A while ago on the blog I listed my plans for wedding music. Well now I’ve gotten married and we have a recording of the music. Check it out:
Adonai Roi by Judith Shatin
May This Marriage by Eric Whitacre
Alleluia by Louis Lewandowski
This is a choir of eight people performing on a single two-hour rehearsal. This demonstrates their incredible power, but also how strong the force was with the conductor. Serious. I sent him an email saying “we may have trouble getting a piano for you to rehearse with—is that ok?” to which he responded—literally—with: “My jedi training is complete. I no longer need a piano to rehearse.” Guess he was right.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Radio One Theme”
The Who: “My Generation (Radio One Jingle)”
The Who: “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Day Tripper”
This is a posting for people who miss guitar solos, actual feedback, and really loud English tube amps, or possibly the days when media conglomerates and audio engineers were kinda baffled and overwhelmed by the above, which I also miss, even though that pretty much ended by the time I had my first erection. Last weekend I pulled out the Who’s BBC Sessions CD and gave it a loud listen. With panoramic 20/20 hindsight I was seduced all over again. In every track you can hear these hyper-adrenalized freaks’ awareness of the import of recording for Radio One, and the tension between obviously wanting to play the best you can and the pull of the fuck-around that got you there to begin with, as opposed to likely alternatives like foreign service or a crappy factory job. I don’t want to second-guess too much more—I just fucking love these recordings. They brought back memories of the Hendrix BBC sessions CD I used to listen to all the time stoned out of my gourd at my friend’s house when I was in college, gushing my shorts over the performances and how the off-the-cuff recordings made it all so real and now. I love the JHX’s “Radio One Jingle.” That’s why pot rules: you can get even more stoned just by listening to music by people who really know something about drugs. (“Experience” is the catalyst.) The Who track is wonderful for its sense of volume—rather that actual decibels—and the real-time physical grappling in achieving/containing it (cf. the middle breakdown part.) As well as fucking retardulistic drumming by Keith Moon at his literal peak. On the subject of drums, Mitch Mitchell’s comparably shit-storming performance turns the kind-of tongue-in-cheek Beatles cover into a real statement of purpose (I figure it struck Jimi as just a blues goof on the Fab Four’s part; he has similar fun with oldie electric blues standards on further Beeb sessions.) Like, imagine having just bought Yesterday and Today not a year earlier and then hearing this riff-raff on the radio, for Christ’s sake. Kinda makes you want to start an amplified blues band and/or a mild heroin habit.
Ich Habe Genug
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson passed away recently after fighting cancer. She was a musician’s musician. A New Yorker profile of her from a few years back sums up her personality in describing an encore from one of her performances, which she performed
“Vedrai, carino,” from “Don Giovanni,” which she introduced as one of her favorite Mozart arias. After explaining that Zerlina sings it to soothe her husband, Masetto, who has been beaten up by the Don, she gave her own translation of the text: “What a wonderful remedy I am going to give you. It’s all natural, and the pharmaceutical companies don’t know how to make it.” She placed her hand over her heart, paused, and choked up. “Feel it beating,” she went on. “Touch me here.” Zerlina’s aria is usually sung as a coy invitation to conjugal coupling. Hunt Lieberson transformed it into an infinitely tender lullaby.
Ich Habe Genug is from her critically-acclaimed CD of Bach solo cantatas, based on a concert series held after her sister’s death from cancer and her own diagnosis with breast cancer. For this piece, she appeared on stage in a hospital gown complete with tubes attached to her. The other piece on the CD —“My Heart Swims In Blood”—is equally heavy. One of the problems of performing liturgical music by Bach is the question of how the performers deal with the grim theology that permeates much of his work. Lieberson—and Peggy Pearson on the oboe d’amore—nail it.
Back in like ‘95-’96 or so, Prichard were one of my favorite bands in Chicago. And this was a time when there were was a LOT of good rock music happening in the city. If you had half a brain it was difficult to have bad taste. Half the time half the people I knew only used half their brain anyway. And about half of them were geniuses. So just imagine.
Just a few weeks ago I was recounting my version of the mid-’90s local scene to James Van Osdol—a name that’ll probably ring a bell for some of you veteran Chicago rock folk. He was one of the seminal jocks (ew) on Q101, when it abrubtly changed ownership and shifted from its previous office-lite format to become the city’s flagship “Alternative” station. James is now writing a history of the ‘90s Chicago rock scene, and apparently doing such a ridiculously thorough job of it that he even gave me a ring.
