Wednesday, June 27, 2007

did I mention?

I have 23 rough mixes of the PUSA record in hand. More on that tomorrow.

Enjoying some homework


ahhhhh...wotta night. The start was not promising. As my bloodsugar was plummeting around 7:00, I thought I would hop around the corner to my newest local pub, SMITH. They have some fancy way of doing french fries that I want to check out! dumb dumb dumb....like every other night since they opened it was like Mardi Gras in there, jammed butts to nuts and spilling out onto the sidewalk...arrggh. I won't tell you where I ended up dining. It's a little embarrassing..although I did get some shopping done at the same time.

Had a drink afterwards at Poco, a little winebar near home...ran into Steve Severin, one of Neumo's owners and Booking Dude around town. Briefly discussed the drama over an article in this weeks Stranger that features him. I'm not up to speed on it, but it sounds juicy so after this I'll be heading over to the SLOG to read up!

which brings us up to right now...

I'm on my deck enjoying a beautiful Chateu....chatue....chautue...nuef...nuff....des Pape?

enjoying a glass of wine.

it's gorgeous. Not my view of the crack building across the alley but the evening air. ahhhh...wotta night indeed.

anyways

listening to some TFH on my cool little ipod/radio playing thing. For anyone who doesnt know....this is The Feelings Hijackers, my singer Chris's other band. They are doing a record release gig this Friday at the Hi Dive in Seattle's historic Fremont neighborhood. It's a duo, singin and rappin over tracks. BUT they have asked me to play drums on 6-8 songs to mark the specialness of the occasion. A little nerve-wracking, since they have a strict no-practice rule. "save it for the show" they say. Fine if you are a rapper or singer who has heard the tunes a hundred times making the record...for us 'hired guns' a run through of some sort would be appreciated! oh well, just gonna let my musical genius carry the mail on this one.

As it turns out it's perfect music for this warm mellow night on the deck....I am going to say goodnight and try to listen for a bit without the learn the tune part of my brain, just the summer wine night part...shouldnt be too tough.


Monday, June 25, 2007

I Swear By All That Is Holy That I Am Never Drinking Again As Long As I Live

So it turns out that what I meant by making a commitment to regular posting for a week or so IN FACT meant that I would be waiting week or so before posting again. Just clarifying that. OK.

I will lay as much of the blame for the breakdown of the "mini commitment" as I can squarely at the feet of the following establishments, who (whom?) all had their opening parties last week:

Cafe Presse (mon night, early eve)
Smith (mon night, late eve)
Via Tribunali II, Queen Anne location (wed)

Here's the alarming thing..the really distressing, scary thing: I probably had no more than four or five glasses of wine on any one of those nights....At no moment anytime during those nights would I have described myself as 'loaded'. And yet here I am days later, lip quivering like a little lost cub scout, moaning about my toxicity (update: feeling better, reroactive to about Sunday). Comes a time, I guess, that one must face up to the reality that one has possibly become a lightweight, a 'cheap date', a creampuff.....a bad partier.

oh, and there was also Friday night, where after watching the Mariners get drubbed I went bouncing around Capitol Hill bars until 4 in the morning...maybe that had something to do with my general feeling of malaise...

I just found this cool text size tool. I am really getting the hang of this!







Saturday, June 16, 2007

robot picture included

Well, apparently blogging is like playing music, or painting, or mowing the lawn: it doesn't up and do itself. Nor do I yet have my own robot to help around the house, or post for me when I blow it off for a couple days. So, I'm making a little mini commitment to myself to add to this little enterprise daily for the near future. Like a week or so. It'll be a nice little exercise in discipline and focus, although anyone who knows me would say I'm loaded with both those qualities.
or not.

There may be some retooling of the premise, though...not enuff pusa to go around...I may be digressing into personal rant and rave land. Might retitle it too...hmmm FINNLOG.....FLOG....FNOG FINNOG ....

Really Good Lyric of the day:

I heard you're back on your feet
I'm really glad to hear it
You're in the driver's seat
And you can barely steer it

Brendan Benson, THEM and ME .... The Alternative to Love

dude has some hella prose chops.

I can't seem to turn off the italics, or the bold...I don't feel that strongly about this sentence. Shoot. I'm done anyway i guess




Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Free stuff

The daytrotter session is up, since last Friday I think, forgot to plug it before. Usually these things end up pretty uninspired sounding. But we hear at PUSA Inc are here tot tell you that these tunes sound pretty good! And you can download them! For Free! There's a new song! And an old hit!

