Litterbox has been hard at work on the newest Howe Gelb tour cd release. You can buy it at Howe’s store - or click the link below!
NOW AVAILABLE!
RETURN TO SAN PEDRO
- train singer song - world stand still - the hangin’ judge
- all done in again - return to san pedro - four door maverick
- explore you - notoriety - the wild frontier
- lonely man you are - seldom matters - down on town
hello. i have put off putting out a tour only type cd because i didn’t want to stock it with out-takes or scrapheap supplement. after ’sno angel, it seemed like a bar was raised, or i just finally got too old for wasting any time, mine or yours. jim blackwood kept coaxing me to come record some acoustic stuff on his new digital device. he is a good man and has worked hard at saving many old recordings through the years that would have just remained in a backyard box, melting there and crusted with a thick desert coating of dust and adobe muck. so i tend to give his requests more then a little merit. he first set up his gear in my home studio, which is just an adobe walled room with a 4 track cassette machine from 1988 i bought a few years ago at a yard sale for 35 bucks. the original price tag was 2000 dollars apparently. but i digress. we didn’t use it at all on this recording. i love the sound of that cassette recorder, but jim was eager to try his new piece of digital yippity.
ok then. thoger lund sat in on upright bass and joe novelli stopped by the house to slip and occasional slide. i used an old 1959 martin 00 E that my wife got me for my 50th birthday. she knew i always wanted a martin, but never gotten around to affording one. this one came with a factory installed d’armond pick up innit. it feels like i always have had it, which might have to do with the notion that we were both made in pennsylvania in the 50s and ended up here in the desert.
for the second session, jim suggested we try going back to where rainer recorded a record 15 years ago; the san pedro chapel. it is also the place we held his memorial 10 years ago just after his death. i had not been back since. being in there again made me dizzy. i could not really think in terms of this world. the walls are also made of adobe, which is a substance i have grown to favor for making any kind of sounds. when i was young, it had always been my plan to eventually settle into an old adobe house one day because of the lack of true right angles, since there are no right angles in nature anyway, and because of the way those rooms sound. but i digress again.
here we were back at san pedro. the air was thick was rainerism. first i picked up my old national duolian and let my heart slide out for him. on that one, thoger just played a sound he came up with on his new old cheap tiny casio sampler thing from a thrift shop. it reminded me how rainer used to loop himself while playing way before there were real loop pedals. that song was the burning of the sonic sage i suppose, then it was back to the martin. we continued with some other songs that were still arriving. i, myself, arrived late as usual, well stuck in tucson time. so in between that moment and having to drive across town to fetch the kids from school, jim captured a few more songs done up by me and thoger. now, thoger is my favorite bass player ever. that boy breathes music. he can’t help it. we locked into some grooves that were impossible to conjure without percussion or drums. but they happened anyway.
some songs were old and desperately wanted a dusting off.
other songs happened to just be there waiting for a bus. and some others wanted “in” even though they had not been written yet. i tried to pick the ones with the most ‘event’ in them. i suppose at this age it’s good to hear something just acoustic and drumless. i dunno. it did that day anyway. so. some days it gets very hard to play music. there is a tragedy that gets attached to it all that tends to weigh down the process. other times we bust on through that gravity and thrive on its buoyancy. busting a hole though gravity is always a good idea for as long as it lasts. after those two sessions, jim and i sat down to clean up the tracks and send em over to roger at sae to master up proper.
upside down home 2007.
it’s just a hole in the donut of gravity. a desert dessert.
thanks to jim, thoger, joe, roger and celia blackwood for putting this thing together. otherwise it would still be not.
the end.
