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Boneheads Gigs Musicians

Strange happenings at gigs

1. Half way to an out of state weekend gig riding in the guitar player’s van. I look over at him and he’s wearing two different shoes.

2. During load out of a gig there’s a big bar fight that’s gone outside. It’s very dark but you can see one dude on his knees beeing hammered in the face over and over. This dude is bloody and fucked up bad. He’s taking a real major beating. The person beating up this dude is a woman.

3. On break at a gig. Fine looking young woman comes up to the “band table.” She says “hi guys, I shaved my pussy tonight” and proceeds to lift her dress up and show us.

4. THE DRUNK BASS PLAYER:

Bass player gets drunk on his birthday. He’s really butchering the songs by the end of the first set. We go on break and call all the bass players we can find. We stall as long as we can but we have to go back on stage.

The bass player can hardly stand up at this point. He’s just playing garbage and rocking back and forth. The stage is about 5 feet off the dance floor. He falls of the stage but the audience just keeps catching him and pushing him back up on stage. Then he falls on the drum riser and ends up sitting on top of his bass right on the pickups. Let me tell you how nice that sounds…

The new bass player shows up! We throw the drunk bass player at the “band table” and start playing with the new one. After a song or two the drunk bass player wants to play again. Problem is, he can’t even walk now. So he CRAWLS up onto the stage and starts tugging at the bass. So the sober bass player hands the bass to him. He puts the bass on and starts playing. His face is now starting to turn blue because the guitar strap is not over his shoulder…its wrapped around his neck. He loses his balance and falls down the stairs on the side of the stage and plows over an entire table of drinks.

We go on break and throw him in a cab. We give the cabbie the dough and tell him where the drunk bass player lives. While driving away the drunk bass player yells out the window…”I’ll be back”

5. BAR FIGHT WITH STRANGE ENDING:

I’m standing at the bar on break waiting for a drink. I hear this kind of wierd smacking sound, followed by something hitting my leg…. I hear another smacking sound and something hits my leg again. I look over to see one dude punching another dude in the mouth. Each time he punches the dude one of his teeth flies out and hits my leg.

These dudes are then forced to take the fight outside. Being an opportunist I grab my video camera and start taping the fight outside. In the background coming down the street is a jeep. The jeep suddenly swerves and flips over onto it’s roof, right in the middle of the street. I immediately turn my video camera to the jeep. Two dudes crawl out of the jeep and try to flip it over but they are too weak and too drunk. They kick the jeep a few times and call it a piece of shit. Then they look around…look at each other…then take off and leave the jeep there.

Categories
Boneheads Musicians Recording

The “Goth” band part I

Got a fun project with these “Gothic” rocker dudes. All they wear is black, with lots of silver jewelery, rings, chains etc… 3 piece power trio with semi gothic/opera vocals. They even bring their own silver chalices to drink wine from their 1 gallon jug they brought. They were even kind enough to bring me my own silver chalice!

We’re doing guitar trax and the guitar player is walking through the control room to the sound room. The layout of this old studio of mine had the JBL monitors hanging from the ceiling. They were fairly high up, but the dude was very tall. So he doesn’t see the speaker and BAM, he walks right into it. The speaker corner pierced right into the middle of his forehead and blood starts gushing everhwhere… The
dude went into shock and we took him into the lounge. We spent a couple of hours bandaging up his forehead and calming the dude down.

It took quite a while to calm him down and make him relax. I asked if he was ready to start laying down more guitar trax. Finally he was ready. So he walks into the control room and BAM! He hit’s his freaking forhead on the same speaker! SESSION OVER.

More to come…

Categories
Boneheads Musicians Recording

The drifter

I’m painting one of my soundrooms. I’m on top of a ladder covered with paint. A “walk in” client suddenly appears. (I don’t have walk ins…) He’s interested in recording. I say when do you want to record and he says “now.”

Well ok then. Let me clean the paint off my face…. So I ask him what kind of project we are about to start on. He’s going to sing. Great, so I ask him what music he’s going to sing to… “I don’t need music.” He says.

