Dr. Frank's What's-it

The Retarded Monkey Effect

Hmm, how to characterize yesterday's session?

As usual, Ted played some great, great, brilliant guitar on several tracks with seeming effortlessness. Then we started to examine the song "Sorry for Freaking Out on the Phone Last Night." That was one we had done live, and we wanted a loose feel (Kevin kept saying "I want you guys to sound drunk.") Well it was loose all right, which is good, and we did indeed sound drunk, which was good, too, and maybe not all that unusual or misleading, but the guitars were so out of tune that it was utterly impossible to sing the scratch vocal. As I've said, I don't mind a little chorusing, or even a nasty, jarring "tune-y" effect at times, especially when you're doing a staggered stereo guitar arrangement. (I still want to save some of those parts, many of which are so messed up that they'll sound pretty cool when put in the right context.) But, this was just not working. We decided, for the sake of argument, to put a simple, strummy, in tune electric guitar in the middle to provide something to sing to and to see where we were "at" with the song. This role was going to be filled by acoustic guitars in the original plan, and I think that's still what's going to happen, but it's way easier to record electric guitar and we were already set up that way.

What happened then was this big argument about how the song was supposed to go rhythmically. It's weird how you can work so closely on something for so long, discuss it endlessly and in great detail, and not realize that the other person has all along had a completely different idea. I suppose my reference points for what makes country rock work are different than his, and I have no doubt that his are "better" and more authentic. The whole thing became this kind of philosophical argument about what constitutes country rock and whether you should worry about what they would do in Nashville, which might have been pretty interesting in another forum. ("Issue 1: Country rock rhythm guitar... Byrds or Stones approach? Or, as some say, Dwight Yoakam? I ask you, Pat Buchanan...")

Anyway, in my song, the bass and drums play almost utterly regular thump (snare) thump-THUMP (snare) through the whole thing, while the guitars play on a lot of the off-beats and up-beats and leave holes for each other and quite often for the bass note/beat on beat 1 when the IV chord happens. It's that particular hole that seemed to be the biggest point at issue. I tried strumming through, and playing a big, straight chord on top of the bass on the downbeat of that IV chord, but it just didn't sound right. To me anyway. I don't think I was doing it the way he wanted.

So we pulled out my demo to check that out and we realized that we had unintentionally recorded the song slower than the demo version. It would have been easier to play faster, no question about it. We have sped up the tape on songs before (on "Hey Emily" it made the snare sound really cool.) It wasn't going to work this time, though. So that led to a discussion/argument about whether to scrap the song entirely so that no more time would be wasted on something we couldn't use. I was for scrapping it simply in the interests of stanching the relentless flow of the budget's life blood all over the tracks, but in the end I decided and we all agreed that the slower version was superior. The question was, were we equal to the task of playing it? (This has been the downfall of many of my country-ish tunes: I write 'em by the bucket-full, and they're pretty good, but it's so hard to play them well that they end up getting scratched and never see the light of day. Or we end up just playing them like Ramones songs, which makes me just as sad. More sad. But then, I'm a sad guy.)

After that whole brouhaha, I knew that, if I tried to play the song at that point, I'd end up sounding like a retarded monkey. And this definitely wasn't the song for the retarded monkey effect. So we took a break to cool off. The idea was that we'd come back and try a vocal or something, just to see what would happen. If nothing came of it, we'd clear out and let Mark work on some editing that would have to be done at some point anyway.

It's a bit early in the process for lead vocals, and I still had a bit of retarded monkey-ness coursing through my veins. But for some reason, I did what I think was probably the most efficient and the best singing I'd ever done. We ended up with four completed lead vocal tracks, which is unprecedented for one night, especially the first one. (I can take a long time to warm up.) Two of them I just did in one go with no punch-ins or anything, which is definitely a first. We'll have to see how they sound today. Maybe we were crazy. But at the time, it sure seemed good. For anyone who is keeping track, the one take, no punch-in songs were "Fucked Up on Life" and "Oh, just have some faith in me." "Elizabeth or Fight!" and "Take all the Time You Need" were the others. I tried "The Boyfriend Box" as well, but Kevin wasn't "feeling" that one. And I was spent. I have some pictures, but I left my USB cable at the studio, so I'll have to post them later.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 30, 2003 07:54 PM | TrackBack