 FLAtRich (AKA Rich La Bonté) |
I'm going to try to keep this
brief, but I have a tendency to ramble so speed read or just stop when you
get bored, OK?
I think I got my first computer in 1982. It was a Commodore VIC-20,
and I bought it because I saw a Commodore TV ad featuring William
Shatner who claimed you could tour the universe with the VIC. The
ad also claimed that the VIC could make music, which was my stock in trade
at the time. I played in garage bands in high school and bar bands for 20
years. My fifteen minutes of fame was with Godspell in the 70s.
Look it up. Buy the DVD. I
don't make anything from it, but I'm not ashamed of it either.
Neither claim was exactly true. I never located the VIC Visible Solar
System cartridge. VIC-20 music was hardly listenable, squeaky stuff,
although I did find a British-made cartridge from Thorne-EMI and
actually took the VIC into a recording studio in the mid-80s.
The only surviving tune from that session is Modern Girl, which runs all
of 46 seconds. You can find it on the Argyle
Ghosts EP (drums by Delmar Richardson.) Too bad, really,
because a lot of my friends from the LA 70s-80s punk scene showed up to do
vocals on cuts that weren't released. The all-girl band Raszebrae -
(Debbie Patino, Katie, Ingrid - hi, guys!) - Kim Fowley
crooning "Moonlight Becomes You", Bill Bored, Tammy Goodman,
Julie Davis, Ed Smith, Harvey Kubernik and all the rest. Imagine
twenty dysfunctional people singing the chorus to the Stones' "2000
Light Years from Home" against a VIC-20 and you get the idea.
I bought a Commodore 64 and found a Stereo SID cartridge. I
wrote some (now) horrible-sounding stuff and did covers of old movie
music. My favorite was "The Moon of Manakoora" (Frank
Loesser-Alfred Newman) from the 1937 film "The Hurricane", but
take my advice and never try entering an Alfred Newman score into a
computer note by note.
I also used GEOS, which was then an operating system for the
Commodore 64 rather than the now famous Australian online TV genre fan
database. When GEOS announced that they were moving to the PC platform, I
moved with them and discovered mods.
What happened next is still available on the MODSpeak
site. I started doing mods in 1993. They were less horrible than SIDs, so
I uploaded them to my provider (AOL back then, when they had about 250,000
members and the only AOL "interface" was built into PC-GEOS)
and a few hundred folks a lot like you (but with pathetic little 286 PCs, Amigas
and Classic MACs) downloaded them.
I prefer not to mention how many really great mod composers there were at
the time in places like Finland. (I was just doing my thing, yuh
know?) You can find some of their works in the MODSpeak
Classics Library or hunt for more in the
fLAtDiSk
Mod Archives.
I released a cover of Mark Snow's X-Files Theme in 1994 and
everything changed. Snow mentioned it in an online chat with Chris
Carter on Prodigy (which I only heard about because I was stuck with
AOL) and 8,000 people downloaded it that month. Pretty awful today, but
people loved it at the time. Fans will be fans.
MODSpeak was born the same year. It
started as an interactive newsletter and became a website. (Hey! The very
website where you found this rap a decade or so later.) Eventually it
spawned other music websites - fLAtDiSk
Mod Archives, Key of X,
etc. - and was jammed into the fLAtDiSk
NeTWoRk.
Just to prove that mod files will
never die, I took over management of The
Mod Ring this year. This was probably the first webring for mods,
founded in 1996 (MODSpeak joined it in 97), and it is one of the oldest
rings in the WebRing
system. If you are looking for more mods, try one of our 160+ member
sites. Click on the link to surf the membership or join up (for free) to
add your site to the ring.
The rest, as some say, is music.
:o)>
Hollywood CA 2003
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