The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 565
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
BACKGROUND 247: JLHS Part Two 20
Sun., Oct. 7, 2007
… Then we worked on It’s 3 O’clock for half an hour. There is already a decent take of this one, too, but Geoff wants to give it another go. We played it slow but were together on it the first time. Then we sped it up and put some energy into it and Geoff played a phenomenal solo at the end of which the drum stick flew out of his hand. I quickly counted it back as I tossed him the drum stick and we were able to finish the song. I just thought that the solo he’d done deserved to be in a full song. It’s all about getting the right mood in the studio for these things. There are already takes of Lily and 4Ever Day but who knows if we won’t give those another try as well. If those guys would come out early on a Saturday and stay all afternoon, we could get a lot accomplished.
That filled up the two hours, or it left just a few minutes for Greg and me to play Lily a bit just for fun. Edward’s son Austin’s band Ginger Nash was playing in a Calhoun school competition of some kind at 5:30 and at a place called the Mean Fiddler so it was decided that, since Greg wanted to have some discussion about the state of affairs with the Threads, it was decided that we’d go over there and drink a beer and then catch Austin in action. Edward had a slight logistical problem because he had to change his clothes at some point in order to go out to dinner on the east side at 7 o’clock. But we all headed across to 47th St. to about 9th Ave. and the Mean Fiddler.
This place has a bar upstairs and a performance room / bar downstairs. What looked like a funk band was setting up with 10 or 12 mostly black kids aged early teens. We would have sat there and caught them if we could have gotten beers but there was no bartender at this point in the afternoon so we went back upstairs and ordered a round, sat down at a tiny round table and had our business discussion.
First up was the point that Greg wanted to make that playing live forces us to work harder than usual and therefore we ought to be playing live once in a while. The Sept. 19 gig at the Bowery Poetry Club, which I haven’t recounted yet in detail [see below], forced us to rehearse about 6 times in a two week period and that improved our playing. I mean, friend, just that small amount of practice had an effect. These kids play for hours every day and so it’s not surprising that they tighten up because they are really into their band. By these kids, I mean young bands that are trying to make a go of it professionally. In comparison we do relatively well given the amount of time we are able to devote to it and the distance we have to make up in comparison to bands comprised of seasoned, trained musicians. We do very well under the circumstances, if you ask me.
I’ve always been on Greg’s side of this argument. No one has strong objections but Edward has always thought that the recording should be the focus. Geoff used to side mostly in that direction but I think this gig opened his eyes both to how much of an effect on us it can have as well as to how much fun it is and how important it is to get out there in front of people. We were not in front of that many people, but we were in front of some and that is entirely different from playing alone in that little 47th St. Jam room. The pressure is on and you feel it but it makes you more intense and focused. That’s what we need.
Greg’s second thought was his disappointment with the number of people who turned out for the gig. He had the story to recount of a friend of his who plays drums in a band that he’d gone to see even though that guy had not come to see us on the 19th. This guy plays in the typical sort of Jam band, i.e., a bunch of guys with pretty decent chops who get together to play Very Superstitious and songs like that. They play very well but no one cares. His point was that they had 50 or 60 people at this gig but not one of them was listening to the band. We only had a few people at our gig but they listened and according to Greg they thought we were good. I’m not sure exactly who he’s talking about when he says this because he had a little contingent of fans sitting at the bar that consisted of Sally and four or five of her friends. They made a lot of noise, especially when Greg stepped up to the mike and started singing Lily. Of course, I had Luz there and her voice, laughter and whistle are all over the recording. But Greg says that these people, who are relatively disinterested in us, thought we were good and liked us and would listen to us. They thought we had something that people would listen to. His friend’s more or less professional band, on the other hand, couldn’t get people to turn their heads. We all remember people turning around from the bar at the Red Lion that night when we started playing They Don’t Know Me and They Take Your Mind Away. There were complete strangers that night checking us out.
So although the turnout was embarrassing to Greg, at least, it was a bunch that was paying attention to us. Luz was there along with Patrice Johnson and I had Kristy [name] there to video tape and I might as well just start talking about the 19th now. I had suggested the idea to Kristy a week or so before and she had been hot to the idea from the start. I ran it by Cerrone and he liked the idea, too. Kristy is one of his favorite kids and he likes the same music that I like. Kristy herself is a hippy chick and so when we were hanging around the school that day just waiting for about 3:30 or so to arrive, she started talking about Donovan and Janis Joplin and about how her mother had all this stuff and she really loved it. She knew White Rabbit and even recognized I Had Too Much to Dream. We headed out on the D train and Michael Acosta showed up on the platform so Kristy was listening to my iPod on the train. At one point she looked over at me and said, “No Grateful Dead?” I just smiled.
