Goodbye, mother******s! (and Gary Busey)

N

NotThatBright

New member
The thread title is an homage to one of the best lines of an excellent movie (Platoon), which happens right after King gets in the helicopter to leave Vietnam for good.

kinggoodbye.jpg

Forgive the verbosity of this post. I can't say that it will be worth the time you spend reading it, but what the hey.

I'm done with any kind of home recording (and by extension this website) until such time as I'm living in a place where I can play drums again, which likely won't be for a year or more. Thank you to all you guys who helped me out with stuff, gave opinions on mixes, or just shot the shit with me when I was bored.

This is the first song I ever wrote. I actually wrote and recorded my first version of this about two weeks after I had acquired drums, a bass and a guitar (a year and several months ago)- it was on a Tascam 4-track recorder that I bought off amazon one night when I was trying to think of a way to motivate myself to actually learn to play the instruments I had just bought. I saw recording as a way to "make learning fun"... which sounds like something a high school teacher would say in the month between when she gets out of college and when her idealistic spirit is completely broken by the sheer indifference and cruelty of the kids she's trying to teach.

I believe I recorded this second, more polished version of this song (which appears here) shortly before when I got on this website for the first time and started learning how to do actually do this stuff properly. At the time I remember thinking that I nailed this mix... and compared to the stuff I had recorded before, I did. This was done with my Tascam DP-24 mixer, which I still use today, but with one overhead mic (an SM57) and the cheapest drum mics I could find on Amazon- some CADs. The first decent drum mic I ever bought was a D112 (a kick mic). I can't remember if I had it at this time... if I did, I obviously had no clue how to EQ or mix it yet (though I don't think the kick sounds totally bad).

This song, GARY BUSEY, is a song that I actually started writing at a local diner when I was 16 or 17 after a regular weekend night of high school drinking. One of the guys I was with was a few years older and was playing in a local punk band (a neighbor of mine who was a cool guy but I seldom hung out with), and I told him that I was going to write him a song for his band because I just assumed I'd be a great songwriter. I came up with the idea of writing a song about Gary Busey... I suppose because he seemed like an admirable person. I think I'd only seen him in Lethal Weapon by that point in my life, but I must have heard something about his exploits/insanity to have made me think he'd be a good subject for a song (this would have been around '94, which, for all intents and purposes, was "before the internet"). I grabbed a napkin and pen from the lady running the place and was off. My aforementioned friend and I went back and forth writing verses that I'm sure were great. I don't remember if we had girls with us, but if I had a girlfriend with me at the time, I probably deserved to get dumped for this.

20+ years later, when I wrote this version, all I could remember from the song we wrote that night was the first line... "Gary Busey, la la la". So as soon as I could play a simple drumbeat, I came up with a simple melody, started with that excellent first line, and wrote a song in the vein of the obscenity we wrote that night. I never posted this here before because Gary Busey seems like the kind of guy who, if he heard it, would either track me down and kill me, or track me down, come in my house and never leave. I'm not sure which I'd prefer. I still think he's a great guy, though.

Song is all original, except for a short part right after the second verse where I borrowed some lyrics from a silly song called "Dope Money" by GG Allin. The night I recorded this second version someone must have mentioned that song for whatever reason, and I guess I thought it would be amusing to include a quick homage to it, as it could be easily related to Mr. Busey. I also ripped off the music from Dope Money for that short portion, but that tune was obviously ripped off from the old video game "Spy Hunter", so we'll call it even.

So here's my home recording swan song. I don't have the original tracks I recorded anymore, so this is the mix I made many months ago. I must have done this second version right after GB was in that amazon commercial a while ago... I quote some of the lines from it at the end. Song contains off-color lyrics, as it obviously should. Tell me what you think!

https://soundcloud.com/user92696274096/gary-busey/s-L4x2g
 
Seeing as you can't remix this i s'pose all i can say is that it sounds ok to me. The song is generally offensive and slanderous enough to overlook any mix details anyway.

As far as ripping anyone off goes, well i didn't notice that either, and i spent many hours of my youth playing spy hunter and may have 'inadvertently' ripped that off at some point myself. What goes around comes around.

I haven't been recording a lot myself lately, which probably spares those here who commented on my mixes in the past some pain. I always liked your originals more so than the covers you posted, and i've got nothing against covers. Can't play for a year? Not at all? That must suck, but then again, i'm not your neighbour. :D

I always liked that film Platoon, memories sort of etched into my mind as a teenager, sitting on old canvas chairs in a tiny little wooden theatre near the beach when i first saw it. But even then i remember wondering what did happen to King? i thought 'what if his chopper got shot down?' or thought he might have fallen out the door when they hit some turbulence as a result of his precarious position. Now is that cynical? I hope he made it out - hope you do too haha :drunk:
 
Anders Erisian said:
Seeing as you can't remix this i s'pose all i can say is that it sounds ok to me. The song is generally offensive and slanderous enough to overlook any mix details anyway.

