Love in the 4th (aka Lies I Can Believe)

Go here for long-circulating demo of "Lies I Can Believe"--

but from better sounding first generation tape

Love in the 4th

(a.k.a. Lies I Can Believe)

Walter Becker and Dean Parks

Zeon Music: Runaway Inflation © 1992

Vocal: Walter Becker

Drums: John Keane

Bass: Neil Stubenhaus

Guitar: Dean Parks

Keyboards: John Beasley

Saxophone: Bob Sheppard

First Solo: Bob Sheppard (Alto Sax)

Second Solo: Dean Parks (low-tuned fretless guitar)

Engineer: Roger Nichols

Recorded at Signet Studios, Los Angeles, 1992

Love in the 4th

W. Becker/D. Parks

Round and round - The words are spinning

Why don't we take it - From the beginning

I know it hurts but - Babe don't you worry

Let's take our time honey - What's the hurry?

Your eyes are moving - Yes I can see them

The words are soothing - Why don't I believe them?

Your eyes are beaming - But I can't receive them

You say our love just - Needs some attention

Maybe it's stuck in - The fourth dimension

You say it wants more - Kissage and huggage

Maybe it just got - Lost with our luggage

Maybe our love just - Needs space to grow in

A place to go to - A vector to grow in

Maybe what I need's - A towel to throw in

Don't you remember that rainy night?

Riding the dog in the pale moonlight

Making love up in the very last row

Lord have mercy - Halfway to Jersey

Spare me the details, the guts and glory

The truth is just another story

Why don't you give me

Why don't you give me

Lies I can believe?

I never said I was a diplomat

I guess I got no country to be true to

Don't you tell me not to be like that

Don't you blame me when I do like you do

(This verse is in the demo, but not in the track)

Life is a gamble - You're never ready

The sands are shifting but - The winds are steady

They never let up - So keep your head up

Don't let 'em blow you away

To every man goes - His share of passion

But I'm way under - The legal ration

I think you nailed it - Right down to the letter

It's getting older - But it ain't getting better

Maybe our love just -Needs a vacation

The train is rolling - Out of the station

Across the platform - Another train is pulling in

Lovers sighing in exotic places

Holding hands with all the aces

Making love up on the captain's table

All the way, all the way home

I see my past stretched out before me

The truth is just another story

Why don't you give me

Why don't you give me

Lies I can believe?

Just Another Story

Matt Kerns

Signet Studios. Formerly Motown’s Los Angeles studio, where the Temptations, the Commodores, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and Smokey Robinson recorded some of their best songs, by 1992 it was the recording headquarters of Bruce Springsteen, Branford Marsalis, and Frank Sinatra. One likes to imagine Walter and Old Blue Eyes rubbing elbows in those hallowed halls as WB and crew settled in for the initial tracking sessions for his first solo offering, the album that would eventually become 1994’s 11 Tracks of Whack.

As far as we know, and we in this case includes some of the musicians and engineers involved with the final album, none of the material recorded at Signet was used on the final album, despite the fact that a perusal of the 11 Tracks of Whack liner notes tells us that the album was recorded at "Hyperbolic Sound USA, and Signet Sound, Los Angeles CA.” One of the reasons we know that these recordings don’t appear on the final release, other than the obvious sonic differences, is the list of LA studio heavies floating in and out of sessions: names like Neil Stubenhaus and John Keane and a few others who had recorded with Walter “back in the day.”

Love in the 4th, which it turns out is the proper title of the demo we’ve all learned to love (despite multiple transfers and quite awful tape-hiss) as Lies I Can Believe, is a Walter Becker and Dean Parks collaborative effort produced in the same fertile period that begat Cringemaker and Ghost of Hipness Past. It was a personal favorite of mine from the moment I heard it, tape-hiss be damned, with all of the lyrical, melodic, harmonic, and textural greatness I love about Walter’s music.

