when the news of amy winehouse’s passing hit yesterday, twitter lit up with any number of arrogant, snarky missives about her, and i was scrolling through all this on my phone and wondering to myself, what’s the point of all this?  what did she do to bring this down upon her in the hours after shuffling off?

i’ll certainly admit that there have been people whose deaths have not exactly triggered a sense of loss for me, and there will most certainly be more.  i highly doubt that i’ll shed a tear when dick cheney finally, for the last time,  clutches the spot in his chest where a heart would normally be found and drops to the floor.   but dick bought and paid for that lack of empathy with no visible outward sign of regret for the life he’s lived, and i doubt i’m the only one who will feel that way.

but all amy winehouse did was to publicly live the life that many people live in total obscurity – addiction, i don’t think, can ever be fully understood by those of us with largely non-addictive character.  saddest about amy’s passing, as with so many others in her situation, is the spectre of what she would’ve accomplished had she not fallen victim to her vices – and fame, notoriety, celebrity…and the trappings that accompany all that…only fan the flames for someone who’s an addict and doesn’t have to worry about where their next fix is coming from.

i’m not necessarily interested in defending her actions, and i wasn’t a huge fan of her music – i didn’t have any contempt for her, and her talent was undeniable…but i’m at a loss as to why marking her death with public derision benefits anyone.

i think there’s an underlying belief that it’s somehow easier for prosperous addicts than it is for the guy who stands in front of the dunkin’ donuts on walnut street, talking to himself all day – and certainly, someone with a bank balance and a support system might stand a better chance of getting certain kinds of help, but their addictions are no less severe than the addictions of someone who isn’t affluent…and their chances of relapse might actually be worse, when you consider the surroundings and temptations that accompany celebrity – and the fact that addicts tend to surround themselves with enablers, who would never think of denying them the things they want.

another ridiculously talented soul left us yesterday, although he’ll get much less ink over having done so.

bill morrissey (1951-2011)

bill morrissey first came to my attention as the guy on the cover of the now-legendary (in some circles) legacy compilation…the guy holding the sign that said, “i wrote all of gorka’s songs”.  some of the other folks who appeared on the album (gorka, cliff eberhart, sara hickman) all went on to have successful careers, and bill’s trajectory never quite reached as high as it should’ve…the song that represented him on the album, handsome molly (featuring harmonies from suzanne vega) wasn’t his best work, and i’m sure that there were folks who found his weary, weathered voice a little hard to digest.  but on his best work, his voice is the perfect companion for his lyrics…and he used that voice and his insightful writing style to forge a career that spanned three decades over the course of a dozen albums, novels and short stories.   and – when you heard him sing, if you were at all familiar with his work, you knew instantly that it was him…for a musician, there’s really no higher compliment than that.

the two songs that best represent his talent as a songwriter, to me, are inside and birches.

inside paints a picture of quiet desperation that, to my ears, has no equal elsewhere:

this ain’t hollywood
it never really gets that good
call it love if you think you should
no need to explain…

…and you won’t leave soon, because i know
you’re just like me, with no place to go
there’s a love still here, nothings’ died
it just got buried somewhere deep inside…

…you’re home later each night, i see
i fix dinner while you talk to me
then we’ll wait for the late movie
to take us away again…

and you won’t leave soon, because i know
you’re just like me with no place to go
no place to go, it’s just a matter of time
you’ll find someone, it’s just a matter of time…

i totally and completely understand the notion that reading lyrics without hearing the song is something akin to listening to sports play-by-play without watching the game…you get the general idea, but there’s no comparison to the total picture.  this is as true with these two pieces of music as any other you could pose as an example.  but since i can’t play them for you, the only means by which to convey a snippet of morrissey’s genius is to cite his lyrics.

the song birches is acknowledged by most as his masterpiece…and probably rightfully so.  i still vividly remember the first time i heard it – when the last line came about, i was just speechless.  and it’s a hard song to stop thinking about after you’ve heard it.

i’m going to strongly recommend that you go find it and (legally) download it, but if you need to be convinced…

They sat at each end of the couch, watched as the fire burned down,
So quiet on this winter’s night, not a house light on for miles around.
Then he said, “I think I’ll fill the stove. it’s getting time for bed.”
She looked up, “I think I’ll have some wine. how ’bout you?” She asked, and he declined…

“Warren,” she said, “maybe just for tonight,
Let’s fill the stove with birches and watch as the fire burns bright.
How long has it been? I know it’s quite a while.
Pour yourself half a glass. Stay with me a little while.”

And Warren, he shook his head, as if she’d made some kind of joke.
“Birches on a winter night? no – we’ll fill the stove with oak.
Oak will burn as long and hot as a July afternoon,
And birch will burn itself out by the rising of the moon.