My addled account of that time was one of a city like a big dirty old sofa to crash on, with relatively cheap rents, lots of disused industrial spaces, tons of places to play, licit and illicit, and growing media and music industry interest…after the exhaustion of such other rock n’ roll “backwaters” as Seattle, Austin, and Athens GA. In other words, the perfect city in which, within the relative economic boom years of the Clinton era (a BA in any dumb major could get you SOME kind of minimally taxing grey-collar job), you’d easily be able to spend most of your waking hours playing loud music and drinking beer in a sweaty rehearsal space you shared with five other bands, two or three or four of which this author played drums and/or guitar in. That’s collectivism, yo: three amps, one and a half drum kits, a fuckin’ taco-stand-of-a-P.A., thirteen people, no air conditioning, rats, pawn shop guitars, a rotating band practice timetable. Everyone shoplifted from Jewel and everyone always had pot though you couldn’t find an actual “dealer” to save your life.
Prichard were interesting. Guys I drank beer with, saw at shows and get-togethers where the music was 2 Live Crew or Hanson. But Neil (guitar/vocals) was breaking his knuckles against the local political machine. He was working with disadvantaged street kids in West Town (read: low-rank Latin Kings), and running for a place on the local school board against a favored ward crony. These weren’t poncey college-rock guys like myself—Big Mike the drummer was from Indiana, and pounded the drums with his six-foot-plus frame sweating in overalls like he was driving a tractor up the side of a barn. Neil was from southern Ohio—if there’s such a thing as country in the Midwest, then there’s such a thing as a country hipster. He spoke easy and smart, with soothing wit that gathered on you. Instead of a bassist there was Seamus, an Irish fiddle player, educated at Trinity College, but he was kind of a Midwestern pothead intellectual by association, laconic but capable of a sublime whimsy he would dispense in unpredictable doses. He played a cheapo violin with an awful electric pickup run thru a very loud tube guitar amp.
We made some recordings in a big raw space in an old factory building. Outside the “studio” walls, Fireproof Press was printing its LP covers and so forth. Winding thru that mess, toward the street side, Steve Walters, aka Screwball Press, was hand-screening T-shirts or posters for some band about to go on tour.
There was a fucked-up old freight elevator, prehistorically slow, from within which I always wanted to record a band, some kind of first, a different take of every song on each floor. An audible tearing of the seam between a space and a thing. (Trying to render transparent the work of capturing industry minus toil. Or vice versa.) Live umbilical ropes soaring up into the dusty black feeding sound while dead metal ropes suspend them like the Fates. Everything moving, the microphones along with the gears of the presses and the machinelike ethics all round, a dumb astrolabe with no measures, generating negative money in a former house of industry. Up top I’d tweak one knob just in time to jump to another, nudging perfect nonsense toward imperfect sense.
This was Prichard’s first studio session. We tracked everything live. We did just one overdub, Seamus’s guitar static in the middle of “Track Star” (and the weird, heavily-gated staccato grot at the end.) I think on one or two songs Neil had a fuzzbox he would step on between parts, but not for the binary off/on drama you hear on those Pixies/Nirvana records—he used it to adjust the climate of the songs like air conditioning in a car. We had a large rectangular room, the floor half splintered pine and half peeling plastic tile. One wall was cinderblock and sliding glass patio doors, separating the “live” room from the control room, where I was with the console and decks and shit. Vomity carpeting hung on the far wall of the live room, with the rest exposed brick and an ancient high timber ceiling. There was an open window through which you could hear the street noises below at the start of each take.
Acoustically the joint was completely uncontrollable but could be coaxed into sounding great with a little patience. We used barely any studio effects at all. I compressed the shit out of Seamus’s yowling fiddle to keep it from blowing the meters out, which makes for some weird stereo effects on “Light is Enough”, and I employed some analog compression on Mike’s kick drum, ‘cause he was a crazy leadfoot. The schizo room sang hauntingly thru Neil’s old Sunn amp on “Tables.” Feedback isn’t about wattage, after all, or even architecture, but how you can get space itself to assert its authority, and it best happens in a rare moment with a kind of fleeting psychic nod between dwelling and dweller.
