My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 12: The Plaids in Orbit

Part Twelve: The Plaids in Orbit

I’ve done a fair amount of local theater and film in the last couple of decades. At one point I was ‘Frankie’ in the cast of Forever Plaid, and the production toured around the state and elsewhere, on and off, for about a year.

We did a cast recording just for ourselves and our families and friends. You certainly don’t need to hear that, but if you’re familiar with the show you might enjoy this mash-up I created as a ‘bonus track’ for the album. “The Plaids in Orbit” combines snippets of the songs and dialogue in a vaguely hip-hop format. Here it is:

The Plaids in Orbit

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 11: A Treasure's Trove

Part Eleven: A Treasure's Trove

One of the biggest and most creatively rewarding projects I’ve worked on during my years at Hedquist Productions was an audio version of a book called A Treasure’s Trove by Michael Stadther which we did in 2004. It was a children’s book, but it also contained clues for an actual treasure hunt.

From Amazon.com:
Treasure Trove is a fairy tale about real treasure for parents and children of all ages. The book is fully illustrated. This Fairy Tale takes place in a Great Forest and tells a sweet (and sometimes sad) story about friendship and greed, Good Fairies and Evil Fairies and how love is greater than fear. Also, concealed in the pages of this story, are the clues to twelve very real and very valuable treasures that are hidden around the continental United States for you to find and keep ...treasures similar to the jeweled Forest Creatures in the Fairy Tale. The treasures are not hidden in remote locations but rather in places accessible to everyone. You might even find one by accident, as you walk across a field or down a street. But none are on private property, and none are buried. Nothing needs to be lifted or moved for you to find them. But they are hidden well. The simple clues do not need any special knowledge to find or decipher. Anyone who can read can discover the exact location of each treasure --just the way one of the characters does in the story.

I gather there were also clues hidden in the audio version as well, or at least in the cover art. But at any rate, what was intended to be a very basic production job - voices, a few sound effects and a little music here and there - turned into the audio equivalent of a Major Motion Picture. Except that it had to be completed in two months.

You can read all about what I went through here:

Production Notes

And download the complete epic here:

A TREASURE'S TROVE

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 10: On the Radio - KRUU-LP in Fairfield, Iowa

Part Ten: On the Radio - KRUU-LP in Fairfield, Iowa

For the Horizontal Program album, above, I created a fictitious radio station called KROO. Ten years or so later Fairfield, Iowa, became the home of a new community radio station called KRUU. Weird. My station was pronounced ‘K-Roo’ and KRUU is pronounced ‘Crew,’ but still...

I’ve been a DJ at KRUU pretty much since it went on the air, and at this writing I currently host three shows. The Intercranial Whizbang Hour and Hepcats’ Holiday are both kitchen-sink free-form music shows and Beatles Undercover features “...the best, worst and weirdest versions of Beatles songs ever recorded.” KRUU is a wonderfully eclectic (and solar-powered!) station for both music and public affairs programming. You can stream it live by clicking on the link in the previous paragraph.

I’ve done a lot of production work for KRUU, mostly station ID’s and promos for my various shows. I’m reasonably proud of my ‘celebrity’ ID’s and promos - I think I do a pretty good Tom Waits and Marvin the Martian, especially.

Here are some of my favorites:

Marvin the Martian SID
Beatles Undercover Promo
Classy SID
Daylight Savings -'Spring Forward' PSA
Daylight Savings- 'Fall Back' PSA
Far Bleepin' Out SID
Halloween Special 2010 Promo
Halloween Special Promo
Hepcats' Holiday - ‘Tom Waits’ Promo
Intercranial Whizbang Hour - 'Supremes' Promo
Intercranial Whizbang Hour - "New Time" Promo
Intercranial Whizbang Hour - ‘Drop Everything’ Promo
Intercranial Whizbang Hour - ‘Good Vibrations’ Promo
Intercranial Whizbang Hour Intro
John Lennon: Beatles and Beyond Promo
Kaleidoscope Highs SID
Soda Powered SID
Sound of the Sun SID
Superstation! SID
VOTE! PSA

Mash-Up SID

Too Much Money

The Grave-Robbers' Ball Promo

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 9: Yellow Submarine

Part Nine: Yellow Submarine

For a few years in the early 2000’s I got to fulfill an adolescent fantasy of mine and sing for a Beatles cover band. Yellow Submarine was the band’s name, and being in the group was a wonderful experience, particularly as the band had two father-daughter teams: Chip Charleston on bass, with daughter Emi on drums, and David Cohen on rhythm guitar, with daughter Gemma on vocals and keys. Lead guitarist Chris Poole was also about the same age as Emi and Gemma, so including me we had three old folks and three young folks (whom we were careful to position in the front of the bandstand).

