[24] The Pyramid

Written and Performed by Monty Dicksion

Newly Re-recorded August 5 – September 7, 2022

The Pyramid was one of the four songs that, between 1979 and 1981, I took to Studio West, a recording studio in San Diego. I still have my receipts from those sessions. In those days, studio time there was $50/hour!

I had a superb engineer at Studio West. I don’t remember his name. But on my receipts, it lists the engineer only as “JE.” So if JE should happen to stumble across this video, I’d like to take this opportunity to tell him “Thank You!” The original 1981 version that he helped me record is included on my playlist called “7 Songs.”

Back in those days, I had recorded this song on 2” 24-track tape. I had kept that tape for about 20 years, but I didn’t store it properly and it disintegrated and became unusable. And that’s too bad, too, because for this ALAICMI project, I need multi-track recordings. Oh well, c’est la vie anyway, because I need digital multi-tracks.

Because the 1981 recording was recorded so well, I was faced with a big challenge when I began this song. I wanted to try to record as well as the original. If I do say so myself, I think I succeeded. And in a few ways, maybe not noticeable to anyone else, this new recording is better than the original.

Musically, I play the song exactly as I’ve always played it. And as it’s recorded, it includes the same incidental little things that I did in the 1981 recording. There is a slight tempo difference in the third part of the song – the “frantic” part. And there are a couple of signal-processing differences. Otherwise, this new recording is very faithful to the original.

The song is called “The Pyramid” because it has four parts, like the four sides of a pyramid, although Part 4, the blues part, itself has two parts; slow and then fast.

I can’t say exactly when I started making this song. I believe it was already coming together as early as 1976, because I recall that was when I started making up the lyrics. That was when I was living on Maui.

All of the lyrics, as a whole, don’t mean anything at all. That is, this song is not “about” anything. But certain lines taken separately do have meaning. For example, at the time when I made up the lyrics, even though I loved living on Maui, I was becoming annoyed at the superficiality and phoniness of all of the tourist attractions. And I recalled that the same thing was true of southern California. Everything’s a show, an attraction. So much just image. That’s what the first line of this song depicts. The University of Alchemy represents Disneyland. In those days, Disneyland had an attraction called ‘America the Beautiful,’ a movie “shown on a screen circled around.” Sadie, in the song is not anyone at all, except in the first reference to her, she represents an employee working in the tourist industry, or, more generally, people who are OK with a make-believe world. I guess still to this day I still don’t care for fantasy. That’s one reason I’m not a fan of the whole Anime subculture today. I prefer stuff that’s real.

And that too had an effect on this recording. Here’s why:

I very much want to have drums for this song. Even when I recorded it back in 1981, I brought a drummer into the studio. I found him through the musician’s union. I gave him a copy of the recording and told him to come up with something and be ready when the day for the studio arrived.

When he showed up, it was as if he’d never practiced anything at all. It was as if he was making stuff up right there in the session. Needless to say, I couldn’t use anything he did.

And when I began this new recording, I was excited to put drums in, because I’m beginning to learn to do a lot with digital drum stuff. But long before my recording was complete, I knew that synthetic drums wouldn’t do for this song. It has to be real!

If anybody who is a drummer hears this song and thinks you’d like to lay down some drum tracks for this song, let me know. I might be interested.