not just a dream
February 7th, 2011
<hit number 2 on google images when searching "not just a dream">
Last week after band practice, I came home and before crashing out I sat on the office couch in the dark and rode the ipod on shuffle for a while…the mix wasn't spectacular or anything, but it hit this one track…and actually, iniitally I was gonna skip it, and then something said, no check it out…
It's from this record that my old band-mate JE digitized for me, and I can't remember where he got it from. It's an anti-drug record from the 60's, but it takes this bizarre form of an announcer who is going to take you on audio versions of all these different drug trips. He's using his BIG ANNOUNCER VOICE, and then he'll pick a drug, like pot, and start talking to you, "You feel very good, very relaxed. Things don't seem to bother you. Maybe you'll get up and go outside…ahhh, why bother. Might as well sit here. Sitting feels good." And so on. Predictably, the LSD one goes into a bad trip, and soon you're in your own grave, trying to claw out of the dirt, and his voice is using all these weird, vaguely sci-fi 60's trip-out sounds. There's one on uppers where you're all wired up. I can't remember the rest, because it was actually kind of boring, and not at all like Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs (a hoot), or A Child's Garden of Grass (a stone cold classic!). The funny thing is, they don't really have any way to make the pot one sound bad…I think it's just a lack of motivation mainly, but mostly its about how good everything is.
Anyway, this track was the LSD trip. And while I didn't have any interest in listening to that bad trip, I listened to the beginning of the track and heard this great sample about pretending it's a dream, but not a dream. Just amazing. I began to loop it on the ipod, continually hitting the skip-to-beginning-of-track button, and it had a great rhythm.
So then, a few days later when I saw it was PD's birthday, I got stoked! PD and I are working on a project about dreams, and have been dropping dream-related stuff on each other for the past month or so. So I took that sample, got a good loop going, and dropped in a beat and fx and some sampled speech and so on. It was just a goof really, but I kind of like the sound of it…
See what you think…
[audio:not_just_a_dream.mp3]