Most of the BN & P master tapes are stuffed away in a large file box in my apartment.  Most all of them were recorded on normal bias cassette , a mistake I would never make today .  That's where Barry resides now.  A jumbled mess of  2 dozen normal bias cassettes in a dusty closet. That's definitely not the end I imagined for Barry. In the middle of it all I never thought that Barry would end. I pictured myself, years in the future, still cranking out a BN album every once in a while. Time and tide waits for no man, even when that man is a figment of a teenager's overactive imagination.

In the spring of 1988 I was working in a sketch comedy show run by my local community college.  The show  was the end result of 8 weeks of a Saturday morning improv workshop. Most of the cast were members of a comedy group called RANSACKED that I had formed in a desperate attempt to be something.  I had written two songs for the show,  Can't Wait To Get Home & Angelicque.  I wanted backing vocals on the songs and some kind of goofy choreography.  As we started rehearsing the songs, the director had envisioned some kind of choreography with maps and such. She also wanted to call us the Lousy Lost Losers.  I didn't particularly care for that name and for some reason my 16 year old opinion carried weight around there. In a flippant moment I suggested that we be called Barry Newton and The Plagues. We used the name.  The rest is history. Unfortunately the performance was never recorded but I do have some horrible rehearsal tracks. Their only value is in nostalgia for me.

Around the same time I was doing some recordings with my friend Steve Yates. We were calling ourselves Deaf Lepers. We managed to produce an album (incidentally when I refer to an ALBUM,  I am talking about a tape that we recorded songs for, picked songs for and mixed down into a cohesive thing. None of the albums were ever released. At most they were copied by friends and distributed that way. I use the word album in reference to a crafted collection of songs.) called Bubonic & Happy. The tape got a lot of play amongst our friends. One song in particular ,  Unclean,  became the anthem of the summer for 1988.  It was the first "album" I ever produced and I saw it as a great personal success.    I dove head first into recording other songs.

Steve wasn't very happy with what I was doing and I continued on alone with anybody who felt goofy enough to record. I decided to use the moniker of Barry Newton and the Plagues because it was a catch all.  Anybody who was inclined to, could be a Plague.  The resulting 30 minute collection I called Jimmy Hoffa Makes Twinkies In Hell.  When I ran thin on songs recorded especially for the tape I over dubbed  vocals on two original instrumentals by a friend's band, (I don't think he ever knew.) This practice would prove useful on the next two albums.   I also got heavily into cross fading sound effects . I was listening to Pink Floyd and The Beatles at the time, what else was I going to do. The title song was nothing more than a Halloween sounds album, mixed in with Ravi Shankar Sitar music and me whispering into the microphone.  I thought this was great and I decided that I wanted to do a full album like this.

I played the album for my cousin Rich Kosman and he thought it was goofy and cool. He loaned me tapes of he and his friends Ed and Perry jamming. I took the tapes and over dubbed vocals and thus was born Don't Forget Glue, Lost Whales of Navarone, and  For God's Sake Don't Go To Sleep.   Some of these songs were actual songs that I was unfamiliar with. The song  Don't Forget Glue was actually Wurm by YES.  I then would flush out the rest of the albums with songs recorded in their entirety by me. Rich came out and did a "session" with  me which made me feel that what I was doing actually had some validity. Those tracks wound up on For God's Sake… . Eventually the tapes of Rich and his friends were tapped out and I was looking at the prospect of recording an album, entirely from scratch. I decided to end BN & P and move on to other things.  In the offical BN history, this is the point at which Barry is lost in a plane crash.

Six months went by. I did some "serious" song writing and recording with some new friends and I felt like that was going well.  Then in the summer of 1989 I met Mike Vertenten.  We began writing songs and recording .  He seemed interested in the Plagues tapes I played him, and we decided to start working on a new tape, from scratch.  I can't possibly describe what a great summer that was.  I really feel that  The Mall captures the incredible feel of the summer. It was two friends , sitting around with some recording equiptment,  making something out of nothing.  Whenever I listen to it, it takes me back to the greatest summer of my life.  I mixed the album down roughly 4 times before I found the order and the mix that fit the mood perfectly. The tape was a big hit with all our friends. 

Another year went by.  It was the summer of 90.  I had a car. I had graduated from high school. And I had embarked on the recording of what would eventually be Newton's swan song, State Of Entropy. I was joined in recording by Caleb Sluga and Eric Umlauf.  We all had the same goals with the album, and for once I was surrounded with people as into it as I was. It actually felt like a group. Mike V. came back and played guitar on a few tracks and another  guitarist friend of mine, Marcel St. Pierre, also performed.  The songs and the production was getting better and better.  The three of us had every intention of actually selling this tape at area record stores that handled local acts.  It was starting to look like it was going to be real. Song after song was recorded over the course of the whole summer.  It looked for a while like it might be a double album. But in the mix down I dropped some songs and added one,  Don't Put Out The Fire, which I placed at the end of the album.   Feelings about the album were very good and we all wanted to embark on the recording of another.  It never came to be.

Once school had started Caleb and I were going to the local junior college and Eric U. and Mike V. were still in high school. On top of that we all worked and I had found myself a serious girlfriend. The desire to crank out another BNP  had dwindled. Caleb and I did a few recordings . Eric U. and I recorded Naptime  and somewhere during the end of the year there was a big recording session with Caleb, myself, my sister Andrea, Greg Twait and my girlfriend Violet Narney.  The songs were good but there were too many other things going on and the project died .

I lost touch with Caleb in 1991 after I dropped out of college. Eric Umlauf also disappeared. Mike and I are still friends , in fact he'll be standing at my wedding in 2 months time.  My cousin, Rich Kosman, died in the summer of 1996. I have to admit I signed the guest book : Barry Newton. 

Now the 6 albums act like snapshots of particular moments in time. Half the time I don't hear the music, I just remember the atmosphere and what was going on around them. I get nostalgic as friends , long since gone float out of  my speakers.  I know it sounds corny,  but I swear it's the way I feel. I doubt that when I'm gone I'll be remembered for being Barry Newton. Hopefully I'll do more in my life.  In the end  it wasn't about being funny, or making music. It was about being friends. Those people on those tapes were my best friends in the whole world. And no matter how crappy it sounds or how hard it is to listen to…
I still think it's some of my best work. Not because of the product, but because of the event.

I have tried several times to kick start a Newton project. Usually we'll get into it and other things with over-ride it. In many ways I want to try it again and I very well may.  Sometimes I am just trying to recapture the feeling of The Mall or State Of Entropy . When I can't I become disappointed and let it go.

  Then, last week, I realized that  this year is the 10^th anniversary of BNP.  I knew I had to do something to celebrate.  Does anybody really care? Probably not.  I care.  So I started to do what all musicians do to celebrate anniversaries. I began to put together a "Box Set."

Like a good 16 year old I dove head first into my master tapes . Looking for anything that could be considered an "unreleased cut". I chuckle now at how goofy this sounds.  Talking about "albums" and "master tapes".  I know that only a handful of people will give a damn at all that I have done this. But I don't care.  It's the only way I can celebrate the birth of something that is such a part of who I am.

                                                                                 -  Eric Schwartz 1998