After a good night of sleep, I awake Friday thrilled with how recording went this past week (given our time restraints and busy schedule, I secretly had hoped to track maybe five or six songs, max).

We, "The Jim Roll Band" have our annual gig at Cheapo Records today at 1pm. Typically it is at this show that we meet up with our international friends and fans. I think the folks who make it over to SXSW from England, Scotland, Holland and elsewhere are able to wake up in time for the early afternoon shows because they are on European time. Their internal clocks read 7pm when ours say 1pm - so they are raring to go! Makes sense to me.

So we drive the van over to Cheapo Records on Lamar Street and play our favorite annual gig. The-Nicest-Guys-in-the-World help us load in and out. They are three fellows from Indiana, New Jersey, Michigan (and sometimes Kansas) who we meet up with every year at SXSW. Needless to say they live up to their names and have become great friends. And not just because they insist on carrying the bass amp in and out of Cheapo Records!!

Drew Glackin of the Silos sits in with us on steel again and truth be told our performance today is a little rough musically speaking. Maybe the adrenaline of having completed the Never Mind the Pollacks basic tracks is fading. Who knows, maybe it’s just the natural rhythm of things: up and down, biorhythms and all that. No matter what the reason, we are definitely winding down from our hectic week and there is an element of fatigue.

After signing a few CD’s and loading up the van, we part ways with The-Nicest-Guys-in-the-World and head back to Rachel’s apartment. There is but one event left: the official SXSW Showcase for The Neal Pollack Invasion tomorrow night at 8pm.

Neil Cleary, Jon Williams, my wife Laura and I, along with our venerable traveling companion Chad, proceed to lounge around Rachel’s apartment the rest of the day. We are playing the card game Racko, which Chad (like some crafty drug pusher) has gotten us sufficiently hooked on. Racko, truthfully, is a great distraction while the adrenaline continues to leak gradually down and down and down and down.

Whenever Jon Williams or I get knocked out of a hand of Racko, we jump to the couch and start mixing the Never Mind the Never Mind the Pollacks tracks. We do so on my iBook/MIO rig through a pair of AKG K240 headphones. Jon (a great engineer and producer in his own right) and I are tag-teaming the rough mixes based on whoever gets eliminated from a round of Racko first.

We are amazed at how good these essentially live recordings sound. The bedroom we tracked in actually served the drum sound well. It’s encouraging. Two important things come of these initial Racko Mixes: 1.) in a very basic sense it is obvious we have a record on our hands. The music sounds good for a garage/post-punk recording and that is a relief. 2.) Jon experiments with the basic Emagic tape delay plugin on Neal Pollack’s voice. It is a revelation.

Maybe this is an obvious option for better engineers than me, but I was not thinking tape delay. I have at least two other reverbs (Waves and Altiverb) that are my go-to choices for vocal effects. But the tape delay is THE ONE for this Pollack album and Jon has likely saved me countless hours of experimentation with his effortless discovery.

Friday night proceeds lazily. We wimp-out and stay home wishing we had the energy to catch some of the other bands showcases this evening. But we do take advantage of an opportunity to conserve energy for the SXSW Never Mind the Pollacks showcase; and for our departure and brutal drive back to Chicago/Ann Arbor to follow. One by one we hit the hay early with echoes of RACKO! flooding our last conscious thoughts.

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