Today was studio day with sessioneer John from and in Brooklyn. We were at Vice & Virtue Studios on Franklin Ave owned by Rocky Gallo who worked as an engineer at the famous Cutting Room Studios in New York for many years (he has a great old Neve desk). I arrived at 11.59AM but getting there from Jersey City was a series of unlikely obstacles. I left the house with Jeanne, Olivia left a little later on her own adventure. We took the Path train to Manhattan where we parted, Jeanne to work, me to make my way to Brooklyn. The problem was that my MetroCard needed refilling and I only had a $50 bill, the machine didn’t like it and after ten minutes of inserting it asked me if I wanted to put $50 on my card, “No”, so it spat out the money. Apparently, it wasn’t going to give me change for a $20 purchase. I went upstairs to Starbucks, I’ll buy a coffee and get change, Starbucks wouldn’t take my $50 bill either. So, I used my debit card for a coffee and a think. Why not use my debit cards (Portuguese and English) in the machine? Obvious, except it won’t accept foreign cards. I called John, he told me to get a taxi, no taxis, I walked to Broadway and eventually found one, $35 instead of 4$ on the train and a lot of nonsense, stress and bother before I even started, at least it was a beautiful day.

Rocky had some amps set up for me already (a newer Vox and a Fender Princeton in one format, a Marshall quad box and heads in another) and John had ordered some guitars for me to play which soon arrived from S.I.R. hire. A newer Gretsch (not bad actually), a newer Strat with high-powered pickups and a Rick 12 with old strings that were tricky to keep in tune, bad intonation and strung thick string first. The sound was there but it was a struggle, hired guitars are a crap shoot but there is no alternative in the present circumstances. I played on four tracks throughout the day and night across nine hours. David who played on the record and drummer Conrad, who I already knew from playing with Ed Rogers and The Silos (we did gigs in Germany with The Silos when I was in The Saints), visited. It was a good day, lots of ideas down, great to work with John and Rocky.

John and I left to meet Olivia in Bedford Ave for dinner. She had been galavanting around Manhattan, walking along the Hudson, hitting Battery Park, the 9/11 memorial and finally going to The Late Show and sitting in the audience watching Stephen Colbert and guests in the flesh. These are our last days in America and it was nice to be in Brooklyn as I used to live there, a slightly longer hike back to Jeanne’s in Jersey City and Olivia’s MetroCard was playing up but we made it back, long day, great day, musical day.

Music today has been Stackridge’s fascinating debut album, released in 1971. Catchy, experimental, thoughtful, funny, arty, great songs, great players. One of my favourite eccentric English seventies bands. By the way, it’s another Hipgnosis album cover.

Music Of The Daze

The problem with being on the road is that you get in at 2 AM and the hotel wants you out by 11 AM (unless you need to leave earlier to reach the next show). Say you get to bed by 3 AM, if you’re lucky, and you have to be up by 9.30 AM at the latest, in time to miss breakfast and with only six and a half hours of sleep night after night. Could be worse, I’m not complaining, I could be in a war zone, but the only thing that keeps you healthy apart from proper food, is proper sleep, something to combat the long days of travelling, the hours and hours at the venue from soundcheck to encore, meet and greet, to the hotel lobby, and then there’s your washing. Heaven forbid you get sick. It was easier in your twenties, I’m 65 this year and I find myself collapsing into bed rather than jumping into it. We have 13 shows in a row in England in March, less travel time between cities helps but I still like to do a language lesson, write the blog every day, visit record and bookstores and eat properly as well as sleep to preserve my voice because when you do this you spend two hours singing and at least two hours talking and you need to be doing both, as well as concentrating on words, tuning and delivery whilst quipping your way through the introductions. Luckily playing the guitar just happens.

We were out of the Maryland hotel between 11 and 11.30AM and yes, they called from reception to remind us to vacate the room. Next door there was a garage but as we pulled in to refuel I noticed I was missing an earring, the one sessioneer Fred gave me as I’d lost one somewhere in Porto. Coincidentally I noticed it was gone as I was speaking to Fred on the phone. I went back to the hotel while Olivia filled up and there it was on the bathroom floor. We were now ready to leave and happy to be driving in the light without the rain pouring down. But another issue has come up. We don’t have an ‘EZpass’ to get through tolls and some toll roads don’t take cash or card, so we can’t use them – New Jersey Turnpike, yes, I-95 toll sections, no. Consequently, hours are piled onto our drive time as well as strange routes all around the houses, down narrow country lanes and through Mrs Johnson’s back garden.

We met sessioneer NJ Brian hours late at Guitar Center in Cherry Hill. I was going to buy a Taylor 12-string that had been shipped from another store. I tried it and I didn’t like it, it also had no case. I also tried a Guild but the problem is that none of these guitars are set up to play. The first thing you do when you buy a guitar is give it to a luthier and he hands you back the guitar set up to your specs, intonated, new strings, the string gauges you want, the action height. None of these things are included in the price. You have to have a vision, experience and a lot of knowledge to know that the instrument you are buying is the right one for you because your ears and your hands aren’t experiencing the best version of what you hold in your hands. In the end, Brian said I could use his Takamine 12-string, it’s set up, I like it. I will admit that an amazing guitar does talk to you even if it’s sick.

