Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“Maybe Great Discoveries” is another song that had been around for awhile without ever being satisfactorily recorded. I don’t recall ever trying to play this with an electric band — though it might be interesting to try in a sort of ’80s power ballad arrangement — but the delicacy of the song always seemed to demand a quieter treatment to bring out melody and dynamics. With a live electric band, melody and dynamics are the first things to go out the window, and frankly whether electric or acoustic no one really wants to hear long, slow songs they don’t know in a live setting, so if this one was going to exist in any form it was pretty much slated from the beginning for a studio recording .
Once the proper approach had been determined, recording the basic track was fairly straightforward: so much of the song was dependent on the interaction between the acoustic guitar and the vocals for tempo, dynamics, and rhythm that tracking instruments separately to a click killed it instantly. Without being able to record the guitar and vocal separately, the ability to punch-in and correct vocal problems is more limited, so in my mind the only way to properly represent the song was to capture a ‘live’ performance of the song played all the way through without major errors. Essentially, I needed just the right performance to justify recording the rest of the song.
There are two ways to come at this: first, you sit down and force yourself to play the song over and over until you get it ‘right’ or as close as you can within a certain timeframe; this is the way it’d have to be done in (for example) any record label-funded recording situation, for example. The other way to do it is to just play the song every so often and wait (hope) for the perfect combination of motivation, intoxication, and circumstance to result in an inspired-sounding take, which is what I did here. There were a lot of lousy, draggy, and just plain failed takes along the path, as well as with many that may have sounded more or less okay but suffered a flubbed lyric or missed chord change along the way. Of course, I could have probably fixed up many of these minor flaws and just gone with one of these had it been necessary, but as I was working without a deadline or other time constraint I was willing to wait.
Eventually — I believe I was testing out the MXL990 low-cost condenser mic on vocals while playing the Fender Catalina acoustic guitar — I managed to record a take that upon replay became apparent was the take, capturing a vocal quality head and shoulders above any of the others while remaining almost miraculously error-free. Having captured this take, though, I didn’t really know what to do with it. On early recordings of the song there had been violin accompaniment, but frankly it didn’t add anything other than mirroring the vocal melody in an unnecessary and occasionally obtrusive way. Still, the spare vocal/guitar arrangement seemed overly stark, so back into the box it went…
…to await (as it turned out) the additional inspiration of a keyboard instrument. I’d wanted a musical keyboard for some time, but after a false start buying a friend’s keyboard I’d finally begun hearing the possibilities open to me. I say “false start” because it turned out the second-hand keyboard had a malfunctioning audio output (which my friend legitimately did not know about, having only used the MIDI outs) and sadly the otherwise excellent instrument had to go back to its original owner. However, in the short time that keyboard had been in my possession my imagination had been inflamed: I used it to record “Palette Cleanser” on my first album THIS IS MY REVENGE and I believe the keyboard lines on the title song “This My Revenge” also came from this short timeframe before it had to be returned.
Fortunately not too long after a great deal on Yamaha YPG-635 digital pianos popped up at Guitar Center — well over a hundred dollars cheaper than the closest price, so I assume it had to be some sort of inventory clearing or overstock dump. (This is how I’ve gotten most of my musical equipment: I identify what I really need/want to accomplish my musical goals, I prioritize by importance/availability of funds, and I keep an eye out for deals too good to be passed up — probably well over half of my equipment was clearance/closeout merchandise. Buying the latest and greatest is a sucker’s game.)
Even having the digital piano and its array of wonderful synthesized sounds didn’t solve the problem for me though, as I was not confident my rudimentary keyboard abilities would allow me to perform appropriate embellishment for such a fragile song. Better, I thought, to wait until I’d worked my keyboard abilities up from “appallingly clumsy” at least to “fumbling amateur” before attempting it, so back into the box “Maybe Great Discoveries” went…
…until an April weekend in 2011, when Jeanette Moradi and I were jamming around in the studio — her on piano, me on guitar — and I started playing back bits of various tracks I had in various stages of completion. After the “Maybe Great Discoveries” basic track came on Jeanette immediately keyed into the vocal, asking “What’s that?” — confirming my feeling that its quality would make it the take of the song that would end up being the final version.
