In honor of the recording of “Meet the Beatles” we set out to record an album live to 2-track. This is something that practically no pop artists do anymore. The album was set up the first day and then recorded the second. We played for a solid 16 hours until we couldn’t see straight. Joe McKenna made wonderful breakfasts for us each day. That was a real treat. There were two songs recorded that were later dropped, “Wildflower” and “Chances.” The snare drum was just too loud in “Wildflower” and we were so tired that we could execute the vocals cleanly enough for “Chances.” It was the last song we did.

The “Earth is Round Reprise” was actually written by John and David while I setting up the mics with Ray Silva on the first day. We recorded it that night with all four of us around one microphone, just like the old days. The street corner sound effects were added during the mastering by putting a pair of mics on the front porch on Sierra Sonics facing Mt. Rose and Plumas street while performing our little “skit” over the traffic noise. For more on this record go to the EAT AT JOE’S section of this site.

Joel is a incredibly talent sax player that allowed me the opportunity to work with a lot of Reno’s fine jazz musicians for the first time. Players like Tony Savage, Steve Swinford, Hans Halt and TK Kellman were slightly intimating to me. They probably have much higher expectations than your average garage band. Fortunately it went smoothly and I made some great friends. I missed out on a fair amount of the overdubbs because I was assigned the job of painting the lobby of the studio that week. But Joel did let me play percussion on the title track. It was the maiden voyage of an Alaskan hand drum I had gotten from friends who informed me that it was the drum made by an village elder before he died. Great drum! In recording Joel’s cover of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Mr. Swinford absolutely stunned us with a phonetically perfect, belly-achingly funny and completely sexually disgusting version of the ballad. I had to change my armor I laughed so hard.

I’ve known Chris Holloway for many moons. I first recorded him with a group called “Urban Dialect” with former Crush Story drummer Kirk Cox. Kirk used to be a student of mine in the McQueen High drumline. The first song on the record, “Catch 22” is actually from the UD sessions recorded two years previously. I had no idea they were planning on putting it on this album. I would have insisted on remixing the tune to try to match had I known. Regardless, tracking went pretty smoothly. Jevan used my DW’s for the session and we were getting good stuff. He’s a very good drummer in terms of control for that fast tempo stuff. They brought in Zac Damon of Zoinks and now Screeching Weasel to do additional production and some back ground vocals. Zac has a wonderful ear for harmonies and has a fabulous voice. He did contribute production input, but he got sole production credit. I don’t want to sound like a baby but I did as much if not more production and feel that we should have shared the credit. All that aside I bonded with their bassist Jason who is as big a Halloween fanatic as I am.