I’ve been secretly bouncing back and forth between Albany and Brooklyn for the past two weeks, making all the arrangements for my move in little teeny tiny trips. On the road to Capitaland at 4am; back in the city for work by 4pm.
I spent a few hours in the new apartment on Thursday, taking measurements so I can figure out where all my stuff will go. Not all the furniture can come with me, as it was purchased to make use of a loft space with a specific architectural feature – namely, no features whatsoever.
Taming that Brooklyn loft was some kinda challenge. Man! The apartment was literally an empty 800-square-foot rectangle with some windows, and the idea of filling it in a practical but appealing way was so intimidating. I kept thinking about something Michael Doret had told me the first time I commissioned a magazine cover illustration from him. I had been explaining this particular mag’s quirks – how there was always a rule line 1/2″ from the outside edge, how nothing was allowed to obscure our logo, how mailing labels would eat up the lower left corner, how there had to be X lines of copy here and here – and I was just cringing at having to place all these restrictions on a great designer. But Michael was cool with it. Working within a set of parameters, he said, was actually preferable to staring at a blank page. It provided a framework upon which to compose his design.
Reeves once told me something similar about doing guitar sessions. He said that when working for hire, one of the first questions he’d ask is what sort of things the client did not want him to play. The resulting restrictions would leave Reeves free to operate within the remaining space, while still enabling him to develop parts in his own style.
I agree with that approach. Whenever I start a project, a band, an album, a song – even a blog post – I like to name it immediately. That name may change, but it provides a basic concept, a direction which enables me to focus. A point.
It’s like having something to say before you sit down to write a song. When you go in with a mission, you write nice and tight. You also waste less time – yours and other people’s.
Anyway… this new apartment is just fuckin full of restrictions. With all these Victorian quirks, it’s the opposite of the Brooklyn space. For example, here’s a floor schematic I did up for the living room:
That is not a plain old rectangle – there’s a fireplace that juts out into the room, interrupting the wall. The entry to the kitchen is six-and-a-half feet of nothing, flanked by columns. And there’s another four-foot gap on the right which leads to an alcove.
A trip to Ikea is still in order, but I’ve figured out how to integrate a bit of the old loft furniture. That’s what those pink shapes are – shelves, armchairs, all that shit. And a Kiss pinball machine. You didn’t think I was gonna put that in storage, did ya?
I believe that if you have a style of your own, you will fill any space, regardless of rules or restrictions, with something that is identifiably you.
I’ve signed a lease in Albany… an apartment in an 1870’s brownstone with one of those gorgeous upper-story bay windows. The interior dimensions are wonky in that Victorian way, but I think I can make furniture work. I hope to be a fully-moved-in Capitalander by May 1.
Amidst the chaos of this two-hundred-mile move, I’ve begun the process of pressing The Cutting Room Floor. The jackets, inner sleeves, and a special surprise insert are in production, and when they’re done we can start manufacturing the discs themselves. The presentation is gonna be very cool. I’m looking into using multiple colors of shrinkwrap to play with elements of Moscoso’s design – different wrap colors will make parts of the image disappear, revealing others, and on the shelves the album will appear to have three dramatically different covers.
I’ve also designed the inner sleeve with a spot UV plate, so secret shit will appear and disappear when light hits it a certain way. Why the hell not, right?
I think it’s interesting that CRF has taken me so long to put out that I began it in Albany, and it will be finished in Albany. It’s like New York City never happened.
This is what it sounds like when you play “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” off a wax cylinder.
Jed Davis | “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” cylinder recording | April 13, 1910
The cylinder was dubbed by placing a microphone in front of an Edison Fireside phonograph (c.1910) with model N reproducer and cygnet horn.
A limited edition pressing of cylinder records will be out in June, paired with a digital download of both the cylinder version of the song, and a hi-fi stereo mix. The entire run of cylinders will be signed and numbered by yours truly – and by the legendary Michael Doret, who designed the package. Here’s a small detail of Michael’s wraparound illustration:
My first job out of college: ad copywriter for a direct marketing company on Long Island. I wrote catalog and space ads. I think they hired me mostly because they needed one more Jewish male to make minyan.
