Misfits and Slow Learners Unreleased Track 2: On the Riviera by Cub Lea as Hot Spot Last updated 05/06

Music Menu | The Winter Heat Project | Hot Spot

Download 32kbps 44.1kHz full-length (3:22) mp3 (mono) 797kb
(Full-fidelity versions at 128kbps and VBR-HQ bitrates are available on "the CD")
NOTE: This mp3 has three brief skips.

	Credits:	Music, arrangement & production by Cub Lea, 11/87
	Players:	Cub Lea (all instruments)
	Guitars:	Westone 'fat Strat' w'Bill Lawrence L500 bridge pickup; the surprisingly rich overdrive courtesy of a ca. 1982 Yamaha brown-Tolex 50W solid-state amp (if you can find one, buy it!); Tokai Talbo bass
	Drums:	Roland TR-505 digital rhythm composer
	Notes:	Recorded and mixed on a Tascam PortaStudio 0.5 4-track cassette recorder 01/88 in a Toronto, Canada rooming house

Concept

This was my first serious attempt at producing a rock instrumental, but that's not how it started. This song began as the stream-of-consciousness lyric shown below, and took form when I realized I had a couple of nice unused riffs that lent a power-funk feel to the track.

As I built up the sketch, programming the drum sequencer as I went (something I hadn't done before), it evolved into one of the hookiest hard rock tracks I'd written to date, perhaps exceeded only by More to Life Than Sex in that department.

A problem emerged when I began to fit the lyric to the music. The melody line was easy to find...in fact, it had been in my head since I first wrote the damn lyric in the fall of 1980 in a truly vicious alcoholic haze while working as a small-parcel courier in Edmonton. The problem? The melody didn't fit.

The more I listened to this track, the more I realized that it might not even need a lyric...particularly one as lacking in meaning, depth and expressive potential as this one. Hell, even the lyric was a bad joke...it was written on a beer bet to prove to my roommate that I could produce something reasonably usable as a rock lyric and melody in less than fifteen minutes!

Joe Satriani was just starting to make waves on FM radio with Surfing with the Alien, and it occurred to me to just leave the track alone, skip the vocal, and present the damn thing as a "rock interlude", since it's not quite a fully-formed, sit-down-and-listen or get-up-and-dance rock track without a lot more searing lead guitars than I could produce.

So why didn't this song make Misfits and Slow Learners? Well, it was written about two weeks after Christmas that year, and the song lineup for that demo album had been fixed before Christmas. There wasn't room. But in later dubs of the cassette (after I'd run out of 45-minute cassettes and had 60 minutes to fill on my new blanks, of course), I did finally decide to add this track, When the Time Comes and a couple of others, turning what was a not-too-shabby cheap-ass four-track cassette demo album into an overblown writer's showcase that ended up quite lacking in consistency and linear flow.

Execution

This track came together fairly easily. I'd been busy recording Misfits for five weeks, and had managed to keep a consistent set of gear, so I knew pretty much exactly what I could get out of all my instruments and outboard gear, and what effects and tones I could achieve to turn the song into a proper production.

This track really needed some far better outboard gear and engineering to justify itself as a listenable piece of music for anyone but friends and fans (yes, I did have more than one fan at the time), but given what I had to work with, I'm very pleased with the way it came out.

The performance, on the other hand, has too many glaring weaknesses. The bass line is overplayed and inelegant, and the lead guitar isn't nearly as well-executed as one should expect from a rock instrumental. The drum line suffers badly from my lack of experience in fusing rock and funk rhythms, a deficit I'd later make up on a pair of "lost" tracks entitled Style and Andy Got Stoned.

All in all, this really had no place on the Misfits album, but if one assumes that a demo album of this relative quality can produce a single, I think it would have been a worthy B-side...provided that I had been able to rope a guitar slinger into performing a proper lead on it.

On the Riviera (lyrics never recorded)

Raise yer skirt length
Lower yer leg line
Smoke yer Git-tanes
Drink yer Rhine wine
Eat yer whore-derves
From yer cure-dents
Ask yer mamzell
Where yer franks went
On the Riviera

Flex yer biceps
Wear yer sandals
Drink tequila
Light yer candles
Tan yer body
Eat yer tacos
Pop yer Gravols
Pitch yer pesos
Down in Acapulco

Crunch yer pot seeds
Jog yer ass off
Watch yer TV
Rip yer gas off
Cruise yer freeway
Fuck yer chick hard
Shop yer Safeway
Punch yer time card
Busted down in Oakland

Tune yer pickup
Belt yer beer back
Dust yer jeans off
Share yer half-sack
Hoot yer brains out
Love yer roughnecks
Run yer checkstop
Cash yer paychecks
Workin' out in Red Deer

Copyright ©1981 Bunction Music