“And you hate a cold house, same as me. Am I right or not?”
“All right, all right, that’s true,” she said. “It was just a thought,
then she said, “Warren, you do look tired. Maybe you should go up to bed.
I’ll take care of the wood tonight.” “Oak,” he told her. “Oak,” she said.

She listened to his footsteps as he climbed up the stairs,
And she pulled a sweater on her, set her wineglass on a chair.
She walked down cellar to the wood box — it was as cold as an ice chest –
And climbed back up with four logs, each as white as a wedding dress.

And she filled the stove and poured the wine and then she sat down on the floor.
She curled her legs beneath her as the fire sprang to life once more.
And it filled the room with its hungry light and it cracked as it drew air,
And the shadows danced a jittery waltz like no one else was there.

And she stood up in the heat. She twirled around the room.
And the shadows they saw nothing but a young girl on her honeymoon.
And she knew the time it would be short; soon the fire would start to fade.
She thought of heat.
She thought of time.
She called it an even trade.

goodbye, bill…and goodbye, amy. i think that the best thing that can be said about someone in light of their passing is that they left something behind that made the world a better place – and they both can lay claim to having done so.

it’s extremely important for any aspiring musician to learn to recognize the difference between studying your instrument, practicing your instrument, and playing your instrument.

this is a distinction that is easily lost on newcomers, and often overlooked by intermediate players as well…but it’s hard to become an advanced player without eventually coming to terms with the differences between the three.

some of you probably aren’t crazy about the idea of thinking of your instrument as something that you have to study, but the form of study that you apply to your instrument doesn’t have to be purely academic. you may also be one of the many players who tends to confuse the study of your instrument with the concept of practice, but the two are actually separate and independent of one another.

the study of your instrument consists strictly of gathering new information about it. when you learn something new from watching a video on YouTube, or seeing another player live, or reading something on the internet, this qualifies as study. anytime you’re gathering information, it can be considered study.

when you take that information and apply it to your instrument, it can be debatable to some whether that should be considered study or practice, but for the purposes of our discussion, practice should be considered as the process of taking information that you currently possess about your instrument and learning to apply it in a playing environment. this means that you’re taking those rudiments and scales that you’ve already learned and you’re running through them to reinforce them in your mind, and you’re also working on your physical technique to improve the means by which you actually play your instrument. speed, accuracy, and fluidity aren’t born into the vast majority of us, and improving those qualities takes a degree of repetition to hone them, and to push our personal envelopes past our comfort zone.

a healthy (but not necessarily exclusive) regimen of study and practice are vitally important to you as a player if you want to continually grow and improve. when a player constantly practices the things he already knows, the only opportunity he’s really giving himself is to become better at executing the things he already knows – and there’s a brick wall waiting at the end of that path. conversely, you can study your instrument, gather information about it, learn new things about it – but if you don’t take the time to work on incorporating that information into your vocabulary as a player, then that information only exists as random academia in your brain, and not in the muscles that control your instrument.

your ultimate goal in finding a balance of these two activities should be in cultivating the ability to take your instrument into a gig or a session or any other performance situation and be able to call upon this stream of new information when you play.

you’ve likely heard it said before – when you strap in and get ready to do this for real, the best work you’ll ever do is when your brain is switched off and you’re relying on your internal wiring to send the signals back and forth without fully realized instructions from your conscious thought processes. if you’ve done the necessary work to gather information about the instrument (study), apply that information to your personal ability as a player and have repeated it enough times to commit it to your vocabulary (through practice), you’ll find that it’s not really necessary to expend a lot of attention towards your actual technique when you’re playing with your band or cutting a track for a session.

i don’t know much, but i do know that – without a doubt – one of the best things about being a musician is that moment of euphoria that occurs when something flies off your fingers that amazes you as much as anyone else who might have heard it…and leaves you wondering where the hell it came from.

you may not always know specifically where it came from…but if you strike the right balance of study and practice, you’ll at least know why it came.

(yes, this is gonna be one of those missives. sorry.)

this past april fools’ day, another person who was – pardon the crappy pun – instrumental in shaping my life went to go rest high on that mountain.

with david phillips at the counter of maxines' house of music on a rare visit to my hometown...

david phillips (no relation or connection to the NJ/PA chain of stores) ran a tiny, no-frills music store in savannah, tennessee with his wife, maxine – called, appropriately enough, maxine’s house of music. i can still tell you the phone number from memory…925-9687. i can also recite their home phone number, but we’ll skip that for obvious reasons. david also taught math at the junior high school in my hometown.

he had an easy laugh, and a kind heart, and had the patience to endure endless questions about musical instruments from a destitute kid, the oldest child of a single welfare mother, who had an abundance of passion and not much else. when that kid decided to take up the drums and managed to cobble together enough cash to buy the remnants of a kit from a friend, david practically gave him a couple of cracked cymbals and pieces of stands so that he could piece the rest of the kit together and forge something playable from it. when he needed a snare drum, david found an old 13″ blue sparkle slingerland snare in the back of the store and sold it to the kid for less than it was worth.

