So you want to make an album? (part 2)
KeithHandy posted in Old skool, Producing, So You Want..., Your Soul on March 19th, 2007
In this installment, I continue documenting my conflicted musical beginnings, to hopefully provide a clearer background for my perspectives on recording. I also demonstrate that I apparently can’t write a whole chapter without using the word “sex” at least once.
Installment 2: My, my, my, I’m so happy (1984-1986)
No child dreams of one day becoming a “solo recording artist”. Sure, there are the truly reality-divorced youngsters, entirely uninterested in things like ideas, tools, techniques, and learning in general, who simply want to be “a star” — but at least among those who stand a chance of actually doing something constructive, the smallest non-divisible unit of musical power is that most sacred of institutions known as: THE BAND.
What is a band? At first glance it would appear to be a democratic gathering of musicians with an equal desire to play together and live happily ever after. On closer inspection, a band is a fictitious entity that musicians create, glorify, idolize, hide behind, and use as a convenient black hole for the absorbtion of responsibility, accountability, and blame.
In other words, while not quite as legally binding, a band is a young person’s first corporation.
Throughout my freshman year in high school, my “original band recording an album” paradigm continued to descended further and further into just “me playing with the organ” (read that however you like). Then one day, in the autumn of 1984, an alternate model somehow popped up, if only for a seemingly short-term diversion: to play a short set of cover songs at the high school concert. The pendulum had swung to the opposite side of my internal rift, but the rewards were irresistible. Suddenly I had a chance to be an active, functioning member of society: a performing rock musician.
Jeff’s newfound excitement was contagious, to put it mildly. We talked for hours on the phone about what songs to play, who would play guitar and bass (and how we would lure them into the fold), and — most importantly of all — what to name the band.
The naming ritual is delicate and exasperating. Nearly everything you come up with, no matter how you go about scrambling for ideas — letting dictionaries flop open to a random page, making obscure references to pre-existing bands, calling out the names of objects in the room — will have some aspect that rubs at least one bandmate the wrong way. Someone will get so sick of having his ideas rejected that he resorts to sarcastic, deliberately stupid names that at least one other person will actually like, which will only piss him off all the more. The lines blur between sincerity and sarcasm as your radar becomes fatigued. Even after you finally come up with something that everyone is agreeable to, you invariably spend the next several days second-guessing it and wondering if everyone simply got too tired and just wanted to get it over with.
My ever-so-brilliant “Nuclear Ghost” had already been vetoed a couple years earlier, and of course Jeff’s “Hot Mustard” concept (complete with a bun-shaped stage that would open up at the beginning of every show) had to be shot down in retaliation. We finally agreed that “Glass Exit” sounded modern, cool, and visual. (I didn’t notice the unintentional subliminal “sex” in the middle until years later; I wonder if that affected our decision.)
I did learn a few valuable lessons about live performance that one doesn’t learn in a home studio environment:
- If you try to use home stereo speakers in lieu of a keyboard amplifier, within fifteen minutes they will cease to be speakers at all.
- A minute into the song, you don’t throw a tantrum and demand to start over.
- Don’t get up from the keyboards to prance around like Mick Jagger, if you’re not Mick Jagger.
- If you happen to be able to sing exactly like Billy Idol, that’s not necessarily something you want people to know.
On a more serious note, I did in fact learn most of what I know about drums and guitars during this time period - what all the strings were tuned to, how to play the most common chords, and so on. While I would hardly call myself a drummer, I can keep a beat in an emergency, and I have an awareness of the drum set that keeps my drum sequencing from getting too unrealistic (some may say that’s a bad thing).
As proud as I was to hang “rock musician” on my hat hook, there was still the composer burning within, and the songwriter on a roll (I’ll describe my take on the difference between these two terms in a later installment). I made some dents in getting the band to try my songs in rehearsal, but not quite to the point of performance. I tried to encourage them to write as well, but they weren’t ready. They all at one point or another played on my home demos, but I found I was more “into it” when I just did the parts myself on my first legitimate synthesizer, the Christmas gift that I demanded so relentlessly that my parents had no choice: the Casio CZ-101.
In my next installment, I’ll look at this same period of time from the opposite side of the widening rift: my very different “meanwhile at the home studio” perspective. Heck, there’s my catchy chapter title already…
