Cerebellum Blues

Members of the band: Mike Northcutt.

Way, way, way back in 1985, I graduated from college with a degree in English, and as I looked out on the big world from under my cap and gown, I had but one question: "What the hell do I do now?" Not having much of answer, I decided to head, you guessed it, back to school. So I packed my bags and drove from Colorado, home of my higher education, to LA, home of Musician's Institute, formerly The Guitar Institute of Technology, aka G.I.T.

I started with a a few summer courses, since the only scale I knew was a pentatonic and my chord voicings were limited to cowboy chords and barre chords. I can't remember when, exactly, but sometime after the real school year began, I moved in with fellow student Mike Northcutt in order to be closer to the school, and he and I have been friends ever since. Mike is a PHENOMENAL guitar player, and someone from whom I have learned a tremendous amount over the years. He's also a gifted songwriter, and one of our seminal moments at G.I.T. was when Kenny Loggins came in to guest lecture for our songwriting class and review student demos. I submitted "The Upside Of Down", Mike submitted "I Can't Stop The Wonderin'. Kenny liked 'em both, as I recall, but neither tune felt like something he could personally get behind.

After finishing G.I.T., I headed back to S.F., but Mike stayed in L.A. and furthered his musical education at Grove School of Music. He then proceeded to make a living as a performing musician for well over the next decade. Impressive, to say the least. Over the years, we've stayed in touch sporadically, but even though we rarely call each other and almost never see each other for eons at a stretch, every time I get back together with Mike, we're right back in it, talking music, politics, life. His recent visit to S.F. to help me with my album was no different. Every night we stayed up past midnight and when the time finally came to turn in, it was always with a bit of reluctance.

I'm deeply honored and pleased that Mike contributed some tracks to my album and that the making of this album has given us reason to see a bit more of each other.

Saturday, March 1-2, Hyde Street Studios.

The sessions over the weekend went really well. Mike (top left) played great, we got some good tones, Scott (below left), the engineer, was an ace. But I learned a valuable lesson: it pays to rehearse and prioritize. Duh.

For whatever reason, I didn't do as much prep for these sessions as I've done for ones in the past, and as a result, we didn't get through everything I was hoping to. I totally blame myself for this. I completely lagged on getting the tunes to Mike, I didn't have good notes with me, I was unclear on what I wanted. Yet despite my lameness, we still managed to capture a lot of good music.  We recorded acoustic and electric guitars for Coming Together (By Falling Apart) and Money, and we got great acoustic rhythm takes for Demons and Saints and The World Turned.

There's still a lot to do, and I confess that I'm having motivational difficulties* at the time, but I am determined to finish this CD by my birthday on June 27. And with a little luck, I think I just might make it.

*About those motivational difficulties: I know that my brain is just playing cruel tricks on me and that I have no good reason to be down these days and yet I am. Actually, maybe I do have a good reason to be down, because waking up every morning and feeling dizzy and knowing that it will last all day until I go back to sleep wears on me. I feel like a burden to Catherine, I can't stand to hear myself complain, I'm sick of startling people with my odd ticks, the nausea has gotten very old. I know my accident could have been far worse, that I could have suffered cognitive issues, but still, it's tough. I want more than anything to be well again.

 

 

Instant karma?

Over the past two days (Saturday and Sunday) I’ve been the studio with my friend Mike Northcutt, who’s playing some killer guitar on a few choice cutts. Naturally, the coffee consumption has been high, but the studio is equipped with a coffee maker and sports beans from Peet’s, so our supply line is short and reliable.

But that’s the not point of this post. Rather, it’s about the coffee cups, specifically the Amdahl cups, which line the studio's cupboards. "Amdahl," you muse, "What’s interesting about that?"

Well, oddly enough, Amdahl, which is a now owned by Fujitsu, was a Silicon Valley upstart back in the 70s, and the company at which my dad was hard at work making his name as an operations and management expert. I remember touring Amdahl's low buildings in the dwindling fruit tree orchards of the Santa Clara Valley and marveling at the walls of wires that were being shrunk by my dad’s engineering teams into tiny, ultra powerful, world-changing microprocessors for Amdahl’s IBM-crushing mainframes. My dad took me to see Amdahl’s labs in the sincere hope that witnessing such marvels would inspire me to extend the electrical engineering lineage of my family, which started with my dad’s father, continued with my father, and was looking awfully tenuous with regard to me. But as amazing as Amdahl’s tech doings were, all those miles of wires were no match for six, simple guitar strings in capturing my imagination. So instead of heading off to a big university to get a degree in engineering, I went to a small liberal arts college and majored in English, all the while harboring dreams of making it in music somehow. My musical plans never really did pan out, but here I am, too many years later into life, finally attempting to make an album, and staring straight at an Amdahl coffee cup and wondering to myself, "What does this mean?"I'm not really, sure, to be honest, but I know this: to my mind it makes a certain karmic sense that I should come across an artifact of my dad’s pursuit of his dreams as I pursue mine.

Stay tuned for more posts about the weekend sessions.