Whatever Happened To… wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 1:34 am
The previews sound great, I dig it.
Is this going to be a road documentary movie as well as the concert footage? Definitely interested in that.
Maybe with dialogue if Dieter’s guys that worked on Ghosts by Michael Jackson want to take over my phone movie. The album clocks in at around 72 minutes. This album got made without a record company or a budget, and the only thing I kicked in for besides gas ,and tour expenses was the announcer because I thought I’d regret for the rest of my life if I didn’t. It was Dieter’s idea to use him, I contacted his brother, thecUFC guy, and I actually made it happen.
Because it became a project out of our love for rock, everybody kinda went all in on it. A last chance effort to keep the band together because I knew I had to stop touring soon.
I basically turned an experimental ‘let’s record one song if you got one’ free day in May at Dieter Dierks’ recording studio into a full double live concert album. And I was suffering from a nasty hernia I got from carrying my Marshall cab up two flights a stairs by myself. After I made the record in May I had to cancel all my summer shows so I lost a bunch of festivals, and big money gigs which had put me in extreme poverty since June. But whatever, I gave up food. I hope to get back on the road by winter but in my world getting started up again is difficult when I had to slam on the brakes to get that surgery.
But back in April, I just had the crazy idea to wanna capture the band as we are live doing all my songs and make the greatest live album ever recorded. In order to do that you needed to check all the boxes - a great announcer, a talk box solo, drum solo, a ballad, the best snare sound ever recorded. That type of shit. So I guess Dieter fell in love with my band, my songs, and my guitar playing, ( and maybe my dog). He’s an expert at live albums and I had the biggest producer fan crush on him. He worked 18 hour days to record it and mix it. He’s 80 years old.
His 2024 theater studio is way cooler than the room downstairs where Scorps and BNB made their albums.
So I convinced everybody we needed a ballad as an encore, and we all came back for one more day right before our last gig in Czech to cut it. And I found the talk box they used on Zoo and was able to use it on the ballad by putting the guitar solo isolated through the headphone and into my Marshall’s and then into the talk box as there are zero overdubs on this album. It’s just the band as we are at a typical live gig.
I’m not a pro video guy. But it’s amazing that I did that video on a crap iPhone.
I took random stuff shot on tour from my phone and rip YouTube, FB, and Insta videos taken by others and hope they sync, which is crazy but it kinda works. Pretty strange that the gig I used most of the footage sip far was over a year before we made the record and the guitar solos locked up so good. I’m getting better at editing but I’m kinda blind in my right eye.
It came about from manager David Krebs. He saw us play in NYC and the Whisky. It was just like old times, me scamming a day in a an expensive studio, and turning into an entire epic album.
Dieter pretty much captured us one-take live without a redo. So it’s got a certain amount of slop that seemed to work. It was very exciting to make a record again with a real producer. It was like a dream.
I wanted a visual to go with it but I didn’t wanna go the fake AI route. I did have fun finding a way to bring my dead friends back to life in They Only Love You When You’re Dead. And I’m very proud of my dog Pip on his song - Lying with Dogs.
If anyone out there wants to hear the whole album, I could send them if they dm me on fb but I can’t post it publicly.
Here I am, posting on sludge about a new album, just like old times.
