-
Little Town 4:050:00/4:05
-
Premium 4:100:00/4:10
-
Name Again 3:150:00/3:15
-
Day Room 3:340:00/3:34
-
Wacky Writer 3:150:00/3:15
-
Treatment Room 5:580:00/5:58
-
Party In My Mind 2:440:00/2:44
-
Harry 3:460:00/3:46
-
Deep Dish Pizza 2:520:00/2:52
-
In Between Scene 3:440:00/3:44
-
Man Gone, TV On 3:520:00/3:52
-
Fifty-Fifty 3:460:00/3:46
-
New York, New York 3:390:00/3:39
One day in 1994-95, a conspicuous, swarthy, scruffy-bearded, and energetic little fellow with a filthy laugh, who I knew vaguely from the downtown Northampton scene came up to me on Pleasant Street, as I recall. He was a well-known character and highly respected photographer in town and his name was Paul Shoul. And he said to me in his abrupt, halting way of speaking when he’s particularly excited.
Shoul: “You’re a musician, right?”
Rocha: “Yep.”
Shoul: “You know Paul Harthorne?”
Rocha: “Yeah, I know him a bit.”
Shoul: “Well we’ve been getting together for a while playing some music and we write songs. It’s a lot of fun and we were thinking because your name’s Paul, and you seem kinda cool, and we’re all short, maybe we should get together and start a band. Wuddaya think? It might be fun.”
Rocha: “Sure!”
One of the greatest decisions I ever made in this life. We started getting together and it was a blast right from the start. We soon added a friend of mine, Tommy Borawski, a well-known rock-solid drummer in and around Northampton with whom I had played in a band in 1987-88 doing 60’s covers along with Matt Cullen and Aurin Schackman, (The Cat’s Pajamas) two main music guys in my life. Tommy was already playing with Matty, Tommy Pluta, and Bobby Laroche with Charisma recording artists, The Sighs. He would go on to play with me in the Amy Fairchild Band within the next year or so.
Shoul played acoustic guitar and harmonica and was the main songwriter and lead singer. Hartshorne played electric guitar: at times extremely tastefully and gently arpeggiated, and then very spontaneously aggressive, like shot out of a cannon. He was incendiary. He also contributed songs to the repertoire. I played bass and helped with the arrangements. Tommy and I locked in real well on bass and drums. We all loved hanging out, making each other laugh, partying a bit and making great noise together.
Shoul and Hartshorne wrote separately and in collaboration. They always had grand schemes. When I met them, they were in the process of writing a musical called Hospital Hill, based on the Northampton State Hospital (1858-1993), formerly the Northampton Lunatic Asylum (I shit you not!). It was more of a song cycle than a musical. They created characters and had quite a few really cool songs. But they hadn't gotten around to writing a narrative. There was no arc. We did develop two of the songs from Hospital Hill for this record: Day Room and Treatment Room.
After playing a number of gigs and rehearsing regularly, we decided to record the songs we had. I've been doing home recording since the early 80s and by now, I had a 16-track studio, in an upstairs bedroom in the house that I had lived in pretty much since 1979. We started by recording drums tracks for thirteen songs with Tommy Pluta engineering at Slaughterhouse Recording Studio in Hadley, MA in May 1996. There were fits and starts. I was still learning how to use the digital machines and how to back-up data. Losing data. It dragged on and on into 1997. I had an emotional breakdown in early 1997 and the project lost all steam and that’s on me. We got back together and tried playing as a band, but the camaraderie and connection was lost. We had spent too much time in the studio and not connecting as a band. Most of the recorded material was in decent shape, but it needed a lot of TLC and I just didn’t have it in me at the time.
I digitized these tracks in the fall of 2009. And they sat until 2016, when I started poking around and cleaning up some tracks for four songs that I sent off to Northampton studio wizard, Jim Weeks, to mix for us in 2018. Between 2020 and 2022, I got the the other nine songs off to him, as well. It is a profound understatement to say he did a miraculous job of fixing these highly compromised drum tracks, whose tape had become oxidized over the years. Jim had to meticulously fix all that stuff and I hate to think what this record would have sounded like without him having rescued it. Old pal, Pete Keppler mastered it for us in April 2022. Shoul took a photo for the cover and our old friend, Richard Cahillane released it on his label, Cooleyville Records out of Shutesbury, MA and the rest is history. I’m really proud of this record. I love these songs and how they trigger the time we spent hanging out together, playing and recording them. I love those guys to pieces.
~ Paul Rocha, 2026 ~