came over one day a few months back, tied us down, poured red wine down our throats and forced us to write a song including the line “I could sit and stare in my lilac underwear.” Well, here it is, now. You’ll also hear the musical talent of Prescott’s best kept secret, Mark Dorsten on bass. Collectively, we like to call our venture Citizen Cat.
When we moved Prescott, the number of people we knew here was in the single digits. We were adrift without a band and without sufficient social contacts to find one. Our first few months in Prescott were marked by a profound quiet. Inevitably, a promoter we knew called and booked us a gig a few months out, which – true to form – we accepted despite the fact that we had no band. This was largely our modus operandi while we were in Phoenix: someone would call us, book us a show, and we’d cobble together a band from the musicians we knew, and rehearse them for the show.
It quickly became apparent to us that we were not going to cobble together a band in time for this gig. I had taken a job at Yavapai College that afforded me access to video production equipment, so one night, Jen and I began tossing around the idea of having a virtual band projected on a screen behind us. The more we talked about it, the more outlandish the idea became. We settled on the players:
Yoda on Bass Guitar
A Slice of Birthday Cake on Keys
Mr. Mondo, a Yellow Finger Monster, on drums
The Yoda Show
Instead of rehearsing a band, we set about an intense two weeks with a camera, a green-screen and 500 watt stage lights set up in our living room. At one point, I was standing too close to a light and melted a set of headphones to my head. Amateur puppeteering became a full-time job. I barely did anything for another week after that but edit the video, stopping occasionally to cackle madly.
We arrived at what amounted to a concept set: Jen and I (and Yoda, Mr. Mondo, and Birthday Cake) were the Court Musicians of the Emirate of Khaang and we were double-booked for the night of the show. However, through the use of “Futuristic Technology” we were able to be in both places at once by beaming our band in from the Emirate of Khaang, where they were fulfilling the duties of the Emir’s Court Musicians while Jen and I appeared in person (and were presumably being beamed back to Khaang).
I edited the backing tracks (bass, keys, drums) to all the tunes using mostly the Fen’s drum tracks and Kevin’s bass tracks we recorded with The Lovelies, and I programmed drums and bass for a few of the tunes.
I realized that we didn’t have keyboards on every tune so we needed some reason for the Birthday Cake to leave “the stage” after the first few keyboard tunes, and then reappear for the final tune. So, we had our dear friend Serene Dominic play the evil super-villain, Dr. Volker Sontaag, who takes over our “paltry communication system to deliver the following edict: There shall be no more birthday cake for anyone, for it offends me! Mwahahahah!” and zaps our (and presumably all) birthday cake out of existence.
At that point, we play the non-keyboard tunes. Then, just before the last tune, Dr. Sontaag again takes over our paltry communication system to “issue the following apology.” He realizes that it was his own latent homosexuality that was preventing him from enjoying birthday cake. Turns out he’s not a mad scientist, he’s a gay dad scientist! So, having come to terms with this, he zaps our (and presumably all) birthday cake back into existence.
Sontaag’s got great timing as it turns out, because we were just about to play our final song (with keyboards) which just happens to be entitled Gay Dad.
The thing that is truly hilarious about this is the crowd reaction. We did this in a few places, but the gig we worked it up for was at the Spirit Room in the weird little ghost-town of Jerome, AZ. At the time, the place was a well-known biker bar along AZ route 89A. I’m pretty sure that no one in that place had ever seen anything like this before. But, as we came to find out, if there’s one thing that gains universal acceptance, it’s video of Yoda playing bass.
Over the next few months, we wound up doing this set more than a few times in our living room for friends and friends of friends who had heard about it. People would show up at odd hours in varying degrees of sobriety cajoling us to “do the Yoda show!” Not long after that, Chris and Stefan came along. We were amazed at how strongly The Force was with them.
My old buddy and college roomate Matt Legrow asked for some production/engineering/recording notes on the Dutch Holly Pull tracks. The reason I chose to write about this tune first
Usurp This
is because in the production of it there is alot about the recording of the other tunes (by comparison) and because it represents the most recent processes that we have used to produce tracks. I will say that the recording of Pull represents the process of learning to engineer/record/mix/master songs for me personally and that Usurp This happens on the more recent end of that learning curve.