As far as ripping anyone off goes, well i didn't notice that either, and i spent many hours of my youth playing spy hunter and may have 'inadvertently' ripped that off at some point myself. What goes around comes around.

I haven't been recording a lot myself lately, which probably spares those here who commented on my mixes in the past some pain. I always liked your originals more so than the covers you posted, and i've got nothing against covers. Can't play for a year? Not at all? That must suck, but then again, i'm not your neighbour. :D

I always liked that film Platoon, memories sort of etched into my mind as a teenager, sitting on old canvas chairs in a tiny little wooden theatre near the beach when i first saw it. But even then i remember wondering what did happen to King? i thought 'what if his chopper got shot down?' or thought he might have fallen out the door when they hit some turbulence as a result of his precarious position. Now is that cynical? I hope he made it out - hope you do too haha :drunk:
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments. As you mentioned, there's nothing I can do about the mix, so I was just wondering if anyone else found the song as amusing as I thought it was when I did it. As far as "slanderous"... well, I didn't mean to besmirch Gary in any way. I was sort of channeling my 16-year-old self when I wrote the lyrics, which isn't that hard to do when you're as immature as I am. Gary's great. You have to look at him with the same kind of admiration or respect that people used to look at Evel Knievel with... which is somewhere between "that guy's got fucking balls" and "that guy's fucking nuts".

I'm moving out of my house into an apartment far away, so the drums are in storage until further notice. I'll eventually buy another house, but that won't be for a while. No interest in recording without playing drums. To me, the drumming was the cake... everything else was the icing. Too much icing and no cake, and you get diabetes! Or something to that effect. :)

Spy Hunter was great. I agree, that music was too good to not be ripped off constantly.

I always liked your songs. I am especially fond of that one where you took a bunch of samples of the Aussie politician speaking and having "you're a liar" playing over or around them. Good stuff!

"What if his chopper got shot down?" Don't you even bring up the possibility. King is awesome. I only want to believe that he made it back to Tennessee, where he could sniff the pines, and sniff that cross-mounted pussy down by the river... Hot damn! :)
 
Oh, Ok.
I live without real drums in the house.
I'm certain you'll get an itch and have to home record it.
Gary did a good turn in The Buddy Holly Story - turning Hardin into a hard one.
 
OK, first funny song. Mix wasn't that bad.

Second, I don't know why you have to give it up. Even though you are moving into an apartment, with everything so portable, just need a good place to track drums from time to time. I put together a little portastudio, everything in a bag for tracking for about $600, 16 tracks using the Tascam 1800 (OK, for most people more like 10-14). But it can be done pretty inexpensive.

You shouldn't give it up having come this far, just rethink how you are going to do it.
 
I thought the lyrics were pretty amusing but then I'm easily amused. I used to have a girlfriend in Tulsa who babysat for Gary Busey...or was it Gailard Sartain? Hell I can't remember. I've been trying to forget that girl for thirty years and I'm getting closer all the time.
 
Hey bright, hope you get back into it as soon as you can! I have only been here a short while but your one of the people I look forward to hear from and I hope you stick around even just to comment on stuff.
 
haha, i meant slanderous in a good way. I'm not one to take offense to anything much, and i always found your disregard for social graces amusing. Didn't think you were besmirching anyone, and even if you were, well whatever. I'm probably just as immature as you though.
 
I think there are some good lines in it, but in my opinion the constant barrage of filthy language takes away from the humor. It's a distraction from what's actually being said. I'm no prude and the f bomb dosen't bother me a lot. I just think that if the foul language content was cut down and you found another way to say the same thing, the comical impact of the overall tune would be more powerful. Also, the impact of the foul language is more powerful when used more sparingly. It's a funny tune worth improving upon IMO.
Thats my 2 cents for what it's worth.
 
I think it would sound better if the vocal were sung harder. It's kind of punk rock, but the vocal delivery is more They Might Be Giants.
 
I liked the song. Very cool. The bass part was particularly cool.

I'm going to miss you. I like your contributions to the site. I wish you'd just stay around for the hell of it.

The only mix critique I have is the gutiars are too muffled. Needs more upper midrange. Everything else was cool.
 
Have a good one, man.

This mix ended up in a kind of weird middle ground. It's too tightly-performed and cleanly-tracked for the crappy punk-rock vibe but probably too sparse and low-energy for the heavy, super-produced pop punk vibe. You may want to revisit it and try to do either a much better or much worse job.
 
I like the fun, slightly-smart-assy punk feel of that track. The vocals seemed a little buried, but for the most part the mix was good.

I wish you good luck on finding a suitable place for your drums!
 
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