Misfits and Slow Learners Track 8: The Point by Cub Lea as Hot Spot Last updated 12/04

Music Menu | The Winter Heat Project | Hot Spot

Download 32kbps 44.1kHz full-length (6:24) mp3 (mono) 1.5mb
(Full-fidelity versions at 128kbps and VBR-HQ bitrates are available on "the CD")

	Credits:	Words, music, arrangement & production by Cub Lea, 11/87
	Players:	Cub Lea (all instruments)
	Drums:	E-mu Drumulator (unmodified unit)
	Bass:	Yamaha DX-7 (patch lost)
	Notes:	Recorded and mixed on a Tascam PortaStudio 0.5 4-track cassette recorder 12/87 in a Toronto, Canada rooming house

Concept

It must be remembered that at the time this was written - summer of 1987 - it was pretty much still mandatory for every rock album to have at least one "paean to the orgasm", a twisted-ass, bombastic, I-just-discovered-sex-and-know-something-nobody-else-does five-man group wank in four-four time.

Of course, these days you can learn the infinite- or multiple-male-orgasm technique, or get endless-stamina training from any of hundreds of websites devoted to the topic. But back then, this was just something I'd discovered on my own and I felt like I'd found the Holy Grail...the only thing I'd ever encountered that cut the jealousy I had of the female capacity for multiple orgasm.

As with so many other songs written and recorded at this stage of my "career", this track has a rather pathological reliance on a particular sound, in this case a patch I created more or less by accident from the unbelievably clumsy front panel of Yamaha's TX-7 tone module, the non-keyboarded version of the infamous DX-7. I wasn't able to save that tone's data to a tape that would load into another DX device, and I was never able to come close to duplicating the uniquely satisfying pluck of this bass patch.

The most fun I ever had in a recording studio was tracking this song at Umbrella Studios in Toronto with three other guitar players, all of them infinitely more competent players than I, with each of us doing an impromptu lead guitar for a verse/refrain section. I've included the 16-track version of this song in the Songs for Sale section.

Execution

I threw every effect at this that I could muster given the gear I had, and devoted a whole track to nothing but severely-effected wailing (often dissonant to the dominant chord!). At the time, I was "curbing" music gear of all description, and happened to have a truly horrible Ibanez pitch-shifter unit which I used at the beginning of the track. The delay effects on the voice were all done live as I "sang". (Hell, if what punks can call what they do singing, I'll damn well call this singing, too.).

I still have an affection for this track, but if I ever do it again, the lyric will be rewritten from scratch, have nothing to do with sex, feature twin basses (a stringed electric and, if necessary, a hired-out clone of this original DX-7 patch), and, of course, a lot less mud.

The Point

Relax...and let it happen
Relax...and ride away
Relax...and let it happen
Let your mind and body fly away
Come ride the wave
Come ride the wave
Come ride the wave, the wave you ride
To the point

Ready for immeasurable pleasure
Transcendental sex
Carelessly reaching for the ecstasy point
Immune to the last caress
Now come down hard
Come down hard
Come down hard to rise and fly
To the point

Relax...and let it happen
Let it burn with a pain you can taste
Relax...and let it happen
Feel the heat, the rush, the cut, the thrust,
The hands, the face, the heat behind your eyes

You make the peak you can't get over
Your whole world drawn into sharp sensation
A meditation on the truth of love and life
You ride online
The rhythm's fine
Pull that sucker down to the base of your mind

Spoken:
You hear people talking about sex, you know?
They don't know nothin'.
Like...how long'd you go last time, huh?
Forty minutes, hard and heavy, then clothes on and a cigarette.
Man, you don't know how fine it gets.
Ah, let me tell you man...last Wednesday we let go
and was three...hours, and it felt like a week, man, y'understand?

You just like let go, like absolutely...totally...flat and relaxed
'Cause like, there's...there's no hurry, you know?
And...and...about twenty minutes in you hit the peak
And it...it...and the ecstasy point, and like you just stay there.
And you know there's no point in cummin'.
'Cause it just can't get no better, uh-uh.

So let me tell ya, you don't learn that from no movie.
So don't talk to me about the greatest twenty minutes of your life.

Ease off...don't let it happen
Tense up and you're over the line
Ease off...don't let it happen
Tense up and you'll miss it this time
You can't go further, there's no higher to climb
You can't go deeper or you'll lose your mind
And you cannot stop 'cause you've found your mind
Has discovered a body of its own
At the ecstasy point

Copyright ©1988 Living Skill Music