The Hanslick Rebellion played a gig on March 2 – our first in four years. It was awesome (for us, anyway). We agreed to keep things going in spite of the band members’ various familial commitments and the physical distance between us. Playing shows together is difficult, but recording is always possible, and since the Rebellion always goes big we decided to tackle the most daunting monster project in my catalog: the unfinishable Rise And Shine.

We’re talking 40 songs in almost as many genres. 15 singers. Two-and-a-half hours of music. My last attempt to record this thing put me off music for over a year.

Rise And Shine is a musical stage play I’ve been working on since 2000, when Arturo Vega informed me that he’d strung together 20 or so of my already-released tracks to tell a story and had already begun writing the script. We brainstormed a complete three-act arc and I began writing new songs to fill in the gaps – 20 additional pieces of music in all. By 2005 I was well into a fully-cast demo of the thing with an incredible and diverse group of singers that included Dicky Barrett, Brian Dewan, Jessy Moss, Matthew Bair, CJ Ramone, Maryann Fennimore, Bryan Thomas and Kitty Kowalski. But we couldn’t stop tweaking, and what was, in retrospect, the perfect version of the play got mauled to death by revision after revision. I gave up on the demo in 2006 because I just couldn’t keep up with all the changes. By the time we took our last meeting, in 2010, we couldn’t even explain to an interested investor what Rise And Shine was supposed to be about. That’s when I packed it in.

The storyline, as plotted in 2000 and held consistent until 2005, is fairly simple – two college friends reunite at a New York City nightclub five years after graduation. One night, a girl from their past appears at the club and fucks all their shit up. That’s basically it. You’ve got a cast of colorful supporting characters representing various denizens of early-aughts New York nightlife, each with a mini-drama woven around the main thread, but it really is straightforward, linear and fun.

Hanslick Rebellion is the no-brainer choice for a Rise And Shine recording. A number of the songs Arturo wrote his script around, including “We Wait And We Wait”, “Leave Your Boyfriend”, “Starlet” and “Grub”, are Rebellion tunes. Better yet, because the Rebellion only recorded live, there were never studio versions of these, so it’s not like we’re being redundant. Plus Mike and I sang the two male leads on the original Rise And Shine demo, with some surprising lead vocal reversals that add a twist for longtime Rebellion fans (for example, Mike sings “Grub” in the play). It’s just right.

My first move in reopening the Rise And Shine case was to sift through the aborted demo recordings and see what might be salvageable. Sadly, not much. For all the vocal talent we had lined up, most of the tracks are unusable. We had such limited time with many of the singers that in some cases we were racing through 20-30 songs in a day. You obviously can’t get good takes that way. Then there’s the file management and handling of those vocal tracks – many were hastily and poorly auto-tuned by the engineer and then the original tracks were discarded! Unbelievable now, but at the time there were no best practices for Pro Tools workflow. The only singers whose work I can confidently keep are Maryann Fennimore, Brian Dewan and Jessy Moss, and those only because their vocals were cut so late in the process that the project stalled before the engineer could mutilate them. Everybody else has to be rerecorded (which is impossible in several cases) or replaced.

On the other hand, all 40 songs are written and arranged right down to the vocal harmonies. It’s all laid out… everything just needs to be properly performed. The undertaking is massive – recording it is only the beginning. Mixing and mastering 40 songs will cost a fortune. I get queasy just thinking about it. Unfortunately, the folks who were willing to invest in Rise And Shine the stage play are probably out on Rise And Shine the album. I understand; there’s a lot more potential ROI in the former.

In order to make this happen as quickly as possible (ha ha) I’m throttling back on my other projects for a while. That means April’s Single of the Month will be the last. My next solo album is just about done, so I do plan on putting it out later this year. But other than that I’ll be in Rise And Shine land for the forseeable future.

As we power through this thing, we’ll do our best to document the process with a series of video clips. Here’s the first one. This is actually an excerpt from a short film made by Emily Sheskin and Serena Kuo in 2004? 2005? I forget exactly. But it features Arturo and me talking about the musical and how we came to be writing partners:

I had to turn off the FREE on Shoot The Piano Player this morning, and I am having guilt over it. So here’s what I’m gonna do: Every day until August 7 (when my next new single comes out), I will set one random Song Foundry track to free download. You’ll have to hunt them all down, but once you find ‘em they’re yours forever. All I ask is that you tweet or post the song link on your FB wall after you download (and say something nice about it, would ya?).

There are 22 albums in the music section of this site (and some, like my In The Presence Of Presents and Single of the Month comps, are already set to free download). Finding the free tune each day will be a bit of a scavenger hunt. Here’s a tip, though: it’ll be marked in the track listing as “(free)”.

