Source: Sound Board Studio Recording
Transfer: DAT-M > UXL 2496 > Tascam DA 20 MKII
Gen: CU.ORG Master
Transferred by: Galen

“4°”

Notes on The Sylvia Massey Outtakes:
In November 2020, Sylvia Massey, the recording engineer for Tool on both Opiate and Undertow offered a bunch of old memorabilia of Tool for sale on her website with a solid focus seemingly on audio cassettes, DATs and even reel-to-reel consisting of studio outtakes. These items were not remotely cheap as in thousands and thousands of dollars. Unsurprisingly, her store quickly sold out of most everything rather quickly. Unsure of the legality of selling something like that but she did have a note specifying that the only thing for sale were the physical tapes and not the information contained on them. To be clear and without a shadow of a doubt: Sylvia Massey has transfers of every single thing she sold but it is also true that there is no incentive for her to release anything pertaining to Tool in the short or long term.

Notes: There is some serious issues with the source material as, particularly at the beginning, there is a considerable amount of tape ‘thhpt’ which is indicative of 30+ year old DAT tapes in various and sundry states of decay. It happens to the best of them however this issue is not pervasive apas it is on the Bottom Session tape. This features working variants on 4° which start out rather as early passes then cut through to much more polished variants. On this DAT there are five complete passes and numerous start, stop, ‘I need more cowbell’ and more cowbell. Before this tape existed, I took Tool at face value that they ‘never use a metronome’ while that is probably totally accurate, this is evidence that they did use a metronome. I mention this as there is no chance any band would go from preliminary attempts to much more polished versions in the span of ten minutes which leads me to believe that this is a culmination of different recording session/s of 4°. Interesting tape with significantly interesting material culled from the voices of Massey’s studio. The tape ends with DC just jamming out the song (obviously on drums) solo. Beautiful stuff, but that is cut short after a few minutes until he does another incomplete pass. Also, there is a ton of banter between the band members that CU.ORG did not transcribe but it is as interesting as marijuana pasta and as mundane as discussions about the last pass of the song.

Time: 1:32:22

4°
(slow, metronome, no vocals, very early pass)

Adam:
”And uh, I need to hear more Paul. I don’t know what happened to my head mix. Can you just Paul up a bit for me? Just a bit.” MJK:
”Steven, Steven, Steven… Adam, can you hear this click at all? Hello?”
Adam:
”My headset is still fucked up can you turn up the click? Can you turn it back up? Yeah. Snare drum please?”

4°
(slow, metronome, first time with somewhat fleshed out vocals, incomplete)

MJK:
“What’s wrong Dan? OK. Pasta… pasta. Marijuana pasta. Got you. Got you pasta… spaghetti pasta. Got ya. Meat yogurt. Ganja pasta. Go to Italy, get stoned. Some girl, any girl or just any girl in the butt? Buttcheese. Buttcheese. This song’s about buttcheese”

Adam:

4°
(First pass with actual lyrics , band stops 3/4 of the way through)

MJK:
”Ugh, I could kill you. I can’t just sing this song like a million times guys. Fuck that! Don’t erase that.”

4°
(cut)

4°
(complete first pass with vocals)

4°
(second complete pass)

4°
(unknown edit/cut, incomplete, this version not on tape sounds like it was recorded and mixed later)

4°
(Incomplete pass)

4°
(Danny Carey drumming)