Two Bands That Matter

The Clash used to advertise themselves as the only band that matters.  A comment on the limp insipidness of most pop music at the time they were active.  They weren't the only band that mattered but not many did in this correspondent's opinion.  Things haven't changed much regarding the nonrelevance of popular music but there are bands that matter and I just worked with two of them.

Jack and the Bear, based out of Michigan and currently embarked on an extensive U.S. tour, stopped in at Prairie Sun to record their first album about three weeks ago.  They are a family affair.  Drummer, Adam Schreiber, and guitarist/vocalist Brandon James are brothers while sister Christina Schreiber plays trumpet and percussion.  They travel with manager Jake Nielsen who is engaged to Christina and works for nothing save the greater glory to come.  The band is rounded out by Reggie Servis on keyboards/accordian/vocals and Evan Close who holds down the bass.  They are young, in their early twenties and idealistic.  Not only unjaded by the travails and travesties of the road but actually having fun at it. 

I'm interested in band names so asked how they came up with Jack and the Bear.  Bear because it's the first initials of the original members - Brandon, Evan, Adam, and Reggie.  Christina whose silence in the name and trumpet playing role symbolically represents the spirit that guides them.  Jack is the name of manager Jake Nielsen's dog.  I didn't ever get it straight how they arrived there but on their Facebook page they say they were: "Named after an inspirational figure in lead singer Brandon James’ life."  They also say that they have their own superhero so I wonder if that dog might be the same one from the Sufi joke. 

 It's the one where a rich lady goes to the big market in Delhi and finds herself at a stall advertising talking animals.  She asks the dog, "what time is it?"  The dog replies in perfect English, " time for you to buy a new menagerie."  She asks a chicken how she's doing and the chicken answers, "eggcellent."  She continues asking questions of all the different animals there and gets a wisecrack answer in the King's English each time.  So she buys the whole lot and takes them home.  An observing bystander approaches the vendor afterwards and asks, "where did you find all those talking animals?"  "Well between you and me," the vendor confides, "only one of them can talk. You see, the dog is a ventriloquist." 

 A talking dog would certainly be an 'inspirational figure'  yet the true identity of the dog they call Jack seems shrouded in mystery.  But seriously, does it matter?

Their name led me to suggest they read The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor one of the best books on music and expanded consciousness out there.  The Bear also conjures the memory of the Grateful Dead sound engineer/alchemist of the same name who once operated a lab across the street from Prairie Sun.

A couple of weeks before their project was to commence I was getting some things out of storage and pulled out a few cds I hadn't heard in awhile.  One of them was Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, an album I appreciated for its spatial use of room ambience and natural sound along with the great music. I'd lost track of Springsteen's musical arc after the mega popularity of Born in the U.S.A. but reconnected with the The Seeger Sessions, Bruce's rendition of the folk songs Pete Seeger popularized in his day.  Featuring classics like Jesse James (the melody that Woody Guthrie appropriated for his Jesus Christ labor organizer song), John Henry, Mary Don't You Weep and Froggie Went A-Courtin'.  A great thing about this album is that it has a big, full sound.  Standard drums, bass, guitars, and keys are augmented by banjo, accordian, two fiddles, and a horn section.  Folk songs that rock out in the inimitable Springsteen style.

The music of Jack and the Bear sounds just as big. 

  Jack and the Bear at Prairie Sun

Initially both Adam and Christina told me, separately, that The Seeger Sessions was a big influence on their sound.  The other inspiration they mentioned was Mule Variations by Tom Waits, an album I have some familiarity with.  These references gave me a clear picture for how to record them. 

The Bear ( I'm not sure about Jack, I never met him) were so into The Seeger Sessions  that they flew out Sam Bardfeld the lead fiddle player in the Sessions band to augment their sound.  Jack and the Bear previously had a fiddle player in their band but hadn't found a suitable replacement yet.  Everyone they auditioned was told to play like Sam Bardfeld so when it came time to record someone said lets just call Sam.  Bardfeld was into it and even wrote some string arrangements for a few of the songs along with playing a straight fiddle on many of the others.

 Sam is a real pro.  An inveterate New York studio musician, writer and arranger along with being a member of The Jazz Passengers and Springsteen's Sessions band.  We have mutual friends in guitarist Mark Ribot and horn player Steven Bernstein.  We have also both worked with The Soldier String Quartet.  

When Sam came to the studio for the first time he walked up to me and asked if I would take a mic request, "It's probably the one you already chose," he said.   I replied yes, definitely, because I feel it's important to make the artist comfortable even if it means using a mic that might not be the best one for my tastes.  However, Bardfeld was right, he requested a Neumann U67 which was the mic I'd allotted for the violin.  It's one of the only times I've been able to use the 67 on violin. It's a vintage mic, relatively rare in my experience.  I noted the coincidence.  

The song Jack's Flying Theme (this dog apparently not only talks, it flies) is one with an evocative string arrangement that helps create tension and sets the mood for a song about humanity on the threshold of the next evolutionary step in consciousness, or so I interpret it.

Sam plays a killer solo on The Atrocious Tale.  He also contributed some general production advice including suggesting a tremolo guitar part for Back to Despair which worked out well

Some noted musician, I forget who, once opined that every band has a music boffin, one member who is an expert in music theory and arrangement.  Paul McCartney was the muisc boffin for The Beatles.  Keyboardist Reggie Servis seems to play that role for Jack and the Bear.  He also contributes lead vocals and wrote a few of the songs including Eris.

Eris is the Greek Goddess of chaos, strife and discord and serves as the chief deity for the Discordian religion/anti-religion.  Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge has this to say:

The religion has been likened to Zen, based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school, as well as Taoist philosophy. Discordianism is centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder is any more accurate or objectively true than the other.


Discordianism was most prominently brought to the public eye by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their magnum opus The Illuminatus! Trilogy.  As such, it's well known to me.  Servis hadn't heard of Wilson, Shea or Illuminatus!  Another weird coincidence.

Christina Schreiber contributes trumpet parts sometimes reminiscent of the Spanish/Mexican stylings of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.  Her tone is very bright and clear.  Her pitch is dead on.

The rhythm section of Adam Schrieber and Evan Close create a solid foundation for the songs to groove upon.  Schrieber also instigated some Tom Waits style found percussion sounds - not that it was ever lost, found percussion means using unusual objects for percussion instruments like banging on walls, sliding screechy doors and scraping on gutted piano harps.  Prairie Sun just happens to possess one of the latter courtesy of Mr. Waits.  The idea to incorporate that came from studio head honcho Mooka Rennick who took a special interest in the band.

I've not seen Jack and the Bear perform live but can tell from his work in the studio that Lead Vocalist/Guitarist Brandon James makes for a compellingly entertaining frontman oozing charisma and soul.  He sings so passionately, putting it all on the line, that you sometimes wonder if he's going to spontaneously combust.  For some of the songs he requested a vocal treatment ala Chocolate Jesus (Mule Variations).

I got the sound they were looking for using lots of natural room ambience, analog tape delays and dark EMT plate reverbs.  It was helped by the fact that we tracked it to 2" analog tape.  At my recommendation, they mastered it with Doug Sax (Tom Waits, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Ray Charles, etc. etc. etc.).  Afterwards, Sax wrote me expressing his appreciation for this record.