I won’t name the company, for reasons which will be made clear. But I will say that they were legendary for once running a promotional offer of one real diamond with every catalog purchase over ten dollars. These diamonds absolutely were real – real, industrial-grade, and just about worthless. The ad wasn’t lying; you got a diamond for ten bucks. A shitty diamond.
Every morning, I would punch the clock and wade into a stack of sell sheets detailing garbagey non-products no one could possibly want or need; bland bulleted lists which I’d have to turn into tight, bright, appealing ad copy. Sometimes I’d get to play with the items themselves. Like the Musical Sweater – an ugly off-red pullover, embroidered with reindeer and snowflakes, which played an 8-bit “Jingle Bells” when you pressed a button on the collar.
(Right now you’re all like, Musical Sweater = WANT! I know, right? But ad copy man, can I wash something like that? Jeez… I have no idea! That info was not on the sell sheet.)
I knocked out copy until lunchtime, and then I had one hour to pull off as much awesome shit as I could. I might meet Chris Hug at one of Long Island’s finer Toys ‘R’ Us locations, or visit Nathan’s at the Broadway Mall with other members of The Hanslick Rebellion, or make out with Cheryl Mare in the IHOP parking lot… but even as all this adventure beckoned, some of my favorite lunch breaks were the ones I spent alone.
There was a great comic book store in Hicksville which no longer exists; I would go there every Wednesday, pick up the week’s new releases, and read them in my car with some drive-thru Wendy’s and Mike and the Mad Dog on the radio. Pure 21-year-old Long Island dork bliss. I still fondly remember the day the Knicks signed Allan Houston and Chris Childs. I didn’t give a fuck about basketball; I just loved listening to Mike and the Mad Dog bitch while I ate my Triple with cheese and caught up on some Justice League.
On non-comic weekdays I might follow the same routine, except with a newspaper or a copy of the Star or National Enquirer. I used to find space ads I’d written all the time in the Star. One that comes immediately to mind was for the Comfort Air Cushion, which was an inflatable pad the size of a car seat that you’d blow up and put on top of your car seat. Yeah, I know, I know.
We don’t often appreciate how pervasive even the most mundane advertising can be, but it is no exaggeration to say that this company’s ads were seen by millions of people. In addition to running in circulars and tabloids, they were mass-mailed in catalogs and sweepstakes packets designed to entice a less cynical population to open and read them, carefully targeted to the Americans most likely to buy a Glow-in-the-Dark Doorknob, or an Adorable Kitten Throw Rug, or any of five-dozen guardian angel-themed products: the Guardian Angel Picture Frame (guardian angels watch over your loved ones when you place their photos in these delightful frames!), the Guardian Angel Lamp Topper (now you can have the warmth and cheer of a guardian angel fill your home every time you turn on the light!), even Glow-in-the-Dark Guardian Angels (who knows what the fuck’s the point of this shit!).
I wrote ads for cheap mail-order shoes, toy trucks with wheels that didn’t turn, and devices which projected an illuminated target into the middle of the toilet bowl so you wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom light in the middle of the night. I learned the power of phrases like “now you can”, “wherever you go”, “orthopedically designed” and “toasty warm”, and the mystique of the “AS SEEN ON TV!” burst, which was so potent that you could fill the same rounded red box with “not ON TV!” and people would buy the product as if it were on TV. And more housewives and geriatrics read my writing than Stephen King’s, which sounds wonderful but is something I try not to think too hard about.
After a few months on the job, I earned a transfer to the company’s top book, which advertised what were purportedly health products. There were lots of pills in the catalog, yeah… but all of the pitches were circumstantial. The tagline for Shark Cartilage pills was “SHARKS DON’T GET CANCER!” So what? You’re not a shark. And the catalog’s Diet Tea could be part of any weight-loss plan, sure, but there was nothing special about it; all tea is low-calorie until you add sugar. I wasn’t allowed to promise any results in my copy; I could say that a product might “help promote” health benefits, but not that it actually did anything.
I acquired a reference library of alternative medicine textbooks and encyclopedia, which I pretty well wore out trying to find an honorable basis for selling these products. I’m not going to say that alternative medicine is bullshit, because there is plenty of evidence that some disciplines are beneficial. But in the year-plus that I worked on that catalog, I wrote ads for dozens of “holistic” products, from ginkgo biloba to St. John’s wort to tea tree oil, none of which could legally be pitched as providing any medical benefit whatsoever.