We exchanged guitars in the car park, Brian got his two 12-strings, the Takamine and the Taylor that he’d lent me, he also took my Seagull to look after it whilst I’m not in the US. Taking guitars across the seas on multiple planes isn’t the best idea, so I have guitars here. It’s harder (more like impossible) to do with the electrics and the amps because of the costs to duplicate everything. We said goodbye and drove north, it was dark now but not raining and we were on a Turnpike with no trucks. Nothing is worse than being sandwiched by 18-wheelers at speed in bad weather. If you slow down it’s even more dangerous, you have to keep up with the traffic flow. We decided that we need an SUV for the height and visibility, not a saloon car that feels vulnerable amongst the monsters.

On this trip we had managed to meet quite a few sessioneers but not Chris who lives in New Jersey, this was our chance, we had a car and were on our way back to Jersey City and so we went via his house in Bloomfield for a cup of tea. Great to meet, stoopid to think we nearly didn’t when he was actually the nearest to us. We had to rush out to get the car back before 11.30 PM and we wound our way through the Jersey streets until we were back where we started. We parked and got an Uber back to Jeanne’s, what a relief, we weren’t dead.

Music today has been UFO‘s No Heavy Petting because it’s just got a reissue with extra tracks and for all the dodgy issues with these NWOBHM records that the indie intellectuals like to expose, I like a bit of dry-as-a-bone seventies Schenker guitar. The title with its Hipgnosis cover, comes from a sign in the English swimming baths in the seventies. It reminded me of the time I went swimming in a pool in Glasgow whilst on tour with AAE that said, “No Nude Showering”.

Music Of The Daze

Time to drive to Maryland but first Jeanne was showing me where someone had left a pile of cassette tapes on the street for people to take. Apparently, a lot had gone already since the previous day but I did take two sealed blank Maxell tapes as I like to get ideas for songs down on cassette at home. The tapes that were still there were seventies artists, I imagine recorded from albums (and meticulously labelled) in an effort to have as much music as possible. The albums you bought were one thing but taping your friends’ albums was an affordable way to increase your collection. Not good for the artist financially but no one can ever afford every cool record that gets released, this way at least you got to spread the word and maybe buy the band’s next album on vinyl because you had a chance to listen to the tape a few times and become a fan. It’s like bootlegs, for all the hoo-hah about the artist not getting paid, it was only the true fans that ever bought them, and they had every album you made anyway, we liked the bootleggers for giving us more material. If the quality was dodgy (and sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t), you didn’t care, you loved it anyway. I’m not sure how many bootleggers got rich.

The trip down to Maryland was long and scary, not least because the Starbucks we stopped at on the highway had no espresso, no cream cheese for the bagels and no brown sugar for the oatmeal – the next one had the cream cheese but not the bagels, haha. The gods of weather and breakfast were against us from the start. We were trying to get down to meet sessioneer NJ Brian near Cherry Hill in South Jersey because he had my Seagull and was lending me another 12-string for the house concert at Tery and Jen’s in Frederick. The only problem was the traffic, the tolls and the accident that had us stopped for an hour on the highway. We were late but Brian was able to meet us in a Wawa car park anyway, with not two but three guitars. he brought me his Taylor and his Takamine 12-strings to choose from which I did later on.

Darkness fell and rain started to fall heavily making visibility difficult. There were trucks tearing down the highway into the blackness at seventy miles an hour, the roads were dimly lit and the reflection of the headlights on the wet black tarmac from the cars coming towards us made the whole second half of the trip precarious. We were originally trying to get to Tery and Jen’s at 4.30 but it was closer to 6.30 when we arrived, at least we were in one piece.

Lots of good homemade food helped as we met the friends and family that were there to see us and hear us. This house concert was way overdue, it was part of a pledge for the campaign for the second MOAT album Poison Stream from 2019 paralysed by the pandemic. Finally, we were here to honour the pledge. I chose the Takamine over the Taylor as my second guitar, a nice night with friends and music lovers, thanks Tery and Jen for having us and for all the support. By the time everyone had left and we’d had a last chat with our hosts and a welcome cuppa, we were pulling into the hotel car park at 2 AM. We checked in and I blogged, as you do.

Music today was Robert Wyatt’s Greatest Misses (2004/2020). Originally only available in Japan on CD in 2004, Domino finally released it on vinyl in 2020. I love Robert Wyatt, I couldn’t leave this album behind, thanks to Andy and George at Rough Trade NYC for having it.

Music Of The Daze

Question? What do you do in New York if you are not going to see a Broadway show? Answer? You go to the New York City Ballet at the Lincoln Center. So we did just that and went with Ahad of Afridi/Willson-Piper fame and Nurtaç of amazing person fame. Take thyself to the streaming sites and listen to the album or go to Bandcamp and purchase a download. We walked from the final Path train station at thirty-three and a third street to sixty-first and Western avenue where we were meeting Nurtaç and Ahad, that’s quite a hike on a cold day but the pace kept us warm and the bulging, buzzing and burgeoning early Saturday night New York streets kept our minds occupied as we sucked in the culture, unfiltered.