The first thing you hear on Usurp This is Jesco White talking about a gas-huffing-induced hallucination he had involving a serpent head on a (naked) girl’s body. What’s so brilliant about this quote is that, despite the disturbing nature of this horrific image, in the same breath, Jesco’s saying ”she looked to me to be about 19, maybe 20 years old.” So, snake-head nothwithstanding, he’s actually checking her out! Jesco is the Devil in himself, and that’s what this tune is about: who’s bad? Jen writes pretty funny stuff sometimes, and this one is a light-hearted romp into the heart of darkness itself, poking a little fun at the (self-proclaimed) Evil Among Us like Anton Levay (“you dance like Charro”).
Chris Ozuna
We recorded drums first. For most of the other tunes on Pull (Paradise, Wingding, Bill, Averge Girl and Hey), Chris had a kit set up at our house in the basement and I had (badly) miked it up and recorded them to a 16-track hard disk recorder. This was before I knew anything about what I was doing, so there’s alot of bleed in those drums and they required alot of post-production to get them sounding right. We didn’t include Usurp This and Supermodels in the initial set of tunes because we had recorded earlier versions of these tunes when we lived in Phoenix and were playing out as The Lovlies with my brother Fen Ikner on drums and Kevin Pate on bass. You can still hear these versions on GarageBand.com (I mixed them in CuBase, on a beige “power-mac” not sure that I even mastered them at all). But at our live gigs, Usurp This and Supermodels slayed, so we decided we probably ought to include them on the album. So, one day during the time I was mixing/mastering the other tunes on Pull, I went over to the Body Bag (Chris lived in a basement of a house with a rehearsal room that was lined in black plastic and so it was dubbed “the Body Bag”)
The Body Bag
where Chris had his good kit properly miked up and we recorded Supermodels and Usurp This with me playing scratch guitar in the headphones and singing as best I could. As I recall, we recorded these to a click which was an el-cheapo Dr. Beat drum machine. We cranked the tempo up as fast as Chris could stand (on both tunes) and were off to the races. I burned the drum tracks to CD and took them home. I imported them into ProTools and got a rough mix together with the scratch guitar and vocal track (shudder) that I had recorded at the Body Bag.
A few days (weeks?) later, Stefan came over to our place and laid bass tracks on Usurp This and Supermodels.
Stefan Cochran
He used a 5-string Ibanez through a DBX tube preamp, direct to my 16-track hard disk recorder. Of course, these were burned to CD and imported into ProTools as well. He also recorded an outro-guitar solo on Usurp This which didn’t wind up on the final version (Sorry, Stefan). Stefan is a hell of a guitarist, a shredder, really, and it was alot of rapid-fire face-melting notes, but the more I listened to it, the more I wanted something a little more melodic ala Billy Corgan on Gish. So, after I recorded the rhythm guitar with my Fender Mustang through a Korg ToneWorks AX3000G (direct to hard-disk of course), I set about recording the outro guitar solo. Now, I’m nowhere near as accomplished a shredder as Stefan, so it took me about a dozen takes but I finally got the take I wanted, and that’s the one you’ll hear on the tune. I then added some final keyboard touches (a sitar and a weird little sine-wave lead synth part during the verse) with the Korg Triton.
With the instrumentals all recorded, I worked up a rough karakoe mix in ProTools for recording vocals. I dumped it to CD and loaded it on the hard-disk. A note about all the hard-disk to ProTools transfers: I didn’t track directly in ProTools because the computer I had was pretty slow and always quit in the middle of takes, my theory is that the playback engine was demanding too many CPU resources to simultaneously record and play back. I never had this problem with mixing, only recording and playback at the same time. Thus, tracking to the hard-disk then transferring the WAV files to the computer (via CD) was the best way to track.
The vocal setup was straightforward, a large-diphragm condenser mic isolated in our walk-in closet (hard wood floor, and clothes hanging on three sides, sounds just like an iso booth!) through the DBX tube preamp. We have a setup where I can be in the room just off our bedroom (we call it the Vision room) and I have a headphone amp and mic cables set up in there along with the Digi002, computer, hard-disk recorder some other out-board effects, and a comfy chair. I run the headphone extension and mic cables under the carpet to the closet and I have a talk-back mic set up at the desk.
Of course, we are parents, so the real trick to recording vocals is finding some time when Max isn’t going to be demanding our undivided attention. This would be nap time. Max naps in the early afternoon on our bed, so while he was asleep on our bed, Jen was in the closet, and I was in the Vision room whispering into the talk-back mic. Luckily, Jen could record this tune in her sleep, so it didn’t require many takes. We even had time to come up with the little harmony part on the outro where she sings “back” after “I want It!” We got it done in one nap time.
