Shinn the Writer

The Lost Songs

 

I’ve said a couple of things recently about resurrecting my recording interests. I actually made my first recording with a couple of friends probably (and literally) half a century ago. I still have a digitized copy of that effort, made on a reel-to-reel machine. Great nostalgia! I listen to it from time to time, as well as to several songs I’ve written or parodied over the many years I’ve dabbled in this pursuit.

 

There are four that are missing, all of which I dearly miss.

 

The first was one of my earliest recordings, a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Up from the Skies”. It was from his “Axis: Bold as Love”album. It was the first song that made me take note of what became known as a “wah pedal” because it made the guitar make a wah sound. I had no such pedal, nor did I have Hendrix’s ability to use one. I recorded the song with just an acoustic guitar, a voice, a tambourine for percussion, and a bass. It was the bass part that I was most proud of, and to this day I wish I had the song. It took the place of a lead guitar, even though that hadn’t been the original intent. But as technologies changed and my equipment with it, the tape was lost. Damn. To my knowledge, nobody else ever heard it.

 

Another song I really liked was from the early days of telephone message machines. Rather than use a standard greeting or even recording a boring one of my own, I was inspired by Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”. It came out “I’m not home again – You’ve reached John Shinnick but I’m not home again – Just leave your message when you hear the beep and then – I’ll call you back when I get home again.” Everyone seemed to like it, sadly to the point where people told their friends who called in to hear it and, since old technology limited the number of messages that could be saved (they were saved to tape) so I had to listen to and erase a serious amount of dead space which often had laughter only. Gratifying but impractical. I erased it, never having thought to keep a copy for posterity! (Sorry Willie!)

 

A third song that was lost to the ages was a parody of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” My employer PG&E was in the midst of trying to convert its customer information system with an IBM product called “Cordaptix”. It cried out for a parody and I obliged. I did it mostly for my own amusement, but I thought it came out pretty good. I transferred it to cassette tape and brought it to work to be heard by a select few. One of these people immediately converted the tape to a digital MP3, put it on an email or two, and the sucker went viral, at least within the company. I knew things had gotten out of hand when a friend of mine in Paso Robles asked me if I knew of it. “Know it? I wrote it!” Officially I never owned up to being the author. The song was actually not negative toward the company at all, but the law department had been on a kick about the use of copyrighted material. I never heard from them, but I did see a chain of emails containing the song. One of the people who had passed it on with the comment “This is hilarious” was my vice president.