Doane Perry's Diary - January 1999

Flight to London

January 4th- 19th--Rehearsals for recording begin. The typical pattern that generally follows is that we will work on a piece of (often untitled) music in the morning, demo it in the afternoon and if any of us are feeling brave enough, possibly try to go for a master take in the early evening. If that doesn’t happen we will all go away and chew on it overnight and try to nail a backing track the next morning with obvious repairs and fixes to follow. Vocals and lead melodies go on later. Although the process varies from song to song we often get the best results when we can do backing tracks together as a band. Unfortunately this isn’t always possible because once we have several pieces going, all in various stages of development, we find ourselves all working on different things on different tracks. This also has its good points. It’s usually exciting to hear how a track has developed from the last time you heard it or added anything.

The down side is when you’re the guy who has been there for all the overdubs; you’ve just heard it too many times. Ian is usually that guy so sometimes he just has to go away and work on something else while one of us is the tape operator for the one doing overdubs. One of the entertaining diversions of recording this way is looking at Ian’s lyrics and trying to work out to which songs they belong. Sometimes we just get a song title to go by, sometimes I just make up my own to give me a clue which one it is when I have to refer back to my chart. I have recently re-discovered some fantastic alternate titles for many songs off “Roots to Branches” before I found out what they were really called.

We all have a different methodology as to how we write out and remember the music and if any of us had to switch charts and reinterpret the music through another band members brain it would probably come out sounding like John Cage’s music…..in other word’s it would be a f!#*ing disastrous musical trainwreck! Apologies to any John Cage fans out there. All in all the record is turning out pretty well and beginning to take some kind of shape. Inevitably we will probably have more material than we can use but because we tend to record so much fairly quickly it is very hard to tell at this stage what will ultimately end up on the record. More about all this later.

Coincidentally and by sheer luck my father and his wife were over in England doing research for one of his projects and visiting some relatives of hers. Since we were recording only about an hour’s journey away I had to the opportunity to see them on two separate occasions. This was certainly an added dividend for me as I don’t get to see them often enough back in the U.S. since they still want to maintain East Coast residency and it’s five hours on a plane for either one of us. So it was nice to hang out, catch up, go to The National Gallery and eat Indian food together.

The Tradeshow

January 20th-31st-- I fly back to America and go directly into rehearsals with my colleague Vince DiCola for the upcoming NAMM (National Association of Musical Merchants) show in Los Angeles next week. This is an industry only trade show which happens every winter in L.A. and apart from the Music Messe in Frankfurt in March is the biggest trade show of it’s kind in the world. We have been hired by Alesis, a manufacturer of high-end audio gear, to demonstrate some of their new equipment. Now ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the fact that I have been trying to keep all the new Tull music in my head this month which hasn’t left a lot of time to be working on anything else in a meaningful way.

This now leaves me only a few short days to relearn some fairly involved pieces that I performed about eight years ago on my instructional video as well as some potential new Thread pieces which I’ve never played live. On top of learning the music and working out appropriate arrangements I have to program their new Drum module to try to coax out of it all the performance features I think I will need for our set. This wouldn’t be so bad if I was just playing my usual acoustic kit, however this was an unfamiliar setup as it was comprised completely of electronic pads and their Drum module - nothing acoustic.

Oh God, what have I done?! I think I might have been just a teeny bit optimistic about the time element. Coupled with this dawning realization and reverse jet lag was the very real possibility that I in fact wouldn’t see the actual drum pads and unit until the night before the show opened because I was working with the BETA unit, not the actual setup I would be using at the show! Yikes, if I hadn’t got the willies by that point I was certainly getting them now. Well needless to say I was up until 5am the night before the NAMM show programming and playing trying to get everything prepared.

Rap Drummer?

One of that evening’s highlights occurred around 3am when two beefy security guards appeared at the door of the Alesis theatre where I was working. Sure that they were going to tell me to shut up or keep it down, instead they came in and sat down and when I stopped one of them said “ Man, you was phat! Do you write beats?”

Unaware that this was a compliment in rap terminology, and still musing over the possibility that these two security guards were informing me of a weight problem, I said, “ Uhh, yeah, I guess so.” The other one said “Great man, we got a rap group and that was jammin’. Why don’t you come and write some beats for our rap record.” So don’t be surprised if you see me in my new alter-ego incarnation as ‘D Jazzy P- Fresh Ponce of Woodland Hills’.

The best and weirdest part of the evening/morning was when I left at 5am and there was not a single solitary soul in the entire hall. My own private NAMM show!! This was absolutely fantastic- I walked up and down all the aisles completely undisturbed, looking at all the interesting exhibits without the usual carnival barker atmosphere but this turned quickly into a Rod Serling Twilight Zone moment for me. In my sleep deprived, jet lagged state of mind I became momentarily unglued, imagining I had somehow willed away the presence of thousands of happy techno-lusting souls looking forward to the newest unveiling of the gear of their dreams, because of the inexorable certainty of my approaching deadline.

Oh selfish, selfish me! How could I deprive all the cheery denizens of bits and bites of the thrill that comes once a year and is not dependent on Santa Claus’ list of ner-do-wells to be ignored? WHAT DELERIUM HAS GRIPPED ME? Oh, wait a minute it’s 5 in the morning…. no wonder no one’s here. Better go home and sleep this off.

After all of that the show went remarkably well and was actually a lot of fun. My gear didn’t blow up or even false trigger and the very full houses we got for every show seemed to really enjoy it and as a result we did too. So a great big thank you to the Gods of Midi Technology! Vince and I decided we wanted to stay away from the endless NAMM noodling you so often see at these shows and play some actual music although I DID have to take a solo every show to put the drum module through it’s paces. I suppose a bit of NAMM noodling took place there, but hell, if you can’t noodle at NAMM where can you noodle? The Ed Sullivan character actor from “Pulp Fiction” introduced Vince and I every show on the big video screen behind us in a mock re-enactment of the real Ed Sullivan show which was pretty spooky to watch as he is a dead ringer in voice and look for dear old dead Ed.

Quite a surprising moment for me took place the first day as I was standing around between shows at the booth. They had constructed a single rather large screen out of eight large TV monitors grouped together and were rotating all kinds of material on it ranging from new products to who was appearing in their theatre. I had forgotten that earlier I had given them a video from a video drum magazine that I had appeared in that was somewhat current. I had carefully earmarked the section to be used but unfortunately they didn’t deem that suitable for their purposes and chose instead some much older footage from the same video. Suddenly looming before me was an unmistakable version of an earlier self, complete with fully intact hairline and ultra slim waist. Whoa, what happened to THAT guy? Not so sure about that hair and I bet those pants would be a tad on the snug side now too.

I was still smarting from a recent and rather nasty altercation with Ian’s phony measuring tape which he had specially made up to make a 36” waistline magically appear as a 42”. He thought this was a pretty funny joke, but I am personally disinclined to believe anything except my own eyes, and I’m needing glasses as well for those. So ultimately it was a good month – busy and productive – now I’m going to have a little sleep. And how was your January?……….

And how was your January?