Track 16 Strikes Again!

Chris "Cujo" Cugini goes airborne during Anastasia Screamed's show at the 1989 WBCN Rumble.

Ok, Moontime session again. We were taking a break from sessioning and this little party started in the lounge next to the control room -- band, girlfriends, drinks. It was early eve. There was even a TV on; this little old set with the manual click click click channel dial. The party sounds were interesting to me, so I threw a blank up, put 16 in record and pulled a mic out in to the lounge.

The mic was close to the TV and I was picking up "Star Trek The Next Generation". There's that ascending horn motif that plays when the show like, comes back from a commercial or goes to a commercial: "Daa da da da Daa, da da da Daaa..." Right? Know what I mean? So that lick plays and somebody turned the channel which gave a burst of white noise, "KSSHHHH". So theres the horn riff and then, "Kssshhhh".

So, again, later we track songs and at mix time I push 16 up to see what's going to happen. The verse riff goes back and forth between D and C and then hits the chorus on an E? I think? Maybe G? So the verse is winding up and going in to the chorus, and from track 16 comes this horn riff in perfect key and timing, leading the song to the chous and on the "4" beat right before the downbeat of the chorus there's the blast of white noise which ends precisely at the "one" beat of the big chorus.

Everybody in the room hit the floor.

We rewound like ten times to hear it over and over. We HAD to keep it! Added some verb to give it stereo space and did a little EQ. Then, I had to painstakingly fly it in to the second chorus. This was an all analog project, no samplers or DAW. This meant I had to record the part off track 16 on to a 2-track and then back on to 16 at the right time. It took quite a while, and was much harder than the one that happened totally by chance. And the nature of the song, being a hard, noisy rocker, you absolutely don't recognise that little blurb as being "Star Trek" at all.

The song is called "Dead in The Grass".

The Track 16 Happy Accident happens at 1:12, and then again at 2:30 (on purpose via fly-in).

Here it is on Amazon: Moontme on MP3 at Amazon (The part we're talkin' about is not contained in the 30-second clip, unfortunately). Warning, track titles are mixed up. The crazy afore-blogged "Blues" with the thunder is mis-labelled "Dead Ants", and if you grab any track at all, get "15 Seconds or 5 Days", which is mis-titled "Fall to Ceiling" "One Deep Breath" is breathtaking, with backing vocals by Tany Donnely (see * below). What the hell, get the whole album!

You can hear full length streamers of a few AS songs, including "Dead in The Grass" on their MySpace page, too: Anastasia MySpace

*Tanya Donnely is also on that LP on a couple of tracks, right when she was leaving Throwing Muses and starting Belly. She liked the Nashville Studio so much, she did the debut Belly album there a few months later. She and I worked together well...she was good at taking direction from a producer and very professional in the studio. She said ideally she'd like to do the Belly LP there in Nashville with ME producing. That would have launched my career. Alas, her label had other ideas. Oh well. can't win 'em all.

But it was a trippy record. So is Anastasia's first LP, "Laughing Down The Limehouse". We did that one here in Boston. All kinds of effed-up cool wierd shit happened during those sessions, too, like the time the speaker turned itself off (a story for another time). Anastsia was never huge in the US and they were way ahead of their time, being pre Nirvana "Never Mind", but they had a loyal following in the UK, Germany, etc. If you want to hear some mind-bending cocophonous ear-candy, get either of their LPs or both. Heck, their London-based label gave us $15K per record budget, which was tiny at the time. Sure wish somebody'd give me $15 grand to do a record NOW! Recording not as big-bottomed as today's stuff, but it sounded right in the early '90s'.

The Mysterious Track 16...

While doing Anastasia Scream's "Moontime" LP at Nashville's at Sound Emporium Studios, we encountered some bizarre happenings. I'm not jivin' you. Some really crazy wierd shit happened. In one anomalous event, we recorded a loud thunderstorm that was happening outside the studio. This was a real boomer. I quickly threw on a blank 2" 24-track reel, popped track 16 in to record, and put a mic in front of an open doorway. This was a $3,000 Neumann U47fet that happened to be handy, and the studio assistant was none too happy later when she saw it placed inches from the torrent outside.

