Hold on to your horses, Craig Miller will be doing a live Blueburst show from his studio in Atlanta on Thursday, January 11th at 8 PM, Eastern Time. He will be playing tracks from the new record, some covers, and anything else that may have escaped under the settee. Please support him in this as he deserves it big time for putting out such a great record in a time when a great record like this might not be seen. What a pleasure it was working with him on this album, new songs, new friends. You can also get some great art prints by Holly Miller, which have been the cover art for recent single releases.
Back in Dallas, it’s always an exciting day in the studio when the ‘other’ musicians come in. The violinist, the cellist, the trumpetist and flügelhornist with the guitarist slotting in somewhere in between them all. We’ve been working on the same song’s guitar parts for three days, partly Monday, all of Wednesday and part of today. When you have a nine-minute song, it’s like three three-minute pop songs worth of material to cover. Generally, the ‘others’ play single instruments, whereas the guitarist has a solid body six-string electric with single coil pickups, a solid body 6-string electric with humbuckers, a semi-acoustic electric with toaster pickups, an electric 12-string, an acoustic 12-string, an acoustic 6-string and more. There are lots of choices, the cellist doesn’t bring in seven cellos.
But first, we had Olivia playing with her single violin, then Tess with her single cello, followed by Evan and his trumpet and his flügelhorn. Next came Brian to finish off the guitars on this track, with Tess returning to finish all the cello parts. A thirteen-hour day of listening and concentrating, recording great musicians and experiencing the songs grow from shells to living creatures.
We also listened to the final mixes of the first album today as it heads to mastering next week. We have to work out which songs fade, and which songs don’t, while Andreas and Björn in Sweden will be figuring out gaps between songs, and mastering for digital and vinyl versions of the record. Every stage of making a record has to be carefully considered, even what you might call ‘the most casual of bands’ generally have somebody at each stage who knows what the hell he is doing.
Music today has been the debut album by Greenslade, one of two albums released in 1973, the other being Bedside Manners Are Extra. In 1974, they released Spyglass Guest, which made it to No. 34 in the UK charts before their last album Time and Tide in 1975. A band that came up with the idea of having two keyboardists and no guitarist. The band was Dave Greenslade (keys) and Tony Reeves (bass) from Colosseum, Dave Lawson (keys) from I Spider and Samurai and Andrew McCulloch who played drums on King Crimson’s Lizard (1970) and with many other bands. Martin Briley joined on bass for the last album. I saw them live in the seventies at the Royal Court (I think) in Liverpool. Martin Briley was in the band then dressed in a skeleton suit playing a double neck bass and guitar (I think). What musical fun those days were.