Not to go on too much about tech geek stuff, but there was one notable fuckup on my part, which luckily proved to be a happy mistake. Between the Prichard session and the last session I had done at King Size North, the studio owners had the multitrack machine recalibrated. With the new (correct) calibration, you were only supposed to print the signal to tape at +/-0 dB, instead of the usual +3 dB. I only found out after one of the other engineers stopped by after we were done tracking and looked at the meters on the deck during a playback. So as a result the guitar tracks are “tape-saturated”: the smoothly distorted quality and “loud”, crushed sound you get when you push the capabilities of analog tape. The beginning of “Prichard’s Lament” is a good example of this phenomenon. Incidentally, this was one of many songs about “Prichard”: a sort of composite everyman character who spoke for Neil, the band, or himself, or some combination of all three. He was like the protagonist in a Situationist play; he would wander from one moral sphere to the next, and each subsequent “Prichard” song was an updated state of the nation.
Neil had a great saying, some kind of southern Ohio thing one’s Dad would say. “I’m gonna ride a hurt on you.” Neil fucking rode a hurt on his guitar. It was a matte army green 70s Telecaster he bought in a junk shop in pieces in a cardboard box and reassembled himself, probably wrong. It’s since been stolen. Probably back in a pawn shop in pieces again somewhere.
The community concern Neil worked for was called Centro Sin Fronteras. For the name of this never-released album, which runs a total of 19:08, I’d suggested Center Without Borders. That’s what Prichard sounded like to me, and fucking still sounds like to me, centered but abstract and hopeful and completely awake and expanding.
[Technical postscript: I’ve sequenced these tracks into a mock album of sorts. These home-ripped MP3s, taken from a CD-R of the original unmastered 2-track DAT mixes, are disappointing compared to the real thing. The best way to hear these songs is to put them in a playlist with no pause space between songs, and play them loud. Seth: play this thru your iPod Mini in your car.]
Prichard: Center Without Borders [unreleased]
Beginning with the End in Mind
Prichard’s Lament
Twenty Questions
You’re No Sweet Thing
Track Star
Rising Tide Hits the Foundations
The Light is Enough
The Papers
Prichard’s Crossroads
Waiting For the Tables to Turn
“Jams Run Free”
“Do You Believe in Rapture?”
Two highlights from the new Sonic Youth album. Haven’t sussed the whole as of, but these two tingled, lounging large-headphones-style in a Caribou Coffee joint on Broadway, gazing out a Boystown storefront three days ago, aether shots from hips to guts. The “green light” ref. made me think of one of my fave past SY tunes, then its titration thru my fave novel probly of all times, and from there, the whole shivvering idea of being a stranger at your own party (wedding jitters)... and then an iPod moment flipping script where I was idling in the armpit of Boul Mich and Mazzy Star’s “Blue Light” had just come on (“There’s a blue light in my best friend’s room/I wanna see it/shine”). Sonic Youth is the only band I can imagine who talk about “jams” in a way that’s abstract and sincere and so concrete and disembodied all at the same time.
Hallelujah—Lewis Lewandowski
Adonai R’oi—Judith Shatin
May This Marriage—Eric Whitacre
It’s hard to find choral music for Jewish weddings that is not real real suck, but I think that I’ve finally figured out what is going to be sung at my wedding. The first is a setting of the 23rd psalm by Judith Shatin (her site’s screwed up web design makes it impossible for me to give you a link to just her composition). It is simple and beautiful but has a sad undercurrent. I’ll just avoid telling people it was composed to memorialize Rabin’s assasination and that the sad undercurrent is because “your little girl is all grown up now.” The recording here is from a concert of Jewish music that the UofC choirs did a few years ago.
The second is a new piece by Eric Whitacre called “May This Marriage.” He’s married to an Israeli and has a set of four “Hebrew Love Songs” but they involve a string quartet, and there is one tambourine-heavy movement which is deeply embarassing to Jews who grew up in the seventies. Anyway May This Marriage is a setting of some poetry by Rumi and you can listen to it at his Myspace page. I like the idea of sneaking something that’s islamotastic into the ceremony as a sort of crypto-multiculturalist nod to rigorous semitic monotheism. I’m also going to be wearing a Uighur cap as a kippah. So there.
We were also thinking of finishing off with a Lewis Lewandowski setting of Psalm 150 but a capella and much more sprightly and agile then the sample I included above. It’s Romantic in style and upbeat in tempo.
