Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

That subject line describes pretty much everything in my life right now, but in this particular case it refers to a track I dug up from one of my old bands. Back in 1994-1995, I played with a little country/rock outfit called Sugarstickygirl (don’t get me started) with my friends Toby, Todd and Mary Alice. We split up at the end of 1995, something I didn’t handle very well in retrospect, but Toby and Todd and I kept playing together, first with Terry Kelly as Audiotone/Sugar Free and then with Brandy Johnson as Drift. Just before the split, we recorded a song called “Where Have You Been” with Tony Persyn of Radio Iodine. As opposed to the mostly live-in-the-studio recordings we’d done before, this one was a true studio production, recorded one or two instruments at a time and overdubbed like crazy. It was also a group composition, and wasn’t even vaguely country. The way we went about recording it didn’t sit well with everyone, so we had a few spats during the recording, and it probably accelerated the breakup. We were still really proud of it, and since this was before CD-Rs were ubiquitous, each of us got a copy of the final mix on cassette. But cassettes get lost and we all lost our copies over the years. At least until this weekend when I stumbled across mine and immediately dumped it into my computer.

So here it is: it’s a damn fine song if I say so myself, and one of the best things I’ve played on. You can see why Todd, Toby and I wanted to keep playing together: Toby’s a hell of a drummer, and Todd’s parts are more creative than any other bassist in town. And me? I just loved having this fantastic rhythm section dragging me along for the ride.

Sugarstickygirl - Where Have You Been (3.5 MB .mp3)