The Discovery of “Waiting In Wings”, “Race Myself Home” and “This Time Next Spring”

Everyone has that box. A box in deep storage, stuffed under old blankets, CDs and tax returns, that is filled with memories, ghosts from the past. Some too painful to look at. Some too precious to discard. Some completely forgotten.

I have a box like this. A large plastic bin filled with ephemera spanning much of my life. Elementary school yearbooks, Little League trophies, baseball cards, college letters, a cassette tape Patterson Hood gave me in 1996 or 1997, a Sugar Ray Leonard autograph, a non-working Tascam 4-track, and, of course, an obscene about of Mendoza Line history. In fact, printouts of ML reviews, newspaper clippings, magazines, album artwork proofs, pictures, never made button designs, contracts of all kinds, and even an old handwritten ML mailing list, make up the bulk of the container. 

Late last year, for reasons not completely clear, I decided to rummage through the bin. Underneath several pounds of paperwork, I discovered several cassette tapes. Some were clearly marked. One contains an entire ML performance at Schuba’s in Chicago in 2000. Others are completely unmarked. I was very curious to see what was on these tapes. Since I no longer own a cassette player, I ordered one online. When it arrived, I took out the tapes and started playing them one by one. I started with the Schubas concert. It’s….err…well….special. Much of the material is from “I Like You When You’re Not Around”. We were certainly not at our most professional or sober. Not surprising. It’s mostly stage banter and Timothy imploring people in the sparse crowd to procure him an alcoholic beverage. The cover of the Replacements classic “Can’t Hardly Wait” is the highlight and we promise to share that with you at some point in the never future. The next tape contained only an egregious and inexplicable cover of “I Wanna Be Free” by the Monkees. It was recorded for a compilation that no one can recall. 

The next tape was a marvel. It’s filled with Shannon’s haunting and gorgeous 4-track recordings. She had only started to play guitar when these were recorded, but within weeks she was writing songs. Her brilliant “A Bigger City” is amongst the song on this tape. There are also several covers and odds and ends on this tape. Perhaps we will release them in archival form down the line. 

The final tape was marked “Mendoza Line Rough Mixes”. It started out as advertised. Among the first tracks on the tape were early versions of “Everything We Used To Be” and “You Singled Me Out” both of which ended up on “We’re All In This Alone”. Halfway through I realized I had no idea what I was listening to. There were three songs that I had almost no recollection of. I recorded the tape and sent it to Timothy. He has a better memory than I do. “Race Myself Home” is one of Shannon’s early songs and was recorded in 1999 at Duck Kee Studios in Mebane, NC. It captures the extraordinary knack for channeling classic girl group tropes and investing them with incredible confessional poignancy that seemed to emerge from her the second she picked up a guitar.  The next, also recorded at that session, is one of this called “This Time Next Spring”. It’s a great piano driven ballad penned by Tim. He and Shannon sing it as a duet, which gives it a bit of a courtroom, cross-examination feel. Sadly, the original tapes of these tracks are believed to have been lost in a fire a number of years ago. 

The last song was an absolute rocker called “Waiting In The Wings”. Tim has no memory of this song and I have only the vaguest memories of it as well. It was obvious Andres Galdames, an early member of the ML and a frequent arranger and collaborator on many of the early ML records, played drums on this song. I sent the digital file to him. He recalled working on this together in 1999 and recording it at Chase Park Transduction with producer Andy Baker. 

Many years ago, Andy moved to Taiwan to open a studio there. We are in periodic touch over Skype, so I reached out to him to see if there was any way he had the original tapes of this session. After a week or two he responded and said he thought they were discarded years ago. Saddened, yet undeterred, I decided to reach out to Dave Barbe. He still owns and operates Chase Park Transduction, where he has produced endless amounts of terrific records from Drive By Truckers and Deerhunter to name a few. 

Periodically Dave and I email each other about our mutual love of Strat-O-Matic baseball, so I decided to email him to see if there was a chance the original tapes existed. I thought the chances were less than zero. To my surprise, no less than 10 minutes later, Dave emailed me a picture of two reels marked “Mendoza Line”. Scrawled across the back of one of the tape logs is “In The Wings”. Dave held onto the original reel with “Waiting In The Wings” for over 20 years. It’s kind of miracle.

We are so pleased to share these lost treasures with you on the 20th Anniversary Reissue of “We’re All In This Alone”.  - Pete Hoffman