“Pagans and Mystics” is the oldest composition in this website. The recording of it is on the album “Saw It At The Circus part 1”. The song was written in 1976 in a sleeping room in a boarding house in Iowa City, Iowa. A room where I vividly recall maggots inhabiting left-over spaghetti in my wastebasket in the sweltering non air-conditioned space. The song was conceived to be a part of a larger work, which never came to fruition formally, but has nonetheless constructed itself informally over the years. The recording and evolution of the song is an interesting story I’d like to tell.
Winter of 1984-85 I had just purchased an 8channel reel to reel tape machine, and had set up a primitive recording studio in a cabinet-building shop I was operating in the 7 Corners commercial district of Minneapolis. I was learning the basics of modern multi-track recording in order to further my growth as an artist-musician.
After recording the acoustic guitar and vocal of the song, while playing along with a rudimentary drum machine beat, I realized I needed to buy an electric guitar, learn how to play it, and incorporate it into my songs. Till then I’d only ever played acoustic guitar.
One night close to Christmas, as I walked into a local Salvation Army store, a fellow passed me in the entryway carrying a guitar wrapped in a blanket. I asked him about the guitar, and he showed me a 1972 Fender Telecaster electric guitar. I was shocked! A storied instrument! He told me he was going to donate it to the store that night. I told him I’d been in the market for an electric guitar of late, and couldn’t believe he was donating it to the Salvation Army. He looked into my eyes and said, “If you write a check for $125 to the Salvation Army the guitar is yours.” Needless to say, I did so, and became the proud owner of a magical instrument, which I only possessed for a year or so, but still remember quite fondly as the best electric guitar I’ve ever played. Soon enough though I sold it for $125 to a friend so I could eat and buy cigarettes.
Quickly I tamed that guitar and played the scorching slide guitar you hear in the song. The Telecaster seemed to play itself, and I was just the conductor! At that time (1985) there was no bass in the recording, and no drums besides the basic drum machine beat. The song fell to the archives and was lost for many years, until 2010, when it was reborn to be part of the album “Saw It At The Circus part 1”. By then the only surviving recording of the song was on a humble cassette tape, so my production skills were put to the test to make sense of the hissing and crackling mess of 25 year old analogue cassette tape!
At the time I was without a bass instrument, due to damage incurred taking a swim in the Mississippi River when my liveaboard boat sank in the heart of winter. So I went out and bought a used bass guitar to carry on my musical adventures. But before that happened my friend and drummer Terry Lee Storhaug played magnificent drum and hand percussion parts on the recording, which was 25 years old by then. The final step in the saga of the recording was for me to weave into it various on location recordings, (demonstrating protesters at the 2008 RNC convention in St. Paul). I also added my voice singing cryptic words of my cohort JS Bowers. This is the story of that one song and recording, “Pagans and Mystics”!
CP Butchvarov 2024