it wasn’t the first time he’d do something like that for the kid, either.

when the teenaged boy’s family needed to go into town for anything, he’d ask to be dropped off at the store, to talk to david…to stare at the instruments in the store…to read catalogs and daydream.

when that same kid decided to try to build a functioning guitar in shop class that year, he brought in a couple of guitars with bolt-on necks that were otherwise broken and let the kid take one of the necks for his shop project…and didn’t ask for a dime. he also welcomed him to stop by his classroom with the work in progress as he was building it, and offered tips and encouragement the whole time.

when the kid practiced enough on his patchwork drums to get to the point that he was good enough for a real kit, david co-signed a note at the bank with the kid so that he could buy a set of 1965 red sparkle slingerlands that would allow him to move up the ladder without having to worry about, explain, or be ashamed of his gear. later, when he’d paid the note down with money he earned playing those drums with one of the best bands within miles of his hometown, david co-signed again to add a set of zildjian cymbals to the note.

he endured countless phone calls from the kid, at home in the evening, who’d just been reading magazines that david had given him and wanted to know what the difference was between the pickups in a les paul and the pickups in a fender stratocaster…was it just the pickups that made them sound so different from one another? what kind of amp makes that sound? questions that a seasoned musician could have potentially found annoying, bothersome, or a waste of time – but david seemed to realize, innately, that everybody had to start somewhere, and he never balked at sharing what he knew.

he could’ve told that kid to keep reading his magazines and catalogs and keep listening and do his homework, and get the answers for himself…or he could’ve called the kids’ mom and asked her to gently ask her son to refrain from calling him at home after school. or he could’ve just told the kid himself, in no uncertain terms, that he needed to rein it in and leave him alone.

to the best of my knowledge, it never crossed his mind. if the kids’ constant questioning ever bothered him in the least, he certainly never showed it.

it sounds like melodrama to say that the kid in this story would almost certainly have died or ended up in prison had it not been for the changes in his life that he was able to make as a result of david’s encouragement and patience…but you’d have to know more about the place where he grew up than you could possibly absorb from a secondhand account. you’d have to know what a hard place a small town can be underneath the sleepy exterior.

but thanks to david phillips, the kid had enough insight to recognize the gift he had – whatever talent he might’ve had would’ve certainly withered otherwise. he would’ve ended up working in a factory that would’ve long since closed by now, and would have most likely discovered the same addictions that ultimately brought down his father – and if he were still here at all, he certainly wouldn’t be the subject of a very pretty picture.

instead, he’s sitting at his computer, late for a recording session that’s been sandwiched into his only night off in a string of two weeks straight…working on three albums simultaneously, with another one sitting on the shelf once these three are done. he just did a show last weekend with a band that he grew up idolizing, sitting in with them on mandolin for most of their set, and is leaving in two days to do another show with a band that’s also cobbled together by personal heroes of his. he’s managed to carve a life for himself from the talent that God gave him…but that would have gone neglected had it not been for the fact that his path crossed early on with someone like david phillips.

rest in peace, david.  the world has always been a better place for me, even across this distance, just knowing that you were here.

and know that you were loved, and you’ll be missed.

(view david’s obituary here…)

so i get an email from todd from the youngers, asking if i was available on the 15th – and obviously, at this point i was. it turns out that the youngers are headlining – headlining – a show at the castle theater in bloomington, illinois.

and yes, there’s a backstory here.

the youngers with the legendary Lonesome Larry Williams at WWHP-FM.

when the youngers released heritage, their latest album, they hired an independent promoter to champion their record to select radio stations in their format, and one of those stations was WWHP in farmer city, illinois – between champaign and peoria, just outside bloomington. larry, the mastermind behind WWHP, fell in love with the album and had been trying to get them to come out for a show for roughly a year before they finally agreed on a date and the details surrounding the show. in fact, there were people who had shown up at DelFest this past year who’d told the band that there was a radio station out in the midwest that was playing their album on a regular basis, and that they really needed to come out and play there.

so todd asked if i’d be available to make the trip out west with them, and since i didn’t have the NAMM trip hanging over my head, i jumped at the chance. also, i had been put in a bind by work back late in the summer last year, and had to bail on the guys because of a migration i’d been summoned to do in richmond, virginia – i know it put the guys in a shitty situation, and i was eager to make it up to them. this would be a great gig to set things right. todd was pretty adamant about travelling light – initially, he just wanted the baritone and electric guitar, but after we talked, we agreed i should probably bring the lap steel as well…obviously, if i had my druthers, i would’ve brought the banjo and the pedal steel – but considering that we were travelling in randy’s blazer, with all the gear in the back, the pedal steel (and the larger amp i would’ve had to bring to accomodate it) would’ve been nice, but it would’ve taken up too much space. and after all – a lot of my friends do fly dates all the time and have much heavier restrictions than i did for this gig, so who am i to bitch, really?

