Here is the bootleg of the month:

Kingsessing Sessions (1997) - The Town Managers (mp3, 18.8 MB)

I'm not sure exactly when in 1997 this was recorded, I suspect it was early in the year, but I know that it was recorded on 4-track Tascam cassette in the basement of a large house on Kingsessing Street in Philadelphia where I used to live with Chris and Brian from The Town Managers. We broke up in 1999 shortly before The Low Budgets formed. In this band Chris had the stage name Rick Luau. He played drums for the first half of our live set and played guitar and sang for the second half. I sang and played guitar for the first half, while Brian, who went by the name Frick Jones (and is now the drummer for No! Go! Tell!) played bass for the first half and drums for the second half.

In this time period we had a habit of recording every one of our rehearsals, sometimes on two-track cassette with built in mic, and sometimes - as in this case - with multiple microphones feeding into a Mackie Mixer and then mixed down to two stereo tracks of a Tascam 4-track recorder. For this session we were doing more of a recording session for practice. I don't think we had any other goals for the recording except to get a demo of some of our current songs. We had yet to release any 7 inches. (We would soon record a 7-inch e.p. for Shredder Records, followed by a second 7-inch e.p. for Marigold Records.)

We recorded one set of stereo tracks for the instruments and then did a second pass to record the vocals, also mixed through the Mackie mixer, to two stereo tracks. We all wore headphones and each had a microphone for the vocal recording and ran through all of the songs "live". It sounds like we were goofing off quite a bit. We mixed it down to DAT as one long track not bothering to pause between songs. Our goofing off rendered the recording ultimately useless as a demo, though it was a fun process for us. Here it is for those brave or curious enough to download it.

Songs:

1. Maybe
2. Secret
3. Muavian Landlord (take 1)
4. Runaway interlude
5. Muavain Landlord (take 2)