Tony Patti and I were going through videos of Wax Theatricks
rehearsals to see if there was anything I could use for the DVD. I think there
will be good Youtube stuff.
He told me he hadn’t been able to finish his personal
project since Danny had passed. It certainly took the wind out of my sails.
When we were in rehearsals for the Wax reunion, my son and I
went down to a studio in South St. Louis . Tony asked him
to bring a t shirt so he could put band art on it for the show. Dylan cherishes
it.
If recordings were still on vinyl, his band had just
finished side one. This was just over a year ago.
Last Fall Danny, Dominic, Dylan and I went to Tony’s house
to hear his new quad release of Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia. It was the
happiest I’d seen Danny since he got sick. He said he was going to throw away
his stereo copy.
After Quadrophenia, Tony played his project. It’s incredibly
ambitious.
The first half is a concept album and he made the band learn
and play the whole thing straight through. I suspect you won’t be able to play
a single song on the Cd. You’ll have to listen to entire thing. I have to
admit, I’ve wanted to control my audience’s listening experience myself on
occasion.
As a record maker, the whole really is academic. It reminds
me of Hitchcock’s Rope. He filmed the entire thing on a stage with a single
moving camera. It was an ambitious experiment, but in the end it didn’t matter
to the audience.
As we were listening to Tony’s project, I couldn’t help but
thinking, “This would have been so much easier to record in pieces!”
I just got a skeleton of a musical piece from Carl
Weingarten and Walt Whitney. I have to do what I’m gonna do to it and send it
back. That’s how the next Delay tactics record is going to be made.
The DVD has been consuming my every waking moment and I have
3 other projects behind that. Not to mention 2 unfinished Fojammi records and 2
records worth of my own material.
Just after Danny passed, we had a huge party for him at
Duff’s Restaurant. My buddy Stephen Martin pulled me aside. He said Danny had
given him a message for me. “Finish your stuff!” It does seem like every time I
start making headway on it, I get distracted.
Get off your butt and finish the project Tony.
2 comments:
NOW! is really, really impressive. With the premise of the work, to do it in pieces would be, not wrong, but insincere at least. Overdubs would be forgivable, too, seeing as how it's always still NOW! ;)
Unfortunately (maybe fortunately), I've never had to put out a "solo" album. And I've started a couple but a band had always grown around it, or, the lyric/song ideas i've been working on have melded into the bands GDG, Funkabilly or The Blastoids. And psychotronics were nothin' but a flat-out jam band anyways.
At this point in my life i have no idea what a "solo" album would be. Haven't written anything since I deleted my lyric book- and that's gone forever now.
La di da...
Yeah, but to me that's the difference between live and studio. It's all in the mind.
Post a Comment