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Kick-Starting the New Yearby George Ziemann -- January 9, 2008 Last week, I said indies should record some cover songs. Then I went to Tucson and spent the next two nights doing exactly that with The Hurricane. A few more days getting the ADAT tracks into ProTools, and the first finished tune has appeared, with another 20 or so in the pipeline. Here's the handy listening guide for the tracks as they appear, as well as some amusing stories from the weekend. Please note that this page will be ongoing while I work on the songs, so check back for updates. I wanted to start it right away because of several factors:
Speaking of the first song, Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" (1970), I probably could have dinked with it a little longer. I hadn't quite defeated the hollowness of the big, empty, mirrored room we played in, the snare drum could still use more presence, it's a little jangly, and a real producer would have compressed the hell out of the vocals to get them more out in front. Of course, it wouldn't have sounded like Sabbath in 1970. But I'm getting ahead of myself... First of all, we'd all like to thank the staff at Famous Sam's on Valencia Road in Tucson for allowing us to record in their venue and being awesome hosts. It being the first weekend after the New Year celebrations, there weren't a lot of people there but those that were really liked us a lot. It may have helped if I had self-promoted us a little, but I didn't because I thought a significant event was going to happen and I didn't want to jinx it by talking about it before it happened. Silly, I know, but the story actually starts around Thanksgiving.  Photos by Kelly Pardi. Last Blast of The Hurricane Carl took his family (Cara and Shane) to Oklahoma to visit his sister over Thanksgiving. Due to a series of unrelated unfortunate events, by the time they headed back to Arizona, it had been decided for numerous logical reasons that moving to Oklahoma was something they needed to do. Two or three days later, Tim calls, makes sure I know about Carl and how this will obviously break up the band, but they're playing at Sam's the first week of January. Acknowledging that I really don't like going to bars, will I come and record them? Absolutely, I say, figuring that this would probably be the last time I'd get to see Carl play. After giving this further thought, I decided to drag my keyboards along, too, because if this was the last gig I'd see Carl play, I was gonna play, too, even if I had to do it from the sound board. So, the plan was to do a live recording at the same time I tried to play keyboards with a band I had never heard play before and may never see again. That's what I was afraid of jinxing. It would have made a compelling story to attract bar patrons, but I'm glad I didn't write it. When I got to Carl's, it came up in discussion that well, maybe they weren't going to Oklahoma after all. In fact, having moved to New Orleans two days before Katrine, Cara did some reading about Oklahoma and tornados, arriving at the conclusion that she really likes it in Arizona. Carl and Cara are not going anywhere quite yet, so I'm glad I held off on saying so. January 10 Today's track is "The Letter," a number one hit for The BoxTops in 1967. I missed the first verse on this one because the ADAT decided to stop at the 27 minute mark for no apparent reason. Kick drum is a little weak, but the rest of the kit sounds pretty good. The mic in the kick drum kept slipping all night. Both nights. I fixed it about 7 times and I think you can hear it fall during the verse after the guitar lead. Tim sings this one, Carl did backup vocals. There is another version of this in the Saturday night tracks. It might actually be the whole song. The Friday take didn't sound too bad, though, so we'll keep it here until I work on the other one. Friday Night at Famous Sam's Carl and I got to the club at about 6:30. Everything was pretty much put together. Manny had already mic'ed his drums. I set up my gear off the side of the stage next to Carl, wired everything up so that the recording was totally separate from the room mix. Once the set-up is done, recording consists of the following:
Since I didn't have anything special to do in the 40 minutes or so between Step 1 and Step 2, we all decided that I could play if I felt like it. I didn't foresee any major problems and we had two nights to record in hopes we'd get five or ten good takes. When all the inputs were lighting up their channels on the mixer, I relaxed a little, set up my keyboards and took a look at their set list to see if I actually knew anything they played. Although I recorded Tim and Carl doing acoustic tunes over a weekend last September, I hadn't even met Manny yet, much less hear the whole band. The Hurricane has kind of a bizarre set list, which you'll see as the rest of the songs appear. It's like an iPod with 40 years of tunes on shuffle. A couple of them made me blink and say, "Tell me this isn't what I think it is..." "Yeah. It is." "And you play that between those two songs? And then Radiohead?" As the night started, I looked around and assessed the situation. I was going to do a live 13-track recording of a band I had never heard before, further raising the level of difficulty by trying to play keyboards, even though I hadn't played out since the first week of 2004 and only knew about half their songs. On the other hand, the place was pretty empty, so if I sucked, it wouldn't be a major embarassment. I would just stop playing and sit quietly until something I knew came around. January 11 4 p.m. -- Posted "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Creep". I'd never heard "Creep" before the take that was recorded here. It's a Radiohead song, but I'd never heard it before because it must have come from their RIAA period, during which I wouldn't buy their music. Sitting in the club, I thought the song was kind of lame or maybe Carl was just a tad hammered. After listening to it repeatedly in order to get a good mix, I think it's a great song and Carl did an awesome version of it, hammered or not. 11 p.m. -- Added "Come Together." This was the first song on Saturday night, and I obviously had issues, because I didn't get ProTools rolling until the guitar lead was over. Even though I had the rest of the song on the ADAT tracks, there weren't any vocals for the first verse or two. It was a really good version, though (the vocals are sweet when they finally show up), so I kept what I could salvage. I expected to have more tracks done by tonight. I've run into a few songs that I've done a bit of work on, then discover something that makes me throw it on the back burner and go see if the next one falls together faster. Still have almost 20 more to go through. January 14 After I posted Friday's version of "Creep," Carl sent me an email. He was embarrassed about his performance on "Creep," which kinda bummed me out a bit because I don't like to do that to my friends. And like I said three days ago, I'd listened to it enough times that it sounded good to me.
