A Recording Session

From the Gig Journal, Jul 2006:


At the last few Civil war gigs we played, there was a camera crew from the local cable TV Co. They got a lot of footage of the dancers, the soldiers' camps, and the reenacted battles, but their camera microphone did a lousy job with the music. They asked us to come to their studio last night to do an interview and music gig.

So we went there and got unloaded, tuned up, wired, mic-ed, sound-checked, lighted, seated, rearranged and cued. As recording sessions go, this one went pretty well. There were the usual SNAFUs: dead batteries; intermittent cables; wires crossed at the mixing board, that kind of thing. Jim showed up with his washtub bass. He keeps the thing in his back yard, and when he overturned it on the floor, some leaves dropped out and a couple of ground beetles took a powder and legged it for cover behind the arras. Sometime in the middle of our third tune, a spider got fed up with all the thumping on his washtub and commenced to haul ass across the bottom. Jim mashed the little beast and we kept playing. I told him he shouldn't have done that; squashing a spider will make it rain. The spider was in the Therididae family with the Black Widow and its cousins. It was the right size, color and shape, but Jim mashed it before I could hunt for an hourglass on its bum.

So we were in the middle of our second-last tune, a really pretty planxty in 3/4 time, when it began to rain. It poured like hell, with the thunder, lightning and all the trimmings. It was "fixin' to come one," you might say. We were in the middle of the second bridge and it was going really well; everybody was in tune and on tempo; I was hitting all my licks on the guitar. Then the power went out just long enough to glitch the tape machine and we had to start the tune over. It was that damned spider getting its revenge, you see.

So they were going to make a DVD of the whole thing and give us the repro and sales rights to it. They didn't do it. Bastards.

MCR>
Abstractor of the Quintessence
Order of the Digital Grail