Tag Archives: Right Track Recording

I Shot The Sheriff- Bob Marley & the Wailers

Monday Monday, can’t trust that day. And you know what? You really can’t. Monday’s are nothing but trouble. Unless you have Monday off, then it’s perfectly alright. Today I find myself at the cigar shop. Another urgent text from Shlomo, begging me to come in and sit for a few hours. I don’t mind. He worked all weekend, including hanging out with that football player who shot himself in the leg a few years ago at a New York City nightclub. No gunshots were fired or heard so I guess it went well, and there was no chalk mark’s outlining a body either.

It’s a federal holiday for Martin Luther King’s birthday and today is also the second inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama. The reich wing GOP did their best to make sure Obama would be a one term president, they stated that as their game plan in 2008 and with that they failed spectacularly. What might be egg covered their faces, but with their greasy hands it could be something wholly other than egg. In fact sometimes it’s paired with an occasional egg and the product of that joining proves to be quite a fetish for that GOP.

I think the first inauguration that I paid attention to was in 1993, with Bill Clinton being sworn in and Maya Angelou saying her inaugural poem. I was working with a woman named Terry Eigenlaub at Skyline Studios, she was the bookkeeper and I was going through the files in the lounge outside of Terry’s office as Maya Angelou’s poetic voice filled the room as Terry yammered on in her office. Maya Angelou’s poem certainly struck a chord and is memorable decades later, more memorable than whatever it was that Terry was complaining about that cold January morning in 1993.

I don’t remember much about the next inauguration in 1997. I might have been working at Right Track Recording and dealing with Eric Andrew Simmons and he was none too pleased with a democratic president being re elected. I do remember Eric Andrew Simmons being thrilled that Newt Gingrich and his ‘contract with America’ was passed some time later, with Eric Andrews Simmons sporting wood to go with his hair plugs and pregnant lactating women porn. I do have to wonder whatever happened to that rat dog he grew tired of and abandoned, Sammy I think it’s name was.

Of course there was no celebrating George Bush’s inauguration. Not at all. Best forgotten, that. In 2009 when Obama was being sworn in, I was working at the BIO-IB gig. It was an exciting time and let the people in the office that I would be out of the office, watching the swearing in on a big screen in Rockefeller Center. I bought a couple of cigars and cheered loudly with everyone else when the final words of the oath of office were said. A woman stood nearby me and commented on the cigar I was smoking.

I was anticipating some stress but she mentioned that she enjoyed the aroma, that it reminded her of her grandfather. Then it was back to being an office manager, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. One of the companies that was subletting space from BIO-IB, a company that was profiting from bad mortgages, had nothing but bad things to say about the new President. I told them to shut up. One of them later killed someone while drunkenly motorboating by the Statue of Liberty.

It’s been fairly busy today, I guess it’s from a few people having off for Martin Luther King’s holiday. A few people came in after waiting online for the Cake Boss and wanted a couple of sticks for the ride home to wherever it was that they came from. Bill is off today and he is just so super great and I of course am a morning behemoth. I am a lucky guy to have a guy like him to turn a blind eye to my morning crabbiness. Not such a bad day after all I think.
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Telling Lies

Last night Tricky played a show at Irving Plaza. I told Roda about it, and he set about trying to get on the guest list. Yesterday he called and let me know. Unfortunately I had to be in early this morning so I could not go. I told him around noon. I found out a little before that, that one of our subtenants was having a meeting early enough for the need for me to be in and help out.

Roda understood the need to make some dosh, and I wished him a good evening. Around 10:00 I get some texts from Roda. CD info on Tricky’s latest, and the fact he had just taken a consonant or perhaps a vowel. I’m supportive and slightly envious and wish him a good time and an ecstatic trip.

A half hour later I get a phone call, a blast of overloaded digital white noise from Irving Plaza. It lasted 44 seconds before the line went out. Roda did get backstage and spoke with Tricky and mentioned Central Park from a few years ago. (Written as The Ghost in You last month) They wound up hanging out, Roda even going to the after party at a club nearby. Roda didn’t get home until 3:00AM. Yikes.

I went to bed after watching Cotton Hill’s bland speech. I have to say that Sarah Palin’s screeching was more rousing for those republicans. Most attack dogs do command attention after all. But once again I only listened slightly to McCrazy, paid more attention to an early birthday present from Annemarie and Co., John Lennon Rock ‘n’ Roll.

His covers record, which came out in 1975 and the last record before retirement. Of course it has a history. Lawsuits, Morris Levy and Phil Spector and May Pang, John and Apple/Capitol Records, contracts, car crashes, missing tapes. It’s all in there. It did ok, made the top ten in the US charts. It was said that he had run out of material, hence it being a covers album, but at the time it was a fashion to do fifties and sixties songs, like David Bowie did with Pin Ups.

Speaking of the Dame, I watched a YouTube clip of David on the Dick Cavett Show from 1975. Young Americans, Luther Vandross, David Sanborn. I had that as a cassette. Only liked the title song and Fame. Young Americans opened the tape and Fame ended it.

I guess I played those 2 songs so much that the rest of the tape was reverse, leaving me able to only play those two songs. I didn’t much like Bowie then except for those songs. The ‘cool’ kids liked Bowie and they were all smoking pot at age 12. I wasn’t ‘cool’, not for another 8 years.

I starting liking him when he started to lose some popularity with Low. He was getting too far out there and that’s where I got it. Still wasn’t too fond of Ziggy et al. I saw him on Broadway in The Elephant Man though in 1980 I believe.

Had 1st row seats and of course he was mesmerizing. The people behind us gave him flowers at the end of the show and he thought they were from me and my friends and thanked us so graciously.

A lot of years pass and I find myself working at Right Track Recording on west 48th Street. David is one of our clients. He was super nice and extremely personable. Just one of the guys, sitting across from my desk chatting about whatever it was like we were mates. I did feel a little bit like Karen Lynn Gorney from Saturday Night Fever.

Then I saw him a few weeks later at Madison Square Garden. I had never seen Bowie live and of course he was amazing though he shared the stage with Lou Reed, Robert Smith, Billy Corgan and Dave Grohl among others.

It was a birthday celebration with the guests covering a Bowie song and then duets with the Dame. A wonderful evening but not really a David Bowie show I guess. A special event nonetheless.

The next time I saw him at the studio, I had changed my perception of him. He wasn’t David Bowie anymore. After seeing him live, I saw him as DAVID BOWIE. It was an odd thing that I had to get over, since being star struck is a no no in the recording studio world.

He thought enough of me to autograph an advance cassette of the record he was working on, Earthling, which of course is one of my favorite Bowie records. Actually he gave me his copy of the cassette, then took it back saying that he ought to autograph it for me. Awfully nice. Asking for autographs is also frowned upon by the way.

Still have it, in fact if I turn my head, it’s within eyesight. He finished Earthling soon after that. He did ask my opinion since he heard I was a DJ, who would I recommend from the DJ world to remix a track or two? I drew a blank and told him I would get back to him in a few.

I called Rand and asked him since he was wise in the world of remixes. He threw out a few names, Josh Wink and a few others. I went back to David and told him who might be good and he basically didn’t like most of the names. I gave up.

It wasn’t until maybe a month later, did I realize that I could have probably suggested myself. He wasn’t going to ask me, but perhaps thought I might have the edge, the nerve, the cojones to promote myself.
But no, I didn’t.

D’oh.

Sniffy Dame(video pulled by EMI)