What happened on Friday is that Carl went to the club two and a half hours early because he was riding with me and I needed time to set up the recording gear. His stuff was more or less set up after 10 minutes or so, we were in a bar, so he got a beer and tried to help me out a bit. To make a long story short, by 9:00 he was already 11:30 drunk. By 11:30 he should have already been in bed for a half hour. To ruin the moral of this story, I'd like to point out that "Paranoid" was the last song of that night. It rocked hard. This did not prevent Carl from getting demerits the next day for having gone over the edge and not keeping his shit totally together. But I felt partly responsible. Anyway, I dug out Saturday's version of "Creep" and worked through it. Now that I've heard how it's supposed to go, I see what Carl was talking about. His vocal track from Saturday is infinitely superior. Nails all the high notes this time. He should be proud of the newer version. But I never thought the first version would have been embarrassing. I listened to the Friday version about 30 times before I posted it. I've still never heard the Radiohead version of this song. But I know Carl's vocal range. This had falsely led me to believe Friday's version was like that on purpose. The odd thing is that, having listened to Friday's Creep repeatedly before hearing Saturday's Creep, I still like Friday's Creep just as much. It still doesn't sound "wrong" to me. It's got a little more deep-burning anger and barely-contained energy. The blown vocals in the screamy parts seem to give it more of a alt-rock, punk, goth, angst-ridden, emo, "all of my clothes are black" feeling of despair, which is what the song is about, after all.
Since I was already into the Saturday night batch again, pulled out "Wild Horses." No major problems at all. The whole song is there. I sang a harmony on the last chorus. "Lightning Crashes" was posted yesterday but I didn't write anything. Never heard this one before, either. Beautiful song, bizarre lyrics. When this song started, I did not know how to play it. Probably didn't have a piano part anyway. If I had been watching the ADAT instead of Carl's left hand, I might have noticed that it had stopped about 30 seconds into the song, leaving a great vocal take with no bass and drum tracks. Couldn't waste it, though. January 17 Today's additions are "Play That Funky Music White Boy" from the Friday set, along with "Some Kind of Wonderful" and "The Letter" from Saturday. I'm noticing that on longer songs, the ProTools tracks slowly grow out of sync with the ADAT, maybe a quarter second over 7 minutes. Just enough to have to go in and move vocal and guitar parts by milliseconds every so often. Never encountered that before. January 19 Went back and fixed "Some Kind of Wonderful", which was just not right. Now it is. Also added "Dreams I'll Never See," which is possibly the best-sounding track so far. January 20 Added "Stormy Monday," or at least the 2/3 of it I caught. Since the last verse is the first verse, I may come back to this one later and try to build the first verse, just so the song doesn't start in the middle of a guitar lead. "Can't You See" -- This one is actually better than being there. Unlike what happened in real life, in this version I played my parts properly, which became important because Carl drops out during the second verse to tune his guitar. It starts out way too slow, but I think we make up for it by the time it's over. "Smoke On the Water" -- Getting this one in just before midnight. Again, better than being there, for much the same reasons. January 21 "Imagine" added. January 24 So Carl writes me an e-mail about "Imagine," saying that, although it came out pretty good, it's too bad that we got the Friday night version instead of Saturday, making this reason number two (or possibly three) not to drink when you play. Saturday's version didn't have rhythm tracks (damn ADAT!), but the vocal sounded way better. So what we've got now is the bass, drums and guitar from Friday (Jan. 4), Carl's vocal track from Saturday (Jan. 5) and my piano and string tracks from, like, this Tuesday (Jan. 22) because apparently I really suck live. We also have the ever-popular "Sweet Home Alabama". I used to boycott this song simply because every band in the country plays it. I would do "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon instead, which is pretty much the same song, only different. Carl does a damn fine job on the guitar work on this one, making it much less painful than usual. January 29 Remixed "Imagine" because the keyboards were too loud. Added "Taking Care of Business," which is probably the last song I'm going to be able to milk out of this session. After listening to all the mp3s in one sitting, some of them need to be tweaked to compensate for what happens when they turn into mp3s. But for the most part, they are all sounding pretty good. Refreshingly raw. The main music page will indicate any upgrades in the mixes. So unless there are any questions about the recording process, this story has finally come to an end. We hope you all enjoy the tunes. |
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