About Me
We met back in the fall of 1979 and soon found ourselves in a band, which begat another and another and soon we were our own band of sorts, which fizzled as most high school bands do...Ed moved away to Boston and several other towns (being a Navy son), along with his guitars and talent and Steven stayed put and continued writing and attending college for music and stuff...
Long before the discovery of the internet, we would mail lyrics and cassette tapes to each other and had a few laughs over the phone at our amusement.
Soon we had quite a handful of tunes together and alone and eventually had to record together... Making the long trip to Olean, NY to hang out with Ed, the SMILE was created in 1990. We recorded over a half dozen demos that weekend, mostly first takes, on a Tacam 4Track, and had a good laugh. The distance was too much to be duplicated, but eventually Ed moved to within an hour's drive, so it became a little easier for us to get together and have a laugh and maybe some hackeysack. We continued our efforts, sometimes long into the early-mid-late mornings and had to even record more than 1 take as the songs were coming together... over the next few months or weeks, we wrote and recorded various versions of original songs and came up with about 20 that did not suck completely, but the recordings were not exactly CD quality, as analog was all that we had available to us at the time. We had unknowingly created an unplugged sound of our own before it became mainstream, and it was just for fun anyway to pass the time as aspirations of fame and Grammies were non-existent. We performed only one gig together as The SMILE in public, and it was an ill-fated holiday party that we were mistakenly booked for, as we were not really supposed to perform our own material. It did not go very well for the guests, but we were pretty tight up until our third song when the owner asked us what the hell we thought we were playing. Fortunately, Ed had some tapes of Christmas music handy, so we just hung out for the rest of the night and had a laugh at our unusual circumstance.
Many a year passed, or maybe just a few, and family obligations became
a presence that took over our individual lives. We had to put The SMILE project masters in the vault for future generations to discover...only a handful of people and pets had ever heard any of our recordings...
One day recently, or not too long ago in 2007, Ed transfered all of his old master tapes onto cd's, revisiting a range of his own material spanning across two decades, and rediscovered the fun in the music of The SMILE. Of all the hundreds of songs and projects he had written and recorded over the years, these recordings had something special about them and took up three complete cds worth of space, some of it was good, some of it was not so good and some of it was too funny to print. Steven, on the other hand had never really left the music of The SMILE behind and practiced all of the piano parts in his spare time over the years, along with many other compositions, in his dark basement studio, while his faithful cat looked on with disinterest, as cats are known to do................
Now for the first time, through the wonders of the internet and MySpace, we bring you The SMILE, raw and severely edited at times, remastered, if you will, with all the fun and nostalgia still intact.... *Headphones are definately recommended... Although the SMILE never reached it's full potential, we remain optimistic that the day will come when we can overcome our mediocrity and vanish into obscurity.
New(er) versions and recordings may or may not be in the works, to be included in the constant song rotation on this space, but I'll have to check with the cat and get back to you on that .....................................
............................................ .*.*.*. Look out or listen for more recent projects as they exist on MySpace and SoundClick at the Jester'Smile Music site and one of the many Von Face music sites .*.*.*.TO BE CONTINUED..... ?
. . .I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)