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Sharpen up yer fangz

Really cool thing happened right at the end of basic tracking, earlier today...

We had just finished the drum track for a tune called unstoppable female. A sorta old tune that CB wrote on a tour bus while we were touring behind "II" in about '97. Now, it's not that anybody was disliking the tune, but there's a reason it was last of twentysome-odd songs to be tracked. The material that folks are more excited about tends get 'got to' sooner than lesser, just like in Life, Man. Anyway.....actually the track track ended up sounding really good, surprising me a little even. But: personally I wasn't having any particular euphoric feeling from being done with a stressful part of making an album. I walked away from my kit, back to the control area to check my performance out. So far so good...I strolled back over to the play area, and CB says something like 'indulge me for a minute, and play along with this'. He played a very simple 3 chord groove, with no 2nd part or changes...Andrew and I comped along....

....and oh my god.......out of Chris' mouth came one of the greatest songs I've ever heard. We ran through it one more time in a better key for the instruments and there she is: Sharpen Up Yer Fangs...the lyrics are SO COOL....poignant, witty but a little sad....great groovy feel......I had goosebumps for at least 30 minutes, and later while on my (almost) daily run I got all choked up listening to it, rough and all.

a sampling:

he's the boy with the messy mind
it's hard to find
the time to clear it

he's the boy with the broken brain
not insane
but never happy
sharpen up those fangs
not insane
but never happy

It is amazing how often the tunes that end up being the essence of a record show up last, or unlooked for.

technology!

Whoo! Basic drum tracks are done for the 22 songs we're doing this session. Most of the bass as well, and Andrew is slicing away at guitars right now. My brain is a little scrambled from thinkin drum for all these days, but its worth it having the glowing feeling of accomplishment. As usual I hear dozens of blemishes on every track. It's ok though....most of it would only be questionable to a very anal drummer, or critique-er. We tend to try to get as much as possible of the whole band playing together, even with some human err intact. So, we tend to end up with alot of 'human' moments on the rhythm tracks. Also, it's amazing what you can do with Protools these days, moving errant kicks or snares around to wherever you like. I remember making my first major label record in 1993 (or 92?), when the only way to edit or combine takes was to slice up the 2-inch magnetic tape with an exacto blade and hope you werent destroying the whole track. We had an engineer who was really fast, so he could do a tape edit in about an hour. Now you can point and click and drag and drop and cut and paste and fade in as many seconds. I love computers, even if they still can't mow my lawn.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Texas is a nice town...SxSW stuff

This Friday the excellent site Daytrotter will be putting up a 4 song live in studio session we did last March at South by Southwest. They want some text to accompany it, so I'm jotting down some fuzzy memories...two birds....one stone.....

TEXAS IS A NICE TOWN

We've been to SXSW three times in the 15-odd years we've been a band.

In '95 we were in the midst of a vicious, old-school style 'bidding war' with A&R dudes elbowing each other in the kidneys to get position in the sardine-packed, smokey sweaty juke joint in the middle of 6th street we played at. I think The Refreshments played right after us. Some major label or other got us a room at the Westin, and a middle management guy from ASCAP gave us our first nuts and bolts of publishing speech. For years afterward we referred to it as the 'bean counting speech'. That's about all I remember....

Then in 2003 right after we had decided to end our 5 year 'break', we got a very weird and excellent gig playing on a huge stage in a field, between The Motels and Joe Jackson (!) with his entire original band playing all the songs from that one album. There were about a million people there, and I brought down the house by whipping out a U of T Longhorns cap and putting it on mid-song.

This year for the first time we got to stay for 4 days and enjoy the town. For me this was 80% about food. Tacos or Barbecue, every 6 hours or so, day and night. Went to all my favorite taco shacks (Maria's, "Taco shack #2") and some new ones. Went to one BBQ place quite far from the city and all 6 of us got a ride back from the proprieter, jammed into the back of her pickup. I ran along the river every morning no matter how bad it hurt, partly to work off the brisket, and partly to reinforce that yes, even one little ciggie makes one feel awful the next day.

I was going to try to fly home with some ribs in my carry-on for my friend at the airport, but chickened out.

Had some beers too.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Hiccup

Sometimes I hit little walls in the studio, where a part or a beat , or maybe just a little fill goes from being routine to being impossible for no good reason.

