The “I’m Gonna Quit” Story

There is a long, semi-funny story behind that song and the first recording and THIRD recording. We were living in Fremont, Nebraska at the time. I’d been laid off of my 1^st engineering job and had taken a position as tech services manager for an Omaha office equipment company, servicing Burroughs Corporation word processors and IBM Selectric typewriters among other electric and electronic equipment. It was a miserable job with a terrible company, but there weren’t many tech jobs in 1976 Nebraska. A few days before the song’s birth the owner of the company told me I had to lay off 2-3 of my newest, most capable technicians because they were “overqualified” and he wanted the money for raises for a couple of his bimbo saleswomen. The tech service department was not only making the company money, for the first time in the company’s history, but our service was attracting IBM customers and the sales commissions on those machines was better than anything a car salesman could make. Today, I would assume he was screwing the sales bimbos, then I was a pretty innocent/gullible 28-year-old.

Another insane Republican had driven the US economy into the dirt and times were somewhere between terrible and disastrous. We “sold” our house at a $5,000 loss (on a $20,000 original purchase), although on paper it looked like we broke even; I paid the “buyers” $5,000 under the table to make their down payment. I had arranged an Omaha apartment for us to move to, but at the last minute (before any money changed hands) Elvy wasn’t going to go. She’d asked a friend in Scribner, Nebraska for help and he’d offered her (and us) a house he owned that needed a lot of work but was livable and he would pay for the work and materials. $80 a month rent, which was workable on Nebraska’s unemployment. One morning, I called the office company owner and said, “I was sick when I took this job, I’m better now and I quit.” No notice, no two weeks, nothing. I hadn’t worked there long enough to damage my Unemployment from my engineering job so I had nothing to lose.

Before we packed up our belongings and gave away everything that wasn’t going to fit in our new far-smaller home, two friends (Dan Tonjes and Mark Von Seggern) and I hit the basement “studio” for one last blast of our past and we recorded the twanging electric guitar part, vocal, bass (Dan), and drums (Mark) to my new song, “I’m Gonna Quit” on two of my Teac 3340’s four tracks (drums ALWAYS get tracked in stereo). After we were sort of settled in to the house in Scribner, I wanted to add a distorted guitar part and an extended percussion into and outro. Dan and/or Mark knew the Scribner school music instructor and “borrowed” a wheelbarrow full of school percussion instruments. We used the other two 3340 tracks on I don’t remember how many percussion players gathered from our friends in Scribner and my guitar part and I had a song and a recording. I still love that original recording, as rough as it is.

A decade later, a Nebraska friend and one of the guys (a drummer) who we used in the studio occasionally was in a band being fronted by Barry Fey’s company. I’d given him a cassette of my songs back in the 70s and he’d played it for the band and they wanted two of my songs: “Down on the Beach” and I’m Gonna Quit.” By “wanted” I mean they wanted me to give them the publishing rights and authorship in exchange for . . . nothing. I declined, but they recorded the two songs anyway and the band dissolved and nothing happened to the recordings after a lot of money was spent and the usual 80’s rock and roll silliness ensued.

When I moved to Denver in 1991, I looked up the lead singer of that band and she gave me a cassette copy of their take on my song. It was . . .entertaining, but I could see how the band didn’t take with audiences or promoters. Too much Pat Benatar, too late.

Through my following studio years, I always wanted to redo “I’m Gonna Quit” with a little more fidelity, but recreating the attitude, energy, random-ness and creativity of the performance and percussion section overwhelmed me. Sometime around 2002, Michael McKern and I gave it a shot with the original recording as our “click track,” we recorded his drums, the clean electric guitar parts, some background vocal ideas, and a decent acoustic guitar part to his 24-track MCI JH24 deck and bounced that to Pro Tools. And . . . nothing. I was still stuck without a way to pull off the percussion section and that was a gumption trap.

Jump to August 2020 and I’ve been playing music, on-line, through JamKazam, with four friends: Harold Goodman, Stu Anderson, and Scott Jarrett since March. We’re messing with original music and covers and they’ve irrationally designated me “vocalist” because no one else wants to sing, including Scott who is an infinitely better vocalist than me and about 1,000 times the musician. Michael has been dubbing drum parts to my original songs via Dropbox and, when I tell him I can’t get into finishing off “I’m Gonna Quit” because my attempts at doing a percussion part either with real instruments or Logic X’s loops or MIDI just sucked, Michael knocks out six tracks of the percussion instruments you will hear on the recording. Hesitantly, I offer up “I’m Gonna Quit” to Harold and we fool with it for a bit on line and he, as usual, asks “Should we record it?”

This was the first time I had sung the song since 1978, other than noodling around with ideas with Michael almost 20 years ago. The vocal you hear on this recording, for better or worse, is my first take at the song in August of this year. I’ve sung it with the group on JamKazam a dozen or more times, since, and tried to overdub it with a “better” microphone in my office/studio and I still like this take the best. I musta been really pissed off at something (probably Trump) that day. Harold’s bass line was the perfect foil for the busy percussion and guitars and Stuart’s steel guitar and Scott’s organ and the rest was my problem. My wife, Robbye, suggested industrial, work sounds to go with the percussion intro and outro and that pretty much filled in everything I thought was missing. I did keep a lot of my last vocal stuff from the times we recorded the song on JamKazam for the outro. All of that “I don’t need this” and “I’m gonna quit” and the rest after the last chorus was cut-and-pasted from every other take of the song.

This is the final, newest, bestest version of my song, “I’m Gonna Quit,” featuring my friends Michael McKern, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett. I can not express the obligation I feel toward all of them for making this happen. Not out of arrogance but out of personal history, I do love this song and I am really happy with this version. It is, finally, done.