This band, Jack and the Bear,  has a bright future.  They are still searching for a name for the album. Perhaps they need to consult with their canine oracle who, I understand, doesn't tour.  I'll let you know when it's released.

Another coincidence I'll note came from discussing other contemporary bands.  The Bear mentioned admiring the production values of an album called Fate by the popular indy band Dr. Dog.  I would imagine Jack would be into them also, same species and all.  This release got mixed by an old student of mine, Bill Moriarty.

 * * * * * *  

100 Watt Mind is the second band that matters I recently enjoyed the pleasure of working with.  They were brought to Prairie Sun by producer Milan Nikolic.  Milan owns a full scale recording studio in Manhatten, AM Studios on 30th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues that also rents out rehearsal rooms.  He relocated with his family to Southern Oregon a few years back where he met 100 Watt Mind.  

My involvement with 100 Watt Mind almost didn't happen.  I'm extremely glad it did.  Milan became ill the night before we were to work and had to postpone.  They had scheduled 2 days to mix a 7 song ep Milan tracked up in Oregon.  He said that he'd been working with them for the past year.

The sessions were rescheduled to immediately follow the 10 day project with Jack and the Bear.  10 consecutive days of 10 hours a day begins to wear down this biological machine's 53 year old mainframe but I was up to work two more even though I knew nothing about 100 Watt Mind apart from their name.  A couple of days before we were to start I was told I would have to vacate the plush suite Prairie Sun generously provides due to returning indy rock star royalty - Eric Gales, Thomas Pridgen et al.  I was ready to go home and leave the mixing to one of Prairie Sun's extremely competent staff engineers, Matt Wright, Isha Erskine, or Timin Murray.  Fortunately, studio manager Andrew Mastroni had wisely apprised Milan of the situation who had already rented a suite of comparable luxury in Santa Rosa.  The sessions were on!

Milan and the whole band trekked down from Oregon to participate in the mixes.  I asked them if they had any references for their sound and they mentioned Led Zeppelin, particularly Led Zeppelin II.  I had reacquired that cd just two weeks before after not listening to it for years.  It was a top favorite in my High School years.  Yet another coincidence that seemed to suggest we were on the right track.

Like Zeppelin, 100 Watt Mind is a 3 piece rock dynamo, drums, bass, and guitar with a powerful lead vocalist.  Based out of Ashland Oregon, they consist of lead vocalist Brynna Dean, guitarist Skyler Squglio, Nathan Hurlocker on bass, and Robert Morris playing drums.   Dean and Squglio seem to be the main writers.  Their music ranges the gamut from high energy hard rock, funk rock, rockabilly to a softer, more sensitive side.  Other influences include The Cramps, Santana, Johnny Cash, The Doors, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Dire Straits, Hank Williams.

100 Watt Mind

Brynna Dean could very well be Oregon's best kept secret in the rock singer department.  One can hear traces of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Patti Smith and Robert Plant in her singing combined in a style all her own.  Her voice has a pure quality, like a glacial mountain stream, that sounds cleaner, less raspy than those artists but just as strong and passionate.  She has been modelling and acting from a very young age, experience which no doubt contributes to her undeniable ability to work a crowd judging from the videos I've seen.

Dean also gets deep inside a song and won't be satisfied until it feels completely right.  I found this out when she requested to retrack a lead vocal to a song called Color of Soul.  Both Milan and I thought the vocal she already had sounded great but something about it didn't sit right with her.  As time was of the essence - 7 songs to mix in 2 days cuts it close - Milan told me to only spend a half hour getting a new vocal.  If we didn't have it by then, we would move on.  We didn't tell Brynna this stipulation - no pressure.  

My favorite mic for female vocals, the U67, was in use in another room so I set up an M49 which I thought might be better for her high decibel vocal delivery.  Both are vintage Neumann tube mics, the 49 has a larger diaphram.  I chained it through a vintage Neve mic preamplifier channel strip and an old Urei LA2A tube leveling amplifier, ie a compressor.  

Searching for that missing ingredient in the earlier takes I asked her about the inspiration behind Color of Soul or if there was anything she could think to do to get into the mood for this performance.  She surprised me by saying that Edgar Allen Poe was a huge influence then recited one of his poems from memory:

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea,
    The weary way-worn wanderer bore
    To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
    To the beauty of fair Greece,
And the grandeur of old Rome.

Lo ! in that little window-niche
    How statue-like I see thee stand!
    The folded scroll within thy hand —
A Psyche from the regions which
    Are Holy land !

I thought this must be related to the color of her soul.  I didn't know Poe wrote poetry much less a masterpiece like this.  It definitely worked.  Dean sang the song three times straight through.  We did a quick vocal comp (taking the best parts of each take) and ended up with the definitive performance.  Milan was good with it too, and it did only take about a half hour.

Later, I noticed she was wearing a long necklace of greyish stones with an old key on the end.  I asked what the key was to.  She said she didn't know, maybe the Moon.  Then I saw a small moon at the end of the key.  She said the stones were Labradorite and volunteered that her number was 3.  Labradorite denotes good luck according to the book Curious Lore of Precious Stones.

Milan and the band left me alone to mix for the most part.  I would play them the track when I was ready then make any adjustments if they wanted any changes.  For the most part they went with the first playback unaltered, pretty much loving the sounds issuing forth from the speakers.  On one track Skyler arranged a guitar solo that had layered parts.  It came out sounding like something Hendrix might have done.  

Both Milan and 100 Watt Mind felt so good about the Prairie Sun experience that they decided to book more time and expand the original ep into a full length cd.  This time I'll be recording as well as mixing their songs under Nikolic's production guidance.  I'm looking forward to it.

The last strange coincidence to note happened when I checked out of my suite in Santa Rosa.  I noticed an expensive looking truck parked beside my humble blue Subaru with an ornate stylized logo on the side that said ESP Pros.  No idea what company acronym ESP stood for, probably not extra-sensory perception unless I slipstreamed into a Philip K. Dick novel and experienced a future time overlay.  You never know.

 

Recording Miles

It was about 2:30am sometime in the autumn of 1990 when I got a call from Herbie Hancock's manager Tony Meilandt.  I let the machine pick up it up and listened as Tony, either over-stimulated, tired or both stuttered out: "big show at the Apollo tomorrow for Quincy ... Miles is going to be there ... Herbie,  ...George Duke,  ... Chaka Khan ... lots of people ... I want you to grab Bill's ADAM and record it."  What he was talking about was a planned birthday celebration for Quincy Jones that coincided with the  premiere of a new film about him called Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones to be held at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater.  The film was to be screened inside the theater while on a lot outside a stage was set-up underneath a large tent for a live, all-star musical extravaganza after party.

I spent about an hour deciding if I was up for this challenge.  When he said "tomorrow" he really meant the evening of this same day.  Nothing like planning ahead I always say.  Bill was Bill Laswell whom Tony also had business dealings with.  The ADAM was a large, bulky, but still portable 12 track digital recorder that Bill used for field recordings in West Africa and Morroco.  It was what we used to record the Master Musicians of Jajouka.  Needless to say, it's a lot more involved to record something of this nature than grabbing a recorder and showing up at the door.  I called Tony back around 3:30am and told him that.  He told me to get whatever I needed to make it happen.

