Week 3 in the studio now, not that we’ve been slogging aways 12 hours a day or anything.
Nah man, what you think?
We’re holed up at Villa Nellcôte, making this record at our bleary leisure?
That we spend our days splashing around the Mediterranean Sea before a light supper of chilled crustaceans and baguette, only then retiring to the basement to lay down half a usable track before calling it a day?
It’s more like, hey Jim, book me 90 minutes next Tuesday, my wife has Book Club. I’ll try to get in to lay down some vocals before I start my colonoscopy cleanse-cool?
Such is life. The reality of the mundane world attempts to extinguish the creative ideal.
Who’s gonna finish these goddamn lyrics, I ask you, when the kid just cracked up her car on Sepulveda yet again.
Are we working out this guitar line, or are we calling the Insurance company….huh?
Heh.
So the guitars are all there now, the lead vocals in the can.
We start listening to rough mixes, throwing out silly ideas for background vocals and horn parts.
You know, the kind of stuff that always gets us in trouble.
If we could only make a full album of Wetspots and Mannequin, ya know?
It would be so easy!
But no, we just can’t help but veer off into the land o cheese.
Our beloved place of the heart that brings you the odd ballads and Aersosmith covers (ahem) that corrupt our every offering, keeping us out of the Hardcore Hall of Fame.
Hey, blame it on our shoddy upbringing.
While you goddamn kids grew up with your Eminem on MTV, we had to stay up late and wait to see who came up on The Midnight Special or Don Kirschners Rock Concert for our musical education.
It was a mixed bag, one night you’d get gloriously rockin stuff by Cheap Trick or Alice, next week it might be Kenny Loggins and the O’Jay’s.
We watched it all, studied that shit.
When you were raised on AM radio hits of the 70’s and the deep tracks of the FM dial, tortured to sleep every night by your older brothers’ Mothers of Invention and Savoy Brown albums, well, that stuff comes back to haunt you.
You look at all the specialized porn categories (asking for a friend), and these bizarre sub-categories are borne from the residual memory lodged in mind if not DNA.
The childhood glimpse at a Sears underwear catalog, the delicious sting of willow switch upon buttock.
Who are we to judge?
So when we roll back on the last odd track, Jay’s final farewell gift to us before heading back to his Safe European Home, it all makes sense.
I mean, why wouldn’t we try our hand at an Irving Berlin number written in the early hardcore days of 1926?!
Jay proposed the idea, and I only had a memory of Willie Nelson’s laconic version.
What, you mean like a ska version or something says I?
Nah man, says Jay.
Hand me that guitar.
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