Last night I watched a Saturday Night Live broadcast for the first time in a while – I usually just cherry-pick on Hulu after the fact. Jimmy Fallon was the host, which is weird because I remember that in one of the dude’s very first appearances on the show, like late ’90s, there was a Christmas Carol sketch with a glimpse of a future in which he hosted the 2011 SNL Christmas episode. Whoa!

Though I haven’t seen much of his Late Night, I do think Jimmy Fallon is pretty funny. I watched him open for Tenacious D at the Town Hall ten years ago with a bit of musical standup that was fuckin awesome. But every time I see Jimmy Fallon on a stage or a screen, I am reminded of this thing that happened back in 1993 or ‘94, while I was a student at UAlbany:

I got a call from a friend of mine named Jenn Donovan. Jenn needed a lift to an audition for Metroland’s Loose Camera, a locally-produced sketch comedy pilot that was to air on the Albany FOX affiliate. I was promised dinner if she got the part, so I said of course I’ll drive.

We arrived at some officey-looking building. I don’t remember details; I was a college student so every building that was not a restaurant, bar or mall looked like an office to me. There was a waiting room with two guys sitting in it… one of them was Jimmy Fallon.

A few minutes passed and no one else came in. It began to dawn on me that Jenn and these two dudes might represent the entire pool of potential Loose Camera cast members. Now, I’d been a fan of sketch comedy, particularly SNL, since I was a little kid. And I thought: This turnout is so weak, these TV folks might get desperate enough to hire anyone who can move around and say words… and those are definitely things I can do. With odds this good, maybe I should audition?

Jenn had been given a script to read; I asked her if I could look it over. I’m a little hazy on it now, but I think the sketch was about two mechanics who were either in gay denial or obsessed with masturbating. Either way, the piece struck me as ignorant, cliché and unfunny. I decided there was no way I was saying that shit out loud in front of strangers. I handed the script back to Jenn and hung out in the waiting room until it was time to go.

Anyway, Jenn got the part; so did Jimmy Fallon and, I guess, anybody else who bothered to show up and read. She never bought me dinner, though. I didn’t watch Metroland’s Loose Camera when it aired – I was too pissed off about the dinner.

A year or two later, I was living at 1011 Madison (since razed by Saint Rose), one floor below a fellow named S. Dion Flynn. All I knew about my upstairs neighbor was that girls never stopped coming to his apartment, and he played “Blackbird” on an acoustic guitar every night at 8 right above my living room. Maybe whichever girl came by at 8 really liked that song, I dunno.

I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but Dion had once been the singer for a band called Empire, which included John Delehanty on guitar and Sirsy’s Rich Libutti on bass. He’d also been a cast member on Loose Camera.

One day Dion mentioned to my roommate Mechno that a new sketch comedy show he appeared in would be airing on public access. I don’t remember the name of the show. Wait, yes I do – 40 Whacks! So Mike Keaney whipped us up a big batch of his signature dish, plain spaghetti with some bread crumbs in it, and we all gathered round the TV.

Sure enough, there was Dion – opposite Jimmy Fallon in that mechanics sketch from the Loose Camera audition, repurposed… nay, regifted for us by the masterminds behind, apparently, both shows. It still wasn’t funny, but I guess Dion and Jimmy were good in it!

So there you have it: another chapter from my never-to-be-published autobiography Shit That Would Turn You White. Merry Christmas!

Sorry, no single this month. How about a whole album instead?

Shoot The Piano Player was recorded a couple summers ago in Chicago. LB, Lucy, Joe Abba and I spent a weekend at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, fluffy coffee and Pip the cat. With Joe on drums, I tracked 13 songs live to tape, vocals and all. There are maybe three overdubs on the whole album – an organ part and a couple of backing vocals. Lucy and LB hung out in the control room, where they got to watch Albini work. That is a true privilege.