This track would quite literally have been impossible without some pretty amazing software. The Signet Session tapes in Walter’s archives contained no recorded lead vocal tracks, the only exceptions being incomplete vocals heard distantly. We struggled for quite a long time with what to do with this track. Release it without vocals, ignoring what we both agreed were a pretty great set of lyrics and a terrific vocal by WB? In the end, we agreed that if we could somehow present the Signet tracking session with the older demo vocal, we’d have the best of both worlds, and the truest expression of what this track might have been.

We used iZotope RX7 to extract the vocal from the previously available demo with vocal. That demo and the Signet Studio tracking session were at slightly different tempos, and Audacity was used to bring the vocal up to the same speed as the track without changing key. Next, each phrase was positioned on the track to match the phrasing in the demo as closely as possible. This was a nearly herculean effort, and one which drove home just how much phrasing matters in WB songs. I expected the first 2-10 comments on this song to be pointing out that this is the same vocal. The fact that no one seems to have either noticed or been bothered by this means that either we managed to do a passable job, or that not everyone obsessed over the tape-hiss filled seventh generation tape demos that have been traded around the darker corners of the web for lo these many years.

There has been an argument going on in Steely Dan circles ever since Walter’s 11 Tracks of Whack was released on September 27, 1994. Some people heard the stripped down songs, the demo aesthetic that permeates the album, and inferred that Walter was not now, and had never been, the source of the lush fulness of the Steely Dan sound. What then did he bring to the table, this stripe of fan may have asked, further inferring through subtractive analysis that the Walter Becker half of the Steely Dan equation was solely lyrical, or musically defined by bluesy romps like 11 Tracks of Whack’s Cringemaker.

Of course the fullness of time has largely answered these questions, if they weren’t answered by a decade plus of sterling production work Walter did for a diverse array of artists including China Crisis, Rickie Lee Jones, Michael Franks, Lost Tribe, etc. etc. Circus Money, with tracks like Paging Audrey, Upside Looking Down, and Downtown Canon reaffirmed that Walter Becker as a songwriter (as opposed to simply as producer) is fully capable of the intricate, the lovely, the sublime. This track, the first Walter Becker Media release from the 1992 Signet sessions—the initial recording attempt (let’s call it “the first whack”) at songs being considered for Walter’s first solo album—sheds some light on the aesthetic decisions behind the songs that eventually made the cut.

Between these sessions in 1992 and the release of 11 Tracks of Whack in late 1994 was the completion, mixing, mastering, and release of Donald’s Kamakiriad album, with every bit of overdub, percent of a percent decibel shifting below the threshold of human hearing, and all that. Though Walter initially set out to make an album in much the same way he had always recorded—in studios with studio musicians and all of what we here in the deep south call “the fixins,” he eventually decided that these songs were served best by a stripped down approach, laying them and himself bare for all to hear. 11 Tracks of Whack is Walter making a deliberate decision for his album to be something decidedly other than simply Steely Dan with a different singer. Though not every fan “got it,” there were those who did get it, and got it immediately. “FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, WE find out who put the edge into Steely Dan,” wrote John Pareles in his New York Times review of 11 Tracks, “[Becker]’s still smart, still a wise guy, still as cagey as any songwriter in pop. But now, he's also willing to show some bruises. He's older now; he doesn't have to worry about being cool.”

And that’s really it. Walter didn’t have anything to prove that hadn’t been proven over the course of 7 Steely Dan studio albums and a subsequent decade producing stelar music for some of the world’’s most demanding and sophisticated musicians. All he had left to do was to serve the songs that he wrote, and he determined that the best way to do that was not the way he had done it before. I’ll admit that during my first listen through this track, I found myself wondering what if...what if Walter had given his first solo album the full Steely treatment? Would the album have been bigger? Would it have dominated the pledge drive of every NPR pledge drive for years to come? Would fewer people have headed for the restroom when Walter stepped to the mic at Steely Dan shows? Would the songs have been better? Subsequent listens have answered that question, for me at least. Walter knew what he was doing and made the album he needed to make. Go back and listen to Book of Liars, to Surf and/or Die, to any of the eleven...er...twelve tracks of whack and you’ll hear it.

-- Matt Kerns