After setting up the YPG-635 for recording, I wrote out the chords to the song for Jeanette’s reference, set the the basic guitar & vocal recording playing, and then just let her improvise away for awhile using first a synth string pad patch and then a more traditional piano sound. We were both really getting into the results so we went all out and pulled out Jeanette’s lever harp, which I’d always wanted to use on a track but didn’t want to just force in somewhere as a gimmick. I set up the MXL V67G condenser mic on a boom tripod above and in front of the harp, angled downward toward the instrument’s soundboard. After very little time, it became clear that “Maybe Great Discoveries” was a good fit for the instrument: the percussive, classical timbre of the harp combined perfectly with the synth strings and piano to fill out the sound of the song without steamrollering the vocal the way the violin had. Good stuff!
Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” version history (click to fullsize)
As the version history above shows, from the point of recording Jeanette’s overdubs all the pieces of the track were basically in place; I did add a couple of additional guitar tracks the next day using the Ovation 2078TC Elite T acoustic, but I eventually ended up pulling them out of the final mix almost entirely as they just ended up getting in the way of the raw original guitar recording. After that, it was mostly a matter of editing and rearranging Jeanette’s improvised accompaniment to sound more ‘composed’ within the contours of the song. It didn’t take long for me to come up with an arrangement I was more than pleased with, particularly given the trouble this song had caused me over the years.
Once it came time to finalize the track for the YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK album it was mostly a matter of slightly tweaking the mix, primarily to remove the majority of the aforementioned guitar overdubs and to pump the keyboard and harp accompaniment higher — but very carefully, as this was the rare track where I felt like we’d really captured something unique and I didn’t want to lose that by overworking the life out of it. Mostly I was just happy to finally put “Maybe Great Discoveries” behind me, content to have realized the song in a form that surpassed my hopes.
Above: “An Accident Of Birth” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“An Accident Of Birth” is really one of the tracks that make YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK the album it became, at least in my mind. It was during the recording of this song that a lot of my working methods for this album really began to crystallize in such a way that I started to realize I could get a number of songs down in such a way that I was happy with the results without making myself completely crazy in the process.
This has not always been the case. Despite admitted nostalgia for the days of tape-based recording, the limitations of home multitrack tape recording always inflicted unacceptable (in my mind, anyway) levels of hiss and distortion in the process for me to be pleased with the results. Yes, my old Vestax four-track taught me a lot about recording that I still use today, and yes, I think a lot of people would benefit from a non-digital recording environment, and yes, there’s something funky and cool about the vibe of analog, but every time I think about that 4-track I instantly recall the godawful hum that filled my head every second of every session using that cursed machine. Granted, no recording ever lives up the one’s image of what it could be, but when every song comes out a disappointing shadow buried under blankets of hiss, hum, and crackle, eventually one just stops trying.
The early days of computer-based recording were unappealing to me in a different way: it was great for experimentation, or for making music that sounded electronic — dance music was made for computers — making something that sounded remotely like a band was basically impossible. Even today, load up any ‘electric guitar’ patch on any synthesizer and I guarantee what you will hear sounds like complete shit, and nothing like an actual electric guitar. And while Pro Tools and other hard-drive based recording systems inarguably took over recording studios insanely quickly, it took a long time for consumer (read: inexpensive) computers to catch up to the point where one could effectively perform anything other than basic recording and editing without going broke, insane, or both.
Frankly, for a long period I simply didn’t have either the money or the time to fool with it — real life and all that. And again, as above when one has no reason to expect tolerable results it tends to inhibit expenditure or time and effort . I never really stopped making music, but for quite some time I had higher priorities that took precedence and the idea of doing any serious recording was so far on the backburner it wasn’t even really on the stove anymore, to stretch the analogy past the breaking point. Occasionally I’d poke my head back in check out the newest digital audio workstation (DAW) software and keep tabs on the progression of recording technology, and working in fits and starts I very gradually ramped up my involvement with recording to the point that I couldn’t deny anymore that I was well back into it — several recordings from this period went on my first album, THIS IS MY REVENGE, including “Not So Naive (Here We Go Again)”, “Home To You”, “It’s Coming”, and “Game Of Life”.
However, two impediments to my creative process remained: Cubase and Windows. Let me say up front that these are both fine products and it’s no one’s fault but my own that I couldn’t make them work for me better than I did, but the fact remained that both the Cubase DAW work environment and the Windows operating system caused me enough inspiration-erasing workflow interruptions that I resolved that they had to be be replaced.