I’m sure we weren’t the greatest Beatles band in the world, but I think we played and sang with feeling, and we had a great time doing gigs at clubs and fairs around Iowa. Audiences really seemed to like us. We never made any serious attempts at recording the band, but here’s a one-mike-in-front-of-the-stage live sampler:

Yellow Submarine

After Gemma left for college, Chris Poole’s sister Emily took over on vocals for a few gigs, and then when Chris left, Gemma’s brother Jonnie took over on lead guitar. Shortly after that, however, Chip Charleston, the founder and leader of the group, was killed in an auto accident, and that was pretty much the end of the band.

There have been a few thrown-together Yellow Sub gigs with other musicians over the years, and they were fun, but nothing to match the soul of the original Yellow Submarine. I do suspect, however, that some of those original young band members will go on to become famous: keep an eye out for Gemma and Jonnie Cohen, Chris and Emily Poole and Emi Charleston.

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 8: Mutation

Part Eight: Mutation

I’ve talked about WBCN a few times, and mentioned the team of Tom Couch and Eddie Gorodetsky. One of Tom’s contributions, in the early 70’s, was a re-edit of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” done in such a way that the song sounded the same but the lyrics were completely mixed up. I believe he called it “Woodwegian Nor”.

Being a Beatles-obsessive myself, I was really impressed with that piece and tried a number of times to re-create it when I was first learning to edit tape at WMUA, and many years later when I had access to better technology, with varying degrees of success. It wasn’t until the studio acquired ProTools that I was able to give it the amount of fine-tuning and polish that it needed.

Tom’s original was brilliant, but of course limited by having to physically splice the different pieces together. So the result, at least as I remember it, was quite funny but not really smooth. My goal had always been to make a version so seamless that listeners wouldn’t notice anything had been done unless they were paying attention to the lyrics, and I finally succeeded.

In the process I learned that there’s a lot more going on musically in “Norwegian Wood” than I’d originally noticed: the instrumentation does change slightly from verse to verse and bridge to bridge. So when bits from different sections are edited together there is some discontinuity here and there. But it’s fairly subtle and again not really noticeable unless the listener is paying attention.

I called my finished version “Norwogian Weed”.

Another piece of Tom’s involved messing around with “The End” from The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. All I really remember is that he looped that short piano bit just before “...And in the end...” so that it went on for quite some time, and re-edited the drum solo in some strange way.

Anyway, I swiped that basic idea as well and did a number of ‘extended’ versions of “The End” over the years, finally using ProTools to come up with a real extravaganza called “Love from Abbey Road,” which includes virtually every “I love you” from The Beatles’ discography, two different count-downs (10, 9, 8, etc.) culled from Beatles songs and edited together , and lots of fun studio trickery.

Over the years I created a few other re-edits/mash-ups of Beatles material and decided to put them all together as an album. This became Mutation.

You can listen to and/or download the album here:

MUTATION

and here are some bonus tracks that came later:

“Please Please Speed,” layers the Beatles’ vocals from “Please Please Me” onto an instrumental version by Link Wray, giving the song a very hyper, New Wave kind of feel:

Please Please Speed

“Hey Jude-athon” was created in August 2008 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the release of “Hey Jude”. It consists of the original recording, but with the “Na, na, na...” ending looped so that the entire track runs for over 22 minutes. Not something you (or anyone else) would want to hear more than once, if that, but here it is:

Hey Jude-athon
(The file is too big for the free version of box.net so you'll have to download it.)

I sent copies of Mutation to various college radio stations around the country, as well as uploading it to the net. The response was really quite amazing. Stations were playing it (It actually reached #2 on the Princeton College station playlist for about fifteen minutes), people were emailing requests for it and others were re-posting the download info on other websites. I’ve seen it posted on sites based in Japan, Brazil and Russia, among other places.

Mutation even received a passing mention in the New York Times in 2006, which completely floored me. The article was about the then-forthcoming Cirque du Soleil-Beatles show, Love, and the author was comparing the remixes of Beatles songs Giles and George Martin had created for the show with the work of some of the ‘underground’ remixers such as myself. The article is still available online here (fifth paragraph down, if you please - sixth if you count the opening line as a separate paragraph):

NYTIMES

I contacted the author to thank him for the mention, and he wrote back to tell me he’d given a CD compilation of various Beatles remixes, including some of mine, to Giles Martin. So who knows, maybe George Martin and even Paul McCartney have heard some of my work?

