These 15 songs were recorded in our rehearsal studio in 1978. A little background:
In the spring of 1977 four back porch musician buddies decided to “go for it” and start a rock band. We’d had so much fun playing acoustic music casually together that we wanted to see what we could do if we knuckled down and actually worked on the music. The result was Haywire. Tom Barrett on drums, Elmer Perry on lead guitar and vocals, Gary Manley on rhythm guitar and vocals, and me on bass and vocals. Somewhere in the first 6 months we added my sister, Terri Fifield, on vocals and percussion. We stayed together until sometime in 1980, when Elmer left the band to move to Georgia with his new bride, and that finished Haywire.
We rehearsed in an old 2 car garage at my 1940’s era rental house on Ebener Street in Redwood City, CA. We dumpster-dived at Vesta Carpets in San Carlos and got enough used carpeting (smelly at first and stained forever) to tack up on the walls and the sliding main door and lay on the floor, 2 or 3 layers deep everywhere. We scrounged egg cartons to tack onto a false ceiling we’d put up, thus managing to provide a modicum of soundproofing. It didn’t trap the kick drum or electric bass frequencies very well but did okay with the guitars and other high end frequencies. We rehearsed three nights a week — Mondays were always vocal rehearsals with just Gary on acoustic guitar and everybody perched on folding chairs. Wednesday and Friday nights were the full electric band. The neighbors put up with us and we religiously knocked off by 10 pm every rehearsal to give them a bit of a break. Of course we all had day jobs so rehearsals were always in the evenings, starting a 7p as I recall. As an aside, I’m amazed at how little I actually remember of all those rehearsal sessions. Ah, well, 45 years is a long time.
We were a true garage band as it turned out, unintentionally. We only performed in public a handful of times in the three plus years we were together (no management, no business sense, no cold contacting skills, and of course no internet). Our sound engineer, Robyn Coultas, produced three multi-tracked sessions in our studio. These reel-to-reel tapes have sat unused for the past 45 years. I finally decided to pay the piper and get them digitized. I found an outfit in Long Beach, CA, called Thin Brown Line, that had the equipment and professionalism to handle the job properly so I sent the tapes and I now have high resolution digital renderings of these old tape-based recordings. I imported these tracks into Logic Pro for mixing and mastering. The results are on this page. I hope you enjoy our musical journey. Sadly, Tom, Elmer and Gary have all passed on, leaving Terri and me as the only surviving members. I really miss those guys.
