Tom Shaw on No Room

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30 years ago this week, I and three other partners in musical madness (underlined) entered Mitch Easter's Drive-In studio to work on what was, to us, our make or break moment. We'd been a Winston-Salem, North Carolina band called Urban Edge for close to four years by this point and had been playing every club, fraternity party, house party, church, restaurant, battle of bands contest, outdoor festival, and Romantics opening gig that we could fit Jason's piano into. With a demo tape we recorded with Mitch in 1988 not getting the results we wished (a recording contract) we decided to prove ourselves by recording something that we believed would "show them."

Who was "them?" I've never been quite sure. Coming from very different musical backgrounds, it might be those who thought we didn't have the musical chops- Jerry Chapman (a brilliant Entwistle/Squire influenced bassist), Jerry Finley (a studio wiz kid and drummer), Jason Buss (a classically trained pianist), and I (a dude who played guitar "ok" and lucked into meeting these guys). More than likely, "them" referred to the club owners that shut us out for being too "neat" and poppy and the radio stations that found us too collegiate but also edgy. Even we didn't know what this was, let alone what to call it. A recording contract was nothing more than a distant dream.

So, five years after Jerry Chapman and I were inspired by a Three O'Clock video on MTV to make a Paisley Underground SOUTHEAST band, we found ourselves working once again with the esteemed record producer and musician, Mitchell Blake Easter. I expected Day One to go like it did almost two years earlier at Mitch's, where we would run through the song to get the drums and then record the tracks, vocals, and finally overdub with trimmings. Mixing would take a week or so and we would have our album ready to roll by mid February of 1990.

We spent six hours in the studio on Day One. We recorded the opening track to what would become "Songs From The Hydrogen Jukebox." That's it. One song. And it wasn't just one song. Take after take of "No Room" was met with false starts, Mitch pulling us into the control room to listen to what we were playing, the introduction of the click track, and frustration. I thought, "What the fuck is going on here? Are we recording 'Road to Ruin' or 'Sergeant Pepper?"

It was somewhere in between. Mitch made it clear that he was going to push us, and I am so grateful he did. By the end of the day, we had the grand accomplishment of keeping just ONE track to ONE song- the drums to "No Room." I thought, "This is going to take a while." It did. We didn't finish the album until the end of April.

The song was written by Jason Buss and me (and possibly Ric Roberts) with a theme adopted from a quote of mine. Earlier, the previous year, I was up late watching television at my girlfriend's apartment. There was a forgetful film on TV about a runaway teen who had fallen into dubious hands and by the end of the movie, instead of being reformed, she had joined the nastiness and ruthlessness of the world. I told the guys about it the next day and said, "You know, it just goes to show that there's no room for innocence in this world."

Jason took it and ran so far away. Here's the song-- with drums from the first week 30 years ago.