Good things, bad things, and chains

With the whiteout conditions out of doors, I canceled my trip to Woodstock this weekend and decided to continue working on the next @Fulcrum record. It has turned into an arduous affair, this recording.

Today I got tired of the 500GB Seagate drive finding, then losing power, and the constant nagging from the Finder that I didn’t dismount my drive properly. Well, I didn’t dismount my drive at all, it did it on its own. A few months ago, I had even replaced the enclosure surrounding it, took it out of the one it came in, and swapped it into another (keeping the name Free Agent– maybe I’ll change it to something more befitting its character, for example Holly Golightly). Same thing happening again now inside its Antec USB enclosure. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the drive, not what I put it in.

What made it more problematic is that this is the drive on which I keep all my documents (my iPhoto library, various Excel spreadsheets and Word documents in support of that novel I still haven’t finished, and sundries accumulated over the last fifteen years)– including all my sessions for the new album. I had meant to back the project folder up to the 1TB La Cie Drive on which I keep most of my other studio-related stuff: AU plug-ins and sample libraries mostly, and today I went ahead and did it, at the same time swapping out the Firewire 400 connection for the Firewire 800 one just because I could (and because I had found the special connector that had come with the La Cie drive).

When I opened a session in Logic Pro 9, I could not believe what I was seeing. Little or no disk churn. The system was no longer coughing up a hairball when there were too many tracks. I’ll have to monitor this more closely in the near term, but so far, this is a Good Thing.

Then I realized that with this newfound throughput, I could conceivably bump my project up to a higher sample rate. I had been doing the roughs at 24-bit 44.1kHz, but my MOTU Traveler will do 24/192.. in theory. And in fact that was one of the main reasons I selected that particular unit: I did eventually intend to record the entire project at that resolution, again, just because I could. So I tried 192 first with the session I had loaded.

Hairballs. Digital clipping, project playing at 3/4 speed or so, what could best be described as smear with clicks and pops. Definitely a Bad Thing.

I backed down to 96kHz. So far, so good, although the CPU seems to be straining, pushing 85-95%. Actually it’s only one core of the CPU, the other is sitting twiddling its thumbs and waiting for something to do. To this point, Logic has done a pretty good job of allocating threads to cores, so I have no bloody idea what’s going on here. Another potentially Bad Thing.

That’s been my day so far, while the snow accumulates outside the windows of the Sanctum Sanctorum and the roads remain pleasantly vacant of cars speeding down the main drag a block south of the house and into the mall abutting the property in the back to the north. The album, and the quietude, have forced me to start to reconsider a few things about life in general and romance in particular, and my relationship with the universe as a side bonus.

I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot to be optimistic about of late, other than the new day gig and the fast start to this album: I’m already about 57 minutes into it if we lay all the roughs end to end. If nothing else, the album is throwing my past failures in my face and demanding that I confront them once and for all: a task I have been avoiding since I was a teenager. I am looking for, and not finding, a common thread as to why they all ultimately failed, and why I find myself alone again at my age.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Demotivators, one which I have bestowed with as much kindness as I could on a few friends in the past, and am thinking about bestowing on at least one or two others present in but fading from my life now, and which I know applies to me too.

And so I find myself in chain-breaking mode– chains I’ve imposed on myself, chains that have tied me to certain others in my life who no longer fit me– and I’m looking for that weak link. I live in hope that recording this album will help me find it.

 

Weaned on Looney Tunes

… And Carl Stalling’s orchestrations for those cartoons routinely circumnavigated the work of visionary inventor and musician Raymond Scott. Watch and smile as anvils fall out of the sky in your mind and assembly lines go haywire.

 

With CAPE behind me..

.. I can concentrate on new musical projects. Finally.

First up on my desk is tracking for the next @Fulcrum record, a loosely-connected 70-odd minute description of the rise and fall of a relationship that may or may not involve people I know and have known. It will probably lean a little heavier on prog rock moves than Luminous City did, but when I wrote all these tunes I did try to cram them as chock full of memorable riffs as I could. Give you something to hang on to, yeah?

Much of the pre-pro at the moment involves moving MIDI notes around: the drum maps that came with the Logic drum kits aren’t like those I used to track the original MIDI files, which adhered to the map on my trusty K-2000. Sonar had a relatively easy way to re-map from one map to another, which still involved some time and effort, but I haven’t discovered a similar feature in Logic yet. If I were thinking straight I would look into that now, but I’m about ready for bed after a night’s work.

