside my head and it makes me fucking “CRAZY!!!!!”…..
Gary Duncan… July 4th…2004