we had a rehearsal in todd’s dining room, with just the three of us – todd, randy and i – and it did feel good to play with them again. after having run through the songs, i started to get excited about the show.

todd had tried to set up another show for friday night, which would’ve meant we’d have had to leave a lot earlier than we did…but there just wasn’t enough time to sort that out, so it was a one-gig road trip..which was fine with me, to be honest – it would’ve been nice to have the extra show tacked on, but i was perfectly happy to just concentrate on the one show…and not having to mess with my work schedule to do so.

so when it’s time to leave, we all meet in our traditional meeting spot – i picked todd up at his house and we drove to the parking lot at weavers’ market on route 272 in adamstown, and randy was already there, and daniel “scrappy” bower had just pulled up…

…without his kick drum.

needless to say, he suffered a bit at the front end of this trip for that, and i scrawled the logo for the makeshift “tour” into the dried salt on the rear window of randy’s cruiser:

all ball busting aside, though, we got on the road at a decent hour and got a lotta miles under the tires before the sun went down. the original plan was to stop over in indianapolis and start from there the next morning…but everybody had quite a bit of gas in their tank when we got there, so we decided to keep driving until a little more fatigue set in – initially, we thought about trying to go ahead and go all the way to bloomington and check into the hotel early, but they didn’t have rooms ready for the night before the show, only the evening of – so we decided to stop in champaign and get one double room for all of us and hunker down there – we’d leave from there the next morning, drive to bloomington, check into our rooms and get a shower there before we left for an afternoon interview on WWHP the day of the show. we checked in, carried up some of the acoustic instruments to the room, and hunkered down – somebody turned on the TV (which was acting a little strange for some reason, fuzzing out at odd intervals as if something were interfering with it…but only for the first half hour or so). Scrappy and Randy took the bunk closest to the door, Todd and I closest to the bathroom…and watched the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies until around 5 in the morning before we finally dozed off.

showering the next morning before we left wasn’t really an option for any of us – certainly because we’d planned to do so at the hotel in bloomington once we checked in, but also because the shower in the hotel we’d stayed at overnight was…well, not real inviting. but – it was all good. we were ready to load up and make some time on the road into town as it was. as we were driving in, i mentioned to randy that he should turn on the radio station that we were going to be appearing on and see what they were playing.

we didn’t have the radio on for more than ten minutes before they played a youngers song. then out of the song, there was an actual commercial for the gig that night. then, out of the commercial break, larry opens the mic and announces that it’s “youngers day” on WWHP, and for the entire time we listened that day, they started every break with at least one, if not two youngers songs. it felt good sitting in the car with randy, hearing them play our little secret on the radio…that was a moment for him, and i was glad to have been there. it was surreal, in every sense of the word, to be celebrated like this so far from home…i mean, here we were, thirteen hours from home, and it was youngers day, for pete’s sake!

at the radio station, it was pretty much decided before we got there that it’d be an acoustic performance – in fact, i wasn’t even going to go initially. i figured that the three principals in the band would be able to pull this off without me, since i hadn’t brought any acoustic instruments. but todd wanted me to come along and play mandolin for the radio set, and there wasn’t any good reason not to – all i’d have done otherwise would’ve been to stay at the hotel and sleep. so after we checked in, i grabbed a quick shower, put on my show clothes, and we started back up the road to the radio station in farmer city for the interview segment.

larry williams at WWHP is a rare breed – he’s an absolute “music first” guy. the whole time we were listening to the station in the car, we kept asking ourselves: what do we have to do to get a station like this in our market? seriously – everything they played was tuneful and well-written, as opposed to some of the americana stations, which will opt for raw meat whether it tastes good or not (it’s long been my opinion that there are a lot of acts within the americana format who pass off their lack of musical or songwriting talent as “rawness” or “barebones” or some other such nonsense as that, and i ain’t buyin’ it). the first thing they played after we turned them on was paul thorn‘s honky tonk neanderthal – a great song. they were also featuring the new gregg allman album, low country blues during the drive…a phenomenal record, and i didn’t hear one shitty song the whole time. a lot of non-comm stations are the exact opposite…you suffer through turd after turd, hoping to hear something that doesn’t suck – and often you won’t hear anything that doesn’t suck for whatever duration you’re listening.

and radio wonders why they’re in trouble. most of the people who’ve stopped listening could clue them in pretty quickly.

this station, honest to God, was an absolute breath of fresh air. it was a real pleasure to be in their company for the afternoon. the only disappointing thing about our meeting with larry was that he wasn’t able to come to the show – we were hoping to have him introduce us, but he wasn’t able to make it. a real shame, since he’d done so much to champion this record. and let me tell you – when we thanked larry from the stage during the show that night, the mere mention of his name got an ovation from the audience.

