When Shirley and I started attending science fiction conventions, we would usually look around the con areas on Friday evening. One year doing this, we saw people performing on stage, singing. Much of the material was very good, some of it humorous, and very well written. Some of the performers however, were not. There was a lot of writing talent there, but some of them couldn’t carry a tune if they had a bucket. (This is the category I fall in. As I tell most people, I sing in the key of OFF.)
Through this encounter, I learned about filk.
I bought tapes from other conventions, and learned about people like
Leslie Fish, and Frank Hayes. I
heard a variety of performers and compositions.
I’ll never forget Tom Smith’s ‘Domino Death’ which tells the tale
of a pizza delivery man who has just slid over the edge.
When they were organizing the committee to put on next year’s convention, I
asked if I could help with the Filksing. I
was then told that in was in charge. Well,
ooook. I immediately started contacting previous year’s filk
performers and setting up a schedule. It
was then that Shirley suggested that we could do this also. This caught me flat footed.
I knew I couldn’t sing. One
local radio station had a morning disc jockey that wrote song parodies,
‘twisted tunes’ as he used to call them.
They always had offers for anyone to write tunes and submit them.
In fact, any that they produced would receive $98 for their effort.
(The station billed itself as 98Rock.)
The only idea I ever came up with was taking an old Melanie song and
changing it around to reflect what the DJ was doing to other songs.
Thankfully, this never got developed.
To say the least, writing became a scary prospect.
We sat down and came up with some ideas. Then
we contacted our friend Jan who is a wiz on the guitar.
What is even better, he has an ear that can find any note or chord on any
song. So, Shirley and I became the
key song writers with Jan’s input helping to flush out the final products.
Suddenly, FreeFall was born.
We came up with a number of ideas, most of which became songs.
We went back to old rock and roll for most of our musical ideas, and then
some otherwise out of the normal rock music path for others.
We used songs like ‘Along Came Jones’, ‘Its my Party’, ‘Bad Moon
Rising’, and 'Do You Believe in Magic’.
We took a left turn with the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies, and
‘When You Wish Upon a Star’. Jan
almost freaked when he walked in one time and we presented him words written to
a song from ‘The Sound of Music’.
It was while at one practice, that Jan started playing “You’ve Got a
Friend”, and Shirley started singing with him.
Shirley finally came up with an idea on what to do with that music.
She decided to tell some of the story of Amber from the book series by
Roger Zelazny. She came up with a
verse, and got stuck. She told me
to try working on it, but not knowing it as well as she, I couldn’t come up
with any thing worth keeping. Jan
finally took a crack at it. What he
came out with was a very good song.
FreeFall performed three times at Shore Leave conventions in three different
incarnations. Each performance was
well received with a lot of people buying filk books of our songs when we sold
them the last year.
Even I managed to find a part to play in one song each year.
The first year, I had to do the part of the damsel in distress in
‘Along Came Bones’. The following year, I mimicked Patrick Stewart’s voice for
a background on ‘Please Make Movies’. The
last year, I wrote a song that was a talking song instead of a singing song, and
performed it with Frank backing me up as a filler between acts.
All in all, it was a fun time.