About the CD
The
concept started in a small room in North Carolina in 1993. I was
helping my girlfriend study veterinary medicine when I came
across a disease that turkeys get called Ulcerative Pododermatitis, also
known as Bumblefoot. One of the treatments for this disease was to rub
hemorrhoid creme on the bird's foot and wrap it in a ball bandage. I found this inspiring. Every song on the CD
is named after an animal disease, and there are characters scattered throughout
the cover art that represent each disease/song.
About the cover art... upon using the accompanying bathroom
to that room in North Carolina for any extended period of
time, my girlfriend would draw pictures of dogs vomiting and birds rendered unconscious
from the smell of what I was doing in there (or so it was implied) and
slip them under the door.
She
would draw scenarios with caricatures of me as a giant ass that met
a skinny neck and head with a giant nose and one eyebrow. Many of these
ideas found their way onto the cover. I spent many weeks sitting
in front of my Windows 3.11 PC staring at my foot, plotting lines on
Corel Draw4 making the artwork.
I recorded everything at home, all the equipment was set up in my
parent's basement in a little area along the wall - a seat, 2 ADATs, 2
compressors and 2 FX processors in a rack with a mixing board on top, a
pair of headphones, and a guitar amp with a mic in front, and a blanket
over it. Five feet away was the big noisy air-conditioning unit
for the house, and it was a hot Summer. So I'd start recording, the AC
would kick on, and I'd have to stop and wait for it to shut off. Then
I'd start up again, and go through the same thing. Once in a while I'd
sneak upstairs and turn the thermostat up to 90F degrees and get a good
batch of recording in, until I'd hear my mom's voice from the floor
above, “Why is it so hot in the house?”, followed soon after by “Who
turned the thermostat up to 90?!?!” “....RONALD!!!” I'd stop
recording, get yelled at, then I'd continue recording. (And I'd
sneak upstairs and turn the thermostat back up again...) I did all the punch-ins with a footswitch
while I was playing. I didn't have any speakers, and recorded and
mixed the entire record using a 10-year old pair of $20 headphones.
A few of the songs were already around. Malignant Carbuncle was recorded
in Dec. '91 as part of an instructional tape for Shrapnel Records that
didn't get released. Blue Tongue was written in 1989, I had a few demo
versions of it - the version on the Adventures album was first released
May '92 on a guitar comp CD for Legato Records (the song was alternately
called 'The Shuck Duffle'). The title track 'Bumblefoot' was released
May '93 by the same label for another guitar comp CD. I started writing
and recording the rest in the Summer of 1994. The first song I recorded was Strawberry Footrot
- I had sinusitis and laid down a track of moans of discomfort - I built
the solo around it later. The original name of Strangles was Bastard Strangles.
The high-pitched squeak at the end of the solo in Orf was from the side
of my hand accidentally touching the high E-string while I was sliding
a 9-volt battery down the neck. At the last minute, 2 songs were pulled
off the CD and I quickly wrote Ick, Rinderpest, and Q Fever. I borrowed
an $85 beginners' nylon-string guitar from a music store I gave guitar
lessons at to record Ick. There was a flat fret that farted out on the
4th string (9th fret) - you can hear it if you listen for it (at 0:29
seconds.) Recording was finished October '94.
There are two bonus tracks on the album - one is a vocal song recorded
when I was 17 about the polluted fish in the surrounding waters of
Staten Island NY; the other is a poem where I took the words and
converted them into a music code played on the guitar instead of being
spoken.
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