When I first started teaching at the small, private school I recently resigned from, my faculty “mentor,” Marc Osborne, from the Spanish department and I soon learned we had an eerie array of things in common—from our love of the Spanish language, to music and art and travel and film…to both having lived in Saratoga Springs, NY, both being guitarists…. But most uncanny of all was the discovery that he and my wife both lived in the same, tiny village, Cadaqués, north of Barcelona, Spain at exactly the same time—in the early 70s. How odd, how uncanny that 19-year-old Marc must have seen, maybe even interacted with my 9-year-old wife! And Marc’s parents must have known my wife’s mother, an American artist living alone there with her daughter…. These early discoveries led to not only a close friendship but a significant chapter in my life in guitars.
Soon after we met, Marc discovered that the band he started in Europe in the same time period when he may well have walked past the girl version of my wife nibbling on a Marzipan or Turrón on a narrow, cobbled Cadaqués alleyway had been resurrected by a small record company, Golden Pavilion Records, in Portugal. His band, Hand, which had made one critically acclaimed album, and which he had assumed had long since been forgotten, had always been and was again selling records in Europe. This discovery came during a class when he mentioned to students that he used to be a singer in a 70s rock band, so, of course a student immediately googled it on their phone and discovered the album, Everybody’s Own, with its new label.… While I’m certainly getting some of the details wrong, the important thing was that Marc decided to gather up some talented student musicians, me, and his lifelong friend and the original harmonica player for Hand who lives in New York City, Nick Zoullas, and we put together a few old and new Hand songs to perform for a school coffee house. On a whim, Marc sent a recording of our performance to Golden Pavilion, and Hand 2.0 was born.
Fast forward. Summer, and the next-gen Hand is in the school music room, Marc showing us chord progressions, explaining what he envisions for his songs, songs that have been sitting in the dark backs of drawers for years. The hum of amplifiers and microphones in their stands and cords spiderwebbing out across the floor, guitar capos and seltzer cans and half-eaten sandwiches, bags of chips…. The drummer, Franklin, banging around on a funky rhythm and Nate starting in with a bass run to match, and me jumping in with some bluesy runs until Marc calls us to order, holding up his hands, “ok, ok, let’s go, next one,” and soon I’m writing down notes on my sheet music score pad, working to find a way to do something that will complement Marc’s strumming in first position, the feel of the song. Maybe just bar chords up high, maybe no chords at all and just individual notes, triads. Libai noodling on his lovely 100+ year old violin, melding his extensive classical training with his love of all things musical, Klemons on the keyboard, dying to get his fingers on the Steinway ivories of the studio…. Nate asks what I think about a certain bass run. Franklin wonders if he’s using too much high-hat. Nick, the harmonica player, leans back taking it all in, smiling, until he brings his harp up to the mic and lets loose. Mariel, the second vocals, actual granddaughter to jazz legend Dave Brubeck, belts out a deep, throaty alto harmony, and Nick calls out “Bella, Bella!”
We will only have three days in the studio, Firehouse 12 in New Haven, and we want to get everything polished and ready in the 4-5 days preceding that. It is hard, focused, painstaking, and so much fun—and something I haven’t ever done before—playing guitars for 6, 7, 8 hours straight, thinking about arrangements, figuring out what I can and can’t get ready come studio time, deciding which guitar is right for each song, electric, acoustic, classical, 12-string…. I bring in all my guitars, lay them out around me in their cases on the music room floor. I have never played all of them in the same day before, or even in close sequence to each other. I might get on a 12-string kick and work up some of my songs on the humble but lovely sounding Seagull 12-string I got for a bargain on eBay, or, as is the case more and more, focus on mastering a classical piece. But never have I set out to play all of my guitars in one go like this. For that reason alone, it is thrilling, new, inspiring…and hard. Each night I soak my left hand in a tub of ice.