I stayed up the rest of the night researching the best ways to accomplish this in the short amount of time left to arrange it.  By about 8am I had decided that the only realistic way to pull this off was to bring in the Record Plant's Remote Recording Truck and Mobile On Location Studio which would cost about $5,000 to record the evening.  I called Tony back and told him this and he said "no problem, do it!" 

 A few minutes later I happened to call another engineer, Jerry Gottus, to ask about something.  I first met Jerry when he hired me as an intern at the studio where I "grew up" as they say in the biz.  Told him the situation and he said that he thought the Apollo had a full scale recording studio upstairs with tie lines from the stage.  Called up the Apollo and sure enough they did. They had known about this long in advance and were well prepared.  I often tell people in "this business we call show" as Tom Waits puts it, about how ironic it is that we provide communication services yet our communication with each other often seems quite lacking.

When I got to the Apollo everything audiowise was wired and in place.  Can't get much easier than that.  I did a quick soundcheck with the band and a line check for all the guest mics.  We were recording to two 24 track Studers linked up to give us 48 tracks which was needed for all of the musicians.  It was definitely a stellar line-up.  The back-up group was the Saturday Night Live house band led by G.E. Smith at the time. Arthur Baker was the musical director.   Miles Davis and a jazz group with George Duke and Herbie Hancock were the first performers.  I scrambled to get the levels right.  Miles was playing long ambient tones similar in style to Kind of Blue.  He sounded great but I was really too busy to appreciate it fully.  

A lot of celebrities were reportedly there in the audience, Dustin Hoffman, Mayor David Dinkins, even Michael Jackson was said to be present dressed in drag.  This was during a reclusive period for him, so it 's quite possibly true.  Jackson was in the film but didn't allow himself to be lit so appeared as a mysterious dark shadow.  Quincy Jones, of course, produced his mega hit album Thriller.  

A lot of top tier musicians performed but I can't say who at the moment other than the ones Tony mentioned.  I have a newspaper clipping somewhere .  Can't find anything on the web.  I remember Lesley Gore singing her hit It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To.  Patti Labelle was there too.  There was also a cadre of then current popular rappers, Flavor Flav is the only one I recall at the moment.  I later worked with Flav on a Public Enemy record.  A very nice if somewhat crazy guy.  When I first met him he went into a whole Wizard of Oz routine: "Oz man, where's my heart, and, and, where's my courage man etc. It's right there, Flav, it's right there..." I replied, getting into the spirit of this ridiculousness.

The recording went well but I never heard it again; don't know who mixed it.  I was told it was just a birthday gift for Quincy and could never be released because all these artists were under contracts to different labels.  Another irony is that I didn't get to meet Miles or any of the musicians then despite recording them.  The performing area and the control room were far apart and isolated from each other.  I did eventually get to meet Miles.

A few months later I was recording overdubs for Bill at Platinum Island, the studio where I grew up.  We were in the smaller room, Studio West.  I forget who the artist was, it might have been The Swans.  Miles was tracking in the bigger room, Studio East, playing as a guest for someone else.  My friend John Herman was the assistant on his session.  I asked him to let me know when Miles was leaving so I could "just  happen" to pass him in the hall.  John let me know.  Miles left with a group of about 4 people, it was kind of a narrow hallway.  The first two people, who I didn't know, just passed by without saying anything like most New Yorkers do.  I was expecting Miles to do the same but he turned, looked directly at me and said in his classic raspy voice, " Hi, how ya doin?"  "Fucking GREAT Miles !!! is what I thought, but just said  "I'm doing good."  He knew I was in that hallway to meet him!  It definitely made my night.

Audio Engineering Questions

Once upon a time back in days of yore, I was asked by Terry Tompkins to record an album for his band The Now Feeling. It featuring guest vocals by Lisa Boudreau.  We made the album, my first, Lisa and Terry got married (the abbreviated version of this story) and now one of their progeny, Jody, works in audio.  He asked me some questions:

JT:  For me drums seem to be my weakest point in the mix, lets say we have a well recorded rock drum kit 2 kick mics one in, one out ,Snare top and bottom, a mic on the top head of each tom overheads and a stereo room pair. The Kicks a little pillowy and the snare is lacking that beautiful crisp crack that are in all the big records. Is there anyway to explain your process of starting to tackle that whole beast. (let me know if it would even be possible to answer ahah its a loaded question).

OM: Someone asked a well known engineer ( don't recall who) how he got a great drum sound, and he answered: "the three critical ingredients are a good drummer, a good, well-tuned drum kit, and a good room."  I agree. Start with the source.  If those three elements are in place, and it's recorded well then you almost have to do nothing more than turn up the faders.

My process of rescuing a poor drum sound would start with seeing what I could do with gating, compression and eq.  I would also try parallel compression.  Sometimes I'll mult the snare and/or kick to another channel, heavily gate, compress and eq that channel and blend it in.  Reamping the drums in some way can help.  One trick is to place your reamp speaker underneath another snare and  mic that snare.  Last resort would be to replace the drums with samples or add in triggered samples.  I rarely do that.

You're right, it's not really possible for me to answer the question except generally and vaguely, you just have to do it .... a lot!  Animators have something they call pencil mileage - skill at drawing comes from doing it over and over again.  So I recommend getting mixing mileage.  When I started  mixing recordings I felt all my mixes sucked.  One day they stopped sucking.  I don't know why except maybe for mixing mileage.

Also don't recommend getting fixated on any one component of the mix.  Maybe the drums don't sound good on their own, but can they work in the context of the whole track?  Bob Clearmountain, a mixer I highly respect, once said that he doesn't listen to the tracks in solo.  He brings up all the faders then makes adjustments based on the overall picture.  I'm not that extreme, I listen to the individual tracks as a staring point but always consider them in the whole context. 

The real power of a rock drum sound lies in the room tracks.  You can try triggered gating, phasing, flanging, pitch shifting, and/or distorting them with something interesting like an old reel to reel mic preamp or a boom box but with subtle taste so it doesn't sound unnaturally processed.  The classic, ultimate, rock drum sound, according to many, was played by John Bonham in Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks recorded by Andy Johns with one mic at the top of a stairwell.  One mic, a top rock drummer, good drums, and a great live space made music history.

JT: Favorite Hardware and plugin Compressor for Vocals

OM: Hardware - Fairchild or Urei LA2A.  Plug-ins - Not familar with all the plug-ins as I still mix mostly out of the box.  I like the Massey compressor and also use the "Fairchild" plug-in from the Pro Tools pack. 

 JT:   When you have a session with 7-8 guitar tracks how do you go about placing them around in the stereo field. I always seem to end up with just this wall of guitars. but not in the good metal kind of way it just becomes a noise. I've tried carving Eqs and other techniques but nothing seems to give me that strong and powerful guitar while still allowing the vocals and drums to come through

OM:  I hard pan all of them evenly to begin with. One might go in the middle or off to one side not hard panned if there's an odd number of tracks.   I'm also not afraid to mute tracks if they are not contributing.  When sound waves interact with each other you get either destructive or constructive interference.  If it's destructive, then taking out that track will make the rest sound bigger.  Short delays (50 ms or less) will make muted string parts sound bigger and add to the rhythm.  Sometimes subtle chorusing, phasing or flanging can help depending on the parts but you never want it to sound artificial.  I've haven't heard any plug-in frequency modulators that I've liked that much, and a lot of those programs in multi-processor effects boxes like TC's M2000 sound very cheesy to me.  The best phasers/flangers are the old MXRs.  You'll find your best tremolo in a pedal or a vintage amp.
  