Earlier in the day we had walked into Jersey City to pick up a Turo car. This is a car that you hire from a private person. You don’t need a credit card (we don’t have one) which you need for the established companies so this is our only option. It’s all very modern, we went to the car park under his apartment building, found the car and took six photos of it from various angles which we then had to upload, this was supposed to unlock the car, it didn’t work. So, Olivia called the owner and he opened it remotely (just as impressive in my book). We parked, we left for the ballet.

The ballet was four ballets in one, Tchaikovsky/Allegro Brillante, Pärt/Liturgy, Gounod/Walpurgisnacht and Stravinsky/The Firebird. It was beautiful, the high art of ballet, the magic, the skills, the choreography and the music and the atmosphere of the David H. Koch Theater at the Lincoln Center, oh yes, and great seats. Afterwards, we walked through the legendary streets of New York, past Central Park, then Columbus Circle, places I know from having a management office nearby in the distant past.

Eventually, we came to Sixth Avenue where we said goodbye to Ahad and Nurtaç. We walked down to thirty-three and a third street via a sandwich shop, where I talked to a Mexican lad from Oaxaca. Olivia stopped off for a burrito, I waited outside where a man approached me for a ‘donation’ in the Year Of The Rabbit. My explanation that I was cashless because my wife was in charge, amused him greatly.

Music today has been Estonian composer Arvo Pärt‘s Fratres (from Tabula Rasa), turned into a ballet (Liturgy) by New York City Ballet resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.

Music Of The Daze

Waking up in Jersey City half an hour after we are usually in the studio. Jeanne told us there was no hot water and it seems that I was the cause, going to bed the night before, bleary-eyed after a long day, I left the tap on. Hot water came back as soon as we realised what had happened but not in time for us to get out of the house and into Manhattan. It was a slow start and all the plans were running away from us as the fingers on the clock span around so fast it only took a minute for an hour to fly by. What exactly is a New York minute? This from the Urban Dictionary: “A New York minute is an instant. Or as Johnny Carson once said, it’s the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn. It appears to have originated in Texas around 1967. It is a reference to the frenzied and hectic pace of New Yorkers’ lives. A New Yorker does in an instant what a Texan would take a minute to do.” Interesting seeing that Texas is the place we have just left, I’m not sure I agree.

We took the Path train to 33rd Street (or thirty-three and a third street as I call it). Two heavily geared-up transit cops were hovering over the seats I wanted to sit at so I asked if we could sit there and they said “sure” and moved away. They have their belts with all this stuff: whistles and torches and gloves and batons, handcuffs and that nasty-looking gun on the hip. They were off the train at the next stop and we were soon alighting and were quickly up the stone steps into the street on 6th Avenue. We stopped at a coffee shop and immediately got talking to two women from Argentina. “Then you’re sitting on the boulevard, with a girl from Argentina”. They were sisters having a fiftieth birthday holiday for one of them. One of them was a teacher and had heard of the Argentinian seventies band Vox Dei – but didn’t like rock music, haha.

Me ol’ mate Craig called me from Nashville whilst we were having a sushi snack and admiring a young fellow’s high leather boots (they had pockets). He took off his sunglasses to reveal blue eyeshadow and a lot of rouge, I just had to talk to him, so I went and told him how great his boots were, he was humbled by the compliment. I had a long chat with Craig, he and his wife Yuriko own a restaurant in Nashville (Peninsula, try it, it’s different). Craig has played guitar live with me before and was in a band called Maplewood in NYC which is where I know him from. We decided that Rick Rubin’s beard wasn’t real.

We walked up to Rough Trade which is next to Radio City Music Hall where we saw the Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes (an amazing show if you like old-fashioned entertainment). I’d ordered two hard-to-find reissue Mars Volta albums last time I was in the city, Frances the Mute (2005) and De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003). Andy in the store recognised me when I came in and immediately knew what I was there for, but he couldn’t find the albums for ages. He called George who I know from the Brooklyn store for help and spent a good deal of time searching but found them in the end, they were secretly stashed in an odd corner, thanks for the effort Andy. I also bought a Henry Cow album, Unrest (1974). It was on an American label, us record collector types like that kind of thing.

Finally, it was getting dark and we had a brainstorm, let’s go and see a Broadway musical, so we did. We checked to see what was on and decided on A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical, it was a two-for-one ticket and yes we knew all the songs. I met him once in a studio in LA. I was listening to Sticky Fingers and he came into the lounge from the studio next door and said, “What’s this, Dylan?” – “No,” I said, “The Stones, Jagger/Richards, Sticky Fingers” – “Ah, ok,” he grunted and left the room, hah, what a thrill to actually have an interaction with the man, and a musical interaction at that. The man who played him in the show, Will Swenson, totally had his voice, he was made for the role. The real Neil Diamond is 82 in three days. He has retired from touring as he has Parkinson’s Disease. The show was a hoot.

Music today has been Henry Cow’s Unrest (1974), experimental, progressive, a bit jazzy and odd, what more could you want as a contrast to Neil Diamond, enjoying both in the context of their separate skills.

Music Of The Daze