Kingtone

Happy New Year. Feels like it’s going to be an interesting one. To start it off as such, how about pulling out some skeletons in the closet?

Lauren Weisbecker, the twelve year old daughter of my high school bandmate and drummer, Will Weisbecker recently posted a comment on The Early Years. In response, I dug around for a live recording of our band, Renegade, that Will had unearthed and sent to me a few years back. Check out my completely bizarre guitar solo on this Lynyrd Skynyrd song:

Needle and the Spoon

Now, I’d like to think that I was channeling Robert Quine, but given the fact that I had no idea who he was back then, it is but wishful thinking.

While surfing around for that nugget in my strange but true audio folder, I found two others that merit exposure.

Heavy Cop

This was written and recorded by my friend and fab musician, Gunnar Madsen back in the late 90’s when Gunnar was a staff composer for Atari Games. He hired me to play metal guitar on this diddie for use in an auto racing arcade game called California Speed. Just imagine yourself tearing down Highway 101, becoming airborne, literally flying, smashing into trees, cars, rocks, and miraculously crossing the finish line - no doubt propelled by this double shot of caffeinated metal riffage. Since neither Gunnar nor I own any rights to this tune, I post it in the hope that one of us will get sued by Atari. We could use the exposure.

The game only received a very limited release, but I did encounter it once in real life while on tour with Ramona the Pest. We were hanging out in some sports bar in Denver, Colorado when, incredibly, the tune sort of wafted by. I exclaimed, ‘Hey that’s my guitar!’ to my skeptical bandmates, who made a beeline for the game and played it quite a few times.

Giant Jeans

This is a recording made in the late 90’s for an ad agency competition. Two friends of Steve Lucky’s worked for a big firm in SF and Steve got me in on the gig. We recorded it on a 1/2″ 8-track reel to reel deck at my warehouse space in Berkeley. Steve plays organ and I play the slide guitar bits. A fun tune that apparently earned an honorable mention, but lost out to…a heavy metal tune. Apologies for infringing on someone’s copyright here.

In the spring of 1997, I played electric guitar on The Power of a Hat, a fabulous record by Gunnar Madsen (The Bobs). I got the gig through my friend Tobias Hawkins, singer and drummer extraordinaire (Girlfriend Experience, Laundry, Counting Crows, Ramona the Pest, etc). Gunnar, whom I’d never met, sent me a CD of piano and voice demos and said he was looking for a “Marc Ribot/Elvis Costello” sort of vibe on the ‘lectric guitar. I liked what I heard and really wanted the gig, so I did something a bit audacious…I dumped a few of Gunnar’s demos onto my reel to reel 8-track, added some Tom Waits’ Raindogs influenced guitar and mailed a cd back to him…I guess it worked.

The sessions took place in a top of-the-line private recording studio called Sage Arts situated in the basement of a spectacular mansion an hour north of Seattle, WA and were produced by Kent Sparling - a veteran of George Lucas’ studio.

I must admit, I had some apprehension about the session going in. We had only rehearsed a few times - without a bass player and with Toby using only a djembe. He had not possessed or been behind a full kit in years, though his capabilities were the stuff of local Berkeley, CA legend. Other than Toby, everyone was pretty much a stranger. There was a heavyweight Seattle based jazz bass player named Chuck Deardorf on the gig and Gunnar is a monster on the piano, so it dawned on me that this situation could really be transcendental or a nightmare. It all hinged on Toby.

Let me tell ya, what followed was one of the most amazing performances I’ve been a part of in a studio. Toby set up a rented standard Yamaha studio kit - twisted it all around and attached all sorts of crazy percussion items - cracked jokes the whole time and then proceeded to nail the 1st track so hard that all doubts were removed. We tracked the basics live and then added a few tasty overdubs.

Do check the record out, the songs are really eclectic and Gunnar was especially great. My faves are ‘Dirty’, ‘Lullubelle’, ‘Naked in the Garden’ and ‘Gentle is the Lamb.’