I hope this introduces you to stuff you’ll like. And who knows – perhaps as you search some of the song titles will pique your interest or spark a memory. There are worse things than finding new music to enjoy!

One track is already set up for ya. Why are you still on this page when you could be downloading that shit?

I decided to move on the idea of a Hanslick Rebellion live archive. I’ll make everything available for download once I can get it all properly mastered; in the meantime, raw audio directly off the soundboard tapes will stream from this new site. Shows are as complete as the source tapes allow… there are a few glitches here and there. Most of the material comes from 15-year-old cassettes.

First one online is our November 2, 1995 gig at the QE2. The band had only been playing for about a month, mostly house party gigs. This was our first time in a real club. Also on the bill: Dryer, Splendiferous Monster and Queer for Astro Boy.

This was clearly before we started breaking our “no banter” rule, ha ha.

I’ve been archiving old Hanslick Rebellion soundboard recordings all morning. Rediscovering what an excellent band we could be, particularly once Kearns became the drummer.

The local blogs occasionally post flashback articles or polls concerning Albany bands of the ’90s, and I’m always amused by which acts folks up here consider the best of the era. Sorry, but the Rebellion was the best. Anyone who claims otherwise obviously never saw us play and forfeits their right to comment.

I’d like to make all existing live tapes available somehow. I do think they need to be mastered first. The sound quality is surprisingly good in general, but someone who knows what he’s doing can probably make them louder and less murky.

There is always the rebellion is here. But we were a very reactive band; every performance was unique and most are worth hearing.

I did find an extra-rare artifact while going through these old tapes… something I didn’t even realize still existed: the one and only studio recording by the original Rebellion lineup. We started tracking “The Four-Minute Mile” at Scarlet East in early 1996, but it wasn’t coming out to our satisfaction so we aborted. Being broke musicians, we eventually decided to repurpose the tape for another project, recording over “Four-Minute Mile”. I thought that was that, but this rough mix survived!

The Hanslick Rebellion | “The Four-Minute Mile (studio version)” | rough mix
Mike Keaney: vocals, bass
Jed Davis: vocals, keyboards
Alex Dubovoy: guitars
John Dobson: drums
Recorded by John Delehanty and Rich Libutti at Scarlet East, Albany, NY, 1996

Sounds to me like vocals were still scratch and the guitar solo was not a priority for this rough mix; I consider this more a curiosity than anything else, and would still refer you to the rebellion is here version for the real stuff.

I’ve been sick all week… flu or something. Whenever I lie down, my nose clogs up and I get too uncomfortable to sleep. The lack of rest is making it tough for me to get better. I was using nasal spray earlier in the week, but you can’t use that too many days in a row so I put it aside. Decongestant pills don’t seem to do much of anything. This is a tricky one!

This is the worst I’ve felt since my 2006 pneumonia, which was really bad. If you want to see something rough, search for The Hanslick Rebellion’s Checkerboard Kids performance on YouTube. I was just beginning to recover from pneumonia when we did that gig. I’m wearing like a dozen layers, I couldn’t speak or sing, and half the muscles in my body were pulled from coughing so every movement unleashed bolts of pain. Even after I got over that pneumonia, it was still two years before my immune system worked properly – I was sickly the whole time. I don’t want to get anywhere near that point ever again.

I’ve been trying to relax at home, do a little tidying up. I moved here way back in May but the unpacking part never really ends. I came across this old J-Bird Records box tucked into a milk crate; I assumed it was surplus copies of We’re All Going To Jail! or some shit, but it turned out to be full of 4-track Portastudio cassettes.

I thought I knew where all my old 4-track tapes were… this was a secret stash of about twenty cassettes dating all the way back to 1992. There are Skyscape tunes I had totally forgotten about; collaborations with old friends like Joe Aversano; some of my earliest solo demos; the only existing recording by Pavlov’s Dogs, my freshman-year band with Mike Keaney; even multitrack takes of live gigs where we used my Portastudio as a mixer. I’ve started dumping them into Pro Tools and playing around – the perfect way to pass sick time at home!

I’m no mix engineer, but the raw material is lo-fi enough that even I can’t mess it up. There is a lot of charming stuff here. I’m polishing and putting snippets online as they catch my ear. Here they are, with more to come – a work in progress, 19 years and counting.

I particularly love “Wheelbarrow Rosebud”, the Joe Aversano track. Joe was (and still is) a really unique guitarist, and he writes such pretty stuff. His delivery on this tune is totally 1992, straight out of “Valerie Loves Me”.

