Blake Babies History Part 7
Gary Smith lived up to all his initial promises by bringing us into Fort Apache to cut a demo of all the new songs we had in March of 1988 with engineer Paul Q. Kolderie.
The demo wasn’t meant to shop a record deal—it was a pre-production demo so that Gary could decide which songs to record for commercial release and suggest changes to the arrangements for a stronger record. He focused on the ones he thought had the most commercial potential, which included Lament, Grateful, Your Way or the Highway, and From Here to Burma.
We set dates for later that summer to record, all initially funded by Gary with free studio time. He was confident he could get us a record deal to fund the project. We set dates for June. We ended up canceling those dates because Freda had health issues from her heavy drinking. She ended up in Beth Israel Hospital with a liver infection.
I tried to play Freda’s drum parts, but I quickly learned that I couldn’t play like Freda. Since I’d taught Freda to play, and because her style was so simple, I’d assumed what she brought to the band was more a personality than a unique musical ability. I learned that her distinctive feel was essential to the sound of the band, something I couldn’t recreate. I’d been so deeply immersed in the creative development of our band that I failed to recognize how far Freda had come as a musician in such a short time. For the first but not the last time, I realized that without Freda, we didn’t sound like us.
Around the same time, I went into a small studio in nearby Newton, Massachusetts with The Lemonheads to record their follow-up album with their producer/engineer, Tom Hamilton. The Lemonheads were in a power struggle because Ben Deily wrote songs much faster than Evan, throwing off the balance. They didn’t talk about it openly, but tensions grew. I knew my days as a Lemonhead were numbered with everything going on with Blake Babies. I kept my head down and did my best with the recordings. We worked so quickly that I didn’t have time to get my drum parts perfect. It felt like they were losing their way.
