Hi.
Tin Pan took a trip down to Phili on Monday to do a recording session for the blues artist known as Wharton Tract. You can hear Wharton playing harmonica on our version of “Careless Love” from the new CD. It was 12 hours of fun and games, basically. Clifton had us do horn section stuff and a few solos to flesh out Wharton’s Album. The sound du jour was using Bass Sax and Tuba to play unison bass lines. Timbre is everything.
Towards the end of the day we built three songs from scratch. The first was a very broken and harrowing “St. James Infirmary.” Darren Morze played a drum kit that Clifton devised that included a refrigerator door, a plate of metal, and an enormous artillery shell. Wharton is the real deal. He is the blues. The second tune was called “Rebuild This City” I think and was a gospel-ly happy up thing. So much fun and again I was just so impressed with Wharton’s energy. He was really bringing a huge intensity to the song. Finally we did a tune called “Broken American Dream” (I think) and I wound up playing Fender Rhodes on it!! It was a blast.
Now that our work was done we recorded a track for Veronica Varlow to use as a music track for part of her promo-real. It was the sleazy riff that Stefan came up with in our rehearsal for our ill-fated Shanghai Mermaid number. (Does anyone have a photo of the cops busting us??!!) We ran down a 4m30s version of it that really articulates exactly what you need to hear when a beautiful woman is taking her corset off.
Veronicas-dance
After a few shots of Bushmills I wound up on the drum kit trying to impersonate John Bonham while Clifton took me on a tour through all the killer odd-meter Zeppelin tunes like “The Ocean” (kinda nailed it) “Black Dog” – (took me a minute to just play in four) and “The Crunge” (no way). We were like kids in a candy store, essentially.
We’ll be back again… Here’s a photo of Stefan rocking a bass sax and a tenor at the same time and one of our intrepid and awesome engineer / drummer Darren Morze
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- Jeeezus