I owe a couple of people in California, New Jersey, and Australia some tracks, too. Inasmuch as I wasn’t able to make it out to LA in late October to do it in person, and I promised a look in well before this.

Oh, and before I forget, CAPE 8 is here, if you want to hear what we all did this time out. Why not, it’s free to your pockets, with only a suggestion that you donate something to the International Red Cross. My team was Zeitgeist.. and I think it is worth your while.

What the hell.. all of it is worth your while.

 

Bye Bye Twitter

After a month or two of using it, I decided that it was superfluous. Anyone who I feel needs to know what I’m thinking at any given moment– anyone who is in on my personal journey to the outer limits– is someone I’m already talking to on the phone or via e-mail, where they don’t have a 140 character limit. Then, of course, there’s this, my WordPress blog, which is being simulcast over on Facebook to my vast armada of friends.

My Blackberry feels a little faster now that Twitterberry is uninstalled, too. Maybe that’s just me.

 

Luminous City: Avarice (Too Much Is Not Enough)

This song bothers me… but not enough that I didn’t put it on the record anyway. It filled a specific and quite important purpose in the band’s repertoire: it’s fast, it’s aggressive, it gives the soloists a chance to stretch out some, it’s a bit snotty and misanthropic. It invariably closed our second and final set, with a long line of exclamation points following the reverb tail out.

And yet it bothers me, because it’s a lyric that no one in that position would actually articulate. It might be their id talking, sure, or at the very least they might even think like that; but who actually speaks from there? By definition the id is unarticulated; what we say and do filters up from there to the ego and the superego, if you hold to the Freudian model (I don’t necessarily, but I’m using it for illustrative purposes). You wouldn’t hear, say, Donald Trump talking like this.

I’ve made a conscious effort over the years to stay away from writing lyrics like that, and then discovered too late that I did it all the same. And in this case changing the words was not really an option (as I had done with One AM Deluxe, although I was also changing the arrangement at the same time).

The closing section, starting with the keyboard solo, came out of a particularly fruitful vening of jamming between Josh, Paula, and me down in the New Haven space– it might have been before we met Pete, or Pete might have been en route, I don’t remember now. The section after the keyboard solo and before the guitar solo gave us a bit of a Genesis moment: it reminded me a little bit of a progression and climax Tony Banks might play, and led into a guitar solo that Daryl Stuermer might have rendered. Not that I’m anywhere near those guys, but there are faint resonances.

 

Luminous City: One AM Deluxe

Once upon a time there was an Englishwoman living in Manhattan with whom I really wanted to get my freak on– and I think she might have been interested in the same thing (judging from an evening spent macking at a mutual friend’s dinner party). Only thing, there was a bit of a language barrier.. she spoke British English and American English (French, too, but that’s not important now); and while my American English isn’t bad at all (and my French isn’t bad either once I’ve hung out in Montréal for a week– what is it with me and the French thing all of a sudden?)– I think in retrospect I had an overly inflated sense of my own command of British English. Signals were missed; mistakes were made, likely all of them on my end. After a few long phone calls and a couple of visits where we didn’t quite know what to do with one another, we drifted. Our collective freaks remained unadorned.

Two years removed from that, rather than assume complete culpability for my failure, I wrote lyrics about “our” failure to stay connected. The song to which I would fit them already had lyrics, but over time I became less and less enamored with singing them; I no longer believed them. Some nonsense about living in Provence, or suburban Paris (ah, that’s why I was making so much of France earlier), and meeting up with an old friend who disapproved of my adopted boho lifestyle, wanting to show her around to justify why I liked my life now. (At the time I was a going-nowhere-never secretary at a pharmaceutical house, so I had reason to daydream of foreign climes.)

I started the guitar part by wondering “What would Chris play?” but probably took it to places he wouldn’t go then. As he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth– none of his musical cronies from that era can find him– I have no idea what he would play now, or whether he is even still playing. I wish him well, no matter what.

Precisely one person who has heard this cut so far heard the Wabash Cannonball allusion.

My English friend now runs her own business somewhere in the five boroughs, and in my heart I am glad; it is what she wanted.

 

So how was your morning?

Since I’ve been meditating again I’ve felt myself opening up to the universe a little more– kind of the way I used to feel the last time I meditated regularly, which would have been back in college (1981). Very liquid, very aware of small changes in my outlook and emotions. Today I woke very fatigued after a restless night’s sleep, during which I met my spirit guide, who told me that yes, indeed he did look like everyone I had ever respected, but wouldn’t tell me his name (here I’m guessing it’s a male — I couldn’t really discern a gender).