In post, I really didn’t like the way the tune started out with just the guitar (that’s how we do it live), it seemed kind of empty. So I started playing with the first couple of measures of the drum track I had mixed down for instrumental recordings. I brought it into BIAS Peak, and tweaked it out with some VST effects (PSP Nitro), and looped it (glad we recorded it to a click). Initially, I had this fading up under the guitar, but it still seemed kind of lacking somehow. The Jesco sample was the final touch, of course. It comes from the cult-classic documentary, The Dancin’ Outlaw which if you have not seen, you simply must. I have a great series of photos on my Facebook page of when Jen and I actually went to Boone County, WV (where I’m from) and hung out with Jesco for the day.
Mixed it in ProToools, not much to tell there. I will say that Fen taught me how to run the drums through a stereo bus and insert compression on the bus to get a fatter sound. Thanks for that, Fen.
Mastered using BIAS Peak and Apple AU Multiband Compressor. This is well before I knew what I was doing with mastering, so at some point, I’d like to go back a re-master using a maximizer/limiter and some EQ, as I think this mix came out a little bottom-heavy.
These two guy/girl acts are pretty inspiring to us:
Pomplamoose - This link takes you to their YouTube channel because the music is only half the story. Their “Video Songs” are fun, funny and give alot of insight into how they work. Not to mention that the music is fabulous.
The Swell Season – The guy is Irish, the girl is Polish, the music is fantastic.
Y’know, being a parent rocks. I used to think that becoming a parent would effectively end my days as a rock-n-roller; that I’d have to grow up, get serious, hock the guitar and buy a beige and brown wood-paneled station-wagon. I thought I’d lose my identity and become this other person. It’s not exactly like that. Turns out that becoming a parent did force me to grow up but I grew up in ways that matter. It enhanced my identity, gave me focus, made me stop sweating the trifling stuff that seemed so important, but that was just holding me back. I dropped alot of the idiotic crap I accumulated over a lifetime to make room for better things. Now that I have someone depending on me to be my best self I don’t have time for the stupid stuff.
So yeah, I did get serious. Back in the day, being in a band was a big party. Now time spent on music is time spent not focusing on my child, so it better be productive. The direction of my efforts has changed. Building a local following and playing thankless gigs in bars to people who are there to drink and check other people out just doesn’t seem to make as much sense in the context of being a parent. I don’t need to be a background sideshow for that. Going big, getting national attention, licensing songs to film, TV and other artists, getting serious about what I’m doing makes alot more sense now. Obstacles to that –mostly my bad attitude–have just evaporated. I used to have this attitude problem about being successful as a musician. Like if I sold a song, I was selling out. Now, that doesn’t even begin to make sense to me. That attitude is just an effort not to be disappointed by failure. Of course, by having that attitude, I was expecting failure, and you eventually get what you expect. Now, not so. I expect success and I make no apology about that.
I guess what I’m realizing is that it takes alot more guts to actually try than to skate by on talent alone and say “I’m not really even trying.” Becoming a parent has given me–no, REQUIRED me– to have the courage to do that. Thanks, Max.
Awash in cold, white fluorescence,
The Cube Farm hums busily
About its collective banality.
The nucleus of his cell,
A worker dares, in the interstices
Between faxes and coffee breaks,
To marvel at the spectre of his eventual glory:
A manfiestation plucked by the hand of chance
From the guf of possibilities.
Working on arranging a new tune right now: Jen and JJ wrote the words, Tres wrote the melody, chords and chorus. A snippet:
It’s good to be in the back with the breeze and the sun shining in our hair, I could sit and stare in my lilac underwear…
JJ wanted “lilac underwear” in there somewhere and Jen and I concur. Too few tunes have any reference to underwear, much less lilac underwear. More importantly, this tune represents the first tune we’ve actually written and arranged with JJ. We’ll be able to perform it at next week’s acoustic jam. Indie folk in the house!
Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to those in Haiti and those elsewhere whose loved ones are in Haiti. May there be an abundance of life-saving miracles and blessings on all of you. If you are so inclined, Here is a good blog about what you can do to help.
Our friend JJ was over at Dutch Holly HQ this week for our weekly acoustic jam. She’s a phenomenal musician, she plays violin, mandolin, acoustic bass, ukelele, etc. She, Jen and I were talking about starting up an indie folk group which is quite a departure from the too-fast-too-loud alt/punk/rock Dutch Holly has been inflicting on our listeners for the past few years. That would be great, though, because we haven’t played in a group since the last DH show last year and our drummer and bassist have moved to different towns. Jen has been yearning to play indie folk for quite some time, and I’ll go quitely, no kicking and screaming. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads.