For me, making a record with Steve Albini is up there with working with the Ramones. I love that dude as a concept and admire him as a human being. Albini is, in my opinion, the incorruptible avatar of Generation X’s finest values. Most of my contemporaries have sold out but Albini marches on. He’s tireless behind the board and radiates competence in a way that is somehow simultaneously intense and reassuring. At the end of the session, he congratulated me on coming prepared and getting my work done. That’s like Wade Boggs telling you, “nice at-bat.” One of the best moments of my entire life!

The songs on STPP were written over a 15-year period, and they are generally pretty songwritery. Lots of roleplaying here. A few of the narrators are unsavory characters (“You Make Me Feel So Young” in particular… that song is just fuckin gross but I had to record it. I lost multiple girlfriends to nasty old dudes when I was in my early 20s and the lyric was born of my outrage). “I’m On Your Side” was originally part of Rise And Shine – it’s sung from the perspective of a bigoted asshole cop, and my job is to make you like him if not inadvertently agree with him.

I do a bit of side-switching in these songs, too: “Piece Of Crap” (the oldest composition on the record; it’s from 1994) comes alternately from the point-of-view of the cynical, sneering wannabe pop star and the spoiled teens who worship him; “For A Girl In Promotions” starts out like a snipe at the title character but the narrator is revealed to truly care about her and appreciate what she does. I dunno, this is starting to sound a little navel-gazey… so how bout: I’m proud of this record and happy that I can share it with you!

In addition to the digital release (it’s for sale at iTunes, Amazon and all the rest today as well, but why would you buy it out there when you can get it right here?), Shoot The Piano Player is also available on 8-track tape. The 8-track run is limited to an edition of 20 copies, manufactured by a really cool company called The Dead Media out of Ft. Worth, Texas. Interesting fact about 8-track tapes: they play back twice as fast as cassettes and use thicker, higher-quality tape. It can be argued that a well-built 8-track cartridge sounds better, and preserves more of the analog experience, than vinyl. I most likely will release a vinyl pressing of Shoot The Piano Player at some point, but it could be argued that this 8-track tape may provide the ultimate STPP listening experience if you’ve got the means to play it. My 8-track deck broke recently, so I picked up an old 2-XL robot on eBay. His eyes light up in time with the music. It’s awesome.

Here are some photos from the Shoot The Piano Player recording session:

It’s the 7th! My Single of the Month for May is “The Breeze”, recorded with Skyscape over two millennia.

I wrote this song when I was 17 years old; my friend Chris Hug and I had been debating whether it was possible to write an emotionally resonant song lyric without including any human (or anthropomorphized) characters. I thought this was possible. And maybe it is… I couldn’t do it, though.

My approach involved a Rube Goldberg chain of cause and effect, but in the end the only way to make it worthwhile was to introduce people – to have it all impact human beings. Ironically, “The Breeze” turned out to be my first love song, albeit a really goofy one. It’s also the first song I ever wrote on a guitar, which probably shows in the chord progression and the opening riff.

Skyscape recorded “The Breeze” that summer (1993… ouch!). At the time we didn’t know whether we wanted to be Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors or Dream Theater, so we sounded pretty much like Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors and Dream Theater all playing at once, and not necessarily the same song. “The Breeze” ended up a casualty of our non-approach, crushed under, like, 50 tons of mëtal.

With the 20th anniversary of Skyscape’s first album, Band Of The Week, approaching, a bunch of us got together to reimagine and rework some of the old tunes. “The Breeze” got the most dramatic facelift; almost nothing of the original recording remains. We kept Steve Theater’s hyperkinetic drums in the choruses, and Sean Gould’s ringing chords in verse two, but the rest is new. Alex Dubovoy added a more textural set of acoustic and electric guitars, and Mike Keaney – who had joined the band about a month after we finished Band Of The Week – finally got to record the bassline he had played live so many times in the early ’90s. I put down some piano, B3 and mellotron (the only keyboard on the original was a now-dated synth pad), and Joe Abba made his Skyscape debut with an entire section’s worth of 11/8 percussion.

