In the fall of 1995, a struggling rock group, not very well-known as As of Yet, wanting very much to play in Lexington clubs, decided it was time to record a demo tape. With very little money to spare, we opted for the do-it-yourself route. With rented microphones, a borrowed four-track, Neal's stereo, and Scott's cassette deck to replace Neal's broken one, we recorded just about every song we knew, hoping to cull from the lot the best four pieces with which to build a solid demo. In the end, we were very pleasantly surprised by the sound quality, given the circumstances, and each of us wanted a copy of all the good stuff.
Three versions exist, the main difference being the song order; Neal preferred a different sequence than did Kristian, and Scott of course thought he knew better than either of them. Andy on the other hand really didn't care, and made a copy of Scott's.
Along with the three different track orders came different titles: Scott called his As of Yet in the "Studio", but Kristian named his copy for Kristian and Neal's roommate Brad Jordan, for whom we often had to postpone practice (so he could sleep before the night shift at the UK Medical Center).
Of the twelve attempted songs, eleven tracks came to a produced point, two of which lacked lyrics (and stayed that way for quite a while longer). For the curious, the failed song was the "pimpy E chords song," which at the time had very little actual structure in the recording environment (recording live without vocals); almost a year later "Pimpy E" found a home on tape in the Leave Bronx sessions, but was never released (in fact, I don't think we've even played it since then!). The unfinished tracks were rather inspired - and fresh-sounding renditions of "the B song" and "Kristian's House of the Rising Sun" -- the former has found its way onto Leave Bronx, and the latter, with Kristian singing the second or third batch of lyrics in the song's history, resurfaces as "Rising Sun" the B-side of the "86 Miles to Chicago" single, and again with a different ending and harmonized vocals on Concealed by Shadows. All in the quest to do the song right....
This leaves nine tracks to comprise Brad's Sleeping:
Of course, some of these tracks date from 1994, such as "Pasta'" and "'Wrote in the Hall"; others were Scott-creations that we played because they were already finished, such as "Remote Control" and "The One with No Name" (we played "No Name" at that time but didn't record it until '96), which go all the way back to the olden days of May 1993. "Green" and "Gremlin" have remained setlist staples to this day. While "Green" makes an appearance in heavily metamorphosed form on Concealed by Shadows, this is the only studio recordings of "Gremlin," which itself has gone through a few minor changes in the past three years of performances; "Gremlin" remains rather static, though the recording sounds almost sluggish compared to the present-day speed (roughly warp-factor nine).