So today it was 101°F/38°C but with the humidity, they said it felt like 120°F/49°C. I can tell you it was hard to be outside at all and today was not a studio day. Sarah and I got in the car and drove to Tone Shop Guitars, where I was going to put together a pedal board to use with Salim for the shows and to keep in the US for future studio projects and any live shows that may reveal themselves. We stayed there for a while, A/C on full in the car, working out what we needed and on the subject of AC/DC, Doty who worked there had me try a replica of Malcolm’s Gretsch plugged straight into a JCM 800 Marshall and a quad box, that was the sound and that was the replica, no pedals needed.

At one point we had to go up the road to buy some Velcro for the board making a few dangerous steps through the thick air and into a boiling hot car, we only had a mile to go so the A/C didn’t have much time to establish a cool environment and with the windows open it was pouring heat into heat. When we walked into the shop up the road, it was like diving into a swimming pool, unfortunately, what we wanted was easy to find and however much I talked to a member of staff, the inevitable beckoned – we had to get back in the car.

We dragged ourselves back into Tone Shop Guitars, finished off what we were building and headed back into town with at least some time for the A/C to kick in. We picked Olivia up from the accom, picked up some lunch from Trader Joe’s, and arrived at the studio where John was working on preparing files for sessioneer NJ Brian for the second Valley of Salt project and sessioneer Minneapolis Jed for the second and third Space Summit project. It takes time to transfer all the files as stems, meaning individual tracks. In Brian’s case, there are a lot of tracks, whereas with Jed, it’s just drums at this point, but there are still 21 songs worth of drums.

The lads in the band started to arrive around 6.30 PM, Rich and Jason joined John, Salim, and me, and we rehearsed till 10 PM. It’s 12 songs, some I know from working on Salim’s A Nuclear Winter album, which incidentally is out on Friday. It’s a rather large learning curve and I may need the chord sheets for the gigs with so many songs, but I’m getting there and at the shows, we will have Joe, who is actually the main guitar player in this band, he lives in San Antonio and couldn’t make the rehearsals.

The gigs:

Thursday, June 22nd – San Antonio – The Lonesome Rose
Friday, June 23rd – Austin – The Parish
Saturday, June 24th – Dallas Sons of Hermann Hall

Music today has been Kate Bush – The Kick Inside (1978), there was a reason, but I can’t remember what it was, but who needs a reason to listen to Kate anyway?

Music Of The Daze