Just happened an hour ago...(edit: finishing this post at the end of the night, many hours later)

We were working on our 2nd track of the day. It's a tune called What The Hell, that Chris and I have played for a LONG time, originally in our "rap/rock supergroup" Subset (that was a band we had with Sir Mix-Alot some years ago...I'll tell ribald stories about that someday soon). Anyways, we'd demo'd it 7 or 8 times in rehearsals last month, so my thought was that no matter which of the various feels we ended up going with It'd be chop chop, a couple run throughs and drums done.

not so much. I had a little hiccup on a transition that features a long fill....no problem, run it again and we'll naill it. Except the next time's worse. Ok, same spot..2...3..4.. fuck. Ditto next one, ditto next one...after about 5 attempts from the same spot, I needed a little 'time out'. everyone was very understanding, and moved away towards the control area of the room, while I sat at the kit and took a bunch of deep breaths and swore quietly to myself. I toyed with the idea of stepping outside and hurling my sticks across 15th ave NW. Luckily, just the thought was amusing enough to have the same cathartic effect as the action would have, so I got to look mature and save 6 bucks at the same time. Sticks are not cheap, people.. Of course, we nailed it next try.

And....we've tracked 5 tunes today, so the train stayed on the tracks, although my noggin is fried now, and as Andrew says: "music-ed out".

Chris is doing lead vox.....jumping around like a.....i dunno...jumping bean?

I'm going home...

Monday, June 4, 2007

Day One: Hearting Davey B.

1:00, and no noise has been made yet. We have spent the morning moving slowly. No; moving methodically. I got here about 11:00, an hour or so behind Davey, my tech, who has spent the morning fine tuning my main kit and a couple others for variety. As a drum tuner, he is a genius. It would take me much much longer, and sound much much less kick-ass if I was to tune them myself. I have battled over 20+ years to a workmanlike, very ordinary tuning ability. But folks like Davey just have an instinct that amazes me as it pisses me the f-- off. I should mention also that he is not really my tech. I wish I was BIGTIME enough to have a tech, like Ringo or the dude from Tool. Davey is one of the people we hire to roadie, or "stage manage" when there's gigs. He is however, the only drummer amongst them, and as stated a pro's pro with my shit. I heart Davey. Awwww.

Chris has been running around with the camcorder already, could be QUALITY CINEMA someday.



Sunday, June 3, 2007

And we're off!

Ok...now I am impressed.

I just spent about 20 minutes at the computer, tops... and I now am the proud father of my very own blog, complete with a flickr account so I can show you all pictures, like this one of my couch. I cannot promise that any of the pictures here will be more interesting than that, but I hope so.

Wait, I take that back! There will be tons of fascinating photos and video footage coming nonstop soon. You see, a quick trip to a large electronics retailer yielded a brand new Digital Video Camcorder (those three words were capitalized on the box, which I consider bad grammar, but whatever. Maybe they were just Excited Like Me).

Anyways....

I'm blogging in order to document for you, the universe, the making of a record by my band, The Presidents of the United States of America (henceforth PUSA since it is a huge pain in the ass to type that all out). Perhaps you have heard of us....maybe not. That's ok. Maybe we are your favorite, or were your older sister's favorite in high school, or maybe the very mention of us makes your blood boil with indignation. All also ok. More likely somewhere in the middle, we're hoping. In any case, welcome and no charge for the wealth of insight into the mysteries of life and the recording process you should find here. Actually, the whole shebang may turn into a personal soapbox anyway. Dunno.

Boy it sure is easy to go on and on once ya get started...no accident that blog rhymes with blah. Also similar to blather. Weird.

ANYWAYS...

Tomorrow is day 1. Very excited, and a little nervous. I've been laying low for several nights in order to feel tip top when we start the session. So tonight I was feeling a little antsy. What did I do? This may seem cliche, and you may roll your eyes at this classic rock n roll solution to cabin fever. That's right, I made scones. And it got very messy. The fellows are in for a treat when they show up tomorrow! It is customary for the drummer to show up at least an hour or two before the rest of a group on the first day of recording, owing to the massive, crushingly anal setup required. So, I'll have plenty of time to nestle the scones into a 'welcome' basket of pouporri (that last part was not true, just the scones). I am not going to bother with looking for a correct spelling of pouporri, since I expect that was the last time I will ever type that word.

Motley Crue, eat your hesher hearts out.










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