Tad Lathrop & Don Giller, "Army of Ants"

It was in the Summer of 1972 when Tad and I, both at the end of our third year at Antioch College, began to get serious with our music-making. I traveled to NYC and met up with Tad and his close friend Steve Kelly, who played bass. The three of us would rehearse in Tad's mom's art studio in Soho, at that time a desolate, dark and foreboding neighborhood. We wrote a lot of songs there together, among them an instrumental called "Army of Ants." Tad had brought in the main body of the tune; he and I then added a middle section.

The recording here comes from mid-May 1974 in San Francisco. There was a building South of Market called Project One, an arts community that housed artists, musicians, and rehearsal spaces, not unlike Westbeth in NYC. We had earlier set up rehearsal space there in the Fall of '73 for a jazz/rock/salsa band we had put together then, and on the same floor was a small room rented by a fellow named Steve Thiel who owned a Revox tape recorder. For some forgotten logic we called Steve's place "Jack's Studio."

Tad was to leave the Bay Area soon, so we spent an afternoon recording a number of acoustic-guitar songs there, one of which was "Army of Ants." In 2003 I digitized the tape, worked on equalization and ambiance, and edited out a bridge within the bridge that I considered a too-cute musical artifact, and then created a fading loop at the end.

This version is on our CD "Red Horizon," which we released in 2006.

The animated background comes from Turtle Interactive's "The Ants go marching one by one song/Ants at war," available in full here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjw2A3QU8Qg

Видео Tad Lathrop & Don Giller, "Army of Ants" канала Don Giller