Juvenalia, Part 1

The music: The Miss Enigma Firecracker Pageant (4:08).

The story: The drive from Atlanta to Jacksonville takes you through a long stretch of rural sprawl. The default route is to take I-75 down to the state line, then cut across on I-10. It's a lonely, dreary stretch, and the lack of scenery makes it feel far longer than the six hours or so it takes.

A more scenic route is to cut east from Tifton to Waycross along Highway 82, then south on US-23/19. Instead of a monotony of swamps and alligator farms, the landscape is varied and lively in a quiet sort of way. Highway 82 runs through cotton fields and National Forest reserves, low but hilly country dotted with small towns it would be unfair to call quaint.

Running south along US-23, you run parallel to rural railroads that fade in and out of visibility from a road flanked by tall dark pines and isolated, antiquated buildings. Just north of the state line, the first transplanted palm trees appear, garishly out of place but somehow serving as notice that you'll soon be entering North Florida, an odd topography of ramshackle auto body shops, golf courses and fast-food restaurants.

I used to love the drive, and I was so familiar with it that I'd make a point of taking it at different times of day, just to see things in different lights.

I kept an old 4-track recorder with me the way a photographer keeps his camera handy. It was a Fostex X-26. Although it's barely considered useable by today's standards, it served me well from high school through my early undergrad years.

Of course, a 4-track cassette recorder is hardly the tool for recording the Great American Record. 1/4" tape is unstable and easy to oversaturate, and you're confronted at every turn by hiss, wow and flutter. That was bearable at the time; what was more important was that I could overdub.

I didn't need to depend on other musicians, who were frequently burdened by technical challenges, recreational chemicals, or just day jobs, to make the stuff I was hearing in my head. At that point, I'd found ways to emulate many of the sounds and techniques I needed with the bass, and from 1988 to 1993 or so, some of my favorite material was recorded on to the Fostex, then mastered on to a boombox.

I viewed the limitations of the technology as a challenge, and I learned to run that thing like I would any other musical instrument. Heck, I had a portable studio I could pull off to the side of the road and plug in to the cigarette lighter on my car. The ability to set up on a hotel bed and get a song on tape is inestimable.

Now I find myself going back through some of those old recordings. They're scratchy, hissy and just plain rough in the fidelity department. Some of the actual material is naive in hindsight, but in the tangle of static and half-finished asides, there are some ideas that I find myself wanting to go back and revisit.

Today's piece is a bit of all that, wrapped up in one gooey ball. It was recorded in April of 1991. One track is taken up by the drum machine; the other voices are played on the bass. Yes, that's two-handed tapping. Some folks used it to show off (as did I, at that age), but I liked to use it to open up wider chord voicings.

I came up with the idea while passing through a town called Enigma in south Georgia, so the good folks there get the nod. And yes, there really is a Miss Enigma Firecracker Pageant. Enjoy.