The internet is a wild and wonderful place. It can also be extremely disgusting - for example, if you accidentally type “roids” instead of “droids” into Google Images - but I digress. Today we’re discussing pleasant things. And would could be more pleasant than a Super Nintendo game known as Spanky’s Quest?

I was poking around on Twitter one day looking for fellow video-game-music affectionados, and I found the feed of a video game journalist called Jeriaska. I followed him, he followed me, and then he contacted me about creating some music for a tribute project he was presenting at PAX East. Contributors from all over the world were submitting re-arrangements of the work of composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki (岩月 博之) .

So I said yes - sounds like fun! I picked out this track by Iwatsuki-san (also known as Iwadon) which he created for “Spanky’s Quest”, as a track which I thought was cute, and could be Texas-ified:

I love it! So I set out to make my low-down blues version. I thought something that was a cross between Joe Hill Lewis and Mance Lipscomb would be killer.

I had to play the snare with brushes, and program the rest of the drums, and of course play guitar. Then I called up J.P. Whitefield and Craig Simecheck to play upright bass and keyboard, respectively. Here is what we came up with (this is the track in the podcast feed for this entry):

Slowed down-and-dirty. It was super fun to make, and I love the way it turned out. However, Jeriaska pointed out that it was almost too different from the original piece. The idea of the tribute was to turn people onto to Iwatsuki-san’s music who may not have heard it before. So I went back to the drawing board and worked up this alternate version - which keeps the feel of the original tune while and captures some of the early rock influences of the arrangement.

I exchanged Mance and Joe for Chuck-meets-The Ventures on meth.

In the end I didn’t make the original deadline for the PAX East panel, but I am working with Jeriaska to submit this track for the Google ‘Droid version of the project. If you want to know what Google Droid is, remember: “Droid” with a “D”. That D is important - it’s the only thing keeping the tide of horrible imagery from washing over your retinas.

UPDATE JULY 25 2010: It turns out that the original track was in fact not composed by Mr. Iwatsuki, but rather by his mentor Iku Mizutani. This song was accidentally included in the original list of source material. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed working on it. And I highly recommend that you listen to the compilation album: IWADON. It is great stuff.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 18 2010: I just met Mr. Iwatsuki in person at the Tokyo Game Show. He was very kind and mentioned that he heard this track and enjoyed it. That made my day!