the man is clearly very highly thought of in his neck of the woods. and rightly so.

we finished the interview and got to the venue around 4pm-ish and loaded our gear into the theater – it reminded me a bit of the cla-zel theater in bowling green, ohio – in terms of the way the floor was set up and how the balcony seats were set up around the perimeter of the room. another room that i’m really fond of, by the way. todd set up at center stage, and randy on the traditional stage left side of the drumkit – todd and i shared one of my guitar racks, which we set up on the other side of the drum riser, and sandwiched our amps on either side of it – it was a comfortable little setup, actually. there would’ve been plenty of room on the stage for the pedal steel (onstage, that is…not in the truck, man), but i would’ve had to have brought another amp for it, blah blah blah…and it was actually cool not to have to think about it – much as it would’ve enhanced the set. the soundcheck was an absolute breeze, as well. we were set up, soundchecked, tuned up, the whole nine yards – in less than an hour. awesome.

so we went down the street and upstairs to the restaurant that they sent us to for dinner…and just as we were getting settled into our table, a couple recognized us – recognized us – and told todd and randy that they were coming to the show later and that they were really looking forward to it. then the guy stopped by the table with a piece of paper and asked us for autographs.

nope – no break in the surreality in sight at this point.

autographs.

i don't think you ever really outgrow this feeling...i know i haven't.

we walked back over to the theater, i said hello to the hameses – carl and jane – and walked backstage. or, i should say, tried to walk backstage…the dressing room was up a flight of stairs and behind a door, but i didn’t know which door it was. i went up several flights of stairs trying to open doors, all of which were locked, before giving up and walking back down to the stage and waiting in the wings just off the side of the stage until lights.

now, as surreal as the trip had been up until now, the show itself was every bit as much of an out-of-body experience as the rest of it had been. there were people in the audience singing along to the songs, yelling out requests for songs from the record – they were intimately familiar with the band, and it was obvious from the first song. the crowd was phenomenal, and they were an absolute pleasure to play for. but i’d be lying if i told you that a great crowd is enough to make for a great gig. there’s plenty of room for error in a headlining show, and all the love in the world can’t make up for shitty onstage sound or internal political crap or any number of other things that could still derail a show…but i tell ya, man – this show was an absolute perfect storm.

the sound onstage was absolutely perfect – the amps were the right volume onstage, and when i’d wander over into todds’ space, i could still hear everyone else as well as i could when i was standing in my own monitor zone – and right out of the gate, it was obvious that we were gonna take some chances and stretch out a bit during this show. the licks were flying back and forth between todd and i from a pretty early point in the set, and we were both “on” – the band clicked from the first few notes of the first song, and the audience seemed to love the extended jams that we incorporated into some of the songs. we were soloing off each other and playing harmony lines in truck driving man, and for having just brought a princeton reverb for the gig, my instruments sounded huge…and it was positively blissful, standing in front of it and locking in with this band.

as with the mauch chunk opera house show, i found myself feeling rather proud of todd and what he’s managed to accomplish with this band – todd and i have a couple of decades of history at this point, and i’ve watched him grow up before my eyes, and it made my heart swell to be there and see the fruits of his hard work coming back to him. at intermission, we went out front to man the merchandise table and the crowd of people lined up to buy CD’s and t-shirts was positively insane. we signed CD’s and posed for pictures for almost half an hour before we had to go back up for the second set, which was every bit as amazing as the first…i didn’t want the show to be over. i wished we had four more albums’ worth of material to play so we could string this on as long as possible.

the guys were understandably euphoric after the show – after everything was loaded up and we’d said our goodbyes to the staff at the castle, the guys in the band wanted to go to some party downtown, but i wanted no part of it…i went along for the ride, until it became obvious that this party was just a bad idea, and i got a ride back to the hotel and was prepared to call it a night until my phone rang just as i was about to doze off…it was todd, and they were heading to steak and shake and wanted me to get dressed and come along. and who was i to say no, really? it was relatively early, by most people’s standards, so i put my clothes on and went downstairs to wait for them to pick me up.

scrappy was a little drunk already, and – as i’d said earlier – the guys were riding on a cloud from the show and everything else that had happened that day. scrappy was sporting a tall can of coors light when we walked in, and thought he was being slick, but the waitress picked up on him right away…but didn’t give him any grief about it. when we got back to the hotel, we all convened in scrappy’s room to finish off the beer that had been sitting idly in scrappy’s fridge. randy even came down and stayed up with us for a while before calling it a night. the three of us, though – todd, scrappy, and i – stayed up until 5AM (again) drinking and talking in scrappy’s hotel room before i finally wandered down the hall and went back to sleep for a few hours before having to get up to start the trip home.