First, spurred by an enthusiastic review in Tape Op magazine I switched my DAW software from Cubase to Presonus Studio One v1. Studio One was claimed to have been developed with “ease of use” and “facilitation of workflow” as paramount considerations, which sounded right up my alley, and while some “professional” (cough) producers and engineers might have chosen to eschew the software simply because Pro Tools and Cubase were already accepted and installed in all major pro studios, I had no such qualms.
After using Studio One for a week, I never went back to Cubase except to transfer my in-progress projects into Studio One. In this manner, I finished most of the other songs on THIS IS MY REVENGE, including “If It Should Show Up On Its Own”, “Caution On The Wing”, and title track “This Is My Revenge”. However, I was still getting unpredictable recording glitches that couldn’t be traced either to my digital interface (TASCAM US-1641) or the DAW, so the computer had to go.
Now, I’m far from a total Apple fanboy — in fact, I hadn’t used a Mac for anything more substantial than reading email for well over a decade — but the company’s products have a long history within creative industries for many reasons and I cannot argue with results: I tried literally dozens of tweaks and configurations over a period of 18 months to two years trying to get two separate Windows machines (one desktop, one laptop) to record properly without glitches or interruptions, and neither would do the job. After purchasing a new Macbook Pro and installing a properly updated version of the drivers for my audio interface, the problem went away and has not recurred since.
With this setup in place, I finished “Watch Yourself Disappear” and created “No Compromise”, the last recorded tracks on REVENGE, but “An Accident Of Birth” was really the first test to see if I could utilize my setup to realize already-extant material in a satisfying way. In many ways creating new material is nearly always easier because I have no preconceptions or expectations of the work, but in this case, I was trying to lay down a song that had eluded proper recording with both full electric bands and stripped-down acoustic arrangements in the past.
Above: “An Accident Of Birth” version history (click to fullsize)
In the end, I was almost shocked at how easily it came together. First, I sequenced some appropriate drumbeats to play against, then laid down a couple of tracks of acoustic guitar to delineate the structure and contours of the song. Then I sequenced the drum parts against the guitar tracks to frame the song, taking the time to place all parts properly so I wouldn’t have to come back and do it again later. This was possible because I already had a very clear vision how the song should go, so I could easily piece the drum part together simply by imagining the structure of the song and placing fills and accents appropriately without any guidance other than acoustic guitar .
Once the drums were in place, I let the track sit for a few days and then came back and did the rest of the recording in a couple of bursts: first, I went ahead and did all the vocals to just the acoustic guitar and drums, which seemed to work out well. Typically I like to have more of the instrumentation down before doing vocals, but here again I knew ahead of time how I wanted the vocals to go and I figured having a simpler arrangement to sing against might make pitching the vocals easier than trying to pick the notes out of a full arrangement. (It worked well enough that I might want to remember this and try stripping down difficult arrangements when I’m having trouble recording acceptable vocals in the future.)
The next day I edited and arranged the vocals, then laid down the rest of the instrumentation in short order: first playing the bass against the drums and acoustic, then adding some keyboards — organ sounds played on the Yamaha YPG-635, don’t recall which specific patch – and finally, layering in some electric guitars, which I think were probably the Gibson Explorer played through the Line 6 POD’s ‘Crunch’ setting. With these parts, besides simple accompaniment I was specifically trying to expand and emphasize the track’s dynamic range — the proper emphasis of which always seemed to be a sticking point when trying to play this song live with other people for some reason.
I do recall I wasn’t even totally sure I was going to keep the electric guitars and considered keeping the song in a strummier acoustic rock arrangement, but I was on a roll with recording that day and figured what the hell, I’d plug in and play because playing the electric guitar is one of the most fun things about the process. Later, when I came back to do a little editing, arranging, and rough mixdown, I heard the way the song lifts off when the electric crunch hits in the prechorus and well, that was that for any thoughts of strummy acoustic rock!
Outside of the above, there’s just not much detail to provide on the recording of “An Accident Of Birth” simply because it went so quickly and was so troublefree I barely remember what I did at any given step other than to go with the simplest path between two points, just finally putting down what had been floating around in my head for years. One day’s recording for drums and acoustic guitars, one for vocals, and one for bass, keyboards, and electric guitars, and that was it.
After a few mixes to dial in the track, I was satisfied the end result did what a good recording should — elevate the song and bring out its strengths — and I was able to combine parts of what I liked about both the acoustic and electric arrangements of the song while retaining more of a live band feel than I had ever previously been able to achieve recording on my own. Finishing “An Accident Of Birth” gave me renewed confidence to plunge into further recording knowing that I would be able to actually realize some of my ambitions rather than simply chasing phantoms or tilting at windmills. Amazing what a difference having the proper tools for the job can make!
