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'.