10-Day Room (since cassette demos 1997)

. . . continued from Hand @ The Hem (since cassette demos 1997) . . .

The locale for 10-Day Room could’ve been anywhere then — maybe someplace like Hotel Congress in Tucson AZ. I was checking in there a lot. It was one of a few affable stopovers around the country where I’d occasionally hole-up for brief periods of time while working on projects or just passing through with time to amuse & no place else to go.  

It’s the town where I got this guitar:

Harmony H-1215 — probably around my age

In this case, the four strings & twenty frets are strung upside-down with some forgotten heavy gauge & played using makeshift mandolin chords. My reverse-setup allows sweeps that can position the low root bass as a mid-chug afterthought, if that’s your thing . . .

It’s the instrument I used for the song 10-Day Room on the 1998 album Since. 

I’ve patched it up myself a few times. Its scars reflect the temperament of its tone. 

Its only live appearance — accidentally — was about 1997 — when I did a run of informal solo acoustic early shows while crashing around NYC. One of ‘em snuck up on me, remembered suddenly while lounging in a Lower Manhattan dusky daze. I grabbed the first guitar case I saw & jumped in a cab for a short ride. It was past soundcheck. Showtime was in a few minutes. I opened the guitar case onstage & — yup — it was the upside-strung Harmony. The small room was full. The audience watched as I pulled the wrong guitar out of the case. 

My enabling soul rushes to sympathetically muse that I competently transposed on-the-spot for a loose set of distinctive, one-off renditions. My realistic assumption is more like it was probably just one of those nights . . . 

Recollection can be a rascal. 

This Harmony’s last recorded mark was left on the 2011 collection Our Blood, layered along with a number of other electric & acoustic four-string setups, arranged to mix-up default strumming tendencies. 

I've been tracking at home with it in the meantime, perpetually dependent upon its uncommon character for a number of different arrangements over the years. 

It came in this chipboard case when I bought it around 1995 . . . 

. . . with documentation of where it was just passing through, as well.

We’ll go back & visit Chicago Store in Tucson next time. For now, here’s the since cassette demo recorded with a standard tuning nylon in 1997 on a handheld corder:

10-Day Room (since cassette demos 1997) :