There’s this guy calls himself T. Max. He's published a fanzine for the local Boston rock scene called The Noise for something like 30 years, so most of the rockers in town know who he is. He was thinking about all the classic rock anti-war songs that have come down to us from the '60s, and wondering why there didn't seem to be any nowadays, so he wrote one of his own as a sort of aesthetic pump-priming. And because he knows so many of the key people, he set about mobilizing the resources to get it performed and recorded by many of Boston’s most celebrated musicians, singers and engineers. The work has been done at Hi & Dry, a loft recording studio in Cambridge built by the group Morphine, whose drummer Billy Conway helped engineer.
Sunday was the humongous vocal session, a good couple dozen singers (and support staff) assembled to sing the song. (I was probably the least famous of the lot.) In addition, there were half a dozen camera operators videotaping the session, because the whole point of the exercise is trying to make a media splash emphasizing the idea that we musicians disapprove of war, and specifically of the war in Iraq (which seems obvious to me, but then, so does most of what passes for news). Chuck Rosina (long time deejay and commentator on WMBR and WMFO and stringer for Pacifica News and its successor) recorded interviews with several of the principals in the project, and he also did one with me because he knows I’m generally good for an articulate sound bite; I said some stuff about how the discourse of the 21st century is dominated by irony, and how the lack of same in this project was not only a throwback to the ‘60s but also curiously refreshing.
The song has three verses, and in order to maximize the public faces of the project, six featured singers each got to do half a verse. Two of the originally planned featured singers didn’t show up, and suddenly I got tapped to sing the second half of the first verse. I haven’t been the lead singer of a group since my voice changed, and moreover my vocal range generally peters out at about the F# or G above middle C. Nonetheless I was assigned a line that climaxes at the A above that. Somehow I hit it. The nice thing about recording studios is that you only need to do something right once and it’s preserved for posterity.
There were boatloads of harmony and chorus parts too, some of which we had even rehearsed. I had thought that my role in this was to sing a bass voice in the four part harmony at the end, which I did do, but in addition to my star turn, I also sang a tenor part in another pass at that harmony, and a harmony line in the third verse, and part of a choir doing “This Land is Your Land” and “Give Peace a Chance” that were being tweezed in to other parts of the song. There were other people doing sound bites from tunes like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and Edwin Starr’s old Motown classic “War.” The whole shebang is just chock full of bits like that, done on a 64 track computer hard disc recording system, and my heart goes out to the poor guy that has to mix it.
But I do like recording. As I've mentioned previously (often), making Crashes to Light with Cul de Sac was certainly one of the peak experiences of my life. This was not up to that level, but it was certainly fun; plus there were a bunch of congenial people to hang out with, and food and drink and coffee were available, and the atmosphere was kind of a working party.
Plus the studio itself was way cool. There were instruments all over everywhere: a couple dozen of Mark Sandman’s guitars and basses hanging on the walls (T. Max grabbed one to strum the chords on for ad hoc rehearsals), and a bunch of pianos and organs strewn about. There was one particular electric piano that must have been 40 years old, and I mentioned that it was the model that Bill Payne of Little Feat used to play, which spawned a whole ‘nother conversation...
T. Max has a Myspace page about the project at
http://myspace.com/dreamerswanted . The song is on it, in demo form, i.e. not my performances! Hopefully a mix of my session will be available soon. It's essentially a power ballad, with lyrics you could read as hopeful and inspiring, or as mawkish, depending how cynical you are. (How cynical am I? Don't ask!) It also occurs to me in retrospect that, inasmuch as I've been sort of obsessing about Brian Wilson since SMILE finally got released, this session allowed me to totally indulge my inner Beach Boy!
In sum it was a really nice event with a progressive motive. I hope it comes out good.
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