The Mystery (mk I), June 1986; standing Dave Ford, Paul Stenvig, Gene Treppeda, Mark Devere; sitting Craig Devere; photo by Ron Heimbecher
Since the Memorial Day weekend I’ve had some songs playing in my head. Not too unusual but these songs are all from the same album, one that hasn’t been heard by too many people. I have two copies of the CD, both of which are numbered (3 & 4) and signed by the producer. I think the reason this album is in my head is that it was recorded, all nine songs, and mixed over a single Memorial Day weekend twenty-five years ago.
My lifetime friend Paul Stenvig owns a company called Beyond Sound, which in turn owns the Capture Communications Group record label. Just before Memorial Day weekend in 1986, he had the opportunity to give a new model Tascam one-inch multi-track recorder an evaluation run.
“Take it and ‘play with it’ over the weekend,” they said. They didn’t understand how seriously Paul ‘played’ with things. A few phone calls later, a marathon session was set, and I was invited to co-engineer. The musicians, a group of friends Paul had been working with, weren’t really a band but had been playing together for a while and had a few songs laid out. The songs had been composed by brothers Craig and Mark Devere and friend Dave Ford, and I hadn’t heard any of them prior to the start of the session.
With the exception of Paul, everyone had regular day jobs, I was working in the local cop shop, so the session started at 5:30 on Friday night. By about ten, we had laid down reference tracks for ten songs and set up a schedule for each of the musicians to work separately on overdubs. Paul and I crashed at the studio for a couple of hours at a time while we swapped engineering tasks. We scheduled mixdown for Monday. Seventy-five hours after we started, we had master tapes for an album called How Many Pieces and a new band named The Mystery.
Craig Devere, vocals; Mark Devere, keyboards and vocals; Dave Ford, guitars; Paul Stenvig, bass; and Gene Treppeda, drums. More songs, and a number of music videos later, I joined The Mystery (mk.II) on vocals, keyboards, and guitars.
How Many Pieces back cover
Here’s the track list. Perhaps I’ll have more in the future about some of these songs.
1. R.E.R.E.S.T.B.
2. Glass Wall
3. Carpenters & Builders
4. Solid Ground
5. Angels Pin
6. Make a Wish
7. Man No Eat
8. Rock Slide
9. So I
We didn’t do video for any of these tracks, but over the period of several months following this amazing weekend, we did a number of music videos featuring the same musicians, many of which were incorporated into the television comedy series Detective Rock Hound, from Beyond Sound.
HoarseMan of... 