As I wrote last week, the Twice album mix sessions were plenty intense. I worked from home editing and adding last minute ideas, then crossed Paris by metro to get in the studio, add my data to the sessions and take over the mix from Henry, the engineer. Usually Henry's work up to that point was pretty much in the home stretch to a final mix we could all be happy with, but I would just tweak a few things to my liking. Well, that doesn't imply as much customizing as it should, we're talking about 2-3-4 hours work but still these things are more a matter of imposing my vision as opposed to pulling back from from, say, Henry going in the "wrong" direction or shall we say a direction I didn't like. His work was solid, and I took over from there and pushed further into my own vibe.
On the metro rides to and from the studio I had time to read. I mentioned Lydia Lunch's "the Gun Is Loaded" last week, it's truly beautiful, please check it out. After I read that, I started Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" and of course it's excellent, I find something hilarious in almost every line, esp. reading it aloud in my head as he captures realistic inflections so accurately. It's detective noir in psychedelic Paisley garb as the universal bummer that was the 70s descends on L.A. and its environs. Love the acid trip descriptions...required reading.
On Wednesday I had a leisurely flight to Zaragoza; there's only one flight a day direct between there and Paris, on Iberia, and since we were planning to rehearse on Thursday at noon I had to be on the Wednesday midafternoon flight. I was pretty burnt from working long studio hours etc so I took it easy. A little caviar, a little pedro ximenez, and zzzz for Zaragoza.
ZARAGOZA, 10/8
The guys from
Muy Fellini arrived and we headed to the venue around noon. Muy Fellini is a drums/guitar duo, featuring Edu Ugarte (one of the best sounding names in the world), drummer from successful Spanish indie band Half Foot Outside, and Juan, who looks a little like Billie Joe from Green Day, and is one of 14 kids in his family! So, he has a really relaxed idea about personal space. Edu arranged a few of the Posies acoustic shows in Spain this spring, which Muy Fellini supported, and arranged this mini tour of the two groups together as well. This tour is commemorated by a beautiful 10" vinyl record, a split EP that has my cover of "Nature Boy", which was on a compilation a few years ago, and my cover of Dylan's "Quinn the Eskimo", which has never been released. You can contact the label that released it on
their myspace.
So, we set up, minimally, as ever. This was at La Lata de Bombillas, the tiny club that's a music institution in Zaragoza. THE DiSCiPLiNES had a great show here in May. It's super tiny--you have to squeeze by the band onstage to get to the bathroom. 40 people and the place is packed. I ran the guys thru things they had heard and things they hadn't. Songs of mine, Neil Young covers, this kind of thing.
One enormous steak later, we were playing, I say we cuz I had the MF guys up every other song, to do new and old songs of mine. I think we opened with a keys/guitar/drums version of 'Spanish Waltz'. Of course, my show went on and on. I did a new song, 'Doesn't It Remind You' with the singer of a local band called
Kyoto, the song calls for a female duet partner, and she read the lyrics I wrote out, and did a great job. Generally people were having a great time, I think...I was wandering around, yelling my fool head off like always.
MADRID, 10/9
We were out the door of the hotel at 7.45, to head to Madrid and my interview on SER radio, one of the biggest commercial radios in Spain. Generally this kind of radio is lite, not that music oriented, but I have to say, I was treated with great respect, the DJs did their homework, and we had a very deep conversation for a daytime, mainstream radio show. Nice!
I went to sleep after that, we had a lot of down time before soundcheck--the radio was over by 2pm. What a strange hotel we had. The Hotel Alexandra. The logo of which shows the hotel’s initials inside an oval. So, the doors of the hotel, each with the logo on it, say “HA HA”, essentially. We checked in. No wifi. OK...we went to our floor and found painters painting, workers working, construction debris all around. Oh, great. We rolled our stuff down the hall and the painter sloshed a bucket of burgundy paint out of the way. There was a temporary carpet down that had the logo in red on a blue field--this produces a visual effect that makes the border of the blue and the red parts dance a bit--so essentially I was walking down a hall on a field of bouncing HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH’s...it was like being in a Batman comic with the Joker. My room did not smell like paint, but the bad news is that this was because my room smelled damp and...not sure what else. My ‘window’ was an open space that looked out on the interior staircase of the hotel, which had workers going up and down it, so, I pulled down the metal shade. Holes in the wall indicated where the hotel intended to put electrical sockets one day. And, when I did lay down and start to sleep, a plastic shelf with some bath products on it came unglued from the wall and dumped itself and its contents into the bidet. Amazing!
