Up early, again, but this time it was to meet Arktik Lake Tony who came to New Jersey to hang for the afternoon – from Sydney. Well, sort of, he was here to do many things; a holiday in Canada, picking up a VOX guitar from MRB in Boston, coming to visit us in the studio and later to go visit dad in Atlanta before returning home. We decided to meet in the chrome diner for brekkie and there he was settled in and seated by the friendly staff with all his bags and his VOX as we rolled in a little late. Odd at first to see someone out of context but one bowl of oatmeal later it was as if we all had been living in America for years, and then we are in New Jersey so we are actually Livin’ on a Prayer.
We can’t figure out how to open the boot of the car (that’s the trunk) so we had to pile Tony’s bags into the back seat and I walked to the studio. It was a nice crisp day and it wasn’t far to go, so unless I was run over by a truck crossing the road, it was easy. I got there first, undamaged, and Olivia and Tony followed. Brian and Bill were there waiting and we introduced sessioneers to each other. We played Tony two of the tracks we had been working on before continuing with the next song and the lead vocal.
Tony stayed till around 3 PM and even did a little interview piece for something Olivia is putting together about the sessioneers – I went to the shop. We wished him well on his journey across the New Jersey tundra and we went back to lead vocals. We finished the track we were working on and started another. Out of the blue, Brian said, “You should sing this verse” which turned into the intro, the verse and the bridge. The reason – Brian’s records are biblical stories and have dialogue between the characters, so today I played Ananias – as you do. At the end of the song, Olivia and I both joined in. Bill put it together and we had another song completed.
As it wasn’t Presidents’ Day, the Thai restaurants were open again and Olivia and I ordered accordingly. We now only have five days left on the Valley of Salt project and being in America. We now only have 19 days left till we move The Archive from England to Portugal, this time next week I’ll be home wondering where the last three months went.
Learn more about the BIG MOVE here.
Music today has been Grateful Dead – Anthem of the Sun (1968), a strange experiment between studio and live performances, mixed together with unique results. It was their second album and they were already causing a stir. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s comments:
“…Jerry [Garcia] and Phil [Lesh] went into the studio with Dan [Healy] and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song — one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other…It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day.”