I still shiver a little at the memory of my first health catalog meeting. The buyer, who ordered all the stock we’d be writing about, sat at the head of the table showing off the latest products. One of the products appeared to be a hot water bottle.
“Check this out,” the buyer said. “Looks like an ordinary hot water bottle. And it is! But when you add this tubing here, it becomes a do-it-yourself home enema kit! One of the worst things about an enema is that you need to have somebody else administer it. How embarrassing is that? You have to call a friend to shoot water up your ass. Well, not anymore!” Then he whirled around and pointed in my direction.
“Davis, give me a headline!”
What popped into my head was not acceptable, but I blurted it out anyway: “With enemas like these, who needs friends?”
“Good,” replied the buyer. “Clean it up; go with it!” What?!
“This next product is for people who suffer from incontinence. Studies show that anyone can control his bodily functions – if he is aware of them! Incontinent people are not! But this device will change all that. It slips comfortably into undergarments, and has a sensor which detects moisture. At the first sign of wetness, the device emits a mild electric shock which makes the wearer aware that he is soiling himself – so he can stop! No more embarrassing, bulky diapers! It’s a miracle product! Davis, give me a headline!”
The dude was clearly not gonna pay attention to anything I said, so I offered: “Stop pissing your pants – NOW!”
“Good! Clean it up; go with it!”
One day, a sell sheet for something called “Royal Jelly Pills” landed on my desk. It had no bullet points – no list of benefits for this product. I spent an hour trying to find a mention of royal jelly in my various books, but no luck. I went to the buyer, and he had no idea what these pills did, either.
“Well,” he asked, “what do we know about royal jelly?”
“If this is the same royal jelly that comes from bees, then it’s the compound which is fed to a larval bee that makes it grow into a queen bee,” I said.
“Go look up the life expectancy of a queen bee as compared to a worker bee,” said the buyer. “Then clean that up and go with it!”
So if you’ve ever seen an ad for utterly useless Royal Jelly Pills with the headline “DISCOVER THE SECRET OF ROYAL JELLY!” and the tag, “Worker bees live for three weeks, but the queen bee can live up to three years! Royal jelly is the difference. Find out what it can do for you!” Well, that’s mine. Yeah, I know, I know. I know.
The job began to weigh on me. Writing ads for junky nicknacks made me uncomfortable, but the products were so overtly ridiculous that I could justify the gig: anyone stupid enough to think his life would be improved by something called Glow-in-the-Dark Reusable Snowflakes deserved to be out five bucks. The health catalog was different, though. It was all semantic gymnastics to offer benefits yet avoid promising any result, because no result had ever – or could ever – be proven. And it was targeted at low-income hypochondriacs who had more important things to do with their money, or worse, at genuinely ill people and people in demographics most at risk of becoming ill, who really had more important things to do with their money.
I had begun making websites by then, and I devoted part of mine to detailing all the ways I perceived this company to be ripping people off. It was 1997 and weblogs hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what this was. I wrote in secret, mostly to soothe my conscience, and the blog wasn’t linked to anything – but I made the mistake of sharing the address with one coworker. Next thing I knew it had spread across the entire company, and I became the first person ever fired for blogging. To this day, it’s the only thing I’ve done online that could be construed as going viral.
Apparently I never learn, ’cause here we are. But that experience did teach me one rule of thumb: never take a job you would negatively blog about. This policy has enabled me to enjoy work – and to keep it.
Yesterday I ran across an old demo of “Hold On To Your Soul” from 2001, recorded after my deal with Kasenetz-Katz went south. Listening to it reminded me of my copywriting days, which in turn made me realize how similar the music business is to that job, and how I was probably never meant to have a “record contract”. When I did get one, I wrote shit like this to ease the guilt of recording for The Man.
Jed Davis | “Hold On To Your Soul” demo | August 1, 2001
New York City is not the best city in the world. But I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest. There is so much shit here you just can’t find anyplace else.
