The Story of TEA - Part I
THE STORY OF TEA
THE QUEST TO FIND THEIR MUSICAL DESTINY
AS TOLD BY BILL
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PART I - TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
Hi, Bill here. I’d like to tell you a little more about what’s happened to us since Snorko landed up in New Mexico four years ago. It’s hard to think we’ve been on the go for this long already, but a lot has happened. I will spin this out over the next few weeks; I hope my memory will serve me reliably.
In Truth or Consequences there wasn’t much you could do to put food on the table, and Snorko and I both went to work sorting metal in the dump. It wasn’t really as bad as it might sound. Sometimes you’d find cool stuff, which you could bring home if the dumpmaster wasn’t looking.
One day Snorko brought home an old signal generator; strangely enough it still worked when we plugged it in. Using an array of salvaged car batteries and homemade resistors we were able to hook it up to a new keyboard adapted from the front panel of a microwave oven.
Our new music machine had sine waves, pulse waves, alpha waves, houndstooth and splash waves. We would jam on it together for hours every evening, as the resistors warmed our TV dinners. Snorko was particularly enthralled and started to skip work just to play on the machine all day, and eventually she lost her job at the dump. But she soon became the master of the machine.
Over the course of a few weeks, I started to pick out some good-sounding car body panels from the dump, smuggling them home at night-time. I sewed up a special pair of pants with extra large pockets just for this purpose. Finally after sneaking away with the hood of a ‘76 Eldorado, I had a complete drum kit and could accompany Snorko on her virtuosic musical peregrinations. This was the genesis of TEA.
We wrote a lot of tunes in those days. It was really exciting to work on these new instruments; we were always surprised by the sounds that would come out. Sometimes Snorko’s machine would break down, but the dump always provided us with spare parts. Every night we’d play for hours together; we’d get into a vibe that would crawl into your head and make you climb invisible ladders, up and down til it got bright and I had to go to work again.
Around the end of October we got a small Thursday night gig at the Stone and Cactus, which unexpectedly ended up in us leaving town forever. The dumpmaster was at the bar and he recognised our stolen gear. Naturally he fired me first thing, and demanded all of our gear back. We wouldn’t part with it, so he called the Sherriff, and they chased us out of town with their shotguns.
We were glad to have escaped, but now we were stuck out in the desert with a bunch of heavy gear on our backs.
***How will TEA get out of the desert? Tune in next week for PART II!***
