Fire Me Up: Our 1987 Live Album

Our 1987 live album, “Fire Me Up” was recorded at the Bathurst Street Theatre and it’s an unusual album in a few ways, it was recorded on digital multi-track 1-inch tape, on a 32 track Mitsubishi recorder. Geek me Martha! Really? Yep! I remember at the time Sony had a multi-track digital recorder and they were in fierce competition with Mitsubishi. Sony bought a full page ad in Mix Magazine showing their recorder in the back of a Mitsubishi pickup truck with the caption: “They Make a Wonderful Truck”. But I have digressed in the most geekly manner. Our label Duke Street Records wanted us to do a live album to get away from the refinement of the studio albums and capture the excitement of the live show They told us they wanted new material on the live album, in fact, half of the material had to be new. Of course, this was all super last minute and it is remarkable to write this but the first time we ever played those songs live, they were recorded. Fire Me Up is an expression given to us by our percussionist Art Avalos. He is from LA so while we were never sure exactly what it meant, we were pretty sure it was cool. Here is an Aaron Davis tune from the record called A World Away… we were some synthy back then!