Santa Is Your Outtake Daddy
Late November 1999 Alex and I engineered a recording session of Downtime. A band that had Shag on guitar, Cleez on bass, Tom singing and playing trumpet and Shag’s friend Jeremy on drums. A similar arrangement to the infamous Blue House sessions only this time we all kind of knew what we were doing and the drummer had more than just bongos to play. The original audition sessions for Alex and I’s show were beautiful chaos to say the least but that’s another story.
This time around I had the basics down. I’d been mixing live sound at the radio station for about 3 1/2 months or so, probably had done about a dozen bands by that point. The song the guys wrote was more adventurous than Blue House Over Yonder in that it deviated from a basic 4 bar blues sort of thing and threw in some cool changes a la mid-late 90′s rock. Tom did the lyrics and I think Cleez conceived the main melody with everyone else pitching in. Jeremy came in town just for the session and he clicked with Cleez pretty quickly.
There was a great rehearsal session in the basement at Shag’s first house the night before. It was really cool for me, who’s never written a song, to watch one take shape in front of me.
Sessions at the KDHX studio were pretty fluid from what I remember. The work the night before honed things pretty well so there wasn’t the all the hanging aroundness of the Blue House sessions. The station had just got their first production computer, I pulled a blank DAT tape from my stash (and it was a relief not to mess with degradable media). The guys ran through 10 takes of the song – with and without trumpet solo – while Alex and I listened and tweaked settings from the control room.
Here ‘s a recently discovered out take from the session. It’s nothing revelatory, no lost cello solo or anything, but for my nickel a nice listen from the session spawning one of the greatest holiday songs since Bea Arthur sang in that Star Wars Thanksgiving special. It’s had a spin on half dozen of Alex and I/my holiday shows and almost every Christmas mix I’ve made since then.
I suppose eventually our kids will record the follow up.
Merry Christmas Guys!