Then there’s “Hippies On The Road”, which always started as Skyscape’s cover of “Riders On The Storm” but inevitably morphed into whatever Dom wanted to sing about that day (most often something concerning the Brady Bunch). The drums were recorded mono, so I shoved them into one channel and compressed them until they blew up… then I dropped them out in spots and added some 909 kick and snare. The bass is the keyboard bassline as I originally played it, but dumped into Melodyne, converted to MIDI and now triggering a Fender Rhodes Bass sample. I then EQ’d the bass out of the keyboard track so only the new Rhodes part remained. I guess I could just do clean, faithful mixes of everything, but this isn’t about preserving history – it’s about making cool shit!

Dom and I have been secretly working on a new Skyscape record: Dr. Des Moines. Like Zetacarnosa, it’s a mashup of hi- and lo-fi sounds from the present and the past. I recently unearthed a couple of unfinished tunes from 1992, “Poetry Read-In At Bob’s” and “Motorvate”, with the intention of slipping them in amidst the newly-written material. We’d gotten far enough with them that keyboard sequences exist, but I couldn’t find lyrics anywhere. Turns out there were 4-track demos of both songs that I’d completely forgotten – so not only do we now know the words, but I’ve got classic takes of Dom singing them that I can weave into the 2011 versions. This is awesome.

I lost about half my wardrobe to water damage right before I moved upstate; what remained when I got to Albany included a number of green plaid shirts that I hadn’t worn since college. Some had purple accents so I busted ‘em out and started wearing them to work on Fridays. School spirit thing, purple on Fridays. Anyway, I’ve named the project after these shirts, which, like the 4-track jams, originated in the early ’90s, sat in the dark for almost twenty years, and are now back in action. These are my Green Plaid Recordings.

The Hanslick Rebellion is returning to action, and we hope to have a new EP for you soon. We started writing and rehearsing earlier this year but things sorta ground to a halt. We seem to be back on track now. Richard Lloyd, who had been producing and engineering the new record, is still producing and engineering the new record. He has been very, very patient with us!

I can say with all confidence that the new material sounds nothing like our last release, Let’s Get To The Fucking. Which is not to say LGTTF is anything less than awesome. I reacquainted myself with that EP recently and was stunned by how great it sounds, and how much fun the blend of rock and reggaeton can be:

The new Rebellion material is closer to our live sound, a la the rebellion is here. Richard’s studio is one small room, and we’re just gonna bang this shit out. Richard recorded all of his recent solo work in that space; his amazing The Radiant Monkey feels totally in-the-room-with-the-band, and that’s what we’re hoping for here.

And now, a few quickies.

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I’m really getting into the singles thing – the flexibility of it. As long as I can keep making physical versions to go with digital, I’ll be happy. I’ve got a bunch of new tunes ready to record in easy-to-release pairs; December should be a busy month for that.

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I’ve got a couple of crayon drawings in a Schenectady art show this month. It was a Hallowe’en-themed exhibition, so I used the Eisenstein stills from The Cutting Room Floor as my basis. Here they are… you can see them in person at the Jay Street Gallery (163 Jay Street, Schenectady, NY):

Both were done on large sheets of Bristol board (I forget the exact dimensions) with Crayola crayons. I’m doing the album art for my pal Matt Johnson’s new record the same way, so this was a nice warmup.

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I recently started DJing at WCDB Albany. That’s 90.9 on the FM dial; you can also listen live from anywhere by following this link. My regular time slot is 2pm-4pm on Sunday afternoons, though I’m off this week for Rebellion rehearsal. I’ll remind you again before my next show.

I was a station member in the mid-90’s, when college radio was in its glory. Things are obviously different now, but today’s station members are just as passionate about music as we were back then. Probably moreso… it’s easy to be involved with something when it’s cool. Harder when you have to fight to make it cool. And they do – WCDB is very cool.

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Finally, I’ve been secretly blogging someplace else, fictionally and under an assumed name. Just a heads-up, so you can play detective if ya really want to… you probably won’t find it, but good luck!

Here’s a rough demo I did up yesterday for the new Rebellion album, when I should have been unpacking.

I apologize for the sketchy vocal. I tend to flatten out on the high notes when I record at home – it’s a longstanding mental block that has to do with the neighbors being able to hear me.

“Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts” is all that was written on the sheet of paper found in Stephen Foster’s pocket when he died, penniless. Nobody knows if it was to be the first line of a song or a suicide note.

The Hanslick Rebellion | “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts” demo | May 31, 2010

Thursday was Rebellion Day last week. We’re sharing Richard Lloyd’s rehearsal space in the Music Building for the next month or two – Richard is producing our next record – and we jammed for the first time under his watchful eye.

