Today in the coffee shop I got talking to a guy with whom I discussed greying hair, as you do. Later in the conversation, I discovered he used to live in Europe, in Stockholm (Vasastan), and was dating Miss Sweden, as you do. I talked to another guy in the coffee shop who had a laptop with an extension screen, that must have been some serious work needing to be done quickly to bother with the attachment. Out there in the Texan carpark, the mega pickups loom. I wonder how the Americans might feel about their vehicles if they were paying European petrol prices. The hike in ‘gas’ here due to the ongoing conflicts in the world is still lower than the petrol prices we had in Europe during Queen Victoria’s reign, although Victoria allegedly did drive a gas-guzzling pickup.

I’m missing the football, Argentina losing to Saudi, Germany losing to Japan but even when I’ve been in the studio for 12 hours, I still think, aw, do we have to go home? Recording music is a wonderful thing, playing live is too but adding that odd little inversion to that chord sequence that takes the whole section to another magical level is what it’s all about. Today we had our friend Paul Averitt come in. He played some hot-wristed mandolin on a track (and some guitar) and tomorrow we will have him in to sing some high backing vocals, not only does he have a tricky wrist, he has radical range. For those of you that really followed really, really closely, Paul was in The Volares which as I recall had Julianne singing and me playing guitar at some point.

John came in to play some drums, on this mostly acoustic extravaganza, low key, brushes. He made us start the rhythm tracks again because his metre is the one we should be playing to (not a click track) and there’s nothing like the feel of a good drummer for making a track great. I screamed throughout the song as you do when it’s acoustic, the result, we’ll see, we don’t know what we have till it’s been manicured like a posh person’s lawn.

The leaf blowers are out in force in the posh neighbourhood, blowing those dastardly autumn leaves away so the streets don’t look unsightly before Thanksgiving. Personally, a crunchy walk through fallen leaves, kicking them into the air is always one of the fun parts of this time of year. In England it was all about conkers, hurling sticks to get them from the high branches that hadn’t yet released their fruits. Then there was the drilling the hole through the middle without drilling a hole in your finger, threading the string with the knot and taking it to school to battle against other brave conker warriors. There were all kinds of tricks to make your conker indestructible, soak it in vinegar, bake it in the oven, give it a pep talk. Sometimes a sad barely breathing remnant would hang off a string, never giving up till the final blow.

Music today has been Alice Cooper’s classic album School’s Out (1972) which blew my mind as a teenager (I was 14). I remember hearing it at a caravan park in Rhyl just about when I was starting to play guitar. It was the band, not the frontman, although I was singing like him today, haha. Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith. Then there was their look, every parent in the land was scared, never realising that they aren’t the scary ones, it’s the ones that look like them.

Music Of The Daze