November 17, 1987
Cold
Cold Cincinnati cassette
[HAHX-1181] color copied inserts (6 different designs), dot matrix labels, soft shell boxes
After Pink Aftershock broke up at the end of summer 1987, I bought a guitar at Service Merchandise for $47 and began teaching myself to play it. I tried several things as musical outlets over the next years before finally putting another functioning band together, Sunspring, in 1990. The first of these efforts were these 11 minutes and two seconds of music, little of which could be considered release quality material. The four songs are a very loose keyboard and guitar mix with neat sounds, awful production and poor playing. The first two are mellow instrumentals, while the third and fourth have loud up-tempo drum machine, super fuzzy guitar which is an early allusion to Sunspring, and very uncertain vocals that seem to not know whether to try to sound like Robert Smith or just be normal.
Cold Cincinnati sold a handful of copies, like, less than fifty, for 88¢ each at Mother’s Record & Tape Co. at the Mall in St. Matthews (where I worked at the time) and Ken’s on Frankfort Avenue. To save money, there were six different cover designs. They were all color copied on one sheet and then cut into sixths. This was recorded while I was also practicing with Dorian Grey which was a distorted drum machine group with Susanne “Sabian” Butler also on guitar, and Jeff “Lippie” Hinton on bass and vocals. Jeff and Sabian were from Shelbyville, but hung out in Louisville and moved to Poplar Level Road in 1988. Dorian Grey recorded an album’s worth of material through stereo cassette overdubbing and some direct to DAT during the summer of ’88. Though an ad for it ran in Maximumrocknroll, Dorian Grey’s Fall album was never actually released. Dorian Grey continued in several incarnations until 1989, one with John Kampschaefer on drums, one called Cold Mourning, and recorded nearly twenty songs. None of it ever escaped our basements.
The Cold cassette began an annual tradition of releasing something every November 17th. 1985’s being the Rockhouse cassette, and the first Pink Aftershock cassette in 1986.
LINER NOTES:
Scott Ritcher, instruments and vocals
Side one:
Louisville
Seven Weeks On In
Too Cool To Clap
Take Another Face
Side two was blank.