Richard’s album The Radiant Monkey is, to Mike and me, one of the coolest, dirtiest, most listenable pure rock and roll records ever made – excellent songs; desperately energetic performances; thoughtful, almost virtuosic arrangements; and just the right combination of hi-fi punch and lo-fi crunch. Richard recorded it mostly by himself in his Music Building space. We feel like the Rebellion can, given the same conditions and the benefit of Richard’s ear, make a very different but no less enjoyable record.

We kinda stalled out of the gate, though. The band was rusty – we haven’t played together since the Jeebus tour last summer – plus we had to work up five brand new songs on the spot. We were all about woodshedding. Richard was a good sport, but I tell you what: it’s a good thing the Rebellion is incapable of feeling collective embarrassment.

I came in hoping to get some mileage out of a keyboard called the Korg RADIAS, which I picked up a couple years ago but haven’t yet found the right use for. This particular synth is handy for lead playing, with nasty sounds that are abundantly tweakable. I thought using it exclusively on this record might mesh well with Richard’s approach; The Radiant Monkey consistently features three tracks of guitar – a rhythm take, a lead that kind of never stops, and a third, all-purpose track that does whatever else is needed at any given time. The arrangements are spartan, raw and rocking, but they end up containing everything the song should have. I figured Alex and I could divide up those three tracks between us in a way that would serve each song.

We may yet do that, but the RADIAS probably isn’t the answer. The sounds just don’t seem appropriate for this band, this album, these songs. They’re not organic enough. Sometimes you want to hear a plain old piano… arbitrarily cutting myself off from that option is just stupid. So for our next rehearsal, which is tomorrow, I’ll be bringing my Jeebus rig: Korg M3 sound module with the Roland AX-1 keytar.

One great thing about the keytar is that it forces me to think about my left hand more – as in, whether a left-hand part is even worth playing. Unless a keyboardist is careful, or has mapped his synth to repeat octaves, his busy left hand is usually in danger of invading the bassist’s space. Years of solo piano gigging has left me kind of careless about my left hand… I take it for granted that I’ll need it to drive the song, which is not often the case in a full band. But many of the keytar’s expression controls, including the sustain and patch changes, are worked by the left hand (not to mention that there’s a strap in the way), so unless you really need it, lefty’s off the board.

I spent the day practicing the new Rebellion material with the AX-1, and it felt right. I’ve never used a keytar for recording before… it has no built-in sounds of its own, and if I’m gonna use an external synth module I’ll generally hook it up to a juicy full-length keyboard instead of something that can only accommodate one hand. Plus the keytar’s a bitch to program – you have to set up the unit’s expression-control parameters for each sound individually. But in this case, all that seems worth it.

I’ve also decided to not be afraid of canned sounds here. Since we aren’t recording in a studio, I have no access to the acoustic keyboard staples – piano, B3, Wurlitzer, Rhodes. I’ve traditionally gone great lengths to use the real thing as opposed to synthesizer patches. But the newer synth samples do sound pretty good (particularly softsynths), and as much as I hate to think about it, the rebellion is here. features canned piano and organ in all its shitty glory… so let’s say the precedent has been set. If the sampled sounds really bug me, I will rent a fucking piano and have it carted up to Richard’s space.

The Hanslick Rebellion has been an important part of my life, and Mike’s, and Alex’s, for 15 years. (Kearns I’m not so sure about; he hasn’t made himself available for this project, so Joe Abba is sitting in on drums.) Even though we’ve all got other (not necessarily better) things to do right now, we know we need to give the Rebellion the shot in the arm – or at least the magnificent Viking funeral – it deserves. You might see the four of us (plus Reeves!) on the road next summer as Jeebus, with the Rebellion finally resting in the past. But even if that’s the way things end up, we are gonna go out at the top of our game, raging and roaring!

The Cutting Room Floor:
- Jackets printed
- Stickers and inner sleeves in production
- Lacquers being cut
- Going live on iTunes imminently

“Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” single:
- Cylinders being manufactured (one per day!)
- Available for pre-order. Check it out:

CELEBRATION PARTY! live album/silkscreen poster combo:
- Ready for mastering
- Silkscreens printed

The Hanslick Rebellion’s Ashamed Of Rock And Roll:
- Rehearsals begin on Thursday with Richard Lloyd producing
- Recording at the end of May

Albany:
- Finished shopping for furniture
- Moving the rest of my stuff up on May 8
- Cannot wait to get the fuck out of here

Mike is here and we just added his vocal and some bass to our demo of the new Rebellion track “Thanks For The Rope”. We think you’re gonna like it.

The Hanslick Rebellion | “Thanks For The Rope” demo | April 25, 2010

A sample from the first pass on this demo is here.