Another recording from the vaults of my late father’s never released music. This time, in order to gain some info about the song (because I tend to know very little background info on these songs), I contacted Phil Doyle, my dad’s music partner and co-writer on many of the songs I have previously posted here.
This song, titled “T4” (which I only recently learned), was always one of my favorites because of how strange it was. Also a song that sounded ripe to sample.
Here is Mr. Doyle’s (edited) response when I e-mailed him the song, recently digitized off the cassette tape I have.
“Whoa… what a kick to hear that again. And a bit spooky too - me playing with two dead guys.
So here’s the whole story, and you can use as much or as little as you like. This was one of several songs recorded at Peer-Southern (our publisher) Music’s demo studio. I sang and played guitar and recorder (that was about the only thing I ever played recorder on), Brian Murphy played drums and Bill Played bass and piano.
T-4 was written as like an ‘anti-song.’ We were involved with people who were very much into very mainstream commercial rock-pop, and while we had some material that fit, it wasn’t really where we wanted to go. T-4 was actually the first song in a larger collection called ‘The Great American Dream’ which included ‘The Uncle Philsey Show,’ amongst others. The tone and lyrics were written to deliberately grate on the nerves and be annoying (and were wildly successful in that regard). Producers HATED it… none of them got it. Bear in mind, there was no Indie music at that time, and Punk Thrash and New Age were still years away. In a sense, we were in the vanguard, but didn’t know it. At some indeterminate point a few years later some of the producers were asking me to play the tape for their colleagues, and seemed to be warming to it, but it still had the capacity to drop jaws anywhere in the music business. The consensus was- we could never release that!
So where did the title come from? There was a wildly popular 50’s movie called “Tea for Two” starring Doris Day that featured a song by the same name. It was a re-make of the Broadway Musical “No, No Nanette.” I hated musicals (still do), and the music for this one as well as perky, pretty Doris Day was enough to make me puke. My new song was the antithesis of this type of, happy, bubbly, perky, barf inducing music, and having no title at the time, I referred to it as ‘T42’ (Tee-Four-Two). It eventually evolved into just T4. The song was based loosely and quite sarcastically on the family of a girlfriend of mine at that time. Her father did, in fact, work 2 or 3 jobs, and they did have fuzzy toilet seat covers.
BTW- In case you can’t hear it, the last 3 words in the song are Latin: “Requiescat in pace” (a/k/a- the familiar tombstone inscription R.I.P.).”
- Thanks Phil !! For the very thoughtful and thorough explanation. Very interesting. And an excellent song!!
- Definitely gonna sample this and re-make my
20092010 version VERY SOON!!!! - DOWNLOAD THE MP3 here !!!
