“Oh What a Concept” (one of the earliest Katz compositions) was and remains one of the most popular Stray Katz songs, and to this day, I don’t know what the lyrics mean. I just started making words up one day while the band was jamming (pretty much the normal method of song creation for the Katz) and it gradually found structure as the music did. The band also came up with the doubled tempo in the middle of the song, and given that such tempo accelerations would one day become standard in the compositional tool kits of pop composers by the 1990s, I think the band’s improve was ahead of its time. The recording was originally planned as a demo for a demo. That is, the Katz planned to record the song in basic form to hear how it sounded, then make any changes before recording a better-quality demo. As such, the band wasn’t looking for the best studio—and they definitely found that in the home-built basement studio of drummer-engineer Andrew St. George (who’d release one album with the Canadian band called The Start).

Soundproofing consisted of mattresses and boxes against the basement walls. A single light bulb illuminated the dusty space and insulation for home-wired headphone jacks was provided by old pudding cups (I kid you not). The room was set with one Sure SM58 on a boom stand for vocals, a few microphones for drums and a few other microphones slung from the ceiling joists to pick up everything else, and the Katz recorded “Oh What a Concept” live in a single take. (I actually dropped a drumstick at the beginning of the double-tempo middle portion of the song and had to frantically snag an extra drum the stick bag clipped to my floor tom.) The song was recorded onto a Teac analog four-track reel-to-reel, and by the time Andrew finished the mix (getting pretty hammered on whisky the whole time), it was about 2 a.m.

For whatever reason, the Katz never did a second demo. (The likeliest reason was that even crappy studio time was expensive and the band was always hurting for cash.) They had a single mix dubbed onto cassette and that cassette was subsequently plopped into a box and forgotten for many years, where age degraded what fidelity was part of the original recording. Even so, “Oh What a Concept” contemporarily and inexplicably still resonates with people and, well, I hope you enjoy it.