We recorded about six minutes of big rain and thunder. It's not like we had any plans for "the storm track", but thought it might be cool to have. (And besides, we were like, wicked baked, y'know?)


Eventually, we needed that reel to record songs, so we put track 16 in safe and recorded around it. Pretty much forgot about it.

Days later, when we were mixing this finished song called "Blues", I remembered track 16. About two minutes in to the song I eased fader 16 up. At one point right before the song, which is raging full-on, breaks down in to a quiet part, Chick Graning sings, "there's a hole in my head where the rain gets in," and, BOOOOOOMMM! A huge rolling thunderclap follows his phrase right on beat, and rolls and rumbles for about 20 seconds right through the breakdown! (The low-frequency of it vibrated the whole control-room)

Yes, for real.

Of course anybody listening would assume we very carefully placed a thunder sound-effect right there in the song. But no! It was there before the song was even tracked.

The breakdown is followed by this manic sax solo, so we left the magical track 16 in behind there...with the rain and thunder and sax wailing, it sounds like total madness!

Johnny and Me

For some reason this morning I woke up remembering Johnny Cunningham, the renowned Scottish Fiddler and producer who passed away a few years back. It was as if I heard the distant voice of his fiddle, calling me from my bed on this gray and rainy winter’s dawn (of course, if Johnny was awake at dawn, it meant he had not been to bed yet). I was lucky to have the great pleasure of knowing Johnny. Not that I was by any means a big player in his life, because he had a very big life that touched countless people. He was like giant ship; like The Queen Mary passing through the harbor. I was fortunate to have been invited onboard for the music and booze-cruise, between roughly '88 and '94. I can say without hesitation that Johnny was the most gregarious, funniest, most musical soul I have ever had the pleasure to get schnockered with. In a word, he was jolly. I was deeply saddened to hear of his passing in December of ’03, but for whatever reason, I have not really reflected on what Johnny Cunningham meant to me until now. Call this the memoir long overdue.

I met Johnny in 1988 while engineering a studio project for The Raindogs. They were an all-star band made up of Rhode Island singer/writer Mark Cutler, Bassist Darren Hill and drummer Jimmy Reilly, both formerly of Red Rockers (remember that one ‘80s hit, “China”?), and Johnny on fiddle. They were a really great band, too, infusing American blue-collar rock with Celtic overtones. It was like Tom Petty meets Bruce Springsteen meets Bob Geldof meets Elvis Costello and they all get drunk with The Pogues. We were tracking a label demo at Newbury Sound, paid by and for Sire/Warner Brothers and produced by Andy Paley. Ultimately, they did NOT sign with Warners, mostly due to Paley’s Specter-like overproduction being a mis-match for the more organic Raindogs, so the tapes I tracked have never seen the light of day. Their LP “Lost Souls” was released a year later on Atlantic, and is a wonderful album.


Dog Days: Raindogs '88, with Johnny as Top Dog in this promo pic.

Suffice it to say we recorded hard and played hard. After Paley’s departure from the studio every night around 1 am, the real party began, revolving around a glass-top table in the studio lounge. Hey, it was the ‘80s! I joined right in and partied with these guys ‘till dawn every night. As the beers flowed and in a haze of cigarette smoke I became drawn to the two Celts of the bunch: Jovial Johnny and his hilarious Scottish stories, and Jimmy, whose tinny Belfast brogue became less decipherable with each passing beer. I learned that before he was in Red Rockers, he was the drummer in Stiff Little Fingers, the seminal Irish Punk band. In fact, Jimmy’s brother had been murdered in an Irish political thing. If I recall correctly it was IRA who killed him, and they had a big benefit concert on his behalf at a football stadium in Ireland. This was ’79 or ’80. Stiff Little Fingers had headlined, and included on the bill was a rising young Dublin group called U2, playing their very first stadium show ever. Jimmy was a funny bastard, in a harder-edged sort of way. You got the feeling he could guzzle kerosene if someone dared him too. You also knew that crossing Jimmy would lead to lost teeth. He was a tough Irish street kid, y’know? One funny note: His Ulster accent prevented him from pronouncing my name properly. They can’t say the “oooh” sound. So, “Drew” always came out of Jimmy as “Dree”. “Dree, kedja add a bitta lew end t’me keck-dram?”

