This week (the 2nd week of April 2024) Dave Hawkins, B.O.B and I got to enjoy some satisfaction, and a bit of closure, after having finally bundled together the ancient Smoking Section demo tracks and released them to the digital airwaves.
It had been a long time coming. When the Smoking Section broke up in 1991, unsigned, our three demo tapes were all we had to show for our work: out of the band’s couple-dozen original songs, only nine of them remained listenable, smeared on slowly deteriorating magnetic tape, transient and un-distributed. The rest of our catalog was of course instantly memory-holed: never recorded, and as far as we know never to be invoked again – poof.
Almost 35 years later, when we pressed GO on publishing our remastered DAT rips, making Smooth & Nasty readily available to the general public this week, it felt like a miracle on many levels. We’d rescued a decent-sized chunk of our collective work from the abyss, and released a solidly legitimate album of original, soulful and sassy dance music. We even rescued an additional 10th track, “My Lips,” which we’d forgotten existed, albeit in a not-quite-finished state (but close enough). And it all happened in the blink of an eye – practically an Instant Album.
It turns out to have been a miracle in more ways than the above.
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