Remember that band I wrote about whose bass player fell asleep in the mix? This is the companion story.
That same band had a cocky guitar player who thought he was hot shit…. Wait a minute. Most guitar players think that. Anyway, this guy’s amp was awesome. It had more tubes than any other I have seen. It practically lit up the room.
When I looked closer I realized the tubes were not tubes at all. They were blue lights setup to look like tubes. This thing was solid state all the way.
Just got back from a 5 band show, 3 of which were Candiria, American Head Charge and Otep.
We stood for 6 hours. My feet, back, shoulders, knees and other body parts I didn’t know I have ache.
It was such an awesome show, but I’m too tired to cover it tonight. Later on I’ll try to give it some justice.
I recorded this really shitty metal band one time. Their singer was so bad, he would blow his voice out after singing 1 or 2 takes of a song. It wasn’t singing either, it was more like screaming remotely close to the key of the (bad) song.
So we finally get to the mix. We’re tweaking everything when I hear this strange noise. I stop the tape (yes, in the tape years) and I find that the sound is the bass player snoring on the couch. He was really sawing logs. I ran into the sound room and grabbed a great big large diaphragm microphone, placed it 1/4″ from his nose and hit record. Then we pumped his snoring through the main speakers and put a giant reverb on it. He sounded like a giant snoring in the Grand Canyon. He soon woke up.
Days later this bass player was bitching and moaning about how bad his bass sounded in the mix. I could only tell the dude that he might have gotten what he wanted if he was actually conscious during the mix. Typical bullshit we engineers go through. They sleep though the mix and blame you for their sound not being what they wanted.
Sometimes I do studio work and quite often live gigs drumming for bands who either don’t have a drummer or whose drummer can’t make the gig for some reason.
One night I was doing a drum sub gig for a band that played what I’d call cool 70’s music. There’s cool 70’s and not cool 70’s. The guitar player had a “girlfriend” who was quite beautiful. In fact I honestly thought she was on another level than him. I couldn’t quite figure out why she was with this guy even though he seemed cool.
I later figured out later that she was with him because he was her sugar daddy. Turns out he was quite the coke dealer/user. This explained a few of his “mannerisms” that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I guess (I wouldn’t know) when you have your own personal coke whore that you supply coke to, you have to ration it out. During the gig she kept coming up to the stage and talking in his ear while we were playing. He kept giving her the brush off.
This stage was fairly high and small. The level of the stage was about 5 feet off the ground in this club. After being rejected, the coke whore left the dance floor and sneakingly crawled up the stage stairway. I watched her the whole time but the guitar player couldn’t see her. Keep in mind that at this point I still don’t know she is a coke whore and that he is a coke dealer. She watched him intensely and when he was playing a lead or doing some vocals she’d crawl ever closer to him on the stage. She crawled on hands and knees right behind my kit. I looked down at her and she looked up at me with a “sssshhh” look in her eyes. She finally found a spot behind the backline of the gear. She got right behind the guitar players amp stack completely out of view of the guitar player and the audience, but in my plain view.
She started digging in the back of his open back guitar amp. After throwning a few pairs of extra strings and a tuner on the floor she found what she was looking for….the coke. She opened up the baggie, put it in her hand and snorted the shit out of it. She emptied some more and did it again. Then she just kicked back and leaned against the amp and started to get “that look” on her face. She was high as a kite and pathetic as hell.
I wonder how many bucks worth she snorted there because later the guitar player was very pissed at her. Having already gotten her goods I wonder if the guitar player got his after the gig…
Years ago a rock & roll band I was in took a little trek to Kemmerer Wyoming to do a gig. Playing a gig in the Twilight Zone would be normal compared to this gig.
Our bass player liked to jump around on stage while playing. He would even do the headbanger move and flip his very long hair all around. It was quite entertaining. He also wore his pajamas for the gig. Gee I can’t imagine why these hicks from Kemmerer thought this was out of the ordinary.
The people in the audience just kind of stood against the back wall of the venue and just watched in disbelief. They looked like deer in your headlights. When we went on break they literally came up and asked: “Can you tell your bass player to stop jumping around? He’s too hard to watch.”