The Answers at Lestat’s: ‘Color Notes’ b/w ‘History’

(Answers guitarist David Fleminger tells the story behind two Answers classics from the early ’80s, which the reformed band — including bassist Tony Suarez and drummer Dave Anderson — performed Jan. 29 at Lestat’s.)

“Color Notes”
I’m not exactly sure what originally inspired the idea for “Color Notes.”

the song was written in 1982 and perhaps I had seen something somewhere about synesthesia, perhaps not. Often music creates clear images in my mind, but not the kind of visions seen by the synesthete, somebody who literally sees colors that correlate with specific notes.

Years later I did discover that once I might have been trained to equate notes with colors … a folded sheet that came with a favorite childhood toy, a Fisher-Price Pull-A-Tune, one of those rolling xylophones with differently-colored metal bars. Fisher-Price included some examples of melodies complete with ‘Color-Notes’ that correspond to the colors on the toy. Perhaps there was something in the simple melody of this song that reminded me of playing with the xylophone.

I can say with absolute certainty who the man “over the fence” is in the lyric … Around age 10 I went through a short phase of tossing snails into the next-door neighbor’s pool, and I remember the profanity that ensued as I hid behind my side of the fence. He knew it was me, obviously, and thankfully I stopped hurling invertebrae before he took any further actions.

Here is a recording of us playing “Color Notes” in Tony’s garage in 1982, shortly after it was written and arranged. Clearly I got some of the words wrong at Lestat’s, proving that I can’t be trusted with getting even five lines of lyrics right, as I further reduced the song down to three lines.

“History”
This was written a bit earlier than “Color Notes.” It’s a semi-apocalyptic ditty with a small debt to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” … Could be determined as either a hopeful or a fatalistic message, depending on your mood.