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The Mountains of Madness was jeez's first go at getting back into music after being out of the business for many years.
It started out as therapy; an attempt to get all those weird noises out of his head so that he could function in normal society.
Since he was never very good at writing lyrics (moon June swoon was standard fare, hardly in keeping with his traditional Gothic leanings),
all of the first songs were instrumentals.
His creative methodology was this:
Plug his guitar into the back of his computer
Turn on the software
Wait for an idea
Quickly play a bar, process the recorded audio with a super-cheap software amplifier emulator
Play back the processed guitar
Wait for the next idea
And so on.
His first attempt was a H.P. Lovecraft inspired Gothic Surf Rock ditty called The Mountains of Madness. It
was awful, but he was pleased anyway.
Many, many more followed, including songs inspired by the movie Mothra,
The heat death of the universe and a novel by David Brin (a trilogy in two parts).
All (yawn) instrumental and all (sigh) poorly produced.
Then jeez met a guy named Cheez (go figure) while on-line, and they tried a collaboration. Cheez wrote lyrics - jeez was pleased.
This opened new doors for jeez. Now that he was working with an actual lyricist, he got a chance to sing backup vocals. This led him to
believe that he could actually sing, at least in some fashion. More on that later.
After a couple of joint efforts, Cheez said "Here, let me send you something." That something turned out to be a little black box with lots of lights
that jeez could plug his guitar into. jeez Always suspected that Cheez hated his cheap-o guitar sound. jeez knew that he did.
This act of kindness gave birth to the TMoM "wall of guitars" era, producing such powerhouse hit songs as
I Wouldn't Want To Lose You (more SF rock), and At The Borderlands of Sol,
inspired by a Larry Niven title.
Now, jeez wanted to sing. He didn't realize that he couldn't actually do that, and he still couldn't write lyrics, but with typical irrational
thinking, he wanted to anyway. So he selected a public domain song to cover. Unfortunately, the song he chose to cover was
In The House of The Rising Sun.
Then, in a magnificent feat of coherent cognizance, jeez remembered previous lyrics he had written.
One of them became a collaboration with Kim Novak
; Janey's Story is about a young woman's life after a global disaster. The other,
Summertime Blues, was written when he was 14 and full of misdirected angst. Yep -
he was scraping the bottom there all right.
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