when we got up the next morning and got ready to leave, todd called me on my cell to see if i was ready to check out…i met him in the hallway to walk down to the elevator. “scrappy’s room smelled like rock and roll this morning,” he says to me as we’re getting on the elevator, and i nearly pissed myself laughing.

and, of course, i’m not about to turn andy down. you don’t turn andy down.

seriously, it was something that was right up my alley, and i knew it’d be a blast working with andy on something a little different. it was for a formerly local singer/songwriter named dakota jay – originally from the doylestown area but now making his home in nashville for most of his days. andy sent me an mp3 of the rough for the track that he’d gotten from jay…a song called love you no more. it was a clever song, with pretty straightforward chord changes…and dakota was clearly a pretty deft vocalist, and he put the song across sincerely.

so i collected all the stuff that i figured might come into play for the session and loaded it into the usual spot in the front room – pedal steel, mandolin, lap steel, baritone guitar, dobro…and i lifted andy’s nashville tele for the session, too (which showed up in the mix with some of my personal nicknames attached to the tracks…so instead of “ele gtr” or “tele gtr” or any number of the usual naming conventions, we had tracks named “tacocaster” and “dick swinging lead guitar” instead…)

before i’d gotten there, andy had enlisted fran smith, jr. from the hooters to pair up with him as part of the rhythm section, and they’d cut dakota’s acoustic guitar plus a scratch vocal, plus the bass and drums – so they were ripe for overdubs when i arrived. we started with the pedal steel, as that would probably take up the most space in the track, and we’d want that to be there while we continued to work so we could play around it. after that, i put down a mandolin track that essentially acted as a high-strung acoustic guitar, in that it mirrored the rhythm track for the most part, but it had a different “voice”, so it was a little more heavy on the emphasis than a normal high-strung guitar would have been. then i put in a couple of different passes of baritone guitar – one with a little more of the twang than the other, so they’d have options – and moved on to the electric guitar.

one pass of the tele was essentially power chords, and the other pass was incidental single-noteish, lead guitar-type stuff…and yeah, by now it was gettin’ a little thick on the tape, folks. but – i tried to keep everything within the spirit of the song, and keep it simple enough that andy would have choices when it came time to mix…and, i’m finding that this is generally what he seems to expect of me in the first place, so…it’s working.

dakota and his family were thrilled with the results – his mom and dad had been there from the beginning, and i’d have to imagine it was quite an experience for them to see how this sort of thing works…building a song from a germ of an idea and some basic chords into what we ultimately created for them. a good song stands on its own with a vocal and a supporting instrument, and this song certainly could have stood on its own in that regard, but they wanted something finished and radio-ready, and i’m pretty sure that when andy finishes the mix for this one, they’ll be pleased with the outcome.

as for me…i’ve gotta hire somebody to carry all this stuff for me. AND i’ve gotta figure out a way to talk andy out of that telecaster.

in michael’s words – “since i’m in my sixties and they’re not really making albums anymore, it’s about time i did one.”

we had toyed with the notion of doing it completely DIY – recording it on my laptop and keeping it relatively low key – but i knew i wouldn’t be happy with the results, and that he deserved better than what i’d have been able to do.

luckily, fate intervened and brought andy kravitz into the mix.

L to R: andy kravitz, michael tearson, and yours truly

andy literally doesn’t have any more wall space in his control room for gold or platinum records…his list of credits include joan osborne, james taylor, shawn colvin, taj mahal, david bromberg, and a ton of other acts that other folks might find more impressive than those…but those are my personal favorites.   andy’s home studio, just across the ben franklin bridge, is a home studio only in consideration of the technicality that andy actually lives there. it houses a neve console and outboard gear that any A-list room would be proud to own….separate control room and iso rooms (which, in english, would be the den, living room, dining room and kitchen), and some really solid microphones to boot.

so michael had decided on the final list of songs that he wanted to cover for this record….he’s not a songwriter, and he realizes that – and he also picked songs that would find service in his own interpretations.

so on the night that we went in for our first session, we sat down to hash out the general philosophy of what we were hoping to accomplish, and how we wanted to go about it. we divided the songs up into two categories – those that would be centered around the initial performance (which we’d do without a click track), and those that would need rhythm section accompaniment (which we’d do with the click track in my headphone mix, but not michaels’.)

for the first session, we decided to concentrate on the former – logically enough.

michael had made me a disc of songs that he’d chosen for the album, and had scrawled on the disk, “stuff that works”.

it was the name of a guy clark song, one of which he’d planned on recording for the album, and was included on the disc – “old friends”.

but, as time elapsed, “stuff that works” became a strong contender for the title of the album…and i think we knew going in that it’d probably end up sticking.

so – we singled out a few of the songs from the disk – “old friends”, “clumsy old world”, “grand hotel”, “buy for me the rain”…and “this beggars’ heart” – to be the victims of the first nights’ festivities.

based on the conversations we’d had leading up to this, i knew that “this beggars’ heart” was going to be a tough song for him to sing. not for any technical reasons concerning his vocal style or his physical ability to sing it, but because of the lyrical content and how it relates to michael’s life experiences.

