putting the j in jjosh

(first image that shows up when you type "happy take trash head toe" in google images)

I was using these MIDI machines they had in the college music lab — you could play a piano/synth that was hooked up to a computer and it would transcribe it into musical notation — and showing Jack how great it was. I then went further and demonstrated how you could type in lyrics and they would appear below the music. I was just typing nonsense to show how it worked, and for some reason I typed "I’m a happy take take the trash out with my head. Head of a toe head." No idea why, they were just the first words that popped into my head and anyway, I was just trying to show Jack a feature of the software.

Jack started laughing like to bust a gut. He thought that phrase was so damn funny, we printed it out and somehow that night recorded this track. Now I don’t know if you know about bouncing tracks on 4-track, but you can do this thing where you record 3 tracks of stuff and then mix it down onto 1 track. You can then record 2 additional tracks with that one and mix THAT down to another track. In this way you can pile track on top of track on top of track. The only issue is that the first stuff you record will get pretty buried in the mix.

Jack and I came up with this idea to record the main phrase as this singer who was in a club and the crowd slowly gets it and starts to sing along until everyone’s doing it at the end. When we recorded the voices of the club’s crowd, we decided that each one would be someone we admired who was at the club. For one take, Jack did Bowie and I did Tom Waits. He did Lou Reed and I did Black Francis. He did Screamin Jay Hawkins. I can’t remember the others, but there are a bunch in there. We also added the sounds of glasses and other ambient stuff to really make it feel like a club. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

This is the kind of stuff we did when we were bored.

I’m A Happy Take Take – Live from Jack & James’s