soon to screech, soon to explode

wherein a whole bunch of things happen all of a sudden-like.

This past weekend, Donny Who Loved Bowling got together –live and in person– for the first time in five years to work on our new album. The results were stunning. Over four days holed up in a studio in Chicago (with brief sojourns out to see 2 Devo concerts at the Vic), five tracks-in-progress were finished, and seven more were written and recorded. The title list as it stands now includes:

Eczema Bop (previously heard on Vince & Daisy’s Progopolis show)
Lazarus Rising
Ain’t Gotta Come On So Boss
Miss Belgium
Archivist Masturbatrix
Corsets to Covet
Deena’s Mitten
Fairchild 666
Mystery Abba Concert
Girdle of Crocodiles
Bunk Floyd
Bettie/Were You There? (also previously heard on Progopolis)

This, as Tom Clancy would say, constitutes the bulk of the Soviet surface fleet. and at the moment, it is the title list and running order for dwlb’s third album, Screeching and Exploding.

click to enlarge:

adding guitar to “Mystery Abba Concert”

Vox Beatle, Marshall, Electra LP copy. Yeahness.

the venerable Silvertone

petkus runs the voodoo down

blood and petkus listening to a mix

What doesn’t come across in the photos is that for reasons best left unexplored, the movies Help! and Ocean’s Eleven were in near-constant rotation on the studio TV.

There’s still some work to do on a couple of the songs, and we need to work out cover art…but we expect that in a very short time we’ll be sending Screeching and Exploding off to be mastered and then up to CD Baby and iTunes!

It was a fantastic weekend in Chicago, the excitement level was through the roof at Toxic Bag Headquarters where the recordings were made. Thanks to Blood and JB for coming in to clap hands.

Once she’s been to where she’s gone to…

…she should know wrong from right.

(and this is just wrong)

You might not know it to listen to DWLB records but I’m a classic rock kid to a great extent. REO Speedwagon, Boston, Styx and Journey were a big part of the soundtrack of my early teens. For years that’s been an uncool thing to talk about, and it seems the only time one hears any of their music outside nostalgia radio is when a bar full of White Sox fans sing “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Recently though, the new “shuffle play” radio stations have been bringing much of this music back, and in one instance I’m a little puzzled and somewhat miffed.

The Journey double-single “Feelin’ That Way/Anytime” is what I’m taking about. It was classic rock candy for Journey fans when that first song would come on, because you always knew you’d hear two Journey tunes back-to-back (I am talking about 12-year-olds here). And this was back before Escape, when Gregg Rolie was still in the band, and the Steve Perry era was just getting started. When the combination of an amazing lead singer and a strong group of backup singers led to rich, thick vocal arrangements that somehow vanished when Jonathon Cain replaced Rolie after the double-live Captured record. You can hear the inter-band tension on these two tracks as Rolie struggles to keep his presence in the face of Perry’s vastly superior vocal ability; the duets are carefully arranged but there’s no getting around the fact that Rolie, the weaker singer, is obviously double-tracked and Perry needs no such studio crutch. It must have been tough; Rolie was, after all, the guy who sang on Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” and who was this head-voice upstart usurping his position as lead vocalist? Can’t we be a two-lead-singer band like the Beatles? Alas, it was not to be. But the lush harmonies on the choruses make it all okay…and the a capella ending of “Feelin’ That Way” gives way to the a capella opening of “Anytime” and the delicious drama starts all over.

But wait. The opening chorus is supposed to be in time with the song, there’s this awesome rest between the first line and the second that creates a fantastic tension…but not on JACK FM, no sir! They’ve cut the rest in half, the second line comes in two beats too soon, totally blowing the groove of the intro. What’s going on here, guys? Two more counts of radio silence is too much for you? You think your listeners will get bored during that one second and switch the dial? You must have felt strongly enough about it to load the song into your computer and make the edit. It’s completely silly. You made a completely unmusical edit for…well, for no good reason, apparently. To quote the late Orson Welles, come on, fellas, you’re losing your heads here.

In his car, Joe has a 6-CD changer, 12 radio presets and a short attention span. He primarily listens to NPR.