…these eyes of mine, they take your picture
these eyes that see in two and four
i close my eyes and i still see you
and see myself no more…

…these words i sing – they ring familiar
these words i sing we’ve heard before
oh, fare thee well…my one and own true love
i’ll see you in my dreams once more

this song i sing – is finally over
you’re free to go about your way
so bang the drum and turn the house lights on
i’ve really nothing more to say…”

now, if you know michael, or anything about his personal life…you know why this song would be hard for him to get through….and if you don’t – well, it’s not my place to broadcast his story here. you’ll have to get that on your own.

andy set us up in the tracking room, facing one another…myself on the piano bench with the acoustic guitar and michael, standing, facing me from just a few feet away.

we started with “grand hotel” and “clumsy old world” – and did a couple takes of each, although we usually ended up keeping one of the first two passes of each of the songs we cut.

when “old friends” came up, we debated running through it before rolling, but i telegraphed in to Andy to just go ahead and roll it – let’s see what happens.

so – what you hear on the record is not only the first take, but it’s the first time we ever actually played the song together…ever.

so…it was time to do “beggar’s heart”….i had planned on doing this with just michaels’ vocal and weissenborn, and i’d set up one of my weissenborn replicas (one that i’d gotten from phil madiera, emmylou harris’ utility guy) with lighter strings and tuned it to a high-G tuning (the open E string relationship, up three half steps) for the recording. i played it through for michael so that he could hear what the instrument sounded like, and what the chord changes would sound like, presented on this instrument instead of a traditional guitar, and he loved it.

so we moved the mics for the weissenborn and ran one verse to get levels…and i knew we were gonna have to nail this one quickly.

what you hear on the record is michael’s second pass…removed enough from the first one that there’s an element of composure, but…well, not much of an element of composure. by the end of the second take, we were both in puddles on the floor of the studio, and i don’t think we could’ve possibly gotten a more perfect performance of the song. maybe a better technical rendering of it, but you can hear the ache in that pass.

so that’s the one we kept.

i’m not really sure which side of that line i would end up on where this gig was concerned.

i saw a post on facebook that scot sax had put up about a show he was doing at milkboy where they were doing the entire neil young album, comes a time from start to finish…and i commented on his post and asked him (replete with a sarcasm-indicating smiley face) if they needed a pedal steel player.

well, he replied and said that they’d be happy to have me along if i wanted to do the show…oh, and he asked if i played fiddle too. no, sadly – maybe someday i’ve gotta take up that cause again.

i had played with scot once before, during his partnership with sharon little, at a haiti benefit that we did at sellersville, but didn’t really know him that well – which is a little odd, considering how long we’ve been knocking around.

during the one rehearsal we had for this show, as the layers peeled back, it turns out that scot and i have a lot of favorite music in common, we’re close to one another on the age ladder…i knew he was gonna be OK when i saw a vinyl copy of buckingham nicks leaning against the edge of his sofa when i arrived at his house for practice. that makes you automatically alright in my book.

the band included scot, myself, fred berman on drums, and a few special guests that rotated in and out as well as some of scot’s old foils from wanderlust…all great musicians.

in addition to the stuff from the comes a time album, we threw in a few kindred numbers from neil’s catalog, including heart of gold, old man, and we decided to do hey, hey, my, my… as the show stopper at the end of the night.

i took a stab at playing banjo and pedal steel quasi-simultaneously on old man, but – that’s still a tough switch for me on a small stage…plus, i was running everything through the same amp, so that compounded matters somewhat.

i played the mandola on goin’ back, pedal steel on already one and a bunch of other songs, lap steel on motorcycle mama, banjo on human highway…and i brought out my goldtop with the p-90′s and the bigsby tremolo for the finale, although i didn’t really lobby for a solo…the volume was creepin’ up by then, and i was playing through the gibson tweed amp…probably wasn’t in the cards for me, volume-wise.

the show was really well attended, and i feel like i have a new buddy in scot – talented dude, and a great hang.

and it was kinda cool.

the pace we were moving at was pretty productive, but there really wasn’t a methodology at work – we worked on whatever seemed to float to the top, based on our prior progress and who was available for a given session…and tonight, with keith giosa and kurm in the house, there was a lot more work on their plates than on mine, so i just sat back and watched, for the most part.

here’s kurm recutting the bass part on gabriel:

and later, here’s giosa cutting the hammond organ tracks for the same song:

we focused quite a bit on this particular tune tonight, as it’s one that has quite a few layers, and it was nice to see it starting to take shape…and it’s always easier to flesh out a song that’s already up on the computer and work through that, as long as there isn’t a whole lot of setup to be done for it – conversely, if you have someone in to track for a session and they’re playing the same instrument on a number of songs, the technology of recording has evolved to the point where it’s relatively simple to change from one song to another on the back end now.