The biggest change is in the vocal track. Instead of my dorky solo lead, my friend Maryann Fennimore joined me to make the song a dorky duet. (Maryann is on April’s Single of the Month, too; no matter what weird-ass shit I’ve asked her to sing, she’s always been such an awesome sport.) And since no Skyscape song is complete without Dom, we added a triple harmony at the end: Dom, Mike and Alex.

I definitely have a soft spot for “The Breeze”… with its odd time-signatures and chord structure quirks, the track represents a turning point in my understanding of songcraft. It’s nerdy and a little silly, and it reminds me of how little I’ve actually changed since I was 17!

——-

Don’t forget, the 7th of every month is Single of the Month day here at the Song Foundry. We’re already hard at work mixing next month’s track, which will be brought to you by the initials A.F., R.G., G.M., J.S., and L.B., and the word “kalimba”!

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 keep hearing that the ’90s are “back”. I can kinda see it… I mean, there’s flannel plaid on every mannequin at the mall. But it’s like when all the hair metal bands reverbed up their drums, strung half a dozen blues riffs together and claimed to be channeling Zeppelin. C’mon, Led Zep was about so much more than that.

Reality Bites was available on demand so I watched it last night. I had never seen the movie… at the time it got too much hype, so true to my Gen X roots I passed on it. Watching it now depressed the living shit out of me. I don’t know that the film really captured the essence, the energy of the time – in fact, nah, it didn’t – but it did serve to remind me how cool the ’90s were. How cool we were. How cool we’re not now.

I’ve beaten generational demographics to death in other posts, and that’s only a smidge of the story here anyway. This is really about nostalgia.

I spend a lot of time dicking around in my own past. Not just musically. I use Facebook every day. For people my age, Facebook is a Ouija board through which we contact spirits from our past. You send out messages; ghosts reply from beyond. You can correspond with them, recount memories, share inside jokes. But you’ll never encounter one in person. They don’t exist in the real world – they’re spectral apparitions of people whose bodies still walk the earth, but are now being used for different lives, with different interests, different priorities, personalities marked and molded by experiences that did not include you.

I don’t mean to say that a Facebook seance isn’t enjoyable and comforting – it is, or we wouldn’t all engage in them every day – or that you wouldn’t appreciate the person your old pal has become if you got to know each other again in real life. But for the most part, the interaction is less a friendship than a mutual haunting.

My favorite musical endeavor lately is Sevendys – I think I’ve made that clear. Fresh music, wonderful new collaborators. I find it exciting and energizing. But my second favorite right now is Skyscape. Maybe it’s because the ’90s are back, or maybe it’s because, for Skyscape, they never ended.

Dom and I (and our legion of bandmates) generated so much material so quickly, and recorded so much of it, that I have albums’ worth of Skyscape music stored in bite-sized lo-fi chunks on old 4-track cassettes and floppy discs. A lot of it is terrible. Most of it is badly performed and indifferently recorded. But it’s full of energy and ideas which are begging to be harnessed and shaped by experienced hands.

When we work on Skyscape music, so much of it is about the people we are today – the skills we’ve developed, the attention to craft and context. But just as much of the process involves the people we were in the ’90s, the kids who built this foundation of ideas and sensibility, who laid down the trail of breadcrumbs by leaving so many recorded artifacts behind. On a Skyscape record, instrumental components are sourced from 20 years of material, as though everyone who was ever in the band is still a member – eternally young, free and full of passion.

For me, bringing these tracks together is like living in all times of my life at once. I think that’s how so many people my age are desperate to feel; I’m grateful to that younger version of me for the opportunity.

Here’s a perfect example in progress. This track started as a Portastudio recording made live at Dom’s 1992 high school graduation party. I was using my 4-track as a mixer and took the opportunity to pop in a cassette. The band was horrible… it wasn’t even really a band. Dom, Rob Hill, Sean Gould and I set up in a line – two guitars, no bass or drums. But our attempt at covering “Hey Jude” was as hilarious as it was awful, and I decided to see what I could make of it.

