WHEW. Well, that was a long marathon session of non blogging. Not blogging really tires you out.
ANYHOO. I’m here to discuss a very important topic to all of us on this day, November 4th 2008. And that is Digital Recording Technology.
Lets go back in time if you care to join me, to a time circa 1960-1979. We have some music to record, so we go into a studio. We prepare in advance, we write some songs, discuss sounds with an engineer. We purchase some Tape, which is kind of expensive, we get sounds, we record, we rewind the tape, do some punch ins (brief sections of recording within a master take), we do minimal edits, we mix, we’re done. Most of the day is spent playing music, arranging parts, rehearsing, getting the perfect take. Now, lets take out time machine and transfer this exact scenario to modern times.
There is one main variable thats different. The Tape. Its now a hard drive. Lets look at positives vs negatives.
Positives:
the hard drive can hold hundreds of hours of audio.
Negatives:
At any point, the hard drive can unpredictably die, losing all data with no warning, present odd errors when trying to open files, freeze up and crash, god knows how many other things.
This is my argument. While tape has its limitations (which some find to be advantages) It wont randomly disappear. It wont give you errors when starting up. It won’t refuse to load in a tape machine. It will be compatible with other tape machines. Some even say it sounds better.
The hours spent in a creative burst are precious, and sometimes rare. Anything can kill this creative spark. NOTHING kills that like having to wait for a session to transfer, or to troubleshoot file errors, or most importantly to lose an important take because of a drive failure. Maybe thats whats killing music. There’s less time to actually create. There’s less focus on the music itself, and more focus on the technical mishaps and advantages. there it is.
ON WE GO.
So its been a very long time since I’ve contributed any sort of music oriented review in this space, and there have been so many in recent months its impossible to recall them all, but last night I did see a particularly interesting event.
Myself and Ross The Sauce Krentzman, revived our lifelong tradition of seeing The Black Crowes. This was a somewhat special event though, they were performing an all acoustic set at Town Hall in New York. (the same venue used in A Mighty Wind!) The last time i heard of the Crowes doing an all acoustic performance, it was circa 1996. The album Amorica had just come out, I was 14. There was a secret taping of VH1’s Story Tellers at The Bottom Line, a now defunct classic West Village cabaret type venue. I was lucky enough to see many shows there in my adolescent lifetime, mostly older blues and folk type musicians. The only way to get in was through local radio stations- answering trivia questions on the air. And oh man, I called in hundreds of times. I knew the drinks were made by Johnny Wong’s in the liner notes to Southern Harmony. I knew Brendan Bud Obrian played organ on Shake Your Moneymaker, I was all over that shit. But alas, it was not to be, and I did not get it. Years later, I did get a bootleg video of an unedited camera perspective from the taping, and it was fucking fantastic.
Anyhoo, I had hoped last night would be an enhancement on the video watching experience. The band took the stage promptly at 8, all seated, 9 piece lineup, extra percussion, 2 backup singers, a very full stage. The sound was beautiful, we were all very happy to be there, you could feel a wonderful excitement as they opened with Under A Mountain, off the often neglected Three Snakes and One Charm, a brilliant, if somewhat depressing record. But oh man, was it wonderful. It felt great, I was transported to being 14 again, and rocking out to the mildly psychedelic sounds of this southern rock institution. Just as I thought it could not get any better, they went into Nonfiction off Amorica, the hands down best Crowes record. This is my favorite song, and I was floating. Never before had i heard an arrangement so close to the original recording, Luther Dickenson playing lap steel, Rich Robinson on a beautiful 12 string , could this get any better? No, the answer is definitely no, because it got worse. A Lot Worse.
He entered unassumingly enough, a guy in a neatly ironed white dress shirt, and a wide shiny tie that seemed to say “i sit at a desk making phonecalls all day, brokering high powered somethingorother without exuding enough energy to wrinkle my nicely pressed $300 shirt.” and oh my, did he look like a meathead. With the voice and girlfriend to match. Now, I’m going to try to imitate his voice with the following text, so imagine if you will the voice several octaves below my own and several decibels above:
WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO YEAAAAAH, SEE HONEY, THATS CHRIIIIS, THE GUY NEXT TO HIM IS HIS BROTHER RICH! YEAAAAAAH! LOOOK AT HIM WORK THOSE ELBOOOOWS!! (side note: he literally said this, and i have no fucking idea what he meant, everyone in the band was seated and barely moving) I JUST WANNA YELL OUT- I THREW CRAPS WITH YOU IN VEGAS!!!!! WOOOO!!!! MOST PEOPLE DONT KNOW I DID THAT, BUT I DID! SEE THOSE PEOPLE BEHIND THEM? THOSE ARE BACKUP SINGERS!!!
Well, this was not good. I wanted to tell him that the Jets game was on next door, they would be doing a play by play there if he’d like to go watch. Fucking frat guys. They really have no place in modern society. They fucked up our economy with their banking system snafus, they have ruined our cultural centers with their douche-baggy ways. Eventually we could not take any more of this shit, we asked him to quiet down, and for the most part, he did, at times bringing his voice back up giving his slut bag arm accessory the play by play, and also yelling SKOOOT! at the top of his lungs, which neither of us understood. I’m guessing it was some type of mating call to attract the Long Hairs on stage, which he might have confused for hippy chicks.
Besides that, the band performed well, some classic jams, some newer tunes, some oddly electric tunes for an acoustic performance, good sounds overall.