THE GRUMPIES - "Barn Demos" - Tape - 1998

 
   In the first part of 1998, I spent a lot of time driving between Birmingham, AL and Starkville, MS, sleeping on floors, working in a bookstore, playing shows in little dives and coffeeshops and living really cheaply. I played drums in THE GRUMPIES and we were trying to get our shit together to record an LP for Recess Records. Whether or not we got our shit together is totally debatable, but we did actually drive out to Los Angeles and record an entire LP (plus some) in a little shitbox of a room while some hack with a goatee (I think he said he recorded FACE TO FACE also) turned knobs. That's a story for another day though....
    When this tape was recorded, we hadn't even thought about crossing the Mississippi yet. We practiced in an old-ass barn in Louisville (that's "Lewis-ville"), MS behind Bubba's house. Bubba was Jayson's (guitar/vocals) 95 year old grandmother who made the best cornbread and was quite possibly one of the sweetest grandmas you could hope to meet. She would always make us stop practicing when it got too late (around 7 or 8, I think). Anyhow, this little demo was recorded just for us on the four track in the barn. We were working on new songs for the LP and beyond. Some of these appeared on the LP and some of them never showed up anywhere else. For reasons beyond our control (because we could barely even control ourselves at the time), Amy (bass/vocals) was not with us at the barn that day, so Jayson and I just recorded these songs without her and Jayson overdubbed the bass himself. I always liked how this turned out because I think it was closer to what we were turning into, rather than the hyper-manic, Chipmunk-style pop-punk we were pummeling people with at our live shows. The songs are a bit slower and darker, at times. When we played some of these songs live, you could see the pop-punk kids eyes just kinda glaze over as they waited for us to speed it up.
    The first six songs are Jayson and I in the barn. Songs 7 through 10 are just Jayson playing everything himself in the barn. I will make no excuses for tape hiss and deterioration. This thing has been sitting in a box, rotting, since 1998.

DOWNLOAD

If you want the original GRUMPIES demo tape from 1996, you can find it right here. I just re-uploaded the files so that you can download it again.

If you want the GRUMPIES LP, you might have to scour the internet. You can buy it on iTunes, but I have no idea where that money goes. I would upload it  here, but I don't feel like getting another file-hosting account shut down just yet. You can still buy the CD from Recess Records. I had to steal my copy of it off of TOYS THAT KILL's merch table because Recess wouldn't give me one single copy. Take that how you want.
(negative views are mine: not representative of the whole band)