All too soon we are in the studio—its oddly flat acoustics, a lovely, curved wooden structure at one end seeming more like a modern art sculpture than a necessary recording apparatus to smooth out the lows and highs of the sound, the thick, soundproof glass of the recording booths, remarkable guitars for me to play with, Strats and Teles and classic and newer amps, a “Divided by 9” amp, that will become my favorite, microphones worth more than small cars, headphones and small control boxes for each of us, each channel labeled in sharpie on masking tape—Vox1, Vox2, Guitar, Drum, Violin, Piano, Harp, Bass—so we can set the levels how we see fit to better hear what we need to hear as we work to give shape to each new song. And, of course, the control room looking like the cockpit of some futuristic vessel with its myriad knobs and buttons and sliders and lights lights lights and cable, and more cable, a wall of mounted speakers which we will soon huddle around on the one, long bench, closing our eyes, listening hard to see if we got it right. Then the “green room,” a small table, coffee machine, small fridge filled with goodies where we will end up spending perhaps too much of our time, sitting there waiting for someone to do a “take,” to redo a vocal, to now lay in the harmonica or guitar or violin or piano solo. Me, alone in the studio, headphones on, everything else set but for a four-measure fill/solo to go. All of the band looking out at me from the other side of the thick glass of the control room, the voice of the sound tech, Eric, coming through my headphones, “we’ll start right at the end of the last bit of the verse to get you in the groove, then you’re on. Just jump in.” In practice sessions, I’ve done it a little different every time. I’ve scribbled some notes on something that was working well, but now I can’t decipher it. Breathe, relax. Here comes the last line of the vocal, start now. Shit. I hate it. Try again. Again. “Everyone leave the control room,” Eric suggests, “so it’s just him and me,” his “you got this, it’s almost there” after the 9th or 10th take not helping at all….
Watching the recent Beatles documentary, Get Back, brought back to me all the joy and frustration of studio work, especially seeing them all in that control room, listening back to what they had just done, hearing something that sounded so right, that somehow found its way from their remarkable, creative minds out through their instruments into the electronic equipment then out again through those speakers into the air. Recording records with Hand has given me so much—the challenge of working hard on bringing ideas to fruition. The joy of collaboration, taking what you hear versus what another musician hears and walking that delicate tightrope to discovering something that is neither theirs nor yours but wonderfully new and surprising for each of you. While I certainly got more comfortable with each hour in the studio and with each album we made (I have now worked on 5 studio albums for Hand), I don’t think I’ve come close to mastering what it takes to be a true studio musician, to find the spontaneity in your playing that all the striving for something like “perfection” often pushes out of it.
Perhaps most memorable of my studio experiences with Hand was the record we made in Florence, Italy, Little Heartaches, near where our harmonica player, Nick, has a home he so generously invited us all to (and even more generously provided meals and lodging for the band and families). After a week cramped into a small practice room each day near where we were all staying in the otherworldly-beautiful Tuscan hills near Siena, we found our way each day to the studio, an indescript factory-like building on the outskirts of Florence. Here I worked with the Russian sound assistant, Yuri his name might have been, going through boxes of effects pedals the likes of which I had never seen before—Russian knock-offs of classic U.S. pedals, odd, flanger-effects devices that made my guitar sputter and gurgle in ways I had never imagined. He ran a beefy twin reverb amp down into its own room, a long way down the hallway, where he could jack the volume sufficiently to overdrive the glowing tubes without exploding anyone’s eardrums, and we found the perfect combo of vintage pedals to give my guitar the growl I wanted for the song “You Slay Me.”
There is so much more to say about these experiences, and I’m certain in a longer, more polished version of this essay to go into more detail, tell more stories… The solo I did on “Pin it on the Wind” that came to me suddenly just as I was playing it in a way I had never played it before, so hearing it later in the control room gave me goosebumps. The two songs of my own I managed, not unlike Ringo, to talk Marc into letting me record with the band, hearing something I had only ever performed live with my one guitar and maybe a harmonica in its neck holder for a handful of people at an open mic now magically etched permanently into those thin peaks and valleys of a vinyl disk. Or that night before we first stepped into the studio in New Haven and Marc reserved a room for us at the Kasbah Middle Eastern restaurant, and we ordered felafels and hummuses and shish kebobs and sticky-delicious baklavas, laughed and talked, working out our collective jitters as we prepared for that first step of our journey. There is a lot to say about how much fun it was to work with musicians who had once sat in my English classrooms, whom I knew in a whole different capacity, and who became friends, collaborators—all the amazing young musicians I’ve had the good fortune to work with in the shifting incarnations of the band, Charley, Tyler, Waylon, Darian. And the professional musicians who came on board, David Cohen, keyboards, Adam Holtzberg, drums, who gave the band such a fresh, polished sound that still fit so seamlessly with the Hand sound/ethos.
I’ll finish for now with one last image: me putting the new vinyl version of our latest record fresh off the presses onto my turntable, the whole band at my house (I have the only turntable) to give it a listen, my dog pushing himself into everyone’s lap, Marc asking me to turn it up, turn it up, smiling, so delighted to see his songs, his music he once thought was a chapter from his past becoming a powerful moment in his present.
So great, gracias Arnie!!!
I wrote you separately and more extensively. What a journey we share!