Freedom (To Me)

You never know what you're going to find when you clean out a closet. For instance, I found a time machine.

Well, OK, not literally a device that could send me back into the past, but most definitely a way to revisit it. What I found was a cassette tape containing a performance of Live Wire. Until I found that tape, I assumed that I already had the complete Live Wire collection in my possession, i.e., one live performance tape and one studio session tape. I assumed there were no other recordings of us. As you might imagine, I was thrilled to find another live recording. Increasing your stockpile of aural memories by 50% in one fell swoop is exciting stuff.

Anyway, I found the tape a few months ago. Subsequently, four of our five met at a Chinese restaurant in preparation for the birthday party of the fifth. It then occurred to me that it would be really cool to digitize everything I had, from all three tapes, and throw the results onto a couple of CDs as a birthday present for the celebrant. And, since I was making the CDs anyway, why not make copies for the other guys? So, I've been busy doing that, during my spare time, over the past week or so.

The major problem in doing so has been cleaning up the recordings as much as possible. As I said, these things were recorded onto cassettes close to 30 years back. The tapes have degraded quite a bit, and some songs needed major overhauls, sonically speaking. Luckily, sound technology has advanced quite a bit since 1981, so I was able - in most instances - to resurrect at least a listenable version of the performances. Of course, since we were the ones playing the songs, our listening experiences will be both better and worse than someone coming upon these things fresh. Our memories will fill in some gaps, while simultaneously remembering some things that weren't salvageable.

For what I hope is your listening pleasure, here's another song from the Live Wire catalog. It's called Freedom To Me and I'm the guy responsible for it. I wrote it. Again, sound quality from 30 years ago isn't as good as it would be if recorded last week, but you should have heard it before I worked on it! Be kind. This one was performed at that club, McCarthy's, that I've talked about in the posts about the group. Thus the sound is intimate and separate audience members get picked up on the tape.

Personnel:

Marty "Sucks" Murphy - Lead Vocal, Flute
Ronnie Bower - Backing Vocal, Lead Guitar
Ron Frattasio - Rhythm Guitar
Jimi LaRue (yes, me) - Bass
Steve Giusti - Drums

Since I wrote it, you fans of bass will hear distinct bass on it (the opening and ending are me, with only accompaniment being Ronnie Bower playing harmonics on his guitar, and Steve Giusti with small cymbal flourishes at the end.) It's a softer tune than most of our repertoire - a ballad, really. Here's the lyric:

Freedom (To Me) (LaRue)

You
Made me
What I am
And what I am is what I wanted to be
So you are freedom to me

You
Gave me
What I need
And what I need is to have you near to me
So you are freedom to me

(bass solo)

I
Can see
What you are
And I believe in what you're trying to be
And that is freedom to me

We
Can be
Something more
And the more you are the more I can be
So you are freedom to me

(guitar solo)

(repeat first verse, etc., then flute solo out to bass ending)

HEAR THE SONG

When MY WIFE and I were married, in 1992, I actually wrote out the sheet music to this and had the choir/band play it during the ceremony. Being self-taught, and having worked exclusively in bands that used nothing but head arrangements, it was the first time I had ever written music for someone else to play. I'm still not sure I got it absolutely correct. I ended up showing the leader/organist the basic structure by playing it myself on his keyboard. He took it from there and the ensemble did a fine job with it. There was some slight consternation on his part when we began, as music played at a Catholic wedding ceremony should rightly not be secular music, but I got him to buy into the entirely plausible rationalization that the lyrics referred to God and not to MY (future) WIFE. If you re-read them, you'll see that this could very well be the case, at least for the first two verses, so he suspended his disbelief and the song was used.

Hope you enjoyed it. The birthday party is Saturday. I'll try to get a few photos so you can compare and contrast us, then and now.

Soon, with more better stuff.

[My thanks to buddy Kevin Fitzpatrick for his work restoring the photo seen on this piece. The original was faded as hell, but - with no prodding from me - he took many of the photos I published here previously and did some work on them in Photoshop. He's one of the good ones, for sure.]