Getcha Some Productions Podcast Episode 32
https://reverb.grsm.io/GetchaSome
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_nc0nleQ5Yk_eKuNpkDFvQ
A podcast covering all things related to music production: from the first note to the last fan and everything in between. Our mission is to create music and to inspire others to do the same.
Not your typical podcast, each episode is a live business meeting. We are in the process of building a media empire (a music production company) and listeners/viewers come along for the ride. This is a chronicle and archive of our progress.
This podcast is always candid and unrehearsed.
In this episode we discuss:
Dan’s personal musical update: he has a music project going in Richmond Virginia called element 115. Dan is the Bass Player. The drummer of the band also plays a little bass. The drummer brought in his own bass for one rehearsal. Dan thinks it’s an early 2000’s Warwick five string with active pickups.
Being a long time fender player, Dan is used to a more old-fashioned passive sound from his basses. So, this modern bass with active pick ups is a big change for him but he’s really enjoying it actually. He plans to spend the next few months seeing what he can do with that new bass.
The biggest difference he sees so far with the active bass is that the amount of kinetic energy he has to put into the strings is so much less. You can just brush the strings and it will make a sound. I know Dan is used to playing very hard on his basses. He really digs in while he plays. So that sensitivity is a big change for him.
I was talking about, in response to Dan’s talking about the bass, a recent podcast I heard about some guys producing a song that sounded like 1980s pick Pink Floyd. That era of Pink Floyd is basically more electronic sounding overall. So it sounds like Pink Floyd with a drum machine behind it (something like that). And the bass player used a jazz bass to record the bassline at first and then realized as the song was taking shape and sounding more electronic overall that he needed to re-record the bassline with a P Bass. The lead the tone he was getting from his jazz bass was more of a lead tone and the P Bass delivers more of a supportive tone it doesn’t stick out in the mix as much.
Then Dan starts talking about the fact that he doesn’t believe the tweeter in his bass amp is working properly. Using the new active bass, he was starting to tweak some of the tone controls on the bass. The the tone controls have a little notch when their centered which I guess is sort of like a neutral sound. When he turns the bass controls up he notices a huge difference. Turn the bass up, tons of bass, turn the bass down, so little bass. But when he turns the treble control up on the base there’s no difference. When he turns it all the way up he’s expecting to hear a lot of high tones and get a lot of “clickety-clack” high-end stuff and he wasn’t getting any of that so he surmised that the tweeter is not working.
Of course, he goes on to say that he’s planning on getting the tweeter fixed but he’s not totally worried about it because the bass actually sounds pretty good anyway. Sounds totally fine with or without the tweeter. Then I’m joking around with him about the fact that it’s possible that tweeter was never working at all. And then Dan jokes back to me “yeah actually I think it probably was never working at all.” He remembers a day where, after he first got her, so sometime in the mid-1990s. He was about to listen to a Rage Against the Machine song and his friend was like “how we gonna make this really loud” and he said “I know I’ll plug it into my bass amp” and so he plugged the CD player right into the bass amp and jammed it up and he’s pretty sure that if the tweeter was blown it was likely then. Which means that this whole time he hasn’t had a tweeter anyway. He and I have played in several bands together the whole time since then for over 25 years and It’s feasible or likely that he never had a tweeter so Dan’s sound is pretty much a tweeter-less sound.
The whole purpose of this episode was just to reminisce about the band that we were in called Jollyship the Whiz-Bang. So I start off by talking about the day that I joined the band. It was sometime in the early 2000‘s. I remember going in to the Flux Factory and it was Dan and Nick and Raja standing there in that front room. The big factory warehouse space, playing songs. I guess. I’m pretty sure Nick was holding a puppet and Raja was switching back-and-forth between accordion and guitar and Dan was playing bass. And I brought my guitar and guitar amp.
https://www.thewhizbang.org/about.html
https://g.co/kgs/KZbhGk
Dan is remembering how he joined the band as well. He also first remembered the Flux Factory.
We should say that we all went to Bard College together so that’s how we all knew each other in the first place.
Dan worked with Nick at Bard. It was the first time that Dan had worked on music but with additional elements like some sort of thematic element or visual elements or plot elements. Not necessarily a full play like a musical that we ended up doing eventually but like multimedia Music productions where the multimedia part of it was just as important as the music part. Dan describes it as performance art and music.
Dan remembers one of the greatest nights of his life playing music was participating in a production by Nick called the revolving doors of Gary. That was around 2000. Dan brings up how magical that was to him because he always assumed that kind of craziness/weirdness and free-ness (creative freedom) would be the type of thing that would only exist within the confines of the college atmosphere maybe even just Bard College or schools like it. It was magical and then it was gone.
So Raja and Nick’s had a two-man show going and they wanted to expand so they thought of Dan because Dan was probably the only bass player they knew (jokingly). However in truth, they probably did remember working with him at Bard obviously and how great it was and how fun it was. So, of course, they called Dan up to participate.
Either they wanted a more electric sound or maybe Dan just thought that they needed the more electric sound so (potentially) he convinced the guys to call me up so I guess I was officially the fourth member of the band.
I confess that, because the band went through so many musical evolutions, I was sort of uneasy the whole time playing in that band. In a sort of way (musically). I think that towards the beginning of the band when it was just Raja on guitar and accordion and Dan on bass and we were singing more folky type stuff and things like that it felt more like a jam rock type of thing so I felt very comfortable. We went through a phase where we were playing more of like the electro pop sort of thing where I was feeling kind of uncomfortable generally with where my guitar sat in the mix. Then the later evolution of the band was more of a combination of a electro pop but veering into kind of an indie rock thing I started to feel much more comfortable with the way the band was going. So, for me, there was a very long period where I was generally feeling a little bit out of place in the band. Musically speaking.
Then, Dan is remembering the house parties and all the times we played Rubulad.
https://www.facebook.com/rubulad/
The biggest and most formative era of the band was in the Bowery poetry club. The Bowery poetry club was a small bar/club venue on Bowery Street in Manhattan near Houston. And it was a place where we had several residencies. We were able to build our performance into the space and make a home out of the place and then play there for several years sometimes one night a week sometimes several nights per week. That was where we really grew as a band and got our performing chops and our band chops and our songwriting chops together.
www.bowerypoetry.com
Bob Holman was the owner of the place and he and Nick were good friends and they were both insane creative geniuses so they came together. Bob, because of Nick’s relationship, gave us a chance and really supported us for those several years where we really developed the show.
http://bobholman.com
I tell one of my favorite stories from that time period. My performing outfit for the time was either boots or new balance sneakers, red velvet sparkle pants, no shirt and an eye-patch. After the show one summer night, I stepped outside to have a cigarette. In those days, there was a rap concert after our show so there was a velvet rope system managing the line of attendees who were coming for that later show. That night, the first person on line was the daughter of the CEO of the company I worked for on Wall Street. She took one look at me and said, “Oh, you’re a freak, aren’t you?”
Dan tells a funny story about Raja.
Raja is one of the most lovably eccentric people we’ve ever known.
As one of our final thoughts, I bring up how we used to rehearse and record and Peter Kohl’s place otherwise known as Royce Peterson.
We have to remember to remember to go through the golden years.
If we think about how humble the beginning of that band was. Just Nick with one puppet and Raja with his accordion and a beat up acoustic guitar. It ended up being quite epic towards the end.
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