On line at the returns counter at Home Depot, my entire back and my crown were tingling uncontrollably — it was almost as if they had become a yawning mouth, desperate to suck in energy and replenish my aura and chakras. I nearly fainted once or twice, but didn’t. After my business there concluded, I drove around aimlessly for a while, not quite ready to head home but not quite sure where I needed to be– until I felt a pull to visit my paternal grandmother’s grave.

It isn’t often that I get into that part of Bridgeport any more; the horror stories of crimes committed at that particular cemetery by local punks are legion. So I wasn’t exactly sure where her grave was, only that it was on the perimeter of the cemetery… until suddenly I saw my surname on a headstone more or less where I expected — but it was the grave of my uncle (my dad’s older brother, who had died of lung cancer when I was 13) and his wife. My back and crown were still in reception, hungry, ravenous. I didn’t know how far away my grandmother was from here– she had to be close by– but at least, here was family.

I got out of the car to have a look and discovered that when he was buried, the Marine Corps had placed a placard there to commemorate my uncle’s service in Korea. I had never known that he served. The plate was mostly covered with grass. I found a rock and, as carefully as I could, dug the plate out to expose his name and rank again to the elements– maybe the rain would wash the rest of the dirt away. People should notice that sort of thing, shouldn’t they?

I walked around to the back of the headstone and discovered that that was where they had placed my grandmother, who had buried her son there 15 years before. A plain, nondescript grave. Her footstone looked a little unkept, so I removed some of the dead grass clippings and rotting leaves from it, and wiped some of the lichens eating into the marble off the face of the headstone.

Then I felt a warm hug surrounding me… and her voice, her soft, impossibly sweet West Virginia accent as familiar to me as it was when last I heard it 20-odd years ago before she died, thanking me for taking care of “our” plot– hers and her son’s and daughter-in-law’s. The tingling in my back and crown stopped, satiated. I staggered to the maple tree hanging over the grave site and cried out of sheer joy. I felt she was happy with the way I’d turned out, that she was pleased that I cared enough to visit.

She is still holding me as I write. I sense now that she never let go in 15 years since she left. Nor did my maternal grandparents. Nor do my family, my friends, my lovers.

I feel sorry for you if you don’t, or can’t, or won’t, feel this way about everyone you ever loved, or whoever loved you.

 

Luminous City: Childhood Falls

As with Storming Heaven, the song began with Pete. He had the wistful opening section, I wrote the key change/jam section and the lyrics… about as close to jazz fusion as we ever got, actually. This aspect was what appealed to Nolan, the guitarist after Pete, Josh, and Paula left, and it was a cross between him and Larry Carlton circa The Royal Scam that I envisioned as I performed the “guitar” solo. I also borrowed his acoustic guitar arpeggios during the choruses.

I’m pretty sure I would not write this lyric today. The initial impetus was observing two of my former girlfriend’s five children, both in accelerated learning curricula at the late grade school and early middle school level, coming home with backpacks weighed down and at least five or six hours’ worth of homework assigned each and every night. With all that, when were the kids going to have any time to go out and play with their friends in the neighborhood? It was as though someone somewhere in the school system had decided, “Hey, we’ve got to catch up, how did we fall so far behind the Asians and Europeans? Damn the cost, these kids need to work and make us proud.” Their childhood was falling before them and adulthood rearing its head at what we used to consider an abnormally young age.

Which brings me, not coincidentally, to the line about “Japs and Krauts”, over which I’ve caught shrapnel. I’m not going to plead a case here, or apologize for my potty mouth; I’m just going to tell you straight up that as a rule, a more, and a code, I do not refer to either nationality as pejoratively as that (I’m probably eine kleine Deutscher myself, but my great-uncle is guessing about all of that except for my being of Welsh descent). My point is that the kind of people who think that there is a quick fix to our education ills– a fix such as overburdening the best and brightest among our children– seem to me to be also the kind of people who would refer to other nationalities as dismissively. As with much of the criticism of Robert A Heinlein’s work, it’s generally a mistake to attribute the attitudes of his characters to those of the author.

Anyway, that was back then. About ten years later, during my first significant stretch of funemployment (ha, and ha) since I joined the ranks of IT support, I spent two years scraping for any kind of work to bring money into the house, and one of the jobs I found myself doing was babysitting teenagers, that is, substitute teaching, mostly on the high school level if I could help it. It mattered not whether I was in the inner city or in the comfy suburbs; wherever I went, I saw that children outside the accelerated programs seemed simply not as inclined to learn. So much for the attitude of Chaucer’s clerk: “And gladly wolde he lerne…”

I don’t know whether it’s that the teachers and administrators cannot or will not make things such that children and young adults want to learn, or that the kids themselves won’t do anything that isn’t entertaining and immediately gratifying to their constant need for sensory stimulation… but there’s a standoff in the classroom. Maybe most regular teachers don’t sense this, and my magpie-on-tourist view is skewed by the transitory nature of subbing, but it’s what I saw.