JT: Is it truly possible to get that console Warmth and summing capabilities through the plugins such as Waves NLS, Waves ReDD and the various UAD plugs. ( The UAD stuff sounds AWESOME)

OM:  This reads as a bit of a strange question because I'm not aware of any plug-ins with summing capabilities.  I don't recommend mixing in the box.  The sound starts to get smaller and flatter with more tracks because the summing bus in DAWs don't do well with lots of tracks.  If a console isn't available then I suggest an outboard summing box like the Dangerous D.  Neve makes a good one too though more expensive.

I like UAD plug-ins, Waves are ok but don't have experience with those particular ones.

JT:  Favorite Reverb and Delay

Different favorites for different kinds. Favorite small room reverb: reamping the Waits room at Prairie Sun Recording where I work a lot.  Reamping into a good live room, stereo micing for the room sound ie mics in the corners or focused away from the reamp sounds better to me than any kind of digital or analog processor.  I like the old EMT plate reverbs, Prairie Sun has two.  Masterworks makes a very beautiful sounding Spring reverb.  As for digital reverbs, Bricasti sounds very natural.  I still like the old AMS and Lexicons 224 and 480 a lot.

Favorite delay is a Studer A80 quarter inch tape delay.  Tape delays in general - the old Roland 201 Space Echos ( but not their reverb).  Fulltone makes a good modern tape delay.  Best digital delays are the Lexicon PCM 41 and 42s.  I like some of the weird reverbs, delay and modulation programs from the Eventide H3000 series.

Question for you: what processor or piece of equipment in a recording studio would you spend the most time learning and studying to optimize your mixes?

Too Noisy Fish

An old friend, Pierre Vervloesem, introduced me to his friend Peter Vandenberghe the pianist of the Belgian piano jazz trio Too Noisy Fish.  I worked with Pierre in the early '90s when Bill Laswell and I produced and engineered a couple of albums for the avant gard jazz/rock combo X-Legged Sally (pronounced Cross Legged Sally) at Greenpoint.

 Last time I saw Pierre, himself a talented producer and engineer, was backstage at a Material concert in Ghent, Belgium.  I remember this trip clearly for being one of the few times I got to mix my brother-in-arms Grandmixer D.ST one of the progenitors of turntablism, ie the turntable as a musical instrument.  At the time, I was wading through a complete linear read of Finnegans Wake for the first time while D.ST (now known as DXT) observed signs of an Illuminatti conspiracy in the jewelry of a woman seated across from us in a restaurant.  The thick plottened when Pierre laid a couple of cds of his recent labors havin' guarded experimentally eclectic approaches to its music and whimsical titles not so far from the Illuminati/Finnegans Wake nexus in the air. 

X-Legged Sally went their seperate ways in 1997.  Bandleader Peter Vermeersch went on to form a big band group called The Flat Earth Society.  Pierre plays guitar for them, engineers and mixes their recordings.  The members of Too Noisy Fish, Peter Vandenberghe, contra bassist Kristoff Roseeuw, and drummer/percussionist Teun Verbruggin comprise the heart of their rhythm section.

When I spoke to Peter Vandenberghe he mentioned liking the sound of the X-Legged Sally albums and asked what it would take to make a record with Too Noisy Fish.  I turned him on to my home away from home, Prairie Sun Recording in Cotati, California and a plan was made.  Peter sent me their most recent cd, Fast, Easy Sick which had been mixed by Pierre.  It sounded quite good, almost intimidatingly good because I wished to produce a recording that sounded at least as good or better.

Many of the song titles from Fast Easy Sick were quite humorous such as: 13 Potatos, Black Keys, White Keys: What's the difference, they All end Up the Same, Curly Wurly Napolean, and The Sky is Falling.  You can get a copy here.

,

 From left to right: Kristoff Roseeuw, Peter Vandenberghe, & Teun Verbruggin.  

Names of the fish unknown.

I booked Too Noisy Fish into Studio C at Prairie Sun mainly for the sound of the 9' concert grand piano that lived there.  It's an older piano, built around 1912 or something like that and has a darker sound with more character than your average contemporary recording piano such as a Yamaha.  The alternative was to put them in Studio B which has a Kimball 7' grand with a brighter, more generic sound similar to a Yamaha.

I miced the piano with a pair of Neumann KM54 tube mics in an X-Y pattern hovering over the hammers around middle C, and a pair of omnidirectional DPAs micing the body of the piano on the side the lid opens, one towards the back, the other near the front.  As the piano was in the same room as the drums, I used the lid open on the short peg and made a little tent over the DPAs with furniture blankets to minimize leakage.

The piano and drum worlds were set up facing each other in opposite diagonal corners, but not stuffed into the corners. Many gobos (baffles) were used to help with the isolation.  I had hoped to set up the contra bass world just outside the glass doors so everyone would have a line of sight with each other while also getting some isolation for the bass mics.  Kristof preferred to play his bass in the same room.  I acquiesced without protest despite this making my job considerably more difficult.  I had seen the Fish on You Tube so knew they played dynamically and listened to each other.  This is key to getting any kind of reasonable balance with acoustic instruments all playing together in the same room live.  I dampened the acoustics in the Corn Room as much as possible.

Studio C at Prairie Sun has three rooms, the Corn Room - very live when you take everything out of it, The Waits Room named after Tom Waits who first suggested recording in it; a stone floor, high ceiling & wood panels give this small room golden acoustics, and Room 66 - the "control room" area resides in one corner of this room that serves as an antechamber to the Waits and Corn rooms at opposite ends.

I miced the contra bass with a Neumann tube 47 near the " F hole"  - the opening on the right side of the bass body, and used a Neumann 582 cardiod condensor aimed at the strings a foot or so above the bridge to get a brighter sound.  Also had a DI ( direct injection) box for the pick-up on the bass. It sounded nasally on it's own but blended with the mics, worked well.

Teun put together a drum kit from the Prairie Sun collection of drums.  He used an 18" Sonar floor tom for his bass drum.  It was double headed with nothing inside to dampen it resulting in a very deep and resonant, old school jazz kind of sound.  He accented a standard drum kit with a variety of percussion instruments and sound modifiers.  He uses some of these percussion instruments to "prepare" the drums ( as in a prepared piano) by putting them on the drum skins - the snare or toms - to alter the timbre of the drum as well as adding the sound of the percussion.  These include: 2 children's music boxes, 2 Thai healing bells,  3 egg shakers, Christmas bells in a plastic bag - the bag adds to this sound, 2 kalimbas, a woodblock, 2 cowbells, Ahoko - dry nuts from Africa's Ivory Coast, a small drum to put on the rack tom, a child's toy xylophone, a tambourine, East Indian finger cymbals, and an iron chain.  Teun brought his own cymbals which were strategically broken and taped to give a very different cymbal sound.  He used regular  drum sticks, brushes, and hotrods (a combination of brush and stick), and sometimes even chopsticks to play the drums.  Also, a contra bass bow that sounded quite eerily alive when used on the edges of the cymbals.

