GREEN PAJAMAS - Summer of Lust

In the spring of 1984, Jeff Kelly and I had our jam room set up in the attic of my parents house in West Seattle. Jeffs girlfriend had just left him and he was sick with the pain, certain he had just lost the one love of his life. We jammed a lot that spring, since making noise seemed to take Jeffs mind off his depression. The two of us would usually alternate playing drums and guitar, or, when we had a drummer over, Jeff and I would play guitar and bass respectively. One evening our friend Karl Wilhelm happened to be sitting in the drummers seat. I chanced to record the session on a ghetto blaster. I thought it was a pretty good jam, but the next day as I listened to the tape, the long hook-filled guitar solos and simple yet emotional ad lib lyrics about the pain of lost love seemed to be a mandate from above. I played the tape for Jeff and had no trouble convincing him that we should start a recording project and put out a cassette. A serious band would do him good and put to use the creativity that poured from his heartache. The name Green Pajamas came from the song of the same name that Jeff had written a few months earlier. This optimistic anthem seemed a fitting name for the band. The title Summer of Lust came from the turn Jeffs love life had to take, since true love had deserted him, and the fact that he and I both lusted after a date-book full of young women that spring/summer. We began recording using Jeffs Teac 4-track reel-to-reel. Basic tracks (drums, bass, and guitar) were recorded in my attic using one microphone placed in the center of the room. Over-dubs and mixing were done in Jeffs bedroom at his parents house, where he had spent years recording songs he wrote. We decided to include Anna Maria" and "Lost in a World," two songs that we had recorded there the previous winter. We spent the next week mixing, and the recording was done. The next day we found a tape duplicator through the yellow pages and Summer of Lust was officially released on July 14, 1984, with a first run of 25 cassettes. By that evening, they were available at our favorite record store. And that is my story of the making of the Summer of Lust and the conception of The Green Pajamas. About four months later I got a phone call from a man named Tom Dyer. He had just bought a copy of our tape and was writing a review of it for Option magazine. He also mentioned that he ran Green Monkey Records and had an 8-track studio in his basement. The rest is recorded history." --Joe Ross.\r\n