[11] Fixed (and Prefixed)

Newly re-recorded October, November 2021

Written and performed by Monty Dicksion

A lot to say about this song!

I was very happy with my original audio recording of this song. I had good reason to be happy with it. I had recorded it in a professional recording studio in San Diego in 1981, and I had an excellent engineer. Plus, I had a real drummer and I was very pleased with what my drummer did on that recording. I have long since forgotten the drummer's name. But he was a Marine. (I was living in Oceanside, California at the time, home of Camp Pendelton.) Funny, but I can't remember how I managed to find him. Anyway, if there is any way I could find him, I'd like to thank him again and I'd like him to know how the song turned out.

As I say, I was happy with how that recording turned out. But even though I would have if I could have, I couldn't use it for my "As Live As I Can Make It" project. For this project, I need multi-track recordings. At the time, I had recorded it on 2" 24-track tape. But I didn't store the tape well and it deteriorated and became unusable.

Fortunately, I had had the good sense to have the engineer make me a stereo mix-down on audio cassette (which I also had him do for 3 other songs, "The Train Song," "The Pyramid" and "Latest Jazziness"). And another fortunate thing was that, although I can't remember now how or when I did it (it had to have been sometime in the 1990's), I somehow managed to save the audio cassette recording digitally. And so, this and the other three songs were preserved for posterity.

Anyway, ever since the time I had taken this song to the studio, there was some confusion about the song's name. I had another song, also an instrumental. But that song is a finger-picked song. I had always thought that the finger-picked song had a kind of Baroque sound to it. Actually, I'm not musically knowledgeable enough to know that much about Baroque music. But I knew enough to know that my finger-picked song wasn't genuine authentic Baroque. So I thought, "Well, if it ain't Baroque, it must be Faw-Ixed!" And so that's what I used to call that song - "Faw-Ixed."

Now, I always knew that was a stupid name for a song. So when I re-recorded it for this project, I finally gave it a descent name - "A Salute to the Noble Ladybug." (Well, it's better than Faw-Ixed"!)

But, like I say, I had this song at the same time. I came up with this song as the result of trying to figure out how to play The Kinks' "Tired of Waiting for You." If you know that song, you'll spot the similarities.

I never figured out how to play that song, but I wound up with this one instead. I liked it. I felt it was kind of "my style." And I liked it enough to take it to the studio.

So, after recording a little bit of it, as the engineer was jotting down some recording time documentation, he asked me, "What's the name of the song?"

By golly, I had never thought of that before! So I just spit out the first thing that came to my head, which I had got confused with the finger-picked song. But I didn't want to have to go to all the trouble of explaining the name "Faw-Ixed" to him. That would just be nutty. So I said, "Fixed." And immediately he said, "And 'Prefixed'," which made sense, actually, because of the way the song begins.

So there it's been since that day - Fixed (and Prefixed).

Well, at least it had a name, but it certainly wasn't about anything; it had never been meant to tell any kind of story.

Well, so more than a decade went by. And I wanted to start putting my songs on the internet. I figured that, anymore, you can't just put audio on the internet. People don't just listen to music anymore. They have to have something to watch. So I set to work making a story to go along with the music. I drew all the pictures in this video (as I'm sure you can tell) and I think it's a story that's pretty easy for anybody to understand. I rather like it, if I do say so myself.

And so, with the project I'm working on, I needed a multi-track recording of the song, ergo, I had to re-record it. That presented me with a rather big challenge, because the original studio recording was very good. I painstakingly worked to re-enact that original recording as best as I could. I think I did OK, as a do-it-yourselfer engineer. Probably the biggest challenge of it was remaking the drums. In that respect, I just might have done the drums better than the original - I don't know - I'll leave it up to the listener to decide.

At any rate, with it completed, I have the multi-track recording that I'll need when I bring it to the next phase of the project.