Too Noisy Fish, along with Peter's wife Trisha arrived from Belgium a couple of days before the start of the sessions, and settled into the studio accomodations, their own house on the southwestern corner of the studio property. Trisha, a filmmaker, was there, apart from moral support, to document the proceedings.  I did a short interview with her on a break from mixing.

My nervousness at making a record that sounded as good as the last one completely disappeared as soon as we got sounds and they started playing.  I realized that the excellence of their sound came from the group itself, the technical sound just had to capture that faithfully.  I never heard that piano sound as good , and it was almost as easy as just turning up the faders.  Usually I end up applying some eq to the piano . . . not this time.  The mics were going into vintage Neve mic pres with only a mild amount of compression. 

I knew that part of what makes a great horn, string, or woodwind player great is the tone they get out of their instrument but had forgotten that this also applies to the piano.  The piano sound was harmonically rich, warm, articulate and clear - very even up and down the keyboard.  It reminded me of recording Herbie Hancock for a Jungle Brothers record, and of the Cuban musician Pepcito Reyes who played like he was making love to the piano. 

The songs were almost all instrumentals though they did have lyrics for a two song cycle called Bring It Home/ Oh God.  However, there was only one person in the world they felt could do it justice and that was Tom Waits.  I agreed with them and sent Tom an email.  Within a couple of hours we received a reply from his assistant Julianne Deery saying he had commitments he couldn't shake.  The promptness and cheerfulness of the reply led us to believe we had Tom's blessing anyway.

Another song was titled Turkish Laundry which continued their emergent tradition of "laundry" songs set in interesting geographical locations.  On the last album it was Latin Laundry, and suggestions were solicited on where to go for clean clothes on the next one.  When hearing about this tradition it recalled being in Mali with KSK producer Aja Salvatore when we auditioned Bari, a master musician who played a short Fulani reed flute that had a beeswax mouth piece. - we ended up recording and mixing a record with him bthat's in the vault.  After playing for a bit, he walked up to me and started directing his flute playing up and down the outside of body as if to clean the edges of my electromagnetic field or what some people call the "aura."  He proceeded to do the same for Aja.  Later, I asked what he was doing.  He laughed, and said he was just dusting us off.  Turkish Laundry reminded me that music can create cleaning environments.  Bob Dylan underscores this point when he "goes into a laundry to wash his clothes down" before going on an epic journey in the song Isis.

On a break during the second day of recording, Lucas Nelson, son of Willie came down to say hello.  He was recording with his band in studio B.  Nicest guy you could imagine, he spoke of the thrill of playing at Farm Aid sharing the bill with his father, Neil Young, and Jack Johnson.

Too Noisy Fish got everything recorded in about two and a half days.  The last half day we spent reviewing and choosing master takes.  Most of the songs landed within two to four takes.  At least one, maybe two were done in one take.  The most we ever did was six or seven versions of one song.

I recorded them to 24 track, two inch multitrack analog tape running at 30 inches/second (ips) with no noise reduction then transferred it to Pro Tools.  Mic pres were mostly vintage Neve with vintage APIs on some of the drum tracks.

Everything had been recorded live with the exception of one or two percussion overdubs, and my voice, playing the (uncharacteristically I hope) part of a harried music producer.  The length of the cd was getting to be too long so they recut two of the improv pieces, Slow B (for blues) and Fast B then had them end abruptly with an old-fashioned phone ring that I answered.

Two samples were used - one from the original Space Invaders video game for the song Jazz Invaders, and the other from and old Russian documentary with haunting female narration that had been financed by the Soviet regime.  Peter tried to have the Russian dialog translated but was told that it was too abstract to understand.  To me, this sample and the whole song, Necrophilology has a mood like something out of Dostoevsky.

We celebrated the finish of the recording by going out for Japanese food.  The conversation was as good as the food ranging from the state of the biz in Europe and America to natural ways of expanding consciousness apart from playing music.  

  I chose to mix this in Studio B on Pete Townsend's old vintage Neve to maintain the purity and naturalness of the tones.  Most of the time I prefer mixing on the SSL in Studio A as it offers a lot more versatility to sculpt the sound but with this record I wished to manipulate the tones as little as possible to keep it honest with what the musicians had laid down.  The mixdown recorder was an analog Ampex 1/2 inch running at 30 ips.

The mixing went well and was accomplished in two long days.  I would have preferred a third day but sometimes imposed limitations become a necessary parameter for the final outcome.  We spent a lot of time on the first song with everyone zeroing in on what they wished to hear out of the balance then the rest seemed to flow fairly easily from there.  The only difficulties I encountered was when they played triple forte ( ie very loud) making a lot of leakage to contend with.  The band wisely stayed out of the control room and left me to my own devices until I was ready for them to hear a mix.  Peter had a very strong reaction to one of the mixes as it was going to tape.  I'd only experienced an artist react that way once before to hearing a final mix.  That was the lead singer for the Brazilian band O Rappa who wept when he heard the final mix Bill Laswell and I had made.  That lets me know, at least for those pieces, that I've done my job which is to sucessfully realize the vision of the artist . . . and then some!

The record still has to be mastered which I'm going to do at my new location inside the Song Relic Studios compound in the Sierra foothills.  Stayed tuned for further info on how to get this when it's released which likely won't be for a few months.

Method of Defiance 5th Column

For 75 minutes on Sunday, February 3rd, I felt perceptually positioned at the center of the creative flow of new sonorous environments and dialogues courtesy of  D.J. Krush, Bill Laswell, and Bernie Worrell.

Here's how I got there:

January 31st/February 1st

Rested from 8pm until midnight; finished packing and left at 1:30am for the 3 hour drive to the San Francisco Airport.  Loud music and high quality green tea fuels the driver.

Flying American Airlines, SF to New York to Milan.  I rarely if ever fly American so not used to looking out the terminal window and seeing rows upon rows of giant A As, colorful, luminous branding letters atop the tails of these aeronautical beasts. 

Same seat assignment for 3 of the 4 flights, 23J.  Having the same seat on successive flights, of any number, is a first for me.  Maybe that's how they do it at American. 

Begin reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as the plane swings around the Bay and begins its ascent.  The opening "doh" note, a quote by Werner von Braun resonates deeply:

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.  Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

A disembodied voice informs us that we are flying at an altitude of 37,000 feet.  Have to take their word for it, I left my altimeter in my other suit.  I choose the lasagna for lunch.

February 2nd

"23 minutes until landing" the Captain announces as we descend into Milan.  I'm reminded of the 23 conspiracy. 

The flight arrives early in Milan.  Standing by a pillar outside the arrival doors waiting for my ride,  I patch into an earlier loop of time, ten years or more before, when waiting in this exact same location I see George Clooney arrive looking spiffy and jovial but suprisingly shorter than expected.  A large sign with my name on it pulls me back to the present.

The sky looks cold, dark and grey.  Overcast and drizzling.  Comfortable ride in a black town car to a comfortable hotel in Milano's moda quartiere.  Lunch with Gianni, the colorful promoter I wrote about last year, James - Laswell's stage tech, and Asai - Krush's manager.  Conversation ranges from reports on life in Japan, California and New York to the Japanese influence in Brazil and growing up in pre-civil war Beruit.

