An old winter coat

After the best part of eight years, 54 gigs (including 9 as Soundguardian) and 63 songs by 13 artists, Radio Seattle are wrapping things up with one last gig before the Space Needle stops transmitting. 55 must be a lucky number.

Use just once and destroy

A coda to my recent(ish) posts on In Utero and Unplugged:

Last Thursday would have been Kurt Cobain’s 47th birthday, and this reminded me that Radio Seattle‘s bassist Richard sent me this link a while back. It’s a letter from Steve Albini to Nirvana, discussing the possibility of producing In Utero, as of course he went on to do in February 1