DWLB on Progopolis Redux

As it turns out, the interview we did with Vince and Daisy did not air on their anniversary show, but that’s more than okay, because they’re actually devoting an entire show to us! Witness:

After five long years, Vince and Daisy finally sit down with Joe Griffin and Christopher Petkus, the creative minds behind the experimental band Donny Who Loved Bowling, for an interview of epic proportions. Spanning the length of the entire 3-hour show, we’ve interlaced fine selections from the band’s diverse musical catalogue with a witty, fascinating conversation ranging in topics from their recording methods and influences, to evolution and the purpose of the appendix. The show will air this Saturday at 7pm Pacific (10pm Eastern) and can only be heard at www.thedividingline.com. Bring popcorn. This is hands down one of the best shows in the five-year history of Prog’opolis.

Seriously, this could not be more awesome and thrilling. We hope you’ll be there.

Tune in this Saturday, September 5, at the Dividing Line Radio Network site.

-dwlb-

DWLB on Progopolis Celebrast!

DWLB has, over the years, enjoyed a fantastic amount of airplay on the Prog’opolis internet radio show. Co-hosts Vince and Daisy Jane have become good friends of the band, and they frequently are good enough to world-premiere new Donny songs. Heck and tarnation, they even gave us the name for this blog. We loves ‘em all the live-long day.

They’re celebrating five years of the show this Saturday, August 15, with a special 5th anniversary broadcast. To help them out we sat down in our respective studios, at our Skype-equipped confusers, and had ourselves a two and a half hour interview with Vince and Daisy — an interview the four of us had been talking about doing since we first sent them “tree fort” all those years ago. Vince is likely going mad trying to edit the interview down to a coherent and succinct 5 minutes for inclusion in the show; we do tend to ramble.

Please tune in Saturday, 7 pm Pacific, to listen live to the Prog’opolis Fifth Anniversary Special. Jump into their chat room and tell ‘em congrats. Ask Vince about his surgery. Hear some great music.

Happy Anniversary, Vince and Daisy! Thanks for everything.

–dwlb–

Turn me on tonight, I’m Radioactive

DWLB runs smack-dab into the War on Terror

The following letter from the United States Copyright Office arrived at DWLB’s Chicago office on Monday:

We recently received your copyright claim in the mail after it had been irradiated. The US Postal Service began this precaution following the discovery of anthrax contamination in October 2001. The irradiation level is strong enough to damage some materials beyond our ability to process them. This is the case with one or more of the items you sent. Please send a replacement for the damaged item(s).

The item in question was a CD of unreleased DWLB recordings, some of which will be included on our next full-length album. A replacement disc is on its way to Washington DC now.

Donny Who Loved Bowling does not wish to downplay the importance of national security, or in any way disrespect the victims of the anthrax attacks.

But we did find this particular situation pretty amusing.

A fine selection of non-irradiated DWLB music is currently available at iTunes and CD Baby.

In the Still of the Night

I hear the wolf howl, honey

Last night I attended a panel discussion sponsored by The Recording Academy and Shure, featuring record producers Mike Clink, Ron Nevison and Keith Olsen. These guys have recorded the Who, Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Heart, Bad Company, the Rolling Stones, Whitesnake, Fleetwood Mac, and countless other amazing bands.

It was a fantastic evening, listening to the songs on Shure’s amazing PA system, and hearing the stories behind famous records. Among the fun tidbits:

Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in Olsen’s bedroom after a huge fight with Lindsey Buckingham.

The hoarse vocal bits on Heart’s “These Dreams” were comped in from the scratch vocal, as Nancy Wilson had a cold when she recorded the scratch and the final vocal was too clean in those bits. Nancy asked Nevison to switch it back but he refused (that’s actually my favorite part of that vocal, so I’m glad he won the argument).

Nevison and Pete Townshend flew in the sound effects on Quadrophenia from broadcast cart machines during the mix because they didn’t have enough tracks to print them to the multitrack tape.

John Sykes’ solo on Whitesnake’s “In the Still of the Night” was assembled on 1/2” tape one phrase at a time (sometimes one note at a time) and flown in manually…because Sykes recorded the solo in another studio…over the wrong section of the song.

I love hearing about stuff like that. It’s part of the audio geek mindset. Are any of these anecdotes going to help me make better records? Probably not. But their thoughts on working with musicians, or use of psychology to bring out great performances and keep temperamental artists in their comfort zone (or out of it as needs require) are invaluable.

Some of the Q & A was pretty good too. A couple of “gotcha” questions, a couple of folks trying to look cool, one question that made no sense…and then the question I knew was coming but really hoped wouldn’t.