4pm rehearsal at a smal studio a few miles away.  Some hard core fans have driven in from Germany to meet us there.  Also some old friends - Eraldo Bernocchi, producer, musician and collaborator, and Giacomo Bruzzo, a self-described "Co-conspirator" at Rare Noise Records ( he runs it).

Krush looks surprisingly fresh considering he played a concert at the Forum in London that went into the early hours then caught a plane in the morning to rehearse this afternoon.  Bernie also looks good for someone hopping around the globe - gigs with Steve Kimock in Northern California and Japan, then back to LA to play with Stevie Wonder at the NAMM show, back to Japan, forward to Italy.  After this show, he'll jet over to Paris to play with Melvin Gibbs, Bernard Fowler, Nona Hendryx and others to perform Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

Bill told me about a fairly recent show he did with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and John Zorn that sounded interesting.  I told him about an apocryphal story of Laurie Anderson wanting to turn Gravity's Rainbow into an opera.  She asked Thomas Pynchon for permission and he consented as long as she did everything on one instrument - the banjo.

It takes about 90 minutes for the 5th Column to work out song arrangements for a 75 minute set. 

Krush generates beats, atmospherics, turntable scratching, and some melody figures.  He uses his machines ( two turntables, a small dj mixer, a Macbook, and fx pedals) to undulate forth a series of parallel Universes made up of sound, mood and texture.  I hear crickets, saxophones, drums, wind, noise, rhaitas, female Japanese singing, flugelhorns, basoons, acoustic basses, handclaps, cowbells, goatbells, aardvark bells, church bells, string orchestras, chamber symphonys, locomotive trains, steam whistles, bansuri flute, ocean waves breaking against a coral reef in the South Pacific, and a piano forte a coda among other sounds.  Krush tunes to Bernie.

atonal is ok sometimes ... throw in some dissonance...

Bernie tunes to omnipotens deus and outer space.  Bill shakes the earth. Solve coagula.

While they are working out the set, I ask Giacomo if Rare Noise Records has a mission statement.  He says it's finding the right thread for things that are not associated, searching for the common language.  The nostalgic fusion of future traditions.  Seems like he's in the right place as that describes MOD 5th Column perfectly as I find out after the concert.

February 3rd

7:30 am lobby call.  It's an unusually early concert, 11am.  Part of a series called Aperitivo (aperitif) in Concerto that runs from the end of October to the beginning of March.  The idea is draw shoppers in from the suburbs with a reasonably priced concert of high quality international musicians.  The show gets out by 1pm giving the concert goers all afternoon to spread economic joy to the area.

8 - 10 am.  Set up and soundcheck go smoothly.  A silver-haired elderly Swiss audio inventor named Corrado Faccioni is in the house.  He has these devices he calls resonators, small steel spiral gizmos that are supposed to smooth out errant harmonics.  They are not powered.  He places them all over the stage, on Krush's mixer, Bernie's keys and a small set that clamp on to Bill's bass headstock.   James later informs me that he even put one on an AC power cable.  How an acoustic resonator can smooth out the harmonics of an electrical current is beyond me.  I don't get a satisfactory explanation as to how they work.  Also, no information exists about them on the web, their site, Cor Fac 2, remains under construction.

Corrado reminds me a bit of the legendary Magic Alex, audio guru to the Beatles, who helped them spend their money on an attempt at a  futuristic recording studio as head of Apple Electronics.   He suprises me by asking if I miss my floatation tank when I travel.  I tell him that I always had wanted to build an orgone box around my tank.  He emphatically replies, "my resonators are much better than an orgone box" which makes me smile.

Corrado also supplied one of the vintage Ampeg SVT bass heads for Bill's backline which he bought from AC/DC in the early '70's.  It reminds me that this concert isn't an isolated event but part of an ongoing, ever-changing living tradition to help nudge humanity along.  AC/DC and MOD have little in common except that both, in  their own ways, strive for music that breaks down barriers, that cracks or shatters the emotional armor that keeps the average person from knowing their true voice.  Music that transcends the flatland view.

The grande signora, chief of the promoters, has a discussion about the volume with me a few minutes before showtime.  She said that last year the volume was too much for the people sitting in the first row in front of the speaker cabinets.  I'm sure it was.  However, I'm here to tell the world, and give everyone permission to alter their own decibel levels if necessary with two simple suggestions. 

1. Don't sit in front of the speakers.  Like the old blues song says: you got to move...

2. If that can't be helped, or if it's too loud for you wherever you are, then use earplugs.  Earplugs are to louder concerts what sunglasses are on a ski slope during a clear day -  sensory attenuators.  Sometimes you have to use them.  If earplugs aren't available, a moist tissue will have a similar effect.  How you postion them in your ears will determine how much sound pressure level they block.

11:15 am - Showtime. The theater is sold-out.  Bernie starts with a solo that seems to reference, recapitulate, and encapsulate the entire history of Western music up to Ray Charles' Georgia.  I don't get the classical music nods, maybe snippets of Bach or Mozart.  The quotes I do recognize besides Georgia are Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Winter Wonderland reminding me more of Illumanti puns than X-mas carols. Krush ambiently lifts off while Bill begins the dialogue with moody melodic phrases and the group voyage has begun. 

 I've been trying to find the words to describe this music for about two weeks and they still remain elusive.  The language of this experimentally expansive music won't reduce to words for me right now.  I have a recording.  I had an experience.  The unique synergy of this triad in the 5th Column methodically defies comparison in any meaningful way.  I can't reduce it.

I resorted to a chance operation to at least find some poetic semblance of a description.  At the Materialized rehearsal last week Dave showed me a copy of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 which I hadn't read or seen before.  Pynchon, clearly a musically inspired visionary writer, seemed a good possibility for finding those words so I randomly opened the book landing on p. 74 and immediately saw the following sentence:

She looked around spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the center of some intricate crystal, and said, "My God."

Change the word "trapped" to "positioned" and this description works for me though it hardly encompass the whole experience.  To my observation, the audience seemed as equally enraptured.  Their response indicated close attention.  The space had a glow about it afterwards.

Spent the afternoon banqueting on Italian cuisine and catching up with old friends.  Eraldo brought la bella madonna, his wife, Petulia Mattioli.  Petulia, an incredible visual artist in her own right, had visually produced and choreographed the montage of images that accompanied the Somma (Sacred Order of Music Magic and Art) shows Eraldo and her put together which included Bill, Nils Pettar Molvar, and a gaggle of Tibetan Monks amongst other stellar musicians playing improvised music.  The Somma link goes to a page featuring an audio sample of the track 23 Wheels of Dharma.

I stayed up most of the night writing.

February 4th

Night begins to lift as Bill, James and I board a coach at 7am to go to the airport.  By the time we get there sunlight pours through the windows.  An ambulance with the name Rosa Croix passes without emergency sirens.  It's one of the clearest days I've seen here in all the visits. The Italian Alps look large and closer than ever.





Materializing

Here goes with the wildest, most unbelievable claim ever seen on this blog:
Space Junk, the new release by Materialized persuasively demonstrates the ability to transform Watergate ringleader and former U.S. President, Richard ("I Am Not A Crook") Nixon into a good guy.