To hear the results of my efforts, check out the video for “An Accident Of Birth” now and if you enjoyed this YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK track breakdown, be sure to join me next time when I’ll be looking behind the scenes at the making of “Maybe Great Discoveries”.
Above: “Spray Vandalism” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
Although most of the material comprising YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK was recorded by me, “Spray Vandalism” is one of two songs from the album that originated elsewhere. The basic tracks were recorded by Mark Haemmerle at Haemmerle Productions and feature the rhythm section of Paul Szewcyzk on bass and Ryan Tully-Doyle playing the drum kit, with me on guitar and vocals.
In this case, all three of us played live together in Mark’s studio. Even the vocals were recorded live along with the band, which in general no one except Neil Young does due to mic leakage. This song was written to be played live, though, and rather than possibly leach the vitality from a track I always prefer to capture the feel of people playing together in a room when appropriate — rock should rock, and it simply doesn’t when everything is tweaked and ‘fixed’ to the nth degree.
Lyrically, while writing I was thinking here about the monotonous nature of the chest-beating threats often found in hip-hop music, which are plenty scary occurrences in real life but as lyrical devices were worn out a long long time ago. I like a lot of hip-hop music but it gets disappointing when you get past the beats and realize someone really has nothing to say beyond making dubious boasts and pop culture references. (Just to be clear, I’m not making a call for ‘positive’ or ‘uplifting’ or ‘conscious’ rap here either, that preachy shit gets tedious fast. If anything, I’m making a call for good writing and cliche avoidance across the board.)
Anyway, the idea here was to try to up the stakes and the scale of the lyrical threat by inflating it beyond all rational proportions and giving it a credible real-life setting. The end result could be taken by the listener either as a more frightening threat or a parody of lyrical braggadocio exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness; either interpretation seems equally valid to me. Of course, none of this is really crucial or even important for listening to the song — I see little evidence that intent makes a huge impact on end results, and I often think authorial intent should be discarded straightaway in interpretation of any text — but that’s what was running through my mind when penning the words.
I believe the vocal mic here was a Shure SM-57, which I generally eschew in favor of the 58 largely because the cylindrical shape feels weird to sing into, but it works fine in this case particularly because I knew beforehand I was going to go for a compressed, telephonic feel to the vocals in post-production. The guitar and bass amps were acoustically separated via isolation booths to minimize drum leakage; while this worked well for the bass, giving it a nice airy presence that’s difficult to obtain recording bass direct, the guitar came out a bit flat and dry for my taste. The basic tracks were recorded in Pro Tools, which I don’t really like to use when I can avoid it, but these days one DAW is pretty much the same as the next as far as the basics of capturing audio.
Later I brought the tracks back to Clairemont Mobile Garage and transferred them into Presonus Studio One, my DAW of choice, and did some slight tweaking here and there to the basic tracks. Fortunately, the basic performances were strong enough to require very little editing or correction, but as expected there was a good amount of drum leakage on the vocal track. Judicious editing removed the majority of it easily (which you can see by enlarging the “Spray Vandalism” project file screenshot above) and once the appropriate vocal effects were applied I was happy enough with the results to proceed.
To fill out the guitar sound I overdubbed two additional guitar lines, using the same Gibson Explorer through Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby Wah pedal signal path as the basic tracking session to maximize consistency and continuity. In order to maintain the live rock feel, the overdubbed guitars were played straight through with very little editing done on the tracks after the fact, but I think I might have recorded them direct through the Line 6 POD rather than micing up the amp in this case. The POD has the same distortion as the Line 6 Spider II amp used on the live guitar track though, and in any case most of the guitar tone here comes from manipulation of the Cry Baby.
Finally I mixed the whole thing down, which here was mostly a matter of adjusting the levels of the vocals and the overdubbed guitar tracks relative to the full-band basic tracks. One benefit of having a group of people playing together in the same room is that good musicians modulate their volumes and performances to fit together — “mixing” the sound in the room, in effect — so a well-recorded live performance often requires a lot less twiddling and tweaking after the fact than one that’s been built up track by track. (This is also why a lot of pre-1980 jazz records sound so awesome). Fortunately that was the case here, and after relatively few back-and-forth tests (taking my mixes between the studio, my car, my ipod headphones, the living room, and the bookshelf speakers in the bedroom) I arrived at a happy medium — which was further enhanced by the great mastering job by Tardon Feathered at Mr. Toad’s.
