A kaleidoscope of images and colours, sun, rain, pigeons, dogs, sparrows, and seagulls in the square. I was amazed to discover the dogs didn’t have wings considering the company they kept. But no cats, mice and no insects, only the occasional mosquito, bee, and house fly inside but where are they on the outside? Maybe the invisible winged dogs are snapping them up. But seriously, butterflies, moths, bees and wasps are in decline. At this rate, more than 40% of insect species will be gone in the coming decades. Anyone who was in a car in the seventies remembers the insects on the windscreen and the radiator, the bonnet and the headlights and then there’s now.

Swimming left me tired out today, not sure why. I couldn’t get much done because of it. Sometimes you need to recover your strength and the idea that you have to exert yourself in order to not feel like you have exerted yourself next time is odd. Swimming buddy Hugo came over, we dropped off at his place too, we righted the world’s wrongs, maybe that’s why I was so tired, saving the world takes it out of you.

I always remember that in Los Angeles sunny days often cloud over but here in recent days, it’s the opposite, I leave at midday in a grey drizzle and come home to a sunny blue sky. I’m busy with the sessioneer projects right now. My responsibilities at this time are lots of listening to songs and sessions and sorting out everyone’s work. Someone asked me how can you work on so many different projects at the same time? Well, the answer is variety and a broad palette make each project new and interesting. Each session has new questions, different songs and styles and with a producer hat on you can make sense of many different projects simultaneously. The big-name producers don’t just work on one group’s records in preparation and in some cases, they really do produce more than one major album at the same time – although tonight, I can’t think of an example.

So Arktik Lake, Minneapolis Fred, Space Summit Jed, New Jersey Brian, New Jersey Chris, Atlanta Craig, Brooklyn Matt, Brooklyn John, Chicago Mike, Ohio Jeff, New Orleans Paul and Mike, Brooklyn Rajan, Surrey Noel, Montreal Noelle, Philadelphia Abby and Nick are all exploding with ideas. Afridi/Willson-Piper is imminent as a digital album and I’ll be writing something about Indiana Brian who has also just released some material for your listening pleasure when I get a tick. Busy.

Tomorrow I’m taking my pedalboard to Jorge the fixer to have him help me wire it up without it looking like a mess. It’s a fiddly job and once you’ve decided which pedal goes where you have to connect them to the power pack and then to each other for the signal flow. You also have to think about how pedals suck the signal out of your guitar in a bad way, losing tone when everything is off, which defeats the object of using pedals/effects to enhance your sound. But when you think about the delay, phase, fuzz, distortion boost, chorus, wah-wah, compressor, and tuner that’s a lot of interrupted signal path and when you take your guitar lead out of the first pedal and plug it directly into the amp, you might be shocked at the amount of general tone your guitar is losing. In the good old days Hendrix, Page, and Blackmore weren’t using multi-pedal pedalboards.

Music today has been The Move’s four albums, Move (1968), Shazam (1970), Looking On (1970) and Message From The Country (1971). It’s an interesting history that went from a slew of Top 20 singles in the sixties, Night Of Fear, I Can Hear The Grass Grow, Flowers In The Rain, Fire Brigade, Blackberry Way, Curly, and Tonight, Chinatown and California Man in the early seventies. They left behind the sixties sound for a harder sound on the seventies albums. Songwriter, singer and original member, Roy Wood, went on to form ELO with later member Jeff Lynne before forming glam band Wizzard. Drummer and original member Bev Bevan went with Jeff Lynne and ELO when The Move broke up. Original member and singer Carl Wayne left after two albums and eventually took over from Allan Clarke in The Hollies when he retired in 2000 but sadly died of cancer in 2004. Bassist Ace Kefford and guitarist Trevor Burton only made it to the first album, Rick Price came in for the middle two and followed Wood to Wizzard.

Music Of The Daze