Winter continues with hopes of spring around the corner. Jeannie and I went skiing two weekends in a row up at Catamount, and the last time our friend Seth came out the ski with us, which was alot of fun. Conditions have been good, although the steep parts near the top of the hill tend to get icy. We skied Sidewinder a few times both trips, but they close it at night. Our favorite run these days is Mountain View, which is partially sheltered by trees, so the snow tends to stay good on it. Jeannie had her fitness app running last time we went, and we learned that the Sidewinder trail is two miles long, and Mountain View is just over a mile. I hope we can get one more ski trip in this season, but this week the weather is turning warm, up to 45 every day the next few days. On the plus side, I can start biking again.
But the main topic for this post is music. I’ve been working on a new record since I finished Plutonium Dirigible late last year. It’s called Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. But where to begin explaining? Let’s rewind a bit.
Martin left behind six or eight albums worth of songs, many of them unrecorded or recorded only as demos. I decided to make my next album a tribute to Martin and celebrate his music by recoding new versions of a bunch of his songs. I wanted to be faithful to his versions, or at least understand them in detail. It turns out he never wrote much down, so the main thing I have to go on is his recordings.
I was drawn to his early material because that resonated with me the most. I learned a bunch of songs he wrote for Shade as he was writing them and we used to jam them, back when we were in college and still lived in my parent’s house. Usually he’d play guitar and I’d play piano. I had a Wurlitzer electric piano and Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer which I later upgraded to a Fender Rhodes and a Roland Alpha-Juno. We used to jam songs like Let It Roll by BTO, Cinnamon Girl, Ziggy Stardust, things like that. We even wrote a bunch of songs together before Shade came into being.
So I started learning the Shade songbook. First thing I did was go out and buy a new guitar. Most recently I’d been using a semihollowbody jazz guitar, which I like alot, and in fact used it for all the guitar parts on Plutonium Dirigible, but wasn’t right for his kind of music. I needed something solid. Martin had maybe a ten or so guitars, including several twelve-string electrics, which became his main instrument by the end. Also a very nice Fender Stratocaster, which was his axe for a long time before he switched to 12-string, and then was at my house for many years. I played a bunch of times but never was happy with the sound or the feel; it just didn’t work for me.
The guitar I ended up getting is a PRS with dual humbuckers, and a rich brown sunburst finish, very beautiful, something like a Les Paul setup but with a lighter, sleeker, better looking body. Excellent tone and feel and control over the sound. Finally the right electric guitar for me! I began practicing with an amplifier pretty much all the time, to get better at that aspect of it too. (With the hollowbody I could practice without and amp no problem and get just the sound of the guitar.) My amp is a Roland Jazz Chorus, one of the all-time classic sounds. I originally bought it to use as a keyboard amp on the stage for gigs.
Later, Kathleen asked me if I wanted any of Martin’s musical instruments, and I did bring home a couple of his guitars. One was the first guitar he ever bought, a used black Ibanez customized with the red and white racing stripes. I had no idea he’d kept it all these years. I remember I drove him down to buy it and got a speeding ticket on the way home. This must have been in the summer of 1988. I think the first song he ever learned on guitar was Your Love by The Outfield. The other guitar I took was his first electric twelve-string, a Carvin. That was also his main axe for a good long spell, when he lived in Pembroke. I’ve played it a few time and it’s very nice. I’m going to use it on the new recording before the end.
Anyway, I dove into the Shade songs. I remember Martin writing alot of those early songs. Some of them he and I used to jam together. I helped workshop a few, and some he just played my when he first came up with them to get my reaction. He always seemed to have a good idea of what he was after. In the end he recorded eighteen songs from that period. So far I’ve figured out twelve or so. I’ve really gotten a feel for his songwriting style and use of chords and voicings.
Martin had a way of doing patterns on the fretboard, coming up with variations on chords that used subtle movements and sound very cool. He’d lift a finger to create an open string as part of the voicing, and sometimes put it down on a different string on the same fret, or shift the whole shape a fret or two or up or down a string. He did this on a few songs including Making Miles on an A major, Frozen Ocean on an E minor, and The Story Lies using a slightly more complicated pattern. He showed me all these songs a long long time ago when I wasn’t very good at guitar. Now I’m trying to reconstruct these patterns.
All of the Shade songs were recorded with a rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums, lead vocals and sometimes a second vocal track doing harmony. I focused mainly on the rhythm guitar parts and started planing how I would do a record.
But then something unexpected happened. I found a recording of a project we did together, even before Shade, that I’d forgotten all about. In January 1990 over winter break from college Martin and I made a little concept album. At this time I was mainly doing my jazz fusion group Event Horizon (and had just written Son of the Sun around the same time), but hadn’t written very many rock or pop songs with lyrics. Neither had Martin, but he wanted to try, and we dove right in. We called the project Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. As with The Brothers Zing / Buzzy Tonic, we each contributed one name and never sorted out which was the name of the group and which was the name of the record.
The project had a definite wintertime vibe with lots of imagery of cold and darkness combined with youthful yearning for escape and adventure. The sound was very much influenced by bands like Pink Floyd, Camel, Supertramp, Styx, old Rush, Genesis and Yes, that kind of thing. I’m not sure why, we were listening to alot of different stuff, and both of our songwriting went in other directions after that, but I guess the prog thing struck a chord at the time, so to speak.
The recording is pretty rough because we wrote and performed the songs very quickly. I think we started planning and writing around Thanksgiving, and started rolling tape right after New Year. We were done just a few weeks later. We used using a borrowed cassette 4-track recorder. There’s no bass; I’m playing the bass lines with my left hand like The Doors. The drums were added last, using a single microphone. The mix is primitive, the sound quality isn’t great, and there are definitely a few clams cuz we had to do everything in whole takes with no punch-ins. Still there are some great moments and I think the song themselves hold up quite well.
So I’m making a new version of Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter, to record these songs properly. It’s another situation where I have no reference to original material and I have to figure out the chords and lyrics by ear. I don’t even know the names of all the songs!
Nevertheless, it’s coming along nicely. The original record was a bit short of a regular LP. We we had five songs, with the first being a two-part suite and the last a seventeen-minute multi-part prog epic, totaling about thirty-three minutes in all. I decided to add a couple more songs from around that time to round it out. One is an early Shade song that fits the theme, and the other is an unfinished piece I originally wrote for my prog rock band Infinigon, which had broken up shortly before.
Since I don’t have to do much writing for this record, things are coming along pretty quickly. I decided to the four shortest songs together in a batch. Then I’ll do the two longer songs, and finally the big epic. For the first batch I have the (midi) drums, bass guitar, keyboards and rhythm guitar parts done. For the synth parts I dusted off some of my old gear including my Roland Juno, which has such great and distinctive sounds, and my rarely used Moog. I have the vocals, lead guitar parts, and and a sax solo to go, plus mixing. Oh, and I’m going to use real drums too.
More on all of this as it progresses. Stay tuned to hear the first batch of songs in the weeks ahead.