it was a productive night, and i was glad i was in for it – even if i didn’t play a note. these guys are a pretty solid hang.

down the road is an interesting story, i think…dan and i were sitting in his basement, going through all the tracks that he’d accumulated on his digital recorder in his studio, and he was playing snippets of all the stuff that he’d halfway finished, or had assembled as ideas but that hadn’t made it to the final stages of completion. this particular song came up, and he let maybe 20 to 30 seconds of it pass before skipping to the next clip…”go back to that last song,” i said.

he skipped backward to the track and started it over…it was this moody, 6-5-4-5 progression, but it had promise. i started fumbling around with the guitar, trying to figure out where the chords landed and, once i’d figured it out, started playing this lindsey buckingham, big-love-ish pattern over the top of it…and a song was born.

the other song, i got a gun, grew out of a soundcheck jam at a gig at rose tree park in media some years back, when i started riffing on fat man in the bathtub by little feat, and the band fell into it. it ultimately morphed into something else entirely, but you can certainly hear the influence from that song in the opening riff if you’re familiar with it.

so we set tommy up in the main room and i set up shop in an ISO right off the floor, and we started working on down the road – tommy actually overdubbed a couple of elements to get the percussion track that lives on the record, and i set up and played the acoustic guitar part in one pass while dan cut a guide vocal into a microphone from the control room, so that i could hear him in the headphones.

here’s the video from the ISO booth:

you can imagine why i was happy to have gotten that in a single pass…i dunno if the fingers on my right hand would’ve been up for multiple takes on that one.

after we finished that one, we moved on to i got a gun and i laid down a reference rhythm track…once we’d gotten the drums cut to tape, i set up The Trusty Gibson and one of my silverface princetons in the big room to cut the lap steel track – we were also going to overdub a lap steel part for lucy, another song that we’d cut during one of the other sessions, once we got this track down.

to say that the combination of those amps in glenns’ tracking room sounded huge would be something of an understatement. it doesn’t come across so much on the record, because you couldn’t have really had those mustered into the mix that way without them taking over the whole track – they had to be layered somewhat to blend in with the rest of the ensemble of instruments. but – i was there. i got to hear it. i know what they sounded like, and maybe that’s all that matters.

next session, we’ve got some solo acoustic guitar to work on, and some dobro overdubs as well…plus, i think dan and i have finished that song that grew out of the riff that i recorded for him, based on the whole tom jones experience. keith giosa has some hammond organ overdubs to do as well, so there’s still plenty of work to be done.

one of the songs we worked on for this session is a moody, quarter-note heavy song called gabriel…and just based on some of the run-throughs that dan and i had done prior to bringing the songs into the studio, i had an idea of the treatment it should get…so i brought in the baritone and an old single-pickup batwing kay electric, in addition to the acoustic that i’d be using to anchor it. i did the basic guide track on the acoustic, then doubled it with the kay, and then moved on to the baritone, which i just used for color here and there.

after we’d finished the baritone pass, there was one lick that i’d done on the outro that i wanted to re-cut, because i was pretty certain that i’d botched it. but when we went back to listen, glenn and dan flipped out…as it turned out, my “mistake” landed on the tape a little differently than i thought it might’ve when i heard it through the phones…and they loved it! in fact, they ended up cutting and pasting it into a couple of other spots in the mix.

i don’t get many of those happy little accidents, and i was glad one of them landed on this record.

the other song we planned on getting through this night was crossover…i’d heard this as something of a levon helm/ryan adams hybrid in my head, but i wasn’t pushing any agenda when we settled in to run it through…which, as it turned out, didn’t really matter – because kurm and rob must’ve been reading my mind. they really nailed the vibe i was hoping for from the outset, and we only did a couple of passes before we felt like we had one that we liked.

in between takes, we went into the control room and glenn played us some of the tracks from the new tom jones record that had just come out, praise and blame (that had been produced by ethan johns). there was one song in particular that had this stephen stills-like riff running through it, although i don’t remember which song it was now…but someone – either dan or glenn – made a remark akin to “we need something similar to this groove for the record”…

so i went in the other room & grabbed my acoustic and came back into the control room – sat down, dropped my low E string down to D and started playing a riff…dan looked up at me over the top of his glasses with that look that i’ve come to recognize as the “are you noodling, or is that already a song?” look – and i got out my iPhone and recorded a snippet of the riff and emailed it to him. knowing him, he’ll have a finished song before i fall asleep tonight.

the recording itself seems to be going pretty well, but there is some weird tension floating around the studio, and i’m not sure what the actual source of it is. hopefully that’ll dissipate before we get too much farther along in this process.