Well, after that restful afternoon, I was ready for soundcheck, and after checking mails at this kind of Spanish Kinko’s (next to a sweaty guy watching Manga porn) Pepo the promoter met me and walked me thru various winding streets to the club. A grungy, homey tiled basement bar with another, brighter looking bar on the main level. We set up and did our thing, and this time, the ‘Doesn’t It Remind You” singer,
Rebecca Lander, who I had met earlier this year when I saw her singing with Aaron Thomas in El Puerto, was able to come to soundcheck and do a run thru. So, when we did it in the show, I pretended to just pick her at random like I had done to Alicia from Kyoto the night before. Rebecca was still in a green wig from her kind of disco cabaret gig around the corner, and our performance was wonderfully surreal. The rest of the show--was real. The club has all kinds of surfaces--big stairs coming down the side, split levels of sitting and standing space, so, there were people at all angles around me, above me, looking down from the stairs. So I had to walk around a lot to get them all feeling included but it was really good. As ever, some really big fans, singing along, and as ever, some funny jokes on my part. I think. Anyway, a great, 2-hour show. Everyone, club included was really happy. After the show I took a drink with friends at El Sol, which was a riproaring disco with funk going on, it was funny for about 5 minutes. Then I walked past the pukers and hookers and, after running into friends from Malaga on Gran Via, went to bed in the HAHA.
BARCELONA, 10/10
The hammering, and funny smells, and collapsing architecture of the HAHA didn’t even wake me up for breakfast. So, before we started our 6-and-a-half-hour drive to Barcelona, I made Edu and Juan stop across the street for chocolate croissants and cortados, and then we went back to the Berlingo waiting for us in a nearby garage. Evidently Edu’s packing job the night before had been influenced slightly by the free beer at hand, and thus we found ourselves repacking all the stuff for a LONG time. Cars trying to navigate around us in the garage while Edu had rolled forward halfway out of the space so we could open the back. But we got on the road, stopped once for sandwiches and diesel in some windswept hellhole and rolled into beautiful Barcelona around 7 that evening. Easy on the eyes, the city at that time. It was still light out, but we passed this teen disco on the way to the hotel that had about 1500 kids waiting in line to get in. Checked into the same hotel we always stay at when playing the Apolo, but I had the occasion to have what has to be the world’s smallest room. ‘Individual’ it was called, a single, but I swear it was actually for half a person. The wifi cut out on my floor so I went to the lobby and tried desperately not to listen to Zombie Zombie getting interviewed about how they just love new challenges and blah de fooking blah.
Dinner and then walked over to the venue, at 11pm, for soundcheck. There had already been a show there that evening, with the band
Maple, and the singer, Laura, had volunteered to play my widow in the song. We soundchecked it. Great. Back to the hotel to freshen up, grab a cafe and then at 1.30 in the freaking morning, I went on. The place was packed but with about 50% people to see me and 50% people there cuz it was going to be the happening place til at least 4am. So, as you can guess, a noisy crowd. So, my usual super quiet antics were not going to cut it. So, I did the opposite. I was the LOUDEST Ken Stringfellow ever. Constantly yelling in the mic, jumping off the stage and dragging the mic with me, running along the bar with Juan’s acoustic guitar...I completely manhandled that crowd, and they loved it. The show was only an hour or so, but it would have been ill advised to keep up that manic energy for much longer. It actually was a great show, maybe the best one. Certainly a unique one. The duet was excellent, and my friends were all there--Oh Libia (who were also in Madrid!), Nacho from Poet in Process, all kinds of people. And fans, too. The girl who had the Posies set list made into a T shirt. This kind of thing. It was thrillsville!
4 hours later I was getting up and stumbling into a cab. Oh, the night guy at the hotel was a big Posies fan and was bummed he couldn’t get the night off and watch the show. I gave him a CD. Got some sleep on the plane to Amsterdam, and when
JB Meijers met me at the airport, we had cafes and sandwiches right then and there and the cafe was so good it just bolted me right awake. So. We drove into town, and he dropped me at his place, and there I met Harry, the drummer for the show we were in town to play. This was to be the release party for JB’s solo album “Catching Ophelia” as well as the release party for a novel, “Engel” by JB’s wife
Wanda Bommer. You may recall that I played on JB’s album in a session near Malaga, the day before the Big Star show there this spring. JB had contacted me out of the blue, I hadn’t met him or heard of him before, but during the sessions we bonded, he’s a great person and one of the most important, prolific and successful musicians/producers in Holland. His biggest successes are with Dutch language bands who don’t do a lot of export biz, but can tour for weeks selling out arenas all over this tiny country, and JB plays live with a couple of them--De Dijk and
Acda en de Munnik. A&dM are a duo who started out as a kind of cabaret/comedy act but have matured into truly great songwriters--Thomas Acda is also a successful actor, etc etc. Their album just came out, and it happens that JB brought me in to mix the title track, earlier this summer in Brussels. The album entered the charts at #2! OK. So, JB’s album, is truly wonderful. It’s in English, too, so feel free to check it out and dig in! I play piano, bass and sing lots of harmonies on the album. It’s a super pop production, with tons of variety.