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And as long as we're talking about mash-ups and remixes, here's one more, featuring Michael Jackson and The Drifters (okay, a karaoke version of The Drifters):

The Way Broadway Makes Me Feel (Driftin' with Michael J.)

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 7: Horizontal Program

Part Seven: Horizontal Program

My two big musical projects in the mid-to-late 90’s were a pair of albums called Horizontal Program and Horizontal Dance Party! These are collections of song-parodies, a la Weird Al Yankovic, with lyrics satirizing the Transcendental Meditation organization in general and life in Fairfield, Iowa, in particular. If you’re not familiar with either one of these, the lyrics will probably make no sense to you whatsoever, as they consist almost entirely of in-jokes.

But I’m very proud of these albums. They were recorded with a full band and many guest musicians and singers and each album took approximately three years to complete, though obviously I wasn’t working on them full-time. And about half-way through producing the first album the studio switched from reel-to-reel machines to digital recording and editing - ProTools, specifically - which made the entire production process much easier and more flexible once I got past the learning curve.

Horizontal Program and Horizontal Dance Party! were a great success locally and made their way to TM-practitioners around the world. You can download them here:

HORIZONTAL PROGRAM
HORIZONTAL DANCE PARTY!

My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 6: More Vocalese and a Few Pop Songs

Part Six: More Vocalese and a Few Pop Songs

By 1990, of course, cheap keyboard instruments were everywhere and I used the one we acquired for the studio to create a children’s song of sorts, entitled “What It All Means (A Brief Explanation)”. Just two tracks of keyboard (vibes and bass) and one vocal plus a little harmony at the end:

What It All Means (A Brief Explanation)

The point of time’s passing is what the day brings.
The reason for the robin is that she has wings.

The meaning of the morning is the sky is blue.
So I’ll just keep on living - it seems to be a good thing to do.

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Around 1991 a friend of mine, a jazz pianist by the name of Ron Dean, asked me to write lyrics to a composition of his called “Time Flies.” He didn’t have the means to properly record it so he gave me a lo-fi, one-mike cassette recording of himself and his bass player. That’s all I had to work with, so that’s what you’re going to hear, with my vocals on top. But I really like these lyrics - just having fun with the concept of time:

Time Flies

(Time flies.)
Time passes by, but no matter how I try
I’ve never seen it. (Time flies.)
I can’t seem to grasp at that moment slippin’ past -
I’m stuck between it. (Time flies.)

And you know,
I feel so put upon, ‘cause when that moment’s gone
and the next comes on,
it’s exactly the same size.

(Time flies.)
TIme takes its time, although I never seem to find
where it’s been taken. (Time flies.)
And when it’s gone by, is it hung somewhere to dry
or just forsaken? (Time flies.)

I don’t know,
but Time, I know you’re slick, because you do your trick
between each tock and tick
that you wear as your disguise.

(Time flies...at the speed of love.)

You won’t think you’re so wise
when I get special eyes
that let me watch you metamorphosize.
And won’t you be surprised?

(Time flies.)

Time can’t be bought - isn’t money, though that thought
has its proponents. (Time flies.)
Some say they can, and even time that’s second-hand
can have its moments. (Time flies.)

Just say no.
But if you’re the type who can see past the hype,
wait ‘til the time is ripe,
and you’ll find it satisfies.

(Time flies.)
Times can be hard, but it could be in the stars
that yours get softened. (Time flies.)
And then you won’t mind if Time comes by to unwind
a lot more often. (Time flies.)

I sure don’t,
‘cause when Time gets unwound, it makes me feel profound
to spread it all around, then wind it up for exercise.

(Time flies...and it’s easy!)

Time won’t keep you in a vise.
When you need to, you’ll arise
and free yourself to see how well time flies.

(Time flies.)

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I met Sandra, my bride-to-be, around this same time and a little later on created a song for her called “You’re My Home,” using the same cheap keyboard mentioned above. It was intended as a kind of Motown-ish production - a joyful, uptempo love song - and I think it turned out pretty well.

The opening riff is basically a sped-up version the beginning of “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass. Lots of tracks: bass, piano, organ, vibes, drums (which I actually “played” on the keyboard rather than using the rhythm generator - something of an accomplishment for a rhythmically-challenged person like myself), flute, marimba, tambourine, handclaps, bell-tree, synth-drums and several vocal tracks. You may notice lyrical borrowings from the Righteous Brothers and Van Morrison. Here it is:

You’re My Home

You...you’re my sun in my sky,
and the love in your eyes
is the reason I wake up every morning.

