Sunday, May 29, 2022

Looking for a "Lost Weekend"

I'm off for the next 12 or so days and so I have entered mixing heaven, hopefully not mixing hell.  But seriously, it's going pretty well so far although I do have a few challenges that I'm tackling.  I've reentered the halls of what is known as "Lost Weekend", my first fully recorded album back from 2000 that's now getting a full remix and a bit of touch up without going too terribly 'George Lucas' on it.

A bit of history...  I started recording this album back in 1997, back when I had just purchased at very long last my first Alesis ADAT recorder, something I had been wanting for about 5+ years and couldn't afford.  I had been waiting to do any real recording for that exact moment since my explored excursions into recording on cassette multi-tracks seemed a complete waste of time, regardless of what some people back then said.  Cassettes had awful quality in general, let alone dividing up the thin tape into 8 segments for multi-tracking.  The end result was usually less than impressive (just listen to my "Halloween" music tape, for example.  Ugh).

Strangely, after already composing about 6 albums worth of material at the time, all vocal albums, mind you, I opted instead to record something completely new and foreign to me versus recording something already written.  Mistake?  Possibly.  It kind of all came about with a new song idea that I had that eventually became "Across the Desert", with this very heavy played strum on the acoustic guitar, and I decided to try "practice" recording that rhythm.  I liked it enough that I kept going with it.  Then, I blinked and had written and recorded "Interstate Blind", at least in its infant state, and I liked both tracks enough that I said to hell with it and moved forward with doing an instrumental album, something I knew absolutely nothing about.

It should be noted that I had not played a single lead EVER on guitar up until this point.  In fact, I commonly called myself a rhythm guitarist and had no aspirations to ever play leads, although I'm not entirely sure why.  I remember the anxiety that composing leads for this album gave me back then for I really was a pretty awful guitar player in general, looking back on it now.  I really didn't even know if I could do it or pull it off, hence the experiment.  And then, in very typical 'me' form, I upped the ante even more to make the album a sort of concept album with some very odd arty bits thrown in here and there.  It was all rather ambitious and I'm shocked that anything listenable even came out of it.

Listening to these songs today, I kind of marvel at them.  I'm actually impressed with the things I came up with back then, having no experience whatsoever with instrumental work or in recording albums in general.  I was about a year into the recording of the album when I realized that there was no way I could possibly get everything I wanted into 8 tracks, at least not without doing a bunch of bouncing of which I really didn't want to do (in hindsight, that was a good idea for I think remixing that would have been a total nightmare, if not impossible).  This meant that I had to table recording for awhile as I saved up cash, or really opened up credit on some credit card, to purchase a second ADAT machine that would then sync up to the first.  This gave me 16 tracks in total to work with and was exactly what I needed.  Some songs did have what I call "work" tracks where multiple things were recorded on the same track but used more or less just as effects, in other words not playing all the way through the song continuously.  These tidbits all had to be broken out in Pro Tools in order to do the remix.

Later on, "Lost Weekend" got transferred over to a Mackie MDR unit somewhere between 2002 - 2007 once that was my main recorder, and then it got transferred once more time to Pro Tools around 2011.  It's been sitting on my hard drive ever since, just waiting for the right moment to be remixed.

Other stories I can tell about "Lost Weekend" have to do with some of the oddities on the album.  For example, for the bird noises and such, I literally hung my AT4050 microphone out of my condo's sliding glass door and simply recorded the various noise in the neighborhood.  I was listening to that at a louder volume today and I was shocked at some of the weird things I could hear such as a couple yelling at one another, a parent yelling towards their child, various cars, and of course countless birds.  My friend Terry at the time was kind enough to help me out with the car noises and I recall using the same mic, hanging out the doorway, and I basically pressed the 'record' button, motioned to his wife to 'go', and then she motioned to Terry down the street who was sitting in his car, revving it and such.  He then drove the car by my condo as loud as he could, and thus that's how the moving car noise was done.

A different friend named Terry did the speaking parts on "Pleasure Oasis" and "Cantina".  I wrote out the various spoken parts for "Pleasure Oasis" and I recall her telling me that she went over the lines while sitting at home with her husband, who after hearing the gist of the dialogue promptly referred to it as "the porno song".  This still makes me laugh.  My friend Travis did the spoken word bits on "Interstate Blind" and I remember us laughing hysterically as we were doing the takes.  He seriously knocked it out of the park, and strangely I cannot remember for the life of me how I got that amazing distorted sound on his voice.  I wish I knew because it's perfect.

A girl I worked with named Tina did "...the grass is greener..." line on "Lost Highway" and also did some spoken bits on "Interstate Blind" that ended up not working, hence the bits recorded with Travis.  My friend Tim did some French speaking bits on "Parasite" but that didn't pan out either, and I instead recorded my own voice, most likely with that same mysterious distortion, saying "devour the parasite" (I would later on return to the French spoken word idea on the Defrost Nixon album) .  And then lastly, Terry #2's friend Saundra, who had done some professional singing, I believe, came over and did the singing part on "Pleasure Oasis".  I think she was beyond nervous for whatever reason and it more or less came through in the recorded takes.  I've since worked very heavily on trying to make that sound better for its one of the things on the album that I've never been super pleased with, and I blame myself because I wasn't very good at directing anyone back then.  I think I was just so grateful to have someone participate that I completely forgot that I needed to guide them.

What other tidbits can I share?  The title obviously comes a little bit from the movie of the same name but actually got into my head more from the David Lynch film "Lost Highway" which I had recently watched for the first time and loved.  The recurring driving theme in the film is what got the concept in my head, sort of mixed with some of the themes from the Marillion album "Afraid of Sunlight".  I think every single electric guitar part on the album was recorded directly through a Digitech 2112 unit that I had recently acquired and actually still own, although I haven't turned it on in probably 2 decades.  I was so nervous when "releasing" this album that I almost didn't do it for I was convinced that it was awful and that everyone would hate it.  Luckily, Travis talked me off the ledge and much to my surprise most people seemed to really like it.

Once the remix is fairly complete, I'm also going to dig out some old pics and start working on a new version of the CD packaging.  The "Mirror Land" EP will be released next and therefore I would think "Lost Weekend" may be out around mid to late summer.  It'll be interesting to see what it sounds like once I've got it all complete.

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