So, while JB and Harry chased Harry’s drum set, arriving from Hamburg, I ironed my clothes (taking a chance I had the house to myself for awhile, as I had to iron my trousers, too) and practiced JB’s tunes on his piano. I had been listening and making notes on the long van rides, so I was pretty well prepared. Indeed, when we assembled in the Van Dik Hout rehearsal place, our first run thru’s were really good. Stefan from the band Racoon on bass, and JB’s pal Wouter on guitar. Wouter broke his arm recently in a bike accident and has it set, Les Paul style, in such a way that he can play, but it ends up with his guitar going upwards, kind of Bill Wyman-ward. He rocks, don’t think otherwise. Very able band we have here. JB is a really formidable guitar player as well. There is a song that we all three play full on rock guitar on, too. Mostly, tho I play keys--piano, organ, and some string parts. I had a Nord Stage to do piano and organ, and then a USB keyboard and JB’s laptop with the strings, some other piano sounds, and some very specific sounds from the album. We did a run thru, had a wonderful, long, dinner at Wouter’s place, had a much sleepier run thru, then went back to JB’s place to drink Pedro Ximenez and while the guys talked rock, often in Dutch, I booked plane and train tix for the Disciplines! The tour managing never stops.
AMSTERDAM, 10/12
It’s always such a pleasure to be in Amsterdam. It is the coziest city. It needs to be--usually it’s windy, damp, etc. but this morning it was truly radiant. I got up early and walked to de Balie, a big cafe next to the Paradiso, and did two interviews with different magazines. In fact, I enjoyed them so much I ended up talking to the journalists for three hours. One was for a guitar mag, so we geeked out hard. Then I wolfed down a delicious sandwich of spiced mackerel spread on very dark bread, and walked over to the Paradiso and found I was on time, and thus the only one there. I’ve had great shows at the Paradiso--the Posies/Teenage Fanclub show on my 25th birthday was a monster--a storming Posies set and then Jon & I sang for almost all of TFC’s set, since Norman was sick. I had great solo shows there for Touched and Soft Commands. So it was feeling very homey when I arrived. Again, the day was sunny and it just felt great to be alive at that moment...coffee in Amsterdam is REALLY good. The guys showed up and we assembled the gear slowly, and ran thru most of the set, it was sounding quite good. Loud, tho--it was an arena-sized show in the small hall of the Paradiso. So, kind of a challenge to make it sound good in there, actually. But the sound engineer is one of the best in the land, so we were in good hands. After soundcheck (remember that everyone is laughing at me as every time there’s a pause in the action I was checking mails and doing Disciplines/Big Star tour management duty) we had dinner together, with the band, Wanda, and some of JB’s famouzz muso friends, some of whom were playing in a musical segment that tied into Wanda’s book presentation, taking place before our set.
Upon returning to the venue, I watched my bro’s Friska Viljor play in the big room, as always they sounded superb. I had time to get nervous, and then it was time to play. The good news: the laptop crashed. But for reals. No coming back. So, much of the cool textures we had worked up were just Oh Yew Tee. Anyway, time to rock, and tho my game was thrown a bit, and I was really feeling the nerves of responsibility--I have to carry one song, the title track in fact, with JB singing over just my piano--but I think we did a great job. There was some feedback, but not many clams, and we nailed a lot of stuff just right. The vibe was a mix of friends, family, press and VIPs which actually is not the ideal composition of an audience--these are not people who are going to cut loose and jump up and down but it was really cool and I think it was even better than we think we thought it was. So, we had no guilt about drinking the methuseluh of champagne someone brought! I hung out with the Friska guys who were plastered, and also watched a little bit of Peter Bjorn and John...they are really good, funny, a bit lite on content but highly enjoyable, and very nice people, which counts for a lot. We all ended up back at the beautiful little flat Harry & I were sharing. When I woke up at 6.30 to get ready to taxi to the station, I didn’t remember going to bed. I had thrown some Pedro X on top of the bubbles, and you know...it didn’t *not* work. But I was soon crisp and by 7.45 I was purchasing train tickets for future Disciplines shows, and boarded my train to Paris. Here at home I was reunited with the family, and checking Aden’s progress in her English class. I did some vocals for a Belgian band called
Zender. And bloggedy bloggedy.
Love
KS
Paris
