[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Chicago. Late winter 2002. I’m on a downtown street corner waiting for a man I know by first name only-and by his make and color of car. Just then I spot it as it turns the corner and accelerates toward me: a sliver Audi coupe. Almost exactly to the second of when I expected it, the car comes to an abrupt stop inches from the curb. I bend my head and offer a faint wave, but I see only my reflection in the pitch-black tinted windows. Then, like a scene out of Usual Suspects, the window slowly lowers, bringing a hand holding a small cassette into view.
This is what I had been waiting for.
So many years later, it’s hard to recall all the details. What I can remember is that I was desperate to get my hands on this demo tape—an actual cassette from a group called The Rain Band. At the time, they were a fledgling Manchester trio, freshly signed to Universal UK. And this was the cassette that had earned them their contract.
The demo had never made it onto the Internet and the band wanted to keep it that way, but their management, as it turned out, had mailed a hard copy to another Chicago resident for undisclosed reasons. If I could get it off him, they said, I was welcome to listen.
“Let me know when you’re done.” He slipped the tape through the crack in the window and sped off without another word.
Even back in 2002, tapes were still very much an outmoded medium. Fortunately, my car had a tape deck; rather unfortunately, my car stereo system did nothing to improve the murky recording. The demo as a whole was quite good, but there was one song in particular that towered above the rest.
According to the barely legible scribbles on the front, the song was called “Don’t Think Twice.” And although the band did indeed nick Dylan’s famous refrain for the chorus, the track was most definitely not a cover. Instead, it was a veritable highlight reel of Manchester past, marrying the rhythmic sway of Hacienda house and a sun-kissed chorus that Noel Gallagher would be proud to call his own.
I kept the demo for exactly four weeks before returning it, figuring a better recording would surface on the band’s debut album. The Rain Band arrived in 2003—a fine and quite underrated album. But much to my surprise, the band left off “Don’t Think Twice.” Didn’t even bother recording a proper studio version, as I would later find out.
The Rain Band never caught on and the band broke up shortly after the album’s release, but I never forgot the track I had on repeat for four weeks in 2002. For years, I hounded their management for a copy of the old demo. They refused my request and eventually lost track of the recording. Perhaps feeling guilty, they put me in touch with the band’s guitarist. For a while, even he was unable to locate a copy of the song and I feared it had been lost forever, but finally, in March 2009, he found the old demo tape and converted it to mp3.
To mark the debut of The Wicked Messenger, I could think of no better gift than to give “Don’t Think Twice” its Internet debut, a decade after its initial recording. Is it perfect? Not by a longshot, but in some alternate universe, it might have been. And that’s what The Wicked Messenger is meant to celebrate: the might-have-beens, the should-have-beens, and the near-classics that were disposed of far too soon. Enjoy.
Written by Jon Garrett