Johnny, contrarily, was round. He was warm and welcoming. He told jokes and stories so funny you’d wet yourself laughing. Being of Scots heritage myself, I was really drawn to his Scottishness. And by that I don’t mean just his accent, which was wonderful and lyrical; it was his wit, his charm, his way that got me. He had the soul of a Scotsman. It was the way he could drink anybody under the table and still play like a champ. It was the twinkle in his eye. It was his bawdy tales. It was his mischievousness. Mostly though, it was the way he could make you feel like a welcome special friend, even though he was immensely popular. Johnny was the life of the party. Everybody loved Johnny and wanted to be Johnny’s friend. I wanted to be Johnny friend.

At one point, Johnny's brother Phil appeared all the way from, I think he had been in Ireland, and the brothers played an impromtu trad performance after hours, Phil on the studio grand piano and Johnny on his fiddle. Amazing!

Shortly thereafter, I got him to co-produce and play fiddle a song of mine called, “I Can’t Get Over You”. I say I “got” him to, but the truth is he was happy to do it, and charged me nothing. We spent a day in the studio together and he really helped me bring the song together. Not only did he play a couple of brilliant fiddle tracks, pretty much in one take (which I learned was typical), he helped me mix the song and provided some nice insight. I learned how to record fiddle with Johnny. But it wasn’t a great song and I never really did anything with it. All I have now is a cassette copy. (My guitar-playing, which I had recorded before Johnny’s involvement, was rushed and sort of ham-fisted).

Later, as luck would have it, we ended up being neighbors. When I moved to Oak Square in Brighton in 1990, Johnny lived in Newton Corner, about a mile up the hill from me. Brighton had lots of Irish Pubs, but the one we ended up at the most frequently was The Green Briar. They had a popular Irish Seisiun there every week, so he sometimes sat in. Other times, I’d find myself sitting on a bar-stool next to Johnny, just drinking and laughing and smoking and soaking up his vibe. Once, I even got invited to a Scottish breakfast at his place in Newton. Jimmy was there and I don’t remember who else. We had Scotch eggs and ale. Nice. I saw him perform solo a couple of times. He’d sit up there with his fiddle, a whisky and a smoke, and play a reel and then tell a story; play an air and then tell a joke. Ever the bard, that was Johnny.

I worked with Johnny again in the studio when I was co-producing the band “Vision Thing”. He came in as a guest player to lay fiddle down on one of their tracks. The studio, Squid Hell, was in a big old house. It had multiple spaces to play, all of which were wired for microphones. He walked/played from room to room to find the best acoustics, and in classic Cunningham style, he chose the bathroom. He played the track (in one take) literally sitting on the throne. At the conclusion of his take, and as the last notes of the song died away, we heard over the control-room speakers: flusshhhh...
I still chuckle over that one. That was Johnny.

I don’t remember when the last time I saw Johnny was, but I think it was in Portsmouth New Hampshire, where I bumped in to him at The Press Room. That was probably ’94, give or take a year. After that he was based out of New York, his career went up to the next level, and deservingly so.

Perhaps it’s the gloom of this dreary day that brought Johnny to mind. He was the kind of guy who, from the corner of the pub and with revelers gathered ‘round, radiated humor and warmth and music, late in to a long winter’s night. He was the hearth. I reckon that is a trait born and bred in The Highlands (and fed by the water of life). One day I'll be drinking with him again and jamming with Johnny at seisiun, in that little pub, far away and over the hills.

For now, I will raise a not-so wee drammie to my lips and toast my one-time friend, Johnny Cunningham, the most soulful Scotsman I ever knew. beannachd leat caraid

Here are some Johnny web sites and his NY Times Obit:

http://www.johnnycunningham.com/

Johnny on MySpace

http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/artist_detail.cfm?artist_id=CUNINGJOHN

NY Obituary