I thought adding a deadpan full-band arrangement would help the vocals seem even funnier and more absurd. Step one was to add drums. My preference was to have drums that sounded similarly 4-tracked, and sure enough I was able to find a suitable performance: drums from early 1993, when we were demoing songs for Band Of The Week. In this case, we pointed one microphone towards Loren Wiseman’s basement kit and he played “Age Song” at a tempo which was, coincidentally, a dead match for “Hey Jude”. I flew the drums in, added some tambourine, piano and a couple of backing vocals, and here we are. Still needs bass, guitar and more backup singers, but it’s turning into something listenable and fun!

Skyscape | “Hey Jude” | rough mix
Domenic Maltempi: vocals
Dom’s cousin Tina: vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, backing vocals, tambourine
Lisa Brennan: backing vocals
Loren Wiseman: drums
Rob Hill: guitar
Sean Gould: guitar
Adapted from a live recording at Dom’s house, July 1992

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.

Sevendys’ next session: Presidents’ Day weekend in sunny LA. Chuck Rainey will be joining us once again, along with a few other surprise guests. The venue: EastWest Studio Three, where The Mamas & The Papas used to record… and the Beach Boys created Pet Sounds. We’re pretty psyched!

Here’s Collider performing “California Sun” live at CBGB, December 17, 1999, at an event called the Ramones Cyberpunk Blitz. [The Blitz was technically the launch party for Arturo Vega's officialramones.com, which was and will always be the only website endorsed by all of the Ramones while they were alive - both ramones.com and the late band members' individual sites were developed posthumously by their families, who then strongarmed Arty into giving up the officialramones domain and changing his site's name to RamonesWorld.]

The Cyberpunk Blitz featured 10 bands doing Ramones covers and a performance by Joey. All of the participants were asked to play under a Ramones-themed pseudonym; we changed our name to Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Stuff for the occasion. Because we were the only band with a keyboard player, we got to do some of the more esoteric tunes – “Howling At The Moon”, “We Want The Airwaves”, “All’s Quiet On The Eastern Front”, and this one.

That’s Chris De Rosa on drums, Bonnie Bowers on bass, Sean Gould on guitar, and yours truly. Video courtesy of Chris De Rosa.

On Tuesday, September 21, I get to do something for which I’ve waited 11 years: put The Cutting Room Floor in my rearview mirror.

I started working on this record in 1999. I finished mixing it in 2006, but it still took another four years to get ‘er the rest of the way. Musically and visually, the vinyl record is the best thing I ever made. It comes out on Tuesday, as does the compact disc version of the album. I’ve made them available a couple days early right here. If you’re gonna buy this record – which I hope you are – and you’re generous enough to wanna help me make back some of the money I’ve spent producing it, buy from that link. Here it is again.

Here’s a player that will stream the whole record:

You can embed this on your Facebook wall if you like; just cut and paste the following link to share:

http://music.jeddavis.com/album/the-cutting-room-floor

The resulting player will actually stream the album right from your Facebook wall, with a link to buy it. I would appreciate if you passed that along! And say something nice about it, would ya?

In exchange for your kind support, I give you…
10 THINGS YOU DID NOT KNOW ABOUT THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR (one per song):

1. The title track was recorded entirely on cassette using a Portastudio. Organ, electric piano, accordion, vocal.

2. The piano at the beginning of “Before I Was Born” was originally at the end. There is a downward walk at the end of the last chorus, which was meant to flow right into the cliched chords of “Lean On Me” as the song faded out. But Dave wanted more of the bridge, so he copied and flew it to the end of the song, after the last chorus. That left the piano part without a home, so he moved it to the top.

3. The arcade I mention in “Enough” was a place called XS in Times Square. It’s no longer there; I can’t even find a photo of their giant TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH sign on the Internet. Weird. I did a show there with Collider back in 1999.

4. The instrument at the beginning of “Let Go” is an electric zither, played by Brian Dewan. Brian designed and built it himself.
4a. I played drums on the track but Tony decided against mixing them in… definitely the right choice.