Actually, what they did was splice a moment of time into their sonic, organic, electronica funk rock landscape sampling Nixon when he gave it up and did indeed sound like an enlightened leader.  It was the occasion of Man first landing on the surface of the  Earth's Moon.  You'll hear it.

Space Junk is a 4 song EP also available on vinyl.  Materialized simultaneously released another 4 song companion EP called Magneto Delicti also available for download or on vinyl.

They are both available here.  Space Junk can be previewed here. Magneto Delicti here



The title track from Space Junk explicates what's implied when you listen to a good piece of music.  Samples from Mission Control of  a NASA rocket launch alerts the listener right away that they will embark upon a trip into Space.

"We have lift-off, we have cleared the tower."

And we're off ... the surface of the Earth driven by a rocket fuel rhythm section outward bound to territories unknown.  We encounter giant stellar beings with mysterious dispositions and unusual topologies communicating to us through the invention of Mr. Moog and the nervous system of Mighty Dave Pellicciaro with some electron reconfiguration ala Brian Eno or Stockhausen for good measure and accurate reception.

The inner space/outer space dichotomy shown in this song recalls the image of two mirrors facing each other with a lit candle (in this case the listener) in between.

Drummer Dale Fanning somehow channels both John Bonham and Ziggy Modeliste in the third song of this ep, No Inbetween, a funky electroharmonic ode with vocals by bassist Carlitos Del Puerto.

The four tracks structure this release like the four cardinal points on an equal armed Celtic Cross, each one offering a unique vision in a different direction. 

In other Materialized news, San Francisco's annual Cosmic Love Ball is set to take place February 9th at the Fillmore.  From its webspace:

"The Cosmic Love Ball is San Francisco's annual celebration of life, love and music. This year's futuristic love circus will feature atmospherically melodic Rubblebucket, perennial Love Ball and genre bending house band Materialized. The North Beach Brass Band will be  kicking the party off with a taste of the Big Easy and the ambassador of east coast disco, DJ Wyllyss will be holding down the decks."

I will materialize there to mix Materialized.

Dylan and Magick

Bob Dylan has had most every aspect of his life scrutinized, analyzed, categorized and symbolized but I don't know if anyone has looked at the startling number of connections between his music career and magick.  I find his songs an ongoing education in that regard.  Imagery he uses uncannily describes certain stages along the esoteric path.

 I seriously doubt that Bob Dylan has pursued magick in the same way that Jimmy Page has, for instance.  However, the nature of his songwriting process allows him to tap into the same kinds of energetic fields that theurgic magickians work with resulting in communications from the same data base.  Dylan's extremely intuitive and experimental approach to songwriting puts him in touch with the non-local field, the realm of magick.  Success is his proof.

I call this writing  process "invocational" which conventionally gets defined as ' to draw down from above,' however I find the whole down/above orientation archaic and therefore redefine as: 'to draw in from without."  Dylan speaks candidly in many places about his process.  The booklet that accompanies his first offical "bootleg" releases goes through it song by song.  Here's an excerpt from an interview with Karen Hughes, April 1, 1978:

"KH:   Do you find that as a composer, you're more like a medium, tuning into something greater happening?

Dylan: I think that every composer does that.  No one in his right mind would think that it's coming from him, that he has invented it.  It's just coming though him.

KH: What kind of force compels you to write?

Dylan:  Well, any departure, like from my traditional self, will kick it off.

KH: How do you go about composing these songs, working them out?

Dylan: I usually get a melody. A melody just happens to appear as I'm playing and after that the words come in and out.  Sometimes the words come first."

What's In A Name?

Names were very important in ancient Egypt, considered nearly identical with a person's soul. C.G. Jung observed that many people take after the meaning of their name.  To my knowledge, Bob Dylan has never clearly stated where he got his last name from, what inspired it.  I saw him directly asked once. He gave a vague answer, couldn't really remember, it just came to him. 

Three theories on where it came from:

1) The poet, Dylan Thomas - probably the  most popular belief.

2) Marshal Matt Dillon from the TV show Gunsmoke.

3) The White Goddess by Robert Graves wherein he offers up Dylan as the name of an ancient sun god.

Not long after he changed his name, posters or handbills used the Dillon spelling, so I'm inclined to go with Marshal Matt Dillon as the original motivation.  Also he told Robert Shelton, the New York Times reporter who wrote his first bio, to make sure and tell them that it wasn't Dylan Thomas.  Something made him change the spelling.   Later on Dylan doesn't dispute that explanation, and at times appears to agree.  At some point or maybe all points, he's misdirecting the audience like a magician does.  

I say it doesn't matter because his multifaceted personas include all three of those characters.  He's been considered a poet by many people for a long time.  He was introduced as a poet by Peter Yarrow at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival whereupon he proceeded to systematically derange the audience's senses with a new electric sound.

Dylan has shown a distinct affinity for the Old West.  He acted in and wrote the soundtrack for the film Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.   Matt Dillon embodies the hero archetype which turns up in Dylan's songs such as Chimes of Freedom, All Along the Watchtower, or Quinn the Eskimo.

The White Goddess theme turns up in a lot of Dylan's music.  He has written many songs about the sublime art of bringing the woman to life.  Coincidentally, Bob Dylan's mother's name is Beatrice, the same name as the female guide and archetype of true love who showed Dante the way into Paradiso in The Divine Comedy.

The sun god aspect appears quite evident in the line from Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat:

If you wanna see the sun rise, honey I know where.; Another interesting coincidence with that: something compelled him to record a cover of House of the Rising Sun on his first album.  He got in trouble for it too because he stole the arrangement from his friend Dave Von Ronk who had been planning to record it on his album. 

The Dylan Thomas connection puts Bob Dylan into a direct literary lineage with Aleister Crowley via Victor Neuberg.  Neuberg had been one of Crowley's most prominent students having assisted him in at least two major invocations - The Paris Working, and the skrying of the Enochian Aethyrs across the North African desert which got documented as The Vision and the Voice.  Neuberg, also a recognized poet of some stature, lead a weekly poetry circle for young writers some time after his break with Crowley.  Dylan Thomas was Neuberg's protege.  Upon hearing of Victor's death Thomas said:

 Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done ...He possessed many kinds of genius, and not the least was his genius for drawing to himself, by his wisdom, graveness, great humour and innocence, a feeling of trust and love, that won’t ever be forgotten.

The Paris Working revealed data consonant with much of Bob Dylan's artistic output.  In those series of experiments the similar identities of Christ and Mercury revealed itself - a sun god and a god of communication.  Crowley also identified strongly with solar deities.  Both Dylan and Crowley were major influences on the cultural phenomena of the 1960s.  They also both turned up on the famous  album cover for The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Timing

"The highway is for gamblers better use your sense,

take what you have gathered from coincidence.

- one of my favorite lines from It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, a song title with a great pun. 

Instances of Dylan's timing provides evidence to suggest that he intuitively tunes into a non-local field of information.  He wrote The Times They Are A Changing a few weeks before the Kennedy assassination and said he knew he had to play it that night.  An alternate version of The Times They Are A Changing was released on Sept. 11, 2001 as part of a bonus package with the new album, Love and Theft which has the chilling lines, Skies full of fire, pain falling down.

