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It is March and the Michigan winter has been in effect for so long that I have no memory of other seasons... So it is on blind faith that I am packing some shorts for my annual trip down to Austin, Texas for the 2003 SXSW music festival. The gear is jam packed in the van as per usual. The only items that differentiate this van load from March of 2002 or 2001 or any of the last 4 years are the two slim black SKB cases that are stacked up and preventing the kick drum from rolling between the rear captains chairs into the back seat of our trusty 1997 Dodge Ram 2500. This year, in addition to our industry party gigs and the traditional Jim Roll Band instore at Cheapo Records on N. Lamar, Jon Williams (a wicked guitarist and effortlessly versatile multi-instrumentalist from Chicago) Neil Cleary (world class songwriter / elephant 6 keyboard player / drummer for hire from Vermont) and I, Jim Roll, signed on to form 3/5ths of the Neal Pollack Invasion (NPI) behind the bold and hilariously scathing lit-satirist author Neal Pollack. The 5th member of the NPI is young Dakota Smith, a recently laid off computer programmer from Austin. Dakota, the son of a Texas Honky Tonk roadhouse musician, is somehow wonderfully obsessed with The Modern Lovers and may well be the real heart and soul of this band. He is essentially a 95 lb. Buddy Holly meets Lou Reed type, but with the genetically predetermined pose and wardrobe Elvis Costello immortalized on the cover of his debut album “My Aim is True”. When performing his own songs, Dakota prefers convenience store sidewalks to Austin’s 6th Street club scene. Anyway, Neal Pollack secured an official SXSW showcase to promote his imminent Harper Collins novel “Never Mind the Pollacks”. As the NPI we’re gonna play his SXSW showcase; back him at an instore rock show upstairs at Bookpeople bookstore; and we also agreed that I would throw my recording studio in the back of my van and do basic tracks for the Neal Pollack Invasion album that same week. Scheduled to be co-released with the book, the album by the same name (Never Mind the Pollacks) will be distributed by The Telegraph Company Records in Brooklyn with additional publicity by Harper Collins. So the two mysterious black SKB cases in the van are a pair of 4 rack unit gear cases. Their contents, when combined with my Mac laptop, constitute a state of the art mobile recording studio (and all-told use up roughly the same amount of space as a large cooler). What’s more, there are actually only 2 hardware components total between the two cases and they are both in black case #1: • A Metric Halo Mobile I/O (MIO) 2882 firewire interface with 8 phantom powered pre amps and some of the world’s best A/D D/A converters. (1 rack unit!) The other SKB case has a bunch of mics and headphones wrapped in soft brown flannel shirts and bleached-out blue towels; some power strips, mic cords, firewire cables and an old 1960’s consumer headphone amp to run 4 mixes out to the band members' phones. The 5th cans mix will come directly out of the MIO 2882 headphone jack and I plan to use that to monitor the mixes and engineer the record while I am playing my guitar parts. Hours ago Neal Pollack and I compared our SXSW schedules for the coming week over e-mail. It was determined that we have 4 hours on Tuesday and maybe 2 hours on Thursday to record the 10 song album. Oh yeah - that includes rehearsal time, setup and tear down both days - and we’re gonna have to use Dakota Smith’s living room and bedroom in residential North Austin to record these Garage and Punk tunes. I hope the walls don’t rattle.
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