KING SHAM
me – vocals
Rob – guitar, bass
John Cerreta – organ
Pete McDade – drums
It’s October 2, 2001. I began this whole process on October 29, 2000.
It does bother me. Objectively I know it’s not as if I’ve actually spent a year on it… even apart from the lack of recording between April and September when we have been in studio it really only amounts to one or two days in a week, punctuated by a couple of weeks off. Hopefully, I’m going to be able to give him a lump sum within the month, and we’ll set aside a block of time to wrap it up. I can’t say enough about Rob and the fact that he has been so willing to work with me on doing this, given the frequency with which he’s actually getting paid by me.
All that said, we began work on song #7 of 11 last night. Pete came in last week and laid down the drum tracks. Last night with a scratch guitar track and the bass already done I did the vocals. One take with a couple of punch-ins, and then doubling it. I could already hear the backing vocals, which is always reassuring. There’s nothing worse than not hearing anything, like staring at empty paper with a deadline looming. Then Rob and John did the intro to the song, a kind of warbley (I love trying to type a word like that… like “wonky”) guitar and organ bit.
Basically things went really easily. I wasn’t absolutely crazy about the song, and I hardly ever play it acoustic. But when we rehearsed the band a couple of weeks ago I brought it out and the version we hashed out sounded great (and I had sort of known that it really was a band song). When I was doing the vocals last night the song wasn’t grabbing me much, I was thinking it might end up being a weak point, but as things fell into place it really started to sound great.
It’s hard at times to keep myself excited about the CD, just because the process has taken so long and has had so many long breaks of no activity. The CD is really meant to be a whole entity (what they euphemistically refer to as a “song cycle” instead on “concept” record, sort of like calling a comic book a “graphic novel,” it just serves to make you seem desperate to not sound uncool) so it’s hard to keep a grasp on it with so much time passing between songs. But I am eager to get it done and out, I want to have a SECOND CD… it’s hard to explain. It’s hard to keep saying that what I do during the day isn’t my real “job,” that what I am is a musician, when I look and only see one CD sitting there. I want development.
Don’t get me wrong. I feel good.