Last night I took a cooking class with Alex Guarnaschelli. If you live in lower Manhattan and you’ve never been to Butter, walk over there next payday and order the tasting. You may find yourself scrounging under the couch cushions for McDonald’s Dollar Menu money later in the week, but no sacrifice is too great. Chef Alex is one of the few Food Network stars who actually cooks in their own restaurant every night, and she’s the only person who has ever made mushrooms and raw tomatoes taste good to me.
So I now (ostensibly) know how to prepare roasted duck with honey and braised lentils, make my own mozzarella, and assemble a spring pea salad. I’ll be taking that information with me when I move to Albany in about three weeks. As I go, there’s a lot of great stuff I’ll be leaving behind… experiences (like last night’s cooking lesson) which can only be had in New York City.
Don’t get me wrong; I am fuckin psyched to be outta here. NYC life is a nonstop battle. You fight for space, for the right of way, for money, for attention – just getting from one end of a block to the other can be a struggle. And the city can make you feel like you’re always failing, always behind. Everyone comes here with a goal, and not usually a realistic one. In that light, it’s hard to see true victories for what they are.
And New York City changes so fast, right before your eyes. The people you care about give up and leave. Businesses open and close. Neighborhoods gentrify and decay. Beautiful old buildings disappear and are replaced by ugly new ones. Like, what the hell is that shit over by Cooper Union? Dubai-on-the-Bowery.
Many of the places I’ve frequented in my 10 years here have gone away. I found out on Christmas Eve that Curry Mahal is no longer on 2nd Avenue. LB and I headed over there for dinner, and it was boarded up. Love Saves The Day is now a noodle house with a mostly brown exterior. Coney Island High is ten years in its grave. There’s no more Tower Records… and of course, no CBGB.
(One day, maybe I’ll tell you the real story behind the closing of CBGB. It’s nothing at all like what you’ve heard or read.)
Less has changed in Albany. Sometimes I feel like nothing ever changes up there, though I understand that’s not true; 10 years in NYC provides a warped basis for comparison. The Daily Grind is still there. Metroland remains in print. Madison’s End Cafe is now Cafe Madison, but that awesome breakfast is the same. Many of my friends are still there – and, as I’ve been pleased to discover over the past few days, they’re still my friends. Saratoga is still less than a half-hour away (and that place never changes).
I’ve been making a list of things I would like to do in my last month as a resident of New York City. The list is too long and I realize I’m not gonna get it all in, but I’ll do my best. If any of these activities sound interesting to you, get in touch. I’m a sucker for good company. And you never know – some of this shit might already be gone by my next visit.
My NYC Bucket List:
- Get a Double at Coney Island Joe’s
- Walk the High Line to Little W 12th Street and have dinner at Pastis
- Visit Liberty Island and Ellis Island
- See James Spader in Race one more time
- Eat at Butter, La Palapa, Katz’s, Vinegar Hill House and Melba’s
- Walk the Williamsburg Bridge (but turn around before actually going into Williamsburg)
- Brunch at Virage
- Walk up the West Side and get breakfast at Barney Greengrass
- Visit the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and the Museum of Natural History
- Bowl at Chelsea Piers
- Catch a couple games at Citi Field
- Walk the Coney Island boardwalk and go on some rides
- Get a vanilla egg cream from Gem Spa
- Drive out to Long Island and visit the Old Bethpage Village Restoration, Adventureland, All-American Burger and Vincent’s
- Go for dim sum
- Walk in from Dumbo across the Manhattan Bridge, stop at the Doughnut Plant, walk along the East River to South Street Seaport, then walk back out over the Brooklyn Bridge
Most of these are things I’ve enjoyed before, and just want to experience one more time. I see this as a sign that it’s okay to go.
I wrote a song the other day called “City Of My Dreams”. It’s about how this place can mess your shit up, and how good it can feel to know you’re getting free. The chorus is: “I want New York City to go back to being the city of my dreams.” Once I’m gone, it probably will. But I’ll be glad to wake up every morning in Albany.
The headline is for all you Empire fans. Topping off a frickin excellent day, Graham Maby recorded bass for two Small Sacrifices tracks.
