I vividly remember when the first Iced Ink song “Spin Cycle” (or at least the DNA of it) was born.. it was Friday night in January of 1999 and my significant udder at the time was in Florida. I had the charming old Grand Ave. apartment in St. Paul alllllll to myself for the whole weekend so I did what any party animal would: put on my PJs, cracked open a Diet Coke, busted out my guitar, and sat on the living room floor with my back against our futon with my drum machine and 4-track at my side.
I was fixin’ to write my own version of “Satch Boogie” (hindsight: psshyeah harrright) so programmed the same hi-hat pattern that song starts with into my BOSS DR550mkii drum machine and started building from there. Thankfully it ended up sounding nothing like “Satch Boogie”. That song had already been done… and I’d already spent the last 8 years trying to be a Joe Satriani/Eddie Van Halen clone on my demo recordings. After nearly 14 years of playing geetar I was finally starting to figure out how to put my own kind of music together, complete with bass lines that did more than thump away at the root notes. It’s called a “bass guitar”, so I figured why not play it like a guitar?
On the 4 track cassette j-card I labeled this new song “BED”. It went like this:
Aw, how cute.
Off it went into my little suitcase-o-master tapes, aka The Vault, where it lived until a few years later in 2003 when I upgraded to a new drum machine, the BOSS DR770. I was desperate to record something with it to get used to what its buttons did but didn’t have any ideas. After going through those old tapes “Bed” popped up and I thought Hm.. maybe we could do something with that? The hi-hat cymbal at the beginning sort of reminded me of watching the front loader laundry machine in the basement of my apartment building sloshing around. That lead to a little name game brainstorming, and one of the first things that came to mind was Annette Bening in The Great Outdoors talking about how enjoyable it was to lean up against the warsh machine when it was on spin cycle. A-ha! There we go. About 10 years prior to that I made another Great Outdoors soundbyte-inspired tune that will maybe see the light of day. Actually… Now that I’m thinking about how that one went maybe not…
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With that title it was a done deal.. “Bed” was dusted off and re-tooled for the newly-formed living, breathing version of Iced Ink. Here’s that one:
The band recorded it for the 2004 album “There’s a Bee in Here” and although it was always fun to play and went over well I was never happy with some of the clunky transitions in it. I retired it when moving to New Yolk in 2009 with hopes of maybe reworking it some day or just leaving it in the past altogether and focus on writing new music.
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Fast forward to 2017: A week or so ago I was itching to do some recording but the inspiration well was dry, so decided to dust off Spin Cycle and try to give it a little TLC. Now it goes like this, complete with the movie clip that the title came from:
Score! The transitions were smooved out and there’s a much better flow to it now. What a difference 8 years makes, not only with songwriting/arranging but technology. That first version from 2001 was done on a barely functioning Fostex 4 track tape recorder which is why it sounds so wobbly. The second one was done in an early version of Cakewalk on a PC that could barely handle playing more than 8 tracks at once. Last but not least, the 2017 version was brought into this world via Logic Pro X with Toontrack’s Superior Drummer on drums, which does a darn good job of sounding way more like a human drummer than my old drum machines.
Welcome back to the fold, Spin Cycle. I can’t wait to play you live again. You’re 18 years old now!
They grow up so fast…
