A Brief History of

B-Cubed & Lost Generation

June 27, 2004

On an unfortunate day in 1982, a group of high school seniors made the mistake of turning on a cassette recorder and attempting to record popular tunes commonly heard on the radio at that time with no practice beforehand, and often without any experience playing the instruments they adopted. Thus was born the Breakfast Brunch Band, a name chosen after an overnighter at one house followed by a late morning meal that was somewhere between breakfast and brunch. Quickly shortened to BBB, and then B-Cubed, the group continued to meet at various homes and inflict their signature version of sonic assault on whomever happened to be home at the time.

The key component of B-Cubed (aside from poorly performed music) was the selection of cassette tape used for recording. The tape of choice was the Certron low-noise 60-minute tape, where "low-noise" apparently meant that the recorded signal could sometimes be heard above the ambient hiss from the tape itself. The other desirable aspect of these tapes that made them so usable was that they were cheap. The challenge eventually became who could find the cheapest tape, with the reigning champion having found a pack of 3 tapes for less than a dollar.

In time, additional personnel were added to the original B-Cubed crew, and projects branched out from audio to video with the rental of a video camera during the summer of 1983. At this point the name Lost Generation was adopted, and became the umbrella organization under which all other groups came and went. The first video project was Twilight Zone: The Video Tape, completed that summer before college classes began in the fall. It spun off a second video project the following summer in 1984, and futher video adventures were filmed with a smaller cast several years later upon purchasing a video camera instead of renting one. During the college years and beyond, the audio tapes continued to roll off the production line, still on Certron or some equally sinister brand.

The projects ground to a halt in the 1990s as everyone became involved in other priorities. Then, in 2003, the aquisition of Cakewalk Home Studio software, coupled with an old PC no longer in use after being replaced by a newer model, gave rise to a new round of audio projects. These projects differ distinctly from previous projects in that they are 100% digital, and actually emphasize good audio quality, multiple tracks, and post-production mixing. This is a stark contrast to the zero-quality, "turn-on-the-tape-and-play" recordings from the 1980s that were lucky to even be in stereo. And though sound quality has improved dramatically, the musical performance remains at the same low level that has been the trademark since the beginning. While no video projects have been started at the time of this writing, a new Canon digital camcorder was recently acquired and video projects are already being proposed. God help us all.