What’s What
Mid 90’s acoustic-y “rock” with Alex, Mike, Chris, and Terry
It was 20 years ago today (give or take a few months) …
I was cleaning out some files and came across a page of waiting for her… lyrics. Here.
waiting for her… newsletters
Here are all the old email newsletters I could find, plus a couple of articles from the now-defunct Houston’s Other alt weekly. I had fun with these:
Boldly going nowhere
This was a somewhat professional ‘waiting for her…’ EP.
(more to come…)
Christmas Songs
Here’s “You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch” by waiting for her…Â
And this is an original from Smooth Like Roy, called Christmas Genie
would you care for a hamburger? – Summer 1992
Before the summer of 1992, Dave and Terry decided to form a band while on break from school. Terry called Chris, a drummer they had played with briefly during the spring of 1991 and he was up for it. Soon after getting into Houston they scheduled the first practice.  Dave suggested his friend from college Danny play guitar, with Terry on bass (mostly), Chris on drums, and Dave on vocals and keyboards… with Ray C. on sax and bongos.
After choosing the name ‘mr. lizardman’, our first gig was June 9 at a run-down, little bar on White Oak called Locals. After that we played a “Breakin Out” night at Zelda’s, Â then more shows at Zelda’s and Fitzgerald’s. Â We even opened for “Little Sister” in October. It was toward the end of the summer that we recorded our only demo/ep/whatever, “would you care for a hamburger?”. It was recorded and mixed over 8 hours at “Stinky’s Studios”, a 16 track studio next to Fitzgerald’s, with Terry on guitar and bass, Dave on vocals and keyboards, and Chris on drums.
Both the name ‘mr. lizardman’ and ‘would you care for a hamburger?’ were taken from quotes from Paul Reubens’ character in Cheech and Chongs “Nice Dreams”.
neon – April 1999
The first waiting for her… CD was neon. It was recorded in late 1998 and early 1999. The drums were recorded onto a 4-track tape recorder in a house that the drummer and I were renting. Those tapes were then taken to my work (at radio station KKBQ-FM), dumped into a ProTools system, and then each of the instruments and vocals were recorded direct into ProTools.
The mixes were burned to a CD and taken to a Houston duplication company, where we got 100 copies made on CD-R, with black printing on the front of the CD. The cover was printed somewhere else and the dupe company packaged it all together for us.
The quality isn’t great, but I still think it sounds okay for a band that was only together for a few months. The only real issue is that the drum mix was stuck at how I dumped them into ProTools, so there are some bad level, especially the snare drum in places.
Two ‘waiting for her…’ videos
Secret Crushes
created in 1999 using video editing software that VERY basic. I don’t remember the name, but you couldn’t do real-time previews, so to align the video and audio, you had to guess about the timing and render every few seconds to check it. Considering my computer wasn’t the fastest, by the end of the 2 and 1/2 minutes, it was taking about 1/2 hour for each render. Much of the footage was taken during our recording sessions with Joe Omulchuck for the “boldly going nowhere” cassette ep.
Ever Song
This was shot and edited while I was working at an advertising and production agency, using a Beta SP camera and a Media 100 editing system. The Beta SP shots were from a gig at Sidecar Pub, and intermixed with some camcorder footage from a show in Beaumont. The Beaumont show had the guy who was painted all silver. I also used some video that is in the Secret Crushes video.