The Taker

G.S.: electric guitar, electronic drums, bass, vocals. Lyrics and music 3/4-6/87.

This was the last thing recorded for this project, and came about under very unusual circumstances. On the night of 3/4/87 I had just finished recording "I Was Back In School Again", and was experimenting with tunings and different effects combinations when I suddenly found my mind inundated with what seemed like input from a malevolent intelligence, along the lines of, say, Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker, a serial killer who terrorized L.A. with random killings). A lot of really horrible imagery went through my head. It's difficult to describe but it was the mental equivalent of suddenly being thrown in a tiny room with such a person. It was very frightening, seemed totally real and was so intense that it felt as if I was overloading, and I managed to get the guitar off and crawl onto the bed before passing out for about a half hour. What caused this? I don't know. At the time, it felt like the process of finding the tuning and experimenting with the sounds from the pedalboard put me into an altered state of consciousness, opened a channel in my head, and that's what came through. Whether this was an actual person, an element of my unconscious, or some discarnate force, it's impossible to say. But it was real enough that I worried about keeping the tuning I'd found- fearing that it would somehow attract this maniac to me like a homing signal. I stuck the guitar in the case and decided to wait until morning to decide.

By the next day, the tuning seemed harmless, but I really liked the sound of it. I played it for a couple of people and it had no adverse effect on them. So I decided to use it and to write a song based on the experience. The harmonics that had seemed to trigger everything that night are what start the piece off; the effects settings were left untouched between the incident and the recording, so this is exact.

The lyrics are from the point of view of whatever it was that passed through my consciousness. The idea was not to create sympathy but fright and repulsion, and to examine the character in a wider social context.