From near the beginning of this project I was pretty sure “Spray Vandalism” would be at or near the top of the album, not only because it’s a strong performance with good rocking accompaniment by Paul and Ryan but also because it sets a tone and mood straight off. Just as it was written to be played live, it was also written to be a first song in several ways: there’s a sense of something impending in the lyrics and the intro really only has the proper impact when it’s placed as the first song — the track builds from the top to bring the listener into the song’s context. And frankly, this was one I was happy with as far as the track representing pretty much 90-95% of what I’d hoped for out of the recording, so while I kept myself open to different sequences during the later stages of assembling the album and tested out a few alternate sequences just to be sure, I don’t think at any point there was any serious consideration of “Spray Vandalism” not being the first song on the album (“CLMT Nightwalk” being an intro piece rather than a proper song).
Thanks for reading this breakdown of “Spray Vandalism” — I hope you found something of interest or relevance to you. To hear the end result of all this kerfuffle you can watch the “Spray Vandalism” music video now, buy or stream the album via the links directly below, and if you found any of this at all interesting be sure to join me next time for a breakdown of “An Accident Of Birth” as it’ll be something totally different!
The first music video from my new album YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK is now available for viewing on Youtube — be sure to bump the quality up to 720p HD if you have the available bandwidth! (Or do what I do and use a script that does it for you.)
Of course, the preponderance of the album was played and recorded by me at Clairemont Mobile Garage (the assemblage-of-odds-and-ends I laughingly call my studio); over the course of these liner notes I’ll try to give some details as to the specifics and circumstances surrounding each track’s recording, but this was the basic setup used to create and record most of the sounds heard on YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK:
Gibson ’76 Explorer 1990 electric guitar
Traveler EG-1 electric guitar
Ovation 2078TC Elite T acoustic guitar
Fender Catalina acoustic guitar
Yamaha electric bass guitar
Fender Squier electric bass guitar
Yamaha YPG-635 Portable Grand keyboard
Golden Age Project Pre-73 microphone preamp
TC-Helicon VoiceLive 2
Line 6 POD Guitar Multi-effects Processor
ZT Lunchbox amplifier
Line 6 Spider II amplifier
Hartke VXL Bass Attack Pedal and Direct Box
Small bass amplifier
Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby Wah pedal
Fulltone GT-500 FET Distortion + Booster and Overdrive Effects Pedal
Electro-Harmonix Memory Toy Analog Echo and Chorus Effects Pedal
Shure SM58 dynamic mic
MXL V67G & 990 condenser mics
Karma K-Micro Silver Bullet condenser mics
Macbook Pro 15.4” 2.53 GHz 4G RAM
Presonus Studio One v1 DAW
Tascam US-1641 audio interface
Apogee One audio interface
Tascam DR-07 portable recorder
KRK Rokit RP5 powered monitors
…as well as an assortment of pedals, plectrums, cables, wires and other doodads. Obviously not every piece of equipment above was used on every track – today’s track will make that pretty obvious very quickly — and several songs have contributions from guest musicians, but this was the basic set of tools available to me at any given point during this time period.
This opening track is something of a wild card; cut mostly without traditional instrumentation, “CLMT Nightwalk” started out completely as an experiment, but I ended up liking the end result so much I used it to open the album!
When I began putting “CLMT Nightwalk” together, I was thinking of something Bob Weir said in the “Anthem to Beauty” Classic Albums documentary about the recording of the Grateful Dead’s ambitious-in-approach-but-baffling-in-result 2nd album Anthem Of The Sun: he/they were looking to get the sound of “heavy air” on there. Of course, the engineers at the time were baffled by this admittedly opaque request, but I interpreted it to refer to the peculiarly unique and realistic environmental sound that can only be captured by two-track stereo recording.
I attempted to emphasize this element by walking down to the corner store from my former Claremont apartment and back one evening, recording the trip using the Tascam DR-07 handheld recorder. I layered segments of that recording atop one another to exaggerate the ambience, using the rhythm of my steps filtered through the recorder sitting in my trenchcoat pocket to create a central rhythm and arranging the rest of the recording into four separate stereo tracks atop the ‘beat’ where they seemed to make sense, exaggerating the similarities between the tracks while emphasizing the differences — mostly unique events such as passing cars, key sounds, and other happy accidents.