 Love and Theft also has a song called High-Water (for Charley Patton) about flood waters rising and causing havoc.  Water, one of the four basic elements of the ancient Greeks, represents the emotions, among other things.  The emotions set off by 9/11 ( high waters rising)  took over and rose so high that American popular opinion was manipulated into supporting a new war with Iraq.

Not long after 9/11, Dylan had an interview published in Rolling Stone.  When asked to comment on the events of 9/11 he replied, ' for any real change to occur, people have to change their hearts.'   In another Rolling Stone interview published last year replying to a similar, how can we make the world a better place type of question, he gave the exact same answer, people have to start by changing their hearts.

Dylan's answer appear isomorphic with Aleister Crowley's prime directive to his students that all beginning magick should get directed toward attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), an operation which takes place in the qabalistic sphere of Tiphareth, also the domain of the heart chakra.  Although an arcane sounding title, this Knowledge and Conversation, to begin with, merely consists of making contact and starting a dialog with that Higher Intelligence which represents your true nature.

The chorus to Dylan's signature song, Like A Rolling Stone plays into this conspiracy.  You might need to hear it to understand this interpretation I have that the first line of the chorus, 

How does it feel  makes a great corollary question to Shakespeare's famous existential line, To be or not to be, that is the question, from Hamlet.

The whole chorus:

 How does it feel

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

also reminds me of Gurdjieff's insistence that people have to realize what he called 'their own nothingness' before the real work of waking up can start.

Michael Bloomfield played guitar on Like A Rolling Stone and a few other tracks from Highway 61 Revisited.  Dylan stated not long ago that Bloomfield was his favorite of all the guitar players he has worked with.  The name Michael, as regular readers will remember, recalls the Archangel of Fire in the magickal hierarchy of the Golden Dawn.  This brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs; continuing our comparison with the HGA we can realistically compare the image of Michael Bloomfield playing guitar over that chorus with Aleister Crowley's primary instruction for contacting the HGA:

Invoke often.  Enflame thyself with prayer.

The Songs

It's beyond the scope of this blog post to examine the vast amount of hermetic data in Dylan's songs; that would require a book devoted to the subject.  I'll mention  a few song titles I've found relevant and leave you to your own devices.   

Hard Rain:  a visionary quest type of song:

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son ?
And where have you been my darling young one ?

Lots of imagery that communicates well through the lens of qabalah in this song.  The first time Alan Ginsberg heard Hard Rain he said tears came to his eyes because he realized that the torch had been passed on.  The literary lineage of that torch includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, and William Burroughs/Jack Kerouac/& Ginsberg.

Every song on Bringing It All Back Home has a piece of the puzzle particularly Subterranean Homesick Blues and Love Minus Zero/No Limit (this title should be read like a fraction, Love Minus Zero over No Limit.)

Also, every track on Highway 61 Revisited rewards examination.  Ballad of a Thin Man and Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues sound straight out of the Bardo.  Desolation Row does too, and also yields much useful info with qabalah.

The songs that stand out for me from Blonde On Blonde include: Visions of Johanna, Stuck Inside of Memphis with the Mobile Blues Again ( the beginning of this resonates with Crowley's Star Ruby ritual), Absolutely Sweet Marie, and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

Everything from John Wesley Harding and most of Planet Waves.

When I Paint My Masterpiece from Greatest Hits Volume II

From Blood on the Tracks (great title!): Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

The album Desire has the song Isis which reminds me of perhaps the best interview comment I've seen, given by Jonathan Cott in the January 26, 1978 issue of Rolling Stone:

ROLLING STONE: Under a statue of Isis in the city of Sais is the following inscription:  I am everything that was, that is, that shall be ... Nor has any mortal ever been able to discover what lies under my veil."

DYLAN: That's a fantastic quotation.  That's true, exactly.  Once you see what's under the veil, what happens to you?   You die, don't you, or go blind?

The album cover for Desire has the tarot card The Empress on the back side.  Tarot imagery also appears in Changing of the Guards from Street Legal.

Romance in Durango (Desire) suggests a trial by fire.  It starts:

Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun
Dust on my face and my cape
Me and Magdalena on the run
I think this time we shall escape.

Pressing On from Saved.

Of his more recent work: Highlands from Time Out of Mind, Misssissippi off of Love and Theft, and Thunder on the Mountain, the opening track of Modern Times.

Mastery of Breath

In the documentary, No Direction Home, produced by Martin Scorsese, Alan Ginsberg makes the point that Bob Dylan has complete control over his breath when he performs.  Scorsese then cuts to a perfect illustration of Dylan doing just that with his vocal delivery.

 According to Eastern mystics, air contains a substance called "prana" which means vital life.  Pranayama is the practice of taking in this substance through controlled breathing.  Performers who use their breath do a natural, instinctive kind of pranayama.  Gurdjieff considered this substance food for the emotional centrum. 

The sound of the harmonica playing also reveals Dylan's prana.  I saw him in concert in the early '90's, and when he picked up the harmonica for the first time that evening and started playing a long note, the crowd went crazy with appreciation.  No technique was involved beyond getting the sound of one note to sustain.  I suspect the feeling he put into it drew the response.  I know I felt it pretty strongly, the feeling seemed amplified by the group reaction like a number of tuning forks amplifying the fundamental frequency after the first one has sounded.

The harmonica has an interesting magickal background.  The virtue of beginning with the letter "h" places it in the realm of the Hebrew letter "heh."  This puts it in the mighty fine company of Tetragrammaton, the four-fold name of God spelt YHVH.  Tetragrammaton can get modeled after a family unit: Yod = Father, first Heh = Mother, Vau = Son, second Heh = daughter.  Crowley uses Tetragrammaton to articulate a formula of spiritual rejuvenation which goes: the Son places the Daughter on the throne of the Mother who then "awakens the eld of the All-Father."

This elevation of the female archetype to a royal platform appears cognate with the function symbolized by the tarot card The Chariot.  Crowley called The Chariot the formula of the new aeon.  The elevation of the female archetype appears throughout Dylan's music.  The breath and sound of the harmonica  passionately takes this theme further and magickally affirms it.

Heh corresponds with The Star from the tarot providing another potent image to add to the harmonica meditation.  In the Book of Thoth ( p.109) Crowley writes:

This picture represents Nuith, our Lady of the Stars.  For the full meaning of this sentence it is necessary to understand the first chapter of the Book of the Law.

It's worth reading the whole description of this card from the Book of Thoth as well as the first chapter of the Book of the Law  (only 66 verses) for a full taste of the richness of imagery and energetics that can get keyed into via Dylan's harmonica solos. 

BotL I:26 gives a good example:

Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body.

Vau, the son in the Tetragrammaton formula, connects with The Hierophant of the tarot whose function communicates "secrets from the temple."  Seems quite easy to see Dylan's music playing this role.

The abstract dramatization of Dylan's life in the 2007 film I'm Not There
has an ensemble cast of actors playing various personas he adopted at different stages in his carrer. Appropriately for the film's title, Bob Dylan himself doesn't make an appearance until the very last scene when director Todd Haynes shows him playing an extended harmonica solo originally filmed by D.A. Pennebaker for a project called Eat the Document.

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