['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Hello listeners, and welcome to episode two of On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these fondly remembered superstars of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
In this episode, we continue looking back at the very early days of the band, and their growth from nothing to something [Gratuitous band in-joke that I will probably explain later]. When we left off last week, the band were midway through the first ever live show, at Josh from Mr Feenjeen’s 17th birthday, and about to begin a song that would prove, possibly more than anything else written at the time, just how purposefully, irritatingly and obtusely different Doctor Rock were aiming to be.
Abasid was a loosely structured instrumental Middle Eastern styled jam, normally lasting somewhere between five and ten minutes. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Eventually, almost a year later, it became a proper song called I Swear to God, with lyrics and structure and a regular running time of around 3:50 and everything. That was later though and before all that, Abasid was a lumbering behemoth of a song; an ambitious jam played by musicians who, given their experience and ability, should have had no place playing ambitious jams.
In fact, if there’s one thing particularly memorable about the first gig, it’s just how unready Doctor Rock were for an audience. Probably that’s true of every single band, and it didn’t matter, of course – debuting at Josh Feenjeen’s party wasn’t exactly playing an industry showcase or anything – but there were problems. Problems aside from, as mentioned last week, our lack of a singer and drummer, which had forced me to attempt to play bass and sing badly at the same time, and had required the use of keyboard drums from Scrappy’s Casio.
There was also the guitar situation. At this time, we had Clemo and Jake on guitar – in theory, one of them was probably rhythm and the other lead, but I doubt anyone could have worked out which was which. Frankly, Jake and Clemo probably didn’t know which was which, and neither seemed in a rush to nominate themselves for one position or the other. Mostly, I would say this is because Clemo was barely capable of power chords at the time, and Jake was apparently completely incapable of doing anything other than standing there blankly looking at the rest of the band while holding his guitar. It’s kind of the defining image of the band at that time.
It’s probably a sign that maybe the practice should have continued all day before the party, and the band should really have skipped two hours spent waving at the Queen as she drove around the lake. But you know, it’s the fucking Queen – what can you do, right? Can’t ignore the fucking queen.
What, you may be wondering, is an Abasid? It’s a Baghdad based dynasty that ruled from 750 to 1258. It’s also the first sort of vaguely Middle Eastern sounding word in the dictionary. There is, now that I think about it, some possibility that the song wasn’t actually yet known as Abasid at this early stage – for a very brief period, it was known simply as ‘Prince of Persia’. Because, you know, nerds.
I don’t really recall what the first version of Abasid, played that night, sounded like. Maybe it wasn’t bad, but more likely it was dreadful, overlong and ponderous for the audience. As with last week’s episode, we’re light on actual audio from the show in question. However, while last week we heard a selection from the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ demo, this week we take Abasid from another early demo – ‘Sing Along With the Doctor’. ‘Sing Along With the Doctor’ was a demo put together by Scrappy and I – just keyboard and bass – to allow incoming Doctor Rock singer Matt to write lyrics. The kind of sparse weirdness you’re about to hear is probably quite similar to that first gig.
So enjoy this week’s selection, friends, and please, do look out for the .MP3 below. Until next week, this has been ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
Download Abasid
