Weird Sessions

Back in the heady days of the punk movement in the 70s and 80s there was a local group by the name of Dementia Precox which featured a very novel approach to music making with regards to their instumentation, especially in the percussion section. When loading in for their session, we were surprised to see a bed box-spring (uncovered to expose just the frame and springs) coming in the door. There was some kind of stand for the thing and wired to it in every possible spot were all manner of metallic, bangable things like a cluster of pop cans, wind chimes, brake drums, you name it. Also present were a couple of 55 gallon drums and the whole assembly was played with a couple ball-peen hammers!!! The admonishment from the performer: "Make sure you mic it well so you can pick up all my metal." Taking a look at the ball-peen hammers and our $1000 plus microphones, the thought of two 414s in Omni pattern about 5 feet away seemed very attractive! When it was all done it sounded very cool though.

One day a long time ago (before digital recording was common and DAT machines even existed) we get a call from an artist who has a burning need to record his band "tonight" and because it's really important, he wants to go live to 2-track digital for their demo. So, because these kinds of sessions require the engineer to mix all instruments AND effects live to the final stereo master with no mistakes or the whole take is blown, we thought it would be a big enough deal to hire a 2nd engineer to assist on the session to offload some of the distractions.

So the evening comes and the 'band' consists of a bass player (the sideman, with a total of one rehearsal under his belt it turns out) and a guitar player who was the singer and writer, and a drum machine. Actually drum machine is a very complimentary term for this particular box, which was actually a battery powered Boss Dr. Rhythm with one button and one knob.

We get them set up; guitar amp in the iso room to give clear vocals and bass direct, "drum" machine in the control room. Time to record. So we ask the guy "which song or pattern on the drum machine for this song?" and he looks at us with that 'deer in the headlights' look like we had just landed from another planet. So we explain that drum machines are usually a number of drum beats and variations that are strung together to form the song. He's still looking at us like we're Martians. He says "I just hit the (only) button and go". Ok so we hit the button and promptly hear BoomBoomBoomBoom which was the programming metronome so you know where the beats are when you make patterns! So we say ok, how fast (preparing to adjust the only knob now) and he replies, "All the way up!"

So they launch into the songs and it immediately becomes apparent that one rehearsal was not nearly enough! Basically they just keep starting over each time they blow up and if they managed to get all the way through something, it was completely by accident so we just had to let tape roll and record it all because there was no such thing as a 'take'.

We really felt sorry for the bass player who was really trying hard to be a good 'hired-gun' sideman but was being presented with an impossible task and extreme pressure. For instance, the guitarist would demonstrate a particular lick he was supposed to play, playing it 8 times in a row, each time slightly differently all the while saying "ya gotta follow me, FOLLOW ME!"

As for the arrangements, there weren't any. No particular verse was ever the same number of bars each time they attempted to play it, and it finally came down to stuff like, "I'll play the guitar-you don't play, then when I kick my leg up like this, that's when you come in". Solos only ended when the soloist was obviously completely at a loss for what to play next. Songs only had random forms to them and tuning??? Fuggetaboutit! But it was going live to 2-track digital and it was clean as a whistle we can tell you.

Well after burning up over two hours of tape (including some retakes of earlier songs that "just weren't quite right") keepers were picked and copied to cassette (no CD recording in those days) so they could send the demos to all the major labels!

It became clear at that point just exactly why the labels routinely refuse unsolicited submissions:

Download a tune from this session: GottaBeStrong.mp3

This weird session comes from waaaay back, pretty much just after we moved out of the basement to our current location so that would put this around 1984 or 85.

One day out of the blue a guy who looked particularly non-music industry pulls up and comes in and starts asking questions, “You guys have a real studio here? Lotsa tracks?? Really??? Great!!!” and ran out to his pickup and comes back with a ratty cardboard box.

Turns out this guy was a successful building contractor in the area and had quite a collection of self-help tapes on cassette (a whole boxful of them in fact). Now these were the kind of tape where the self-help message was a subliminal message where the message is repeated over and over and is mixed just below the threshold of audibility against a background of white noise, which sounds pretty much like the static between FM stations.

The scope and variety of the tapes was amazing! He had tapes for Stop Smoking, Lose Weight, Sleep Better, Stop Drinking, Be A Better Christian, Get Rich Quick, Increase Your Memory, Have Better Sex, Stop Abusing Your Spouse, Eat Your Vegetables, you name it; if it was a human foible, he had a subliminal message tape to combat it!

So he says to Dan, “I’m really busy and I don’t have time to listen to all of these! What I want is to see if you can put them all on your multi-track machine and mix them down to a single cassette I can listen to instead of going through them one at a time. It would be a tremendous time saver!”

Well Dan is now looking down the barrel of the weird job from hell looming in front of him so he tells this guy that it might not be as effective as he thinks due to the phenomenon of the well known “masking effect” in multitrack recording where when more than 3 or so similar signals are blended, they lose their audible individuality etc., but it didn’t faze this guy a bit! He wanted to go right ahead. Dan tells him that this is going to be a “real-time” kinda activity and therefore will be quite expensive as well, yet this guy remains undaunted. Well ok here we go… Dan takes the cardboard box full of tapes and tells this guy he’ll call him when it’s ready!

So taking stock of the project there are around 25 sixty minute cassettes, same program on each side (thank God!). Now in those days, all we had was a 16-track recorder so that meant one thing-submixing!!! So Dan figures out that he can record 8 tapes straight over, then take seven more, bounce them down to one track, erase the 7 and put 6 more on there (gotta leave a bounce destination track), bounce the six, load 5 more etc. you get the idea…

Now remember that these are white noise tapes, when you play one it just sounds like FM noise. A less than scrupulously honest person could have just copied one of these tapes on a cassette dubber and charged the guy for 40 hours of studio time since at the end, since all you were going to have at the end  is a tape with noise on it anyway. But not Dan Murphy!!!

So for about three days all you hear coming out of the studio is these noise tapes as Dan painstakingly records each one, matching level amongst all the tapes so there’s a verifiable  0db level for each track of the 16-track.

Finally all 25 tapes are submixed on the multitrack and ready for “mixdown”. So Dan puts up all 16 faders to 0, pans them all across the left/right spectrum, hits record on the cassette mixdown deck and runs off this guy’s master, calls the client to tell him his ‘project’ is ready.

The client rushes right over pays us around a thousand dollars for a cassette that sounds only like “hisssssssssssssssssssssss” top to bottom, end to end!

This story is so unbelievably odd we almost can’t even believe it; I mean, what about the possibility that all these subliminal messages might start interacting with each other when all layered up like that??? And let’s totally forget about the idea that subliminal messages even have any perceivable effect, evidence is very poor that they are of any significance. We never heard from this guy again but we’re convinced that he’s either the CEO of a major multi-national corporation or raving lunatic! But ever since that project, Dan has had the strangest craving for broccoli and still doesn’t smoke!!!