After arriving at a mix that pleased me, I placed synthesizer loops atop the resulting mishmash and added additional environmental recordings from elsewhere in the Claremont area (including the thankfully far-off sound of what sounded like gunshots) to create something of a progression or narrative within the track. (I leave it to you to determine what this narrative might be.)
Later, when putting the tracks together for final assembly into album form I cut about forty seconds out of the middle of the track (seen in the multiple crossfades in the project file screenshot above) because it seemed to go on a bit for an intro track and I thought some of the more interesting sounds were getting lost towards the end. Finally, I tweaked the mix to sound more of a piece with the tracks to follow later in the album, mostly by adjusting the level of the “beat.” And that was basically it!
Join me next time here at aaronpoehler.com, when we’ll take a look at the creation of YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK track #2, “Spray Vandalism”. (Spoiler: other humans were involved!)
My brand-new second album titled YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK is now available for purchase via iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp with additional stores to follow. The entire album can also be streamed via Spotify and Bandcamp.
Videos for many songs and behind-the-scenes/making-of posts including complete track creation breakdowns will be shared here at aaronpoehler.com in the coming weeks, but for now here are the basic details:
Recorded by Aaron Poehler at Clairemont Mobile Garage, San Diego California except “Maybe Great Discoveries” basic tracks recorded The Aerie, University City and “Spray Vandalism” and “Naivete” basic tracks recorded by Mark Haemmerle at Haemmerle Productions, San Diego California
Additional musicians: Kurt Baumer – violins on “Last Call” and “Encore”; Mike Cook – drums on “Last Call” and “Encore”; Jeanette Moradi – lever harp, piano and synthesizer on “Maybe Great Discoveries”; Paul Szewcyzk – bass on “Spray Vandalism” and “Naivete”; Ryan Tully-Doyle – drums on “Spray Vandalism” and “Naivete”
Mastered by Tardon Feathered at Mr. Toad’s, San Francisco California
Album cover design and photograph “CLMT Garage” by Aaron Poehler
This is regarding the ipad version of ComicBookLover. It’s a good app, but you seriously need to add an option to display comics in the library by filename only and ignore tags.
Although I’m sure you and the vocal users on your forums probably use tags, 95% of people or more who use your software are never going to bother with tags if the files don’t already come tagged, which very few do. As a result, the average user experience of your product is to see “(Unknown series)(Unknown series)(Unknown series)(Unknown series)(Unknown series)(Unknown series)” all over the place. That gets really old, and there’s no way to change it on the ipad.
Right now, the way it comes off is that it’s like you want to force people to use the desktop version of the software — if they even have a Mac, since it’s Mac-only — and devote a significant portion of their time to tagging every file they have before loading them up on their ipad if they want to avoid a library full of “Unknown series”. I can tell you now that practically no one has the time or inclination for that. These comics get thrown on, read in ten minutes, and deleted to clear space; to spend even a minute per book would be a pointless waste of my life.
Also: I know what series it is. It’s in the filename. It’s only your software that doesn’t know what series it is, and I don’t need it to let me know constantly that it doesn’t know. I don’t care.
Either way, I’ll likely continue to use and recommend ComicBookLover (unless as a result of posting this open letter on my website someone recommends a superior product to me), but if you’d do this one thing you’d eliminate a minor but constant annoyance caused by your otherwise terrific product and improve user experience for a huge percentage of the userbase.
Hi, my name is Don J. Long, and in 1966 I was a radio disc jockey with my first radio gig at age 18, on a local Top 40 Pop and Rock music station in the major Los Angeles radio market, KLFM 105.5 FM, Long Beach. I was employed by the radio station full time from January to June 1966, when the station went out of business. I did the “Morning Drive” show from 6 AM to 9 AM then, with the name “D.J. the Deejay” for my radio handle.
Occasionally, I would do on-air live interviews with musical artists and celebrities on my morning show. I interviewed Bobby Fuller live on the air in April 1966, a few months before his tragic death. We mostly talked about his music, how he came from Texas, and how people compared him favorably to Buddy Holly. He was in Hollywood to do some music gigs at that time, and the program director, Harvey Sheldon, knew the guys who worked the shows up on the Sunset Strip, so they told him Bobby Fuller would be available for an on-air interview so he came down and we talked for about 20 to 30 minutes. It was all later edited into my radio show the following day. Other artists I interviewed, for example, on my radio show were Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, Gary Lewis, Jerry Lewis’ son, of Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and Del Shannon. I wish I knew where any recordings were of my radio shows. I used to have my own copies but I was robbed in a burglary in 1975 and those tapes were stolen along with my reel-to-reel tape deck.
