Kinloch Nelson - Waiting: More Recordings, 1968-1976 (2025)

“Waiting: More Recordings 1968-1976” can be thought of as a before-and-after follow-up to the Tompkins Square release, “Partly On Time: Recordings 1968-1970.” For that record we stuck with the mono recordings my high school friend Carter Redd and I made at WDCR radio in Hanover NH in those years. When Tompkins Square brought up the idea of doing a follow up collection we turned to some even earlier material, five songs Carter and I previously made that were kindred in spirit but more primitively recorded. There had been one more WDCR era song which there wasn’t room for before, and there were two other recordings I made a few years later including one I did with another friend, Bob Stein. All of these were instrumentals, much of it in stereo. Here they are.

The first five songs were written and recorded in the early months of 1968 (or possibly late ’67) before Carter and I got the bit in our teeth and went up to WDCR later in the summer of ’68. We had both been writing folk songs for years (ie with vocals) but the idea of writing instrumentals was new and just plain fun.

The first song’s working title was “Peanut Butter.” (“Scrambled Eggs” had already been taken.) But that sounded dumb so we changed it to “Opus One.” Naturally the next song became “Opus Two.” But there’s a gazillion Opus Ones and Twos out there so I changed the titles so they might have a fighting chance. The third song, “Yawning Dogs” takes its name from a squeaking door opening in the background. Door, or dog? You decide. I like the timing. In the fourth song, “Train Coming” there’s a mysterious howling sound right in the beginning that somehow fits the mood, like a train whistle off in the distance. The fifth song, “Sunset Summer” showed up on a really worn tape I had forgotten about. It was done on an Arvin tape recorder with really cheap mics. But like the others, through audio filtering it cleaned up pretty well. So there they are, the early beginnings.

The next three songs came later. “Waiting” I wrote in 1970 sitting in an airport. The original title was “Crosseyed At The Airport” (for various reasons) but that seemed too off beat so I renamed it. “Big Machine” was originally “The Big Smiling Musical Chewing Machine” which was a reference to getting the munchies. What’s different here is that the other guitarist I’m playing with is a friend named Bob Stein. This recording is from the summer of 1971, possibly 1972. Jazz and rock had entered into the mix. Bob was a jazz pianist. But he had guitar chops as well. The song is a mashup of jazz and folk and blues. What’s fun for me bout this tune, aside from the stylistic change is that it is the only recording I have of both my 1963 Gibson J-50 that was in a car crash, which I rebuilt right before this recording, and my new at the time 1971 Martin D-18 I got from the insurance company after the car rash. Bob is playing the repaired Gibson, and I’m playing the Martin and harmonica.

The last song,“Los Collados De Las Penas Blancas” was written in 1976. I was visiting my sister where she lived in a remote adobe brick cabin way up on a mountain in Columbia, South America. By then I had had a year or more of classical guitar study with Stanley Watson, and a summer of jazz guitar study with Gene Bertoncinni. The title comes from the white cliffs one could see across the mile wide valley where the cabin was. My playing had moved on again. So had the technology. It was recorded on modern digital equipment. It’s a mix of folk and jazz and I thought would make a good closer. There’s a dreamy feel to it, inspired by those times and the view from that mountain.

Here’s a word about this recording. The recording tapes weren’t particularly high quality. They were what we could afford and what was available at the local department store, or in one case in a waste paper basket. As one can expect with nearly 60 year old recording tapes there were dropouts and tape hiss to contend with. Attempts to remove the hiss resulted in unwanted affectations, so better to just leave it. I’ve remixed the songs to minimize the hiss. The dropouts and volume shifts from tape degradation and poor engineering was mostly fixable with digital manipulation. The idea is if there is a split second of missing sound in a note, you have to find that exact note with the right tonal aspect, make a copy of it and stick it into the hole in the sound without it being noticed. Needles in haystacks. On “Train Coming” the tape actually ran out right right before the very last note could fade out. So I stretched that last note with a digital magic wand and the train disappears in the distance.

There was talk about re-recording these songs, but the thing about these early recordings is that they have a certain mojo and patina that frankly I don’t think we could recreate. So there we are.

In closing I would like to say thanks to Tompkins Square for getting all these early efforts out there. I never would have done it. To the the folks who have heard the original “Partly On Time: Recordings 1968-1970” record, thanks for your enthusiasm and the nice feedback we’ve had for that music Carter and I did all those years ago. This then is for you, and maybe some other folks who might stumble into this little time warp.

Cheers, K Nelson July 2025