REC : Dartmouth’s GARAGE BANDS that never were

Never practised in garages anyway.

As a musical genre, the bands I saw rehearsing, in the Sixties and Seventies, in Dartmouth Nova Scotia Canada (Canada - important bit, that) certainly made the right sounds, certainly fit the bill.

But I think the myth of all amateur bands rehearsing in garages much better fits sunny warm southern California or Australia than most of the rest of the world.

Where, if garages even existed, they were freezing cold much of the year.

Yeah, Canada. As in : cold.

Bands that I knew always rehearsed downstairs, in the basement’s REC room.

More accurate then to call this sort of music, REC.

There is quite a story on how that name emerged.

The word parlour for the ‘best’ room in the house had long been replaced by newer words, but the form and function still fit.

A room to the front of the house, with soft wall coverings and plush furnishings that made the room sound relatively quiet and sedate.

Often called the front room - for obvious reasons, ditto sitting rooms.

But as they came to be called ‘living’ rooms, they underwent a subtle shift that was made clear when they became, in turn, the family room.

They gradually shifted to the back of the house, open both to the kitchen and to the back deck.

Still at least semi-formal when they needed to be, louder than the old parlour style rooms but not as loud as the REC room downstairs.

REC rooms started out a big open room, taking up about half of a semi-finished basement, designed for noisy children and were called, appropriately, rumpus rooms.

Then as teenagers, the kids now wanted to take the toys out and to bring a big games unit in.

And sometimes parents (ie Dad) intervened to fixed it up a little so he could put a bar to entertain his drinking buddies in a man-cave.

But frequently teenagers also found the REC room an excellent place to rehearse as a band : big, warm, often with a bathroom, plenty of electricity.

Hard concrete walls and floor and no isolating insulation on the open floor boards and joists ceiling meant mom and dad upstairs heard nothing all night but the bass-line.

The sound downstairs was even worse, in my opinion, so when I built my recording studio in the REC room in my parents’ tiny home on Hastings Drive, I made sure to improve it.

My success was limited, mostly because the current culture among musicians back then mitigated against it : this was still the era of bringing big stage amps into studios and then turning them up to ten.

I was just briefly in one Halifax studio beneath the Zapata's restaurant before I had to leave (as my ears were bleeding) because I honestly thought the volume from the hard rock band inside was about 110 decibels, yet with the massive studio door closed you heard nothing in the corridor outside.

It had cost over a million dollars in today’s money to achieve that though.

Still, by the time my much more modest efforts were complete, entering my studio slash REC room was a bit like entering an anechoic chamber : corpses in a funeral home made more noise.

Good enough that when once, by mistake, I recorded Bella Coast Bounty only on the room mike rather than through all their individual close-up mikes, it sounded so good I released it as a record : Shake, Rattle & Roll, Strident Records SR 826 Boy Side*.....

*Yeah, I thought using A and B sides was a waste of good ink : one side was boy-oriented, the other  girl-oriented.

But even then, even with all the sound-padding, I still noticed that groups with very small or no amps (for I also recorded vocal jazz, folk and country-pop, as well as rock and R&B) sounded best recorded in REC rooms. A parlour is a parlour is a parlour.

So if I claim that there are still four to six person bands making amateur parlour music (often on ipads with the Garageband app) and releasing it on Youtube, where actually is their music being performed ?

Probably not in the the equally mythical bedroom : much too small.

And rarely in the family room : too open to constant interruptions.

Nope, just like the good old Sixties, its still be made in the REC room.

I credit Greg Shaw, he of WHO PUT THE BOMP fame - a really really nice guy - with popularizing the term garageband  in 1973 after he reviewed Lenny Kaye’s compilation album NUGGETS from 1972.

But in my communication with Greg, I never had the nerve to task that term, even though I made it clear that my own recordings were all coming out of a basement REC room.

Like all Canadians back then, I was too in awe of America in those days to really do my own thinking, I’m afraid.

After all, I had deliberately labelled my record label, Strident Records, as delivering rocking sounds from the Memphis of the East....