Bobby mentioned that he had a girlfriend from Las Vegas; she must have been the ‘Melanie’ mentioned in the reports, who was driving around Hollywood at that time in a red 1959 Cadillac convertible, allegedly given to her by a local club owner who was also from Las Vegas, who was her ex-boyfriend, and so the reports go, had ties to the Mafia and organized crime.
He also said he was really happy with his newfound success in the music business, and enjoyed working for Bob Keane (Keene) at Del-Fi and the people at Mustang Records in Hollywood. At that time, his two big hits were “Let Her Dance” and Buddy Holly’s song “Love’s Made A Fool Of You’. His big hit “I Fought The Law” was also starting to get some serious airplay at KRLA, KFWB and KHJ, and whatever they played, we played at KLFM.
Bobby impressed me as being a very positive, intense and driven but personable young man, and not the sort of person to take his own life, especially when his career was still on the rise. I don’t believe he committed suicide, he was murdered. And I would blame it totally on the girlfriend Melanie’s jealous ex-boyfriend, and his associates.
Bobby also mentioned at that time that he was really excited about buying a new red 1966 Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback sports coupe from the local Hollywood Ford dealer, which would have been Don Hartunian Hollywood Ford at that time. I don’t know if he purchased the car or not, but he talked about it on my show interview with me.
For what it’s worth, this is my input into this story. I also gave this same story, my testimony, to the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1996 when they ran a segment of their program about this case.
Just thought I would drop you a line about this, since I read online you were interested in this case.
Best Regards,
Don J. Long
DJL Projects
Thanks, Don, interesting stuff. It’s a real shame your interview tapes disappeared, I’m sure those would be fascinating to hear today — I’m a big Del Shannon fan too.
Of the new shows I’ve seen so far this season, Up All Night is the one I’ve enjoyed the most and the only one I’m certain I’ll watch more episodes of. I’m one of the fifty or so people who watched and enjoyed every episode of Running Wilde, Will Arnett’s last attempt at sitcom stardom; I grew up watching Christina Applegate on Married…With Children; and I saw Bridesmaids in the theater. I’m so predisposed to watch this show a picture of me appears under the heading ‘this show’s demographic’ in the affiliates’ promotional materials.
Of course, none of that matters if the show sucks, but even the slightly rickety pilot makes a strong case for Up All Night. Some seams are visible where it was retooled to expand Maya Rudolph’s role and squeeze in new cast additions (Nick Cannon, of all people? OK, we’ll see…) but even so it’s still easily the most promising new comedy I’ve seen in some time. I am a little worried the show might fall into a tedious pattern of repetitive “diapers and poop are gross, haha” jokes and that Rudoph’s character will continue to be simply a thinly-drawn Oprah sock puppet, but I’m on board for at least the next few episodes — and as long as the writing is strong I’ll likely be in for the first season.
Free Agents is the show that comes on after Up All Night and is “the comedy that comes on at the half-hour mark” in every way; it feels designed to go with Up All Night in the same way Mad About You was made to go with Seinfeld and King Of Queens with Everybody Loves Raymond — and it feels slightly second-rate in the same way those shows did. Where the late-thirty/early-fortysomethings of Up All Night are married and breeding, those on Free Agents are divorced and rebuilding — NBC’s got all the angles covered!
Based on a British show, Free Agents shows it with sharply written dialogue and frequent reliance on the comedy of awkwardness, the special talent of the English. I don’t find myself particularly vested in the characters — Azaria lacks the easy likability it’d take to sell the ‘flustered everyman’ thing he’s going for here, the kind of thing Louis CK has been doing perfectly on Louie recently — but given the strong lead-in from Up All Night I can see it outlasting the original version’s six episodes, anyway. Where it goes from there is down to the writing; if they keep hammering the “are they/aren’t they/dating/not dating” thing I can see it getting tiresome quickly, since I don’t find myself really caring whether the characters are hooking up or not.
Honestly, more than anything Free Agents makes me want to check out the original show, but having watched both the pilot and the second episode I can say it’s a minor pleasure, though I can’t say I’d mourn too deeply were it to vanish suddenly. In the meantime, I’ll have to see if I can track down that UK show…
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