5. I wrote “Blood” right after getting out of a bad contract with some music biz old-schoolers in 2000. They kept telling me I could be the next Graham Gouldman if I would just lock myself in a room and “write million-sellers!” Then they tried to trick me into signing over publishing rights to four songs.
5a. The drums on “Blood” are a combination of loops and live kit, which I played – the same drum set Steve Drozd used on The Soft Bulletin.

6. The vocal in the verses of “Denny’s 3am” is from the original demo of the song, recorded in Sean’s grandmother’s attic in 1997. There was an innocence about that take which I really liked, so I flew it into the finished track right before we mixed, replacing my studio vocal.
6a. The Denny’s on Western Avenue in Albany, where we recorded the group vocal for “Denny’s 3am”, is now a Five Guys. Great burgers, but what a bummer. By the way, yes – I did pay royalties to the folks who wrote the “Three’s Company” theme for its use during the conversation in the hidden track.

7. The piano on “Interesting Times” was recorded after hours in a Latham, NY piano store. The piano we used was gorgeous but it hadn’t been tuned; Tony had fits trying to mix it.

8. “Native Son” was recorded live to tape in one take.
8a. At the time I recorded “Native Son”, Sean was hanging out with a singer named Aimee Allen who had just signed with Atlantic. Aimee got way into the track and played it for her A&R guy, who said: “Good song. You should totally rip that off.”

9. The “I Have A Rose” rose was my most prized possession. I don’t have it anymore… somebody threw it out when I wasn’t looking.

10. I recorded the vocal at the top of “Queens Is Where You Go When You’re Dead” on the J train at 4:00 in the morning. A week later, I was again on the J at 4am, riding home from work, when three dudes dragged a guy into my subway car, stabbed him right in front of me, and then ran off as the train doors opened. The victim, gushing blood, staggered out onto the same platform; the doors closed behind him. I have no idea what became of that dude; the incident did not make the news.

Okay, that’s too grim a note to end on. How about one more for the hidden track:

11. We almost got kicked out of Denny’s for pounding on the table for the “Denny’s 3am” recording. This brings to mind the Denny’s Appreciation Society, a UAlbany student organization formed for the express purpose of getting the school to pay for their fourthmeal. They did in fact receive enough funding for one trip to Denny’s, during which they kicked up so much noise they were all banned from the establishment!

Enjoy my record, friends.

Last summer, two magazines I was designing folded simultaneously and I found myself with some extra time on my hands. I took the opportunity to hit the road with three of my favorite musicians: Reeves Gabrels, Mike Keaney and Matt Johnson. We drove west to St. Paul, south to Lenexa, Kansas, and then back home, stopping along the way at anyplace that would have us. And we hit as many Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives locations as we could find on the route.

It was a blast, and every show was captured on my trusty digital stereo recorder. A couple were even multitracked by the venue. When we got home, I collated representative tunes from each show into an audio souvenir of the tour. Dave McNair did a stunning job massaging takes from different rooms and sound systems into one smooth set, and the result is CELEBRATION PARTY!, which came out today at iTunes, Amazon, and every other such digital retailer.

You can listen to the album in its entirety right here at the Song Foundry, of course – and also purchase the download in a package with one of the silkscreened posters from the tour if you like. Reeves and I signed and numbered 50 of the posters, which I gotta say look awesome. I drew the poster in crayon (after the work of Kazunari Hattori), and then the great Kayrock of Brooklyn printed up a sweet batch.

Here’s video of “We Wait And We Wait” from the tour’s first stop, in Pittsburgh, PA.

I needed a long weekend, and here one is!

Working on another Amy Willey mix with Eric Jarvis; hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you in a couple of days. The song is called “Not This Way” and it’s one of my favorites from the Structure days, though the arrangement here is very different. Brian Dewan shines on this version, with layers of electric zither, accordion, and theremin.

We did a lot of the overdubs during a similarly long weekend at a studio in Catskill called Old Soul – a beautiful place with every keyboard instrument you could want to play. I was able to add some real clavinet and mellotron to “Not This Way”, though the mellotron was typically out of tune. Brian worked the pitch wheel while I played.

Wait, I have pictures! These were taken on April 12-13, 2008.