Retro-Rick for seniors

[teb]

Well, our band of nearly sixty year-old guys is getting back together just long enough to play a two-hour set of our old tunes for our now-old fans at a folk festival reunion show next month - which should be fun as long as we don't make total fools out of ourselves and as long as we can still see well enough to read the chords and lyrics off of the music stands in front of us. The guys are flying and driving in from all over the country and we'll only have a day and a half to rehearse. In preparation, we dug out the motherload of old studio and live tapes so that we could practice at home. We were surprised at how good they were, even though some of them are so old that they were done on a four-track machine. The plan is to eventually put together a small website to distribute re-releases of both albums and also release a couple of CD's of stuff that never made it onto an album. Then we'll see if we can alll get together for a week or so in the studio every couple of years and record some new stuff (assuming that we don't suck).

Anyway, this is one of those old cuts that never made it to a record. It was recorded 33 years ago (4-track, I think) and I could only remember one line of the tune until I got the mp3 version. From day one I always knew what sound I most wanted to hear on the chorus, but it was one that we didn't have. Well, now I have two of them hanging on the wall, so I sat down for fun after dinner with my little Korg deck and my 370/12 and finally put it in - kind of like guitar-karioke. Things could use some level adjustment with the new edition if we still have the masters, but finally I get to hear it the way I always wanted to. I clipped about half a second of the beginning while monkeying around with the transfer, but the rest is Ok. I think I'm pretty ready for the gig, but I'm not sure I'm ready for the groupies in the audience to be 60 years old...

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... f/saw2.mp3

[doctorwho]

Sounds good, Todd! Good luck on the 'reunion tour' gig!

[shamustwin]

Agreed - sounds good...good luck!

[rikk]

Todd, groupies or no groupies have a blast!!!!!!

[ajish4]

Todd,

Sure sounds good to me. I can only imagine how good it will sound on a multi track recording.

A while ago, you posted a link to THE SHIP. I've listened to that recording over & over and I really enjoy it.

Glad you guys are getting back together. Is this the complete original line up?

I look forward to you band re-releasing your materials on CD, I'll take my place in line...put me down for one of each please!

Are you planning on using your Gibson like bass? There is something about that bass that is very haunting.

Good new all the way around....hey, speaking of Seniors....this being my 3K post, am I a SENIOR Member yet?

[tennis_nick]

this being my 3K post, am I a SENIOR Member yet?

yes.

[teb]

Tony, we have all five of the original members plus two from the second generation, so we should be able to cover the whole life-span of the band, though most of it will be acoustic guitars as the place holding the reunion was pretty much a folk music venue. We'll do mostly old original songs and plan to do a couple tunes from the original album. The last time they were played live, I was 21 years old. Since I only get to play out once every 33 years, I'm making the most of it and taking four basses and two amps (did I say folk music?). The old fretless, stereo Gibson was part of the band's sound, so it has to go. I've been fighting with it for a month, trying to find a decent compromise between high action and fingerboard buzz. I have it sounding pretty good, but the action is not so great. I even bought a new set of strings for it. I put them on and it didn't sound as good, so I put the old ones back on. This means that I'll be using the same strings that I was using when I last stepped off the stage in 1975. I put a set of tape-wounds on my Pedulla Buzz to tone the whine down a bit and I'll have it for a backup if I get tired of fighting the Gibson. Naturally, I'll have my modified Rick 2030 there and plan to use it on a couple of tunes and since I own a drop-dead perfect 1968 Hagstrom eight-string like I used a few times back then I'll probably bring it for a tune or two. After all, at this rate, I'll be 88 years old at my next gig, so I better use 'em now.

[rikk]

Todd, you have to get someone to video tape it and put out a DVD. Or at the least put it on Youtube.

[walker]

Todd - nice job mixing in your 370/12! I never would have known the parts were recorded 30+ years apart.

[teb]

Thanks, Im constantly amazed at the capabilities of my little Korg deck and when I get time, I'll try a little more serious effort on this project. It took me two hours and eight minutes to do this one - four minutes to play the guitar part with no real plan in mind, four minutes to generate a quick mix and two hours ahead of time trying to read through the manual and figure out how to get the darned CD track into the machine! Unfortunately, there are no twelve-year-olds in the house to clue me in on how all these new gizmos work. I plugged the twelve into my JangleBox, EQed it by running it through the head of my Traynor bass amp (which for some reason generates the best Rick twelve sound of any of my five amps or any other amp I've ever tried) ran a direct line from the head to the recorder and just added a bit of reverb to move the twelve back away from the front a little bit. There are some things I'd like to boost or back off a little if we ever find the masters (bring the vocals up a bit toward the end, eliminate what seems to be a little clipping and clean up the mix of guitars with the twelve tossed into the fray) but we'll have to see who has what tapes stuck away in their attic.

The gig is shaping up to possibly be a real nightmare, which we're trying our best to prevent, but I see that concert organizers can be just as unprofessional and difficult to work with as they were 35 years ago. We're spending a huge amount of time trying to get the logistics ironed out when we could be spending it working on the music. I'm about ready to say forget it and start talking to people we know to get a real concert hall on campus and a later weekend. We'll see how it goes, but it brings to mind much of the stuff that we've been discussing in Brian's topics on the music biz. Playing is usually gloriously fun, but the business end of things can be a real monster to deal with at times.

We did, however, find some fun stuff. We used to do a lot of commercials and most of the recording sessions for our own songs were funded by the money made from the commercial sessions. Sometimes they would give us the whole pre-written tune to arrange and play, other times maybe just the lyrics to put to music that we would write and sometimes just a concept, where we had to write both the music and lyrics. Then we would book a day in the studio and do as many as six or seven different versions for the client to pick from.

This one is from a session for Kelloggs in about 1974 or '75. The spot was only five seconds long and it was the intro tag for the CBS TV program "In The News", part of the Saturday morning kiddie program lineup. It ran for somewhere between 12 and 18 months and that one-day studio session ended up paying about $60,000 in 1975 money by the time the spot's run had ended. Back then, you might make $1,000-$2,000 doing a local or regional jingle, but national stuff for big companies paid extremely well. These are the four different jingle versions that we sent to Kelloggs. They picked the first one (happy and mainstream versions nearly always won the contest, but we always liked to give them as many choices as we could think of). Having an "unusual" and not very melodic singing voice, they always made me sing the hard-rocker versions (the third one). I don't believe any of mine ever got used, but they were fun to do. There are probably some forumites who last heard this one while sitting in front of the tube on a Saturday morning in their jammies with feet in 'em.

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/Kelloggs.mp3


Here is one for Arbys. The instrumental break in the middle is where they later dubbed in the announcer's ad copy.

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/Arbys.mp3

This is one of six versions that went out to Heinz for a ketchup commercial. We got paid well for the session, but the client later decided they wanted to use Carly Simon's song "Anticipation" for those spots instead and they paid huge money to secure rights to use that tune. They did use one of ours for some regional test marketing, but it's hard to compete with "Anticipation" because everybody on the planet already knew the tune. All they needed to do was put the thought of ketchup into peoples' minds whenever they heard the song. Here was one of our ketchup spots.

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/Heinz%205.mp3

[rikk]

Todd,

Cool spots!

[sloop_john_b]

Really cool, Todd! BTW, love your voice. It was my favorite out of the four.