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The week is flying by, and given our schedule, my only regret is that I am not seeing enough music. SXSW offers such a rich pool of musical talent each night that I practically weep when considering the number of great bands (within walking distance RIGHT NOW!) that I will never see. More than eight hundred bands converge on Austin each year this time. This year my region of the country is very well represented. There were years when Detroit and Ann Arbor were pretty sparse as far as attendees. But, with the recent popularity of The White Stripes and the rapidly rising Ann Arbor hipster label, Ghostly International, making major national waves, that has all changed. In fact there is already a backlash in effect: a lot of grumbling going on about the over-hyped Detroit scene. Ah, you gotta love the indie music world! All that said, our job today is to get on the road by 10:30am; grab Maria's Taco Express (again!); load in at Dakota's house by 11am; and record the remaining four songs for the Pollacks album by 1pm. All went well at the taco stand and we are at Dakota's House. Neal Pollack is running a little late, but that's okay as we have setup to do anyway. The boys are arranging the amps and I am reconstructing the studio setup based on Tuesday's arrangement. This involves:
The beauty of this task is in the MIO 2882+DSP. The only variable in achieving the exact sound we had Tuesday is in mic placement. This is because the mic preamps are controlled digitally through the MIO Console on the iBook. This means I recall the MIO setup file I saved Tuesday and all mic preamp settings, phantom power sends, headphone routing and mixing, volume levels, and communication with Emagic Logic, instantly re-materialize. Amen. There is always that moment of doubt with any computer application, when you pray that nothing apparently RANDOM occurs to screw up your system performance. I test all the mics and boot up Logic and IT'S ALL THERE! Levels are identical to Tuesday and all channels are live! It is 11:15am and we are ready to record. I call the band to their instruments, and there is a little grumbling as the Suns/Lakers video game has to be cut short between Pollack (Phoenix) and Jon Williams/Neil Cleary (Lakers). They'll live. Jon Williams, Neil Cleary and Dakota Smith are in the bedroom-tracking-room with their instruments, and I am out in the living-room-control-room playing guitar while seated at the recording station. Pollack is back at his microphone in the hallways between the two rooms. We start rolling and all the music we have played together this week pays off at just the right time (given our time constraints today). It is always a joy when a band can practically skip verbal communication, and make musical adjustments by exchanging glances or simply sensing the direction of a song performance. We are there. The lack of sleep has joined forces with the amount of music we played together this week . . . and the result is a no-bullshit vibe where we we are ready to crank out 4 tunes in an hour and twenty minutes. THE SONGS: 1.) Racism Number 5 -- This is a tricky one as half the band is not terribly familiar with SST Records funk/punk band The Minutemen, whom Pollack has modeled this song after. Neil Cleary saves our asses because he knows their music well. Fate has intervened, because the drummer is probably the one person who needs to know this style of music if we are to make this song work. (Cleary has just earned himself a couple of more tacos!) We practice the song once, and nail it on the next take with the exception of the ending. I keep the computer rolling and tell the boys to hit the ending again before the tempo leaves their collective subconscious. I'll splice it later. 2.) I'm a Seeker -- The Kinks inspired much of this lewd but hilarious raunch-rocker. I won't get into the lyrical content here, but if you have a blue sense of humor you'll enjoy Pollack's purposefully adolescent rant. Lyrically, he basically challenges a love interest to do everything to him imaginable -- but her efforts are futile as, ultimately, he is an unattainable desperado. That's right . . . a Seeker. The joy here is in the details . . . 3.) Jenny in the Car 1972 is the "Cadillac Ranch" Springsteen parody that we bombed with at the Swollen Circus Tuesday Night. It goes well here today and we get it in two takes. I am responsible for the guitar riff that drives the song, so I try and bang it out confidently. Pollack is totally out of tune on vocals BUT he delivers them with such conviction that I am convinced that this is his best performance of the week. I am probably wrong. We do the big E-Street Band fake ending and Pollack screams out ONE TWO THREE FOUR!! as we rip back into a reprise. Bruce would have been proud. Or sickened. 4.) Vein -- With Vein we are shooting for a transparent ode to the Velvet Underground classic "Heroin". It is the perfect song with which to finish the recording week, as it is entirely "feel" and improvisation based. Essentially, it is a drone in the Key of E, where the band can let go of any song structure for good and purge any lingering tension in freeform waves of plodding energy. Once the song is under way, I walk across the living room (away from the computer/MIO 2882 recording center I have set up) and start banging my Fender Telecaster on my VOX AC15TBX amp. I am achieving some pretty cool feedback BUT I can no longer hear the band at all. I am trying to study Pollack in the hallway (he is the only person I can see) for hints of the band's rhythm. Somehow it all works and my guitar noise fits the arrangement rather well. It is 11 minutes long so we spend 25 minutes recording this song twice. Amazingly, we are done recording and it is just 12:45pm. Neal Pollack's ride is on the way to whisk him off to his book signing across town at 2pm. The boys break down the amps and I tear down the mobile recording studio for good. While I break down the mic stands and get the mic cables wound, we are backing up the 24Bit files to an external firewire drive. I recorded everything to a partitioned section of the iBook's internal drive and now I have a backup as well. There is a great deal of satisfaction as we drive away from Dakota's house. Pollack nailed all of the vocals live, and the band played ragged-tight versions of the songs, and did so with passion. We have our Thursday night ahead of us, and the basic tracks for the Never Mind the Pollacks record in the CAN!
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