Edward, Geoff and Greg were already at the Bowery Poetry Club when we got there. Michael had stopped off to see a friend around Rockefeller Center. Geoff had driven in and Greg had driven in from Long Island. They met up at Edward’s place where we’d already stashed some equipment when we’d driven in on Sunday to rehearse with Carol there. I think I mentioned that already. The idea was for us to do a sound check between five and six, rush over to the Film Archive for the movie at six and then come back along with any of Carol’s friends to perform from 7 to 7:45 or so. Geoff and Greg were parking cars and all of our stuff was sitting there on the stage waiting to be set up at about four o’clock.
Luis [name] was supposed to be second camera for Kristy but he backed out at the last minute. I’d tried to recruit a couple of still photographers through Lizzie and the Yearbook Club but they also backed out at the last minute. Kristy, however, was gung ho and Marisol [name] and Deysha [name] showed up on their own to help out so that Kristy had a stationary camera set up stage left that took in the entire stage (which was about 20 feet or so across) and then she had a hand held camera that she used on the move. So we’ll have a two camera angle video of the performance with the sound coming from the mixing board. The mixing board unfortunately merely took the sound from a room mike or mikes so there is not a lot of separation and the quality is only so-so, but the mix itself is decent. The bass is a bit too low because Edward was using his own amp and that thing is not too powerful. He had it cranked to the max but it was miked. There were mikes on all three amps and about three on the drums, which still didn’t come out the way we would have liked for the sound to be. But the vocal is mixed in well and over all it sounds pretty good. We played well: From Now On, It’s O.K., Lily, We Can Never Know, Nothing That You Do, and Love Canal in that order. Geoff disappeared just about the time the rest of us were ready to get going. You can hear Kristy asking for lighting adjustment on the soundtrack and then I suggest that we’ll get going as soon as the drummer shows up.
The set up was not too bad. We had Geoff’s good amp for Greg and he had a pedal or two running through that, which gave him that industrial sound. His Fender Twin Reverb had had the speakers blown at some point by Geoff and he had not addressed this until now. I was using the third amp upstairs, which is not too bad and plenty powerful for this small room. The place is only about 20 feet wide and 60 feet deep but there is seating up front for about 50 people, tables for another 30, room for another 40 at the bar and then there is the front half which is a juice bar.
The guy running the place, Mike, was there when Kristy and I showed up and he was immediately open to the idea of the kids being there to videotape, something that had been of some concern. Evidently Ron had tried to take someone to see Valerie somewhere and the kids couldn’t get in. Then there was last summer at the bar I was just talking about with Ron where I did the open mike. They wouldn’t tolerate Michael [name] in that place. But the Bowery Poetry I knew to be kid friendly. It’s not strictly a bar and the guy who owns the place is the guy who started up the Puerto Rican cafe on Ave. B or so and he must know that the future is in the young. So it’s half bar and half juice bar and they don’t mind having kids there. In fact, they like the idea. I’d seen Eliza perform some flamenco one afternoon there a few years ago when Greg and Elizabeth were still a functioning couple. That no longer seems to be the case.
We had brought along the “Tweed”. That’s the small amp that I ended up with from the old Murray St. Jam and their fire sale a couple of years ago. We had been through the fiasco of the Acme Underground when we had not had a back up guitar when my string broke so we had a back up amp as well as an extra guitar in case of emergency. The only thing not backed up was Edward’s bass ….
Note: Kristy never came through with the video she recorded of us that night and never gave me any explanation for that. It was a great disappointment. That would have been the only video of the Threads performing. The audio track from the mixing board, however, we did get directly from the Bowery Poetry Club and somehow survives. It’s a single track of the full 32 minute performance of the six songs mentioned here. I just now ran it through GarageBand and split off the opening track with a little of the waiting for the drummer to show up (as mentioned) and with me talking to the sound guy in the booth a bit. Since Greg opened with the guitar chords that the song is built around, we never had to count this one off. We just had to wait for Greg to get it going so that’s Greg there at the beginning with all of us kicking in after the first four bars. We did get a studio recording down of this song and at some point I hope to attach it to one of these chapters. We were recording it at the time of this live performance so the arrangements are identical.
AUDIO INSERTED: Threads, From Now On
Live at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC, Sep. 19, 2007
Greg - lead guitar / Edward - bass / Geoff - drums / Dave - rhythm guitar, vocal
IMAGES INSERTED: Bowery Poetry Club, ca. early 2000’s