Long ago, in a land far away, I played guitar in somewhere around 10 million garage bands. One of the better ones (purely my opinion) was called Jagged Edge. This was somewhere around 1990 and lasted until around 1994. I’m pretty sure it was before the current rap group by the same name surfaced. It was a blast. We played in a bunch of bars and had a great time. Even had the opportunity to write a few of our own songs and get them recorded. One of my best friends always told me that we “never sounded better than when it was 5 bucks for all you can drink.”

So here they are in all their glory. The final mix never happened (hey – that gets expensive!), but the rough mix was bearable. All I had was a cassette of the second round of mixing and wanted to get the songs on to CD so that my grandchildren would have something substantial to tease me about later in life.

Using a portable tape player I went from the headphone jack to the line in jack of my sound card and grabbed some free software off the net to do the recording. That software built a WAV file for each song that averaged anywhere from 35MB – 52MB. They are huge. Grabbed another piece of free software off the net that took the giant WAV files and converted them to MP3 files that are less than 1/10th of their original size. Nothing is altered. Nothing has been passed through any kind of enhancement or equalizer. It is as it is. Maybe some day I will find time to try to enhance the files, but they are not too bad considering the trip they took to get here. Enjoy!

Jagged Edge was myself, Christine (vocals), Paul (drums), Phil (guitar), Vicky (bass). So we had a 5 piece lineup with a female singer and a female bass player – they both could definitely rock. On all recordings Phil and I played the rhythm tracks together and then I came back through and added an acoustic guitar track. Seemed to give it a little more depth. One thing we always teased Christine about was her lyrics. Most of the time we couldn’t understand them! I did see a written copy once, but if you didn’t have them in front of you I bet you couldn’t guess what they were. What a blast we had. Click on the links below to hear the songs.

Take You Away
I always liked this one. I wrote the music and Christine wrote the words. Came out pretty well.

Composed Expression
Maybe my favorite original we had. I wrote the music and Christine wrote the words.

Dare To Dream
I wrote the music for this one during the sound check at a little bar on route 51. I remember telling Christine that I could picture the chorus using “dare to dream” in it. Couple days later at practice we had a song.

Ripper
Christine wrote the original music and words, but I do remember Phil taking it and giving it the kick that it ended up with. This is the only original I played lead guitar on.

Blind Man
Probably my least favorite song we ever did. Christine wrote the music and lyrics. Phil did a nice job with the slide, but for some reason I just never warmed up to this one. There is no doubt that the mix is rough when the lead guitar comes up on this one. It is over powering.