Follow, For Now 30th Anniversary reissue
Chuck and Jason over at Solid Brass Records spearheaded this process, and we tagged along. We had the original reel for Follow, For Now for about 24 years, moving with us from apartment to apartment, city to city.
The original story of making Junk of Myth was complex and convoluted, and Chuck was there for almost all of it as it was a co-release with Sound on Sound. The first thing we did with the reel was take it to George Horn at Fantasy to transfer it to digital. Before we did that, we were told that the reel was flaking and needed to be "baked." This is counterintuitive but what did we know - it wasn't stored in a cool dry place this whole time and moisture was a bigger issue than heat. What we got back after the baking and trasfer we realized was not a master, but the original recording reel! The drums and instruments were hard-panned and all the takes were audible. Doh!
So the next step was finding Someone who had a 1" reel-to-reel machine! The Boltons of Santa Cruz were identified, but then we needed a way to record the analog tape to digital! That's when Simon (bassist) and George drove down to Santa Cruz with a DAT tape machine that was rented from Guitar Center.
I for one had no idea what I would be doing other than overseeing the project. I don't recall if the songs were actually in the proper order or we had to mix those in the correct order. I think at the end of the reel we realized some other band had already used it but it played backwards, a common enough practice in reusing tapes.
I don't think i'd ever touched a knob for a recording; I used to put on shows where we used guitar amps for vocals, what did I know? Somehow I got my grubby hands on the controls at some point, just to assist Simon. I do remember that we pumped the bass up on Age of Cinders, and it sounded sick.
So that leads us to 2025 and the 30th Anniversary of Follow, For Now. Youth Strike Chord was Drew Gilbert's label, from the bands Fisticuffs Bluff and Floodgate, among others. It was nearly impossible to find this LP at the time outside of shows. A friend had dubbed me a cassette copy which I'd pretty much worn out. The Sorting That Evens Things Out appeared on a few compilations and was kind of their hit song. This was the genesis of Zum as a label - the first project I wanted to do was to anthologize all of the pre-San Lorenzo's Blues material (the Cap'n Jazz anthology had come out in '98, but this was also fairly common practice in the '90s to reissue obscure vinyl to CD). Now we've come full circle and reissues are on vinyl!
Liam Nelson and the band took time with the individually transferred tracks in digital workstations that did not even exist for prosumer folks in Y2K. Some tracks are significantly louder and shorter, some are not far from the originals, but when it comes to this record, there are several flavors of "original" since we had no version of the LP master. I'm thinking of the recent Replacements mixes that came out that emphasize different tonal aspects and reflect the style of the mixer.
Liam was in the post-Nuzzle band The Dying Californian, so he knows the band and the material. New artwork was brought together and assembled by Sonny Kay who also ran the distribution company that handled both Zum and Sound on Sound in its early days. Elements of the original LP and insert were mixed with scanned versions of original photos. A photo of Summer Mastous from Fisticuffs Bluff graces the back cover - it is a clear version of one of the blown out images on the black silkscreened plastic covers. Will Killingsworth (from Orchid) did the mastering.
All this to say we have three versions of this third version of this album - Solid Brass produced 250 red vinyl copies, Zum has the other 250 on white vinyl (it is the Pearl anniversary after all), and there was a test Pressing edition of 30 that has its own hand-glued-and-cut cover artwork on black. We have two of these versions available here.
Will the boys from Rosemead do anything more to mark this anniversary? Watch this blog for updates.