One of them is “I Hear An Echo”. I had posted a rough mix of this a few weeks ago, but now that the bass is in it’s really starting to come together. Here’s the latest:
Jed Davis | “I Hear An Echo” rough mix | April 6, 2010
I still need to track an acceptable lead vocal and some real piano. Probably organ and a couple other keyboard instruments, too.
That’s Anton Fig on the drums, and Reeves Gabrels on guitar. Fuck yes!
Mike came by the other day with three chord progressions and some words… we hammered the whole mess into a new Hanslick Rebellion tune called “Thanks For The Rope”. This morning I whipped up a vocal arrangement. Here’s a sample, taken from the last 1/3 of the song.
I was sort of arranging off the top of my head, so a bit of tweaking’s got to happen yet – but seeing as how it’s posted here I’m obviously not ashamed of it or nothin.
The Hanslick Rebellion | “Thanks For The Rope” demo | April 4, 2010
Been thinking about four-track recording a lot lately. I had two Portastudio 464s; I recently gave one to a friend and he’s been using it to create some crazy shit. Now I meditate upon the four-track. OMMMM. One benefit of this exercise is that it helps keep me from thinking too hard about the red velvet cupcakes LB and Crazee Joe baked on Thursday. The cupcakes lurk deliciously in the fridge and if I dwell on them for long, I will end up eating many and everyone will be pissed at me.
Four-track cassette recording is synonymous with lo-fi, but you can make a whole album on a Portastudio without compromising fidelity. Plenty of bands have managed this; Ween and Whirlwind Heat are two examples that spring immediately to mind. (The latter mixed their four-track recordings at Tarbox, though, so I’m not sure if it counts.)
I weave Portastudio material into many of my own recordings. It’s not strictly a sonic choice, but also about selecting the takes that mean the most to me personally. I might spend years working up one song; it follows me from format to format as technology advances. If I consider a guitar solo from 1992 to be the definitive take, then that’s what ends up in the final mix. For example, “Statement Of Intent” on Skyscape’s Zetacarnosa:
The guitar solo was played by Rob Hill, as recorded on four-track cassette in the summer of ‘92. The rest of the band was tracked in 2002 and 2003. (The banter with acoustic guitar at the top and end of the song, and that quiet moment after the solo, is from a 1993 videocassette.) To me, Rob’s solo summed up the time in which the song was written, and the exuberant energy which propelled us in lieu of the chops we hadn’t yet developed. No listener need know or care about any of that, but it makes the finished product more satisfying for me.
Zetacarnosa was about compressing the then-15-year history of Skyscape to a single point, so the emphasis was on context; it was okay for an element to retain its lo-fi grit because that would tell the listener something about it. The result is a superdense hi-fi/lo-fi hybrid where the Portastudio almost serves as an effect. The sound is colored, but it’s all there.
On the other hand, when the point is just to make a great-sounding track, a skilled mix engineer can work wonders with even the murkiest raw material. Andrew Weiss managed this with those classic Ween records; Dave Fridmann with the Whirlwind Heat stuff. Here’s what Tony Doogan was able to do with “Let Go”, which was recorded mostly on an eight-track Portastudio:
Everything but the piano, bass and guitar is from the eight-track cassette. Technically, each of these waveforms was squeezed into a smaller space – containing less information – than if it had been recorded on a four-track, since the width of the tape is doubly subdivided to fit twice as many tracks. Yet you’d never be able to tell which sounds came from the cassette, and which were recorded digitally; Tony sculpted the material into a hi-fi whole.
There was a time when the cassette Portastudio was the key to the recording kingdom for thousands of teenagers. It was affordable magic – you could at last let out the music in your head, arranged almost exactly the way you heard it. In mass application, though, the machine eventually became its own built-in excuse: if your music was shitty, you could blame it on the small number of tracks or the poor recording quality. It’s one reason why there were so many awful fuckin bands in the ’90s, bands whose lazy approach unfortunately continues to inspire people who should not bother making music today.
Anyway… I’m thinking about busting out my old 464 and tracking some shit. One thing I’m curious about is what it would sound like to bring a Portastudio to a real studio and use it with great mics and outboard gear. Would the result be a mess? A waste of time? Or would it realize the ultimate dream of every suburban songwriter circa 1991?