I ask “so you’re going to sing with no music, just acappella?” ….Yes.

DUDE IS TONE DEAF. After “singing” for an hour in the most sour, out of tune fashion he asks if I have a guitar.

“I’ve got a strat here, but no amp” I say

He’s cool with that, doesn’t need an amp so we plug the fucker right in! I hand him a tuner.. He hands it back to me “I don’t need that, I have perfect pitch. I’ll tune it myself.”

He definitely doesn’t have perfect pitch. In fact he has NO pitch. So he takes the guitar and doesn’t even tune it. He then has me roll tape and he starts to pluck the strings and put his fingers in random positions on the frets of the guitar! HE DOESN’T PLAY THE GUITAR! We lay down a tune of guitar and vocals.

I mix the tunes and make a master. At that point I inform him of his bill. He asks me if he could bring the bucks by later and I say “sure.” (I figure as long as this guy owes me money, he’ll never come back). So I let the guy go with his master in hand, without paying a dime. I watched him leave and he had no car. He just walked down the street… I picked up the paint brush and start painting again.

Categories
Boneheads Recording

The strangest engineer I ever knew

I was at another studio doing drums for a rock album. When all the tracking was done we asked the flaky engineer/owner to mix it. This guy was a piece of work. He’d go to the bathroom and disappear for hours. He spouted wierd gibberish for hours. Anyway, he says “we can’t mix until we have a spiritual moment.” HUH?

He proceeds to tell us how he was driving down the road and smelled smoke. He thought something was wrong with his car, but when he looked down he noticed his arms were on fire. Upon looking out the window of his car, he saw Jesus Christ floating above his car. The light from Jesus Christ was so bright, it was burning his skin!

So we say “cool, uh, can we mix now?”

Then he tells us he’s tired because he had sex with his wife for 8 straight hours. We’re saying “woa dude” but he says “it’s not physical sex, it’s spiritual sex.” Oh shit, here we go again…

He proceeds to tell us that when he has sex with his wife, they sit in a plain room with no pictures or items in the room…only one light hanging from the ceiling. They then have “spiritual sex” by starring into each other’s eyes without even blinking for hours and hours…

“Uh, can we mix now?”…..sure

A while into the mix he says he’s gotta take off for a while and lets us run the board while he’s gone.

We’re working the mix and tweaking when some guy we’ve never met walks into the control room. “Is Sam here?” the guy asks? We tell him we don’t know where he is… He say’s ok, then proceeds to unplug the Yamaha NS10 studio speakers and haul them off….

Categories
Recording

Banging your head against the wall

I’m working on some new music in the studio with my two buddies Kent and Matt. This is like our millionth studio project. We get together to work on some kind of music every Wednesday.

Last week we started to work on the drums of this new tune. We have some basic dummy tracks down from the week before (bass, keys, theremin). The music we usually do is very technical. This tune however, is much more straight ahead and simple. The tune has a shuffle groove at a medium pace. As a drummer (and a musician) I find it harder to play slower tempo tunes and sound tight than fast ones. This tune is no exception.

I did take after take last week on this simple tune. I just couldn’t get the groove happening to my satisfaction. After about 3 hours I threw my cans off and called it a night. My chops just weren’t there that night.

I played a gig last Friday night and I had hoped maybe that would get my chops back. It may have done the trick because tonight I sat down and did the tune after about 15 minutes of tracking. Not only did I do in 15 minutes what I couldn’t do in 3 hours last week, it sounded decent too. It just happened with no extra concentration and no forcing it.

So the moral to the story for me is something that has bugged me about doing studio work for the last 20+ years as an engineer. You have to be able to tell when your takes are happening and when they are not. If you sit there in the studio doing it over and over and over forever then move on! Do something else…go to dinner…do jumping jacks. Playing the same freaking take a million times will not usually result in an good sounding & inspired cut. If you can’t get it in the first few takes do yourself, your bandmates, your engineer and your record label a favor TAKE A BREAK.