Dr. Frank's What's-it

Big Old Jet Airliner

Spaceland, the club we played last night, is located down the road from Matt Welch's house, so I had a chance to hang out with Matt and his wife, the lovely and talented Emanuelle (whom I had never met in person before.) Great, smart conversation about music, the blogosphere, Arnold (of course), Prague, Europe, the INS, lots of other stuff, you name it. (I wish I could remember all those things about which I thought "note to self: remember this." One good bit was the discussion about surface noise and tape hiss, and about how listening to Sticky Fingers on CD just doesn't work. You miss the record-related sounds, the floppy needle sound before it finds the groove, the rough, scratchy sound that somehow kind of matches the guitar sound. Even that brief moment during which the automatic arm creakily makes its way over to the edge of the record and drops down is part of the experience. And, as per his example, that skip on "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'". Of course I know exactly what he means, even though my skip is toward the end of "Sister Morphine.")

If I have this right, Matt's plan was to write a whole column (deadline 10am) when he got home from the gig. Damn. I couldn't have written my way out of a paper bag after all that punishment. The long arm of the blogosphere was evident in the fact that Greg from the Talent Show was, to my surprise, also in attendance; and the fact that that arm stretches out to touch the rock and roll world far more than you might think was evident in the fact that he was hanging out with Kim Shattuck's sister. Jeff Whelan from Tsar was there, too, along with several other usual suspects.

I can't say the performance was stellar. We're still a bit rusty, from all that studio playing (which is totally different from live playing and doesn't at all "count" as practicing-- in fact, it can even do considerable harm.) I don't know how it is for other bands, but I find we're constantly in a state of trying learn our own songs, even those we've been playing for fifteen years. (Yesterday, driving down I-5, we spent a bit of time trying to remember how certain oldies, er, classics, went, and it sounded like: "okay, I think it's: why don't you C F your CFC 'cause a little F can make F minor difference A minor than D minor you're trying to G...") I'm on auto-pilot on a lot of this stuff, it's true: the trick, though, is to get everybody's autopilot to synch up, or come pretty close. We haven't yet hit on the formula to make this effortless. I think there might be some kind of glitch in my autopilot from time to time. There are just too many chords and words, and I'm a bit absent-minded. Maybe there's some foul play involved as well. Anyway if everyone's following me, and I space, the whole operation can come crashing down, killing all on board and not doing the parent company's stock any good. My solution: arm the audience. No, really I'm just kidding about that. I'd prefer a sturdy steel door between me and them, sometimes, anyway.

Seriously, though, there is always a sense in which (or maybe I should say a feeling that) you're covering your own songs when you try to take songs that were shaped in a recording studio and make them work in a little club when no one can hear what you're saying and you can't correct any mistakes. Sure, the songs exist as disembodied words and music beforehand, and you might have played them a certain way live before you "put them down." But the process of recording almost always changes the songs in small or huge ways. And the very existence of the completed recording exerts an influence even after the song incorporating such changes has already become effectively set in stone, subject to gradual, imperceptible evolution/devolution, but with a publicly accessible "original" to which it will always be compared. (Not that you can't improve on this "original" if you try-- in fact, it would be hard not to improve on most of those old recordings of ours; though sometimes the best thing you can do to improve a song is to decide not to play it. But that's a different sort of thing.)

The goal of recording playing on the one hand, and live playing on the other remains the same: to get the song across. But there are totally different criteria for what works in those two contexts: hence the challenge of coming up with studio arrangements of songs that sound okay live but lack character as is in two-dimensional recorded form, and live re-arrangements of those re-arrangements in a way which will be understood, and which you can pull off, in front a live audience of drunken, not necessarily very attentive or interested punters.

We're in strange situation with our new stuff because it has been "recorded" but not finished (i.e., not mixed and mastered.) All sorts of things will happen to it in the process of getting mixed. In a way that's similar to the much more dramatic changes the song and arrangement goes through during the recording process. These songs are in limbo at the moment, and no one knows for sure what's going to happen with them (though I have a good feeling about it-- we really did get great sounds.) I wrote them, we practiced them, we played them relentlessly, ad nauseam, in a zillion different ways by a zillion different means-- but we really don't know them yet. Stay tuned for that.