Our First CD (1991)3/5/2018 by Devan
We had just completed our first successful summer of playing shows both in Memphis (during the school year) and Tulsa (back home for summer break). We received a lot of attention and caught the eye of two local entrepreneurs named Jim and Cindy. They wanted to help us finance a CD and help us sell it. I had interned at a local Tulsa recording studio a year prior and knew they had the gear to pull this off. At first everything was running smooth. The songs were recorded and mixed and we were happy with the results. Instead of walking out of there with the master recordings in hand and going to a CD manufacturing facility ourselves, we trusted the studio owner (Mike) to do this for us. We had the design and everything handed over, but every time we asked for a completion date he would keep pushing it back. Month after month more excuses were added upon. What should have been 2 - 4 weeks for delivery turned into several months. Our investors started to smell a rat and threw some legal threats at the studio for their delay. Luckily it worked, but we still had no CD in hand. Here is what happened. The studio was having financial issues unbeknownst to us. Mike did record us and had the master recordings ready, but when he received the money for the CD duplication, he used it to pay his older debts and tried to stall us until more business came in to pay for our project completion. It hurt me deeply that a person I knew and trusted took advantage of us. Anyway, because of the long delay, Greg and I had written a ton of new material. We were ready to record a new CD. So, instead of spending money on duplicating this current CD, it was cheaper to press some cassettes (which still were used in 1992) and spend our money for studio time in Oklahoma City to record two new CD's with new music. That is how we ended up with our first recording being such a bust. But that wasn't the end of it. How did our original investors feel about this? to be continued...
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