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Lavatory

by Sam Pocker

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Bad Medicine 03:24
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Down Boys 03:19
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Lick It Up 04:10
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Wild Side 02:34
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about

My new album "LAVATORY" will be released on New Music Friday March 2nd, 2018. It's a collection of 11 acoustic covers of songs most closely related to the hair metal genre, the majority of which were released between 1986 and 1988.

The entire album was recorded in my bathroom on cassette tape. Initially I wanted to do something as simple as possible. Culturally I felt like our entire society was regressing into 1988 and so I began looking at popular music from that year. I started to ignore the big hits and look at the songs that you heard everywhere on a daily basis but didn't really have any serious cultural impact on paper.

Warrant's "Down Boys" was the first song that really struck me as being perfect for the album and the t-shirt that I'm wearing on the cover is worn by the now deceased Jani Lane in the music video. It made it all the way to #27 on Billboard's Hot 100 and thereafter he sort of began to drink himself to death.

I think living in Los Angeles and encountering so many out of control addicts on a daily basis sort of made me appreciate where this guy was coming from in what appears to otherwise be a poorly written anthem about wanting to have sex with a model or something.

As I delved into the seedy underbelly of 86-88 hair metal I started watching documentaries about the Sunset Strip in the 80s and really seeing how Los Angeles had influenced this style of music. An interview with Dee Snyder (who IMO owes his entire career to hairspray and makeup) of all people showed his contempt for the genre, and he then went on to talk about how much he despised metal bands that went acoustic and played ballads such as Extreme and Mr. Big.

It then seemed to me the most proper way to investigate this music was acoustically.

I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this and I didn't want to work with anyone else. It just needed to be something simple, cheap, and interesting. I really wanted to learn what made these seemingly bad songs so infectious that I still remembered them 30 years later. So I bought a cassette recorder on eBay and got right to work. My bathroom was the most obvious place to record because of the natural reverb from the shower and the fact that it was the most isolated room from my neighbors whom I didn't want to disturb.

The cassette recorder (which I didn't realize until it arrived was the exact same model I had owned in the late 80s) died after recording two songs. I bought another, it died after one song. I borrowed one from a friend, it died after a few more songs.

$200 in tape recorders and a headache of legal clearances later I am ready to release "LAVATORY".

credits

released March 2, 2018

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about

Sam Pocker Los Angeles, California

Sam Pocker is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and musician. Pocker’s songwriting catalog covers over 8 albums worth of material, released by his bands The Pretty Colors, The Pregnant Vegans, and The Agoura Hills PTA. His most recent book “Where Do Incorrect Ideas Come From?” was released in January 2020. ... more

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