 

Luminous City: Topanga Canyon Blues

So this would be one of the first songs the three of us wrote together. Josh had the bass riff. Paula had the accompanying second-line beat (though I tweaked it somewhat in the rendering). I told Pete, “Maybe a Chuck Berry riff? Oh, and solo here.” That was pretty much it.

Lyrically: it was winter and I was thinking a lot at the time about California. I had lived north of Los Angeles for about five months when I was very young, and now with the wind blowing upstairs and out of doors down George Street in New Haven, ice freshly chipped off the sidewalks and salt duly spread liberally by the landlord, I tried to recreate the gestalt of the San Fernando Valley and the adjacent canyons– a five year old’s eyes grafted into a 32-year-old’s body. Lizards in the low evergreen hedge in front of the house and the dull pink noise of Balboa Boulevard traffic. Learning to ride a bike up– and down– a steep hill. Pouring dirt into the in-ground kidney-shaped swimming pool to see how long it took for the filtration to remove it from the water. My first kisses with a fellow kindergartener on the playground. A smiling Buddha statue (with a clock in his belly) in the display window of Treasure Isle at Topanga Plaza.

Oh, how cruelly life had turned out since then, I thought; me here in the deep freeze and no one to keep me warm, working a shitty day job with no future– and this band, the only thing keeping me going, still without a guitarist, and good Lord, what a chore finding one. Our last one, when the band was still called Fulcrum, had bailed to Colorado and a better day job– understandably.

There are a couple of people in my past to whom I could be singing, people who left the band du jour just when it was on the verge of doing something really cool, like for example actually playing out, or finally getting an original set together. (Our last guy wasn’t among them: we had actually gigged with him a few times.) As much as it would have been better karma for me to wish the lately-departed well, at the time I couldn’t help being royally pissed off over the lack of faith and the doors that would have to close now that we would have to replace them.

Really I’m singing to myself, because I have also left bands just when they were on the verge…

Jay and Paul together constituted an off-kilter reference to a local bilionaire. I named the barista Stymie because it just seemed like a good idea at the time– I envisioned a guy who reminded me of a fully formed version of his namesake from the Our Gang comedies. The Plaza has long since been taken over by the many-tentacled Westfield, but don’t worry, our hero has yet another mall to conquer in Edmonton.

The second verse, for those not conversant with the biz, is a sidelong acknowledgment of the pay-to-play syndrome that has now filtered east– in order to play Toads Place, my ex-wife’s nephew’s band had to buy a roll of tickets and sell them to all their friends. The amount of tickets sold with their name on it would determine whether the band got a second shot at playing there. I’ll let you know how that goes. So much for bands getting paid when they’re starting out.. it’s a major outlay of cash for them now.

I knew that I was going to set the song in one of the canyons around town– historically the canyons, especially Laurel Canyon, had been a hotbed of activity for some of the bands I spent large amounts of time admiring and studying later (Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, Jackson Browne, Eagles– pretty much anyone Henry Diltz photographed, as it transpired). Some time after I started fleshing the lyrics out, I realized that I had a golden opportunity to sneak in the phrase Fernwood Tonight, and out of respect to Fred Willard, Martin Mull, and especially Norman Lear, I just couldn’t pass that up.

 

Luminous City: Gaining On Me

Continuing with our tour of the seven tracks on the album, we arrive at the song that does not sound like the other six.

This one has other musicians on it.

History. The Radiant City rehearsal space was in the basement of a funky brick building in the North End of New Haven, complete with a bus stop and a junkie or two in front. We shared it with one other band, which was OK because we could trust the guys in the other band, Seven Story Mountain: both me and our bassist had been in that band at one time or another. (Notwithstanding the fact that their guitarist blew out a tweeter on my PA column and by way of apology spilled a Coke into my Kurzweil K-2000, thereby destroying its pitch bend and modulation wheel function.) The rehearsal space had its own rest room, and at one point must have been a recording studio because what apparently had been a control room sat just off the main space, with a heavy door and a window looking out on to the main space.

I walked into rehearsal one evening to find Pete, Josh, and Paula doing battle with a sprightly and yet driving riff in A dominant– the first guitar riff audible in the finished song. I liked what I heard, and leaped in with supporting Hammondesque comping. It felt good; I immediately had ideas for where the song could go, and told the others so.