“Do you think that modern tools like Pro Tools, Autotune and Beat Detective are making musicians lazy?”

Seriously? You’ve got three guys in front of you who have produced or engineered albums that have collectively sold over 300 million copies and you’re going to ask a question that you have already answered for yourself. Just the fact that you’ve asked it gives me a big clue to the position you’ve taken. And now you just want the guy who recorded Appetite For Destruction to agree with you. Come on, man.

I’m not saying it isn’t a valid question these days. I’m not saying it isn’t a concern, an issue we all have to struggle with every time we go into a session where there’s a computer involved. But for one thing, it’s one of those almost religious issues that is never going to be resolved, and for the other, if you really want to talk about it, go to Gearslutz or TapeOp and wait a few minutes—someone will start up a thread about it. It happens almost daily. This is a rare opportunity to actually learn something; ask a better question, not a cliché.

Music technology has, over the last 50+ years, developed myriad ways to alter performances. It didn’t start with Autotune. The first time a recordist punched in a phrase in the middle of a vocal track, or cut two different performances together using a razor blade and tape he was creating an artificial representation of a musical event. Is that reductio ad absurdum? Perhaps. Is a staunchly conservative stance against digital workstations overly reactionary? Very possibly.

If you think that Pro Tools, Autotune and Beat Detective create lazy musicians or are “destroying music”…don’t use them. They’re tools, nothing more, and the positive or negative results from the use of those tools rests squarely in the hands of the craftsmen.

Here endeth the rant.

Bite size

As promised, Donny Who Loved Bowling announces Tweetcasting: podcasts 140 seconds or shorter. DWLB tweetcasts will feature snippets of unreleased music and works in progress, band news, or whatever we decide to lay down for ya. And it takes less than two and a half minutes, so why not listen?

The first DWLB Tweetcast is up now. It features a rough mix of the basic track for “Ain’t Gotta Come On So Boss,” as well as a little bit of our Pink Floyd cover. Enjoy!

more,

dwlb

After all, we’re only ordinary men

A couple of months ago, the offices of Toxic Bag Records got a strange phone call from The Big Old West Coast. Seems that a production company was cutting a commercial for the new Christian Bale movie Terminator: Salvation and needed some music. Specifically, they needed a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.” The actual Floyd track is used in the film, but Pink Floyd does not license their recordings for commercials…so a substitute was required.

As fate would have it, DWLB had recorded one such cover the week that Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright died, and the recording was broadcast on the Progopolis internet radio show. The production company had apparently assigned one of their producers to scour the internet for cover versions of the song. The producer ran across ours, liked it and contacted our record label.

Since we know how these things work, it was no surprise that we never heard back from the production company after sending them the track. They most likely had 40 different versions to choose from and went with one that sounded more like the original than ours.

So the Terminator: Salvation commercial went out without a DWLB song in it, but we don’t think that ought to diminish your enjoyment of the movie.

casting about

As mentioned on the 140s this morning, the podcast page is active and contains some works in progress as well as some finished tracks.

Next up? Tweetcasts: podcasts 140 seconds or less. Look for it, and tell ‘em dwlb told you it would happen.

more,

-dwlb

the public folder and the title file

these are the tools of the new dwlb album.

The first record, tree fort was done in a not-quite traditional way, in recording studios, sure, but also in an abandoned bar on Western in Chicago. The second record, Butcher Covers, found us unable to be in the same state, let alone the same studio, so we worked over the internet. The common destination for multitrack recordings and demos is the mac.com public folder, from which we pull down to overdub and then upload the result.

This process will continue for the as-yet-unnamed third album.

The title file is an ever-expanding list of strange phrases which are destined to become song titles or lyrics or both. Or neither. We have kept this list since we finished tree fort.

In December we “underdubbed” drums on a series of demos. The underdubbing was done at Stereophonic Studios in Chicago. Peter Griffin played drums. Marshall Terry engineered. Joe drank diet soda and listened. Christopher was in Austin. The drums, recorded and edited, made their way to the public folder.

Pete and Marshall at Stereophonic

Drums were recorded using a modified Glyn Johns technique with added snare mic and distant room mics.

Pete at Stereophonic

In the next episode, Christopher will play and listen in Austin and Joe will be in Chicago. Whatever is recorded will find its way to the public folder.

More sooner.

-dwlb-