It’s you...your smile lights up the night.
Your arms feel so right
every time that my heart’s in need of warming.

You’re my Sleeping Beauty.
You’re my little kapha cutie.
I love you so.

You’re my soul and inspiration.
You’re my final destination
‘cause you’re my home.

You...you’re the best part of me.
You’re the calm of the sea
that this restless river has been seeking.

It’s you...you’re my favorite book,
‘cause each page is the look
that you give me to love me without speaking.

You’re beans and vegies and rice,
you keep me feelin’ so nice.
I love you so.

You’re the North Star, guidin’ the way
to the place where my heart will stay
‘cause you’re my home.

All these years my heart has been here waiting, alone.
Then you came along and shone,
and our love has grown,

because of you. Your love makes me so strong
and your laugh is a song
that I will never tire of hearing.

It’s you...if I’m worried or down
I know you’ll bring me around -
one kiss and the clouds start disappearing.

You’re the one I adore,
so I just gotta tell you once more:
I love you so.

You’re my teacher, I’m your toy,
you’re my (tidings of) comfort and joy, comfort and joy.
You’re my home.

You’re my home, you’re my home.
I love you so
and I want you to know
you’re my home, my home.

You’re my brown-eyed girl
and I want to tell the world
you’re my home.

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Back to the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out album. At one point I vaguely had the ambition of writing lyrics to every track on the album, but was defeated by “Blue Rondo a la Turk”. (Al Jarreau came up with a pretty good version which he called “(Round, Round, Round) Blue Rondo a la Turk”.)

But I did manage to write lyrics to “Strange Meadow Lark” and “Kathy’s Waltz” (the latter of which has become “You’re the One”). As usual, it’s just me singing over the original recordings, which again I’ve edited somewhat:

Strange Meadow Lark

Now the Sandman has come,
and his spell has cast you softly into sleep
so deep
that the sound of your name,
being whispered by someone you’ve never seen,
doesn’t seem that strange.

So you follow her down
to a meadow where the moon has made the night
so bright
that her face seems to glow,
and she moves as if to music as she turns
...and you see her eyes.

They stop your heart
and make it start to beat a different way.
And in its sound
you find you’ve found love that’s come to stay.

And everywhere
you feel the air alive with something new,
as if tonight
the time is right to make one wish come true.

So you reach for her hand,
but she whispers from you with a step as light
as flight.
And you think that she’s gone,
then she lets you hear her laughter, so you turn
...and she’s in your arms.

And yes, she’s alive and warm.
And her eyes, so kind,
read your mind
and you find you’re dancing...

The stars at play
all seem to say, come dance on our dark shores
if it’s your wish
to have this night go on forevermore.

But when you turn to see her face,
her eyes are edged with tears
that burn like diamonds
as the light of dawning day appears.

And with sunrise she’s gone,
and her tears are mingled with the morning dew,
as you
wonder how to go on -
when it seems to you there’s somewhere else you’ve been
where she can be found.

And yes, then you hear the sound,
and you know she’s somewhere near.
for you hear
that she’s calling you:
“Wake up... Wake up... Wake up...”

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You’re the One (Kathy’s Waltz)

You’re the one, you’re the one.
You’re the queen, though it seems
your domain is a dream where we stroll
hand in hand through the land,
talking of how our love
will remain deep enough to enfold
all life brings in its wings.
And it’s so, even though
every dream, as we all know, has to start
coming true while we do
what we must to adjust,
where the seams seem to have just come apart.

You’re the one, you’re the queen of my heart.

While romance enchants, you dance on,
and never think of how the piper will be paid.
But on the morning after
when you find the laughs are all gone
with the dawn, and the song
has begun its long fade,
you’ve gotta start beginning
to improve your best chance of winning.
So while the wheel’s still spinning
take the hopes that you’ve been pinning to a falling star,
and when you’re strong
put them back where they belong:
bright in the middle of you.

You’re the one, you’re the one.
You’re my queen, for you mean
more to me than it seems I should say.
“Not allowed!” cries the crowd
full of fools full of rules -
which, you see, makes them cool to displays
of delight, even slight,
between those they oppose.
For they’re not much disposed to be part
of the whole uncontrollable thing
that in spring
birds have gotten to sing as their art.

You’re the one, you’re the queen of my heart.