Here's a rocker from my band back in high school, The Raid. Tim wrote the lyrics just over 37 years ago on his 15th birthday, and I wrote the music a few months later in August 1980. It was recorded in the fall of 1981 in our space in Jon's basement. It's a rocker highlighting my new Electro-Harmonix PolyChorus in the flanger mode. I think we processed the whole backing track through a flanger setting --heard most obviously on Jon's cymbals and drum rolls. Here are the recording notes:

We set up a tape deck and put one mic over the drums, and one mic about five feet away from Tim's and Andy's amps which were at right angles to each other and both facing away from Jon. We spent Thursday (October 8th) night getting things set up and placed, and Friday was spent trying to figure out why it didn't sound like it did the night before. We found out Saturday that a mic had been unplugged all day Friday... Saturday we did most of the backing tracks. Friday the 16th we did the rest of the backing tracks. Saturday the 17th we started the vocals, and November 2nd we did the rest. We did the "overdubbing" by putting the mono-ized output of the backing track in one channel of my amp, and putting the vocals in the other, which allowed for reverb and tone control on the mix. The mono output of that was put through Polychorus to make a synthesized stereo output that sounds pretty ok. We did: Don't Know, Midnight Rider, Live It Up, Midnight Sun, You Never Know, Poor Man's Hell, and Pressure; and [covers] I Need To Know, The Breakup Song, Hold On Loosely, and Good Times Roll.

Check out the pics of us above, from 1982, and click the pic for a whole album of old pics. And check out the guitar tablature (and some regular bass clef notation for that rippin' guitar riff!) below.

Appears on the album The Raid along with six others from this Fall 1981 session, plus 5 from The Raid on Moonfish from September 1983. The same trio of me and Jon and Tim called ourselves Voyager from 1979-1980, The Raid from 1981-1986, and Everything But Anchovies from 1986-1989 and beyond.

I think the end took me by surprise when overdubbing the vocal!

Thanks for listening!

-Andy

Don't Know

Don't know where I'm gonna run to
Can't find no place to hide
I thought you would never leave me
That you would always be by my side

But I was wrong and you were gone
Without a single word
Now there's no one left to hold me like you did

We'd found our dreams together
Don't say it's not true
So why'd you go and leave our dreams behind

Now I'm left alone here 
No one else around here
You don't know how much 
I want you by my side

My nights are long now that you are gone
They're long and cold and dark
Now there's no one left to hold me like you did


Lyrics by Tim Odell on 6 May 1980 (his 15th birthday!)
Music by Andy Wyatt on 9 August 1980
©1980 by The Raid