My SOP at the time was to take whatever jamming we did and mine it; e.g., discover whether there was anything there that I could fashion a song around. (As resident auteur and presumptive visionary behind the band, I claimed that role of benevolent dictator for myself, which included setting editorial tone for the music and lyrics. While this would later come back to bite me, thus far in the band’s development and history the arrangement had worked.)

So I went to town. The thing took a day or so to come together as I modelled it in the EPS sequencer. Each section flowed organically from the one before, and back into itself. I stood the guitar riff on its head, turned it around, split it down the middle, translated it into Esperanto, and I must have written half the song  just from that. Dynamics, technicality, drive… I christened the song and was pleased with what I’d done.

The others were, hmm, less than thrilled. They never did say why, or if they did I was too busy being myself to hear them. Even though we were hurting for new material, I shrugged and opted to put that one on the back burner and take another swipe at it in the future.

By the time I got around to that second swipe, that incarnation of the band had been defunct for about ten years. We never did get around to writing new material; a battle of the bands had us in thrall at the time…. But I’ve discussed all that already.

So ten years down the road from that full hour of studio glory, I was hanging out (virtually) at the precursor to The Womb, a place which I will not name here– because advertising ain’t free. We had instituted an annual or semi-annual worldwide musical and engineering activity called Collaborative Audio Production Experiment, CAPE for short, and rashly I had signed up to be a songwriter. Before I opted to include it on Luminous City anyway, the only Radiant City song I had handy that wasn’t already spoken for by one of the two Fulcrum albums I had (and have) planned was Gaining On Me.

It seems to me that the CAPE Team who wound up recording it, christened Team Galactic by the guy who put us together, was constructed for the purpose of doing something progressive or at the very least musically challenging. As it was, I had the two best guitarists hanging on the board at that time playing on the track (MudCat and Trazan are still the two best now that they’re on The Womb); our wizardly mix engineer, Otek, had access to a top flight session drummer in his native Karlstad; and Spock, the project manager, was keeping us on track. All I had to do was play them the model.

Those are not their real names. I just thought I should mention that.

The response to the initial airing of my model was more or less unanimous. “Um could we hear something else?”

It didn’t occur to me to wonder what it was about GOM that put musicians off initially. My thoughts were: good melody, memorable guitar riff, GottaGoodBeatAnYouKinDanceToIt… and I was assured that it wasn’t that it was a bad song, far from it, but these guys wanted options. Hurriedly I put together a second model of another song which if anything was even more complicated than GOM– that will see the light of day sometime, trust me. I think part of me did that on purpose in order to ensure that GOM would be the choice. All right, maybe it was all of me.

Team Galactic agreed that GOM was the lesser of two evils, but Trazan offered to have a bash at “doing something” with it. I gave the digital nod to Trazan through Spock, and he disappeared for a few days into his studio somewhere in Norway.

What came back was the form that you hear on the finished track. One or two sections excised, a new turnaround to get back into the last verse, a busy string quartet sawing away over much of the chorus and instrumental sections, and some Beach Boys harmonies during the final chorus. Mind-blowingly good work, and though it took some getting used to, I embraced what Trazan did with it to the point that I gave him a partial songwriting credit along with Pete, Josh, Paula, and me.

The slide guitar work you hear is MudCat, who chose just the right notes for my paranoia. Our bassist, bassman134, lived somewhere on Staten Island and for all I know is still there.

Now. Compound our efforts over three months with those of 15-20 other “teams”, and you have an idea of the scope of CAPE– the latest (eighth) iteration of which is now starting up over at The Womb Forums. At the time, reaction to our work from members of other teams ranged from “This one shines, I just had to groove to it again”, “I wish there was music that good in video games”, and “Incredible journey” to “Weather Report gets stoned and watches Star Trek”, “I’m gonna sync my Christmas lights up to this”, and “How did you get Kansas to record your song?”

I guess we done good.

In my mind’s eye I envisioned the video: Mad Max redux, with a desert truck chase scene populated not by heavily armored road warriors with piercings at odd angles and through odd appendages, but by business-suited drones firing the rifles and lobbing the grenades, all chasing after the flatbed lorry driven by me (with the rest of the band chugging away on the flatbed itself, a la the splash screen of Rock Band). Of course the dashboard has a Hammond built into it, I think the steering wheel is protruding from the spot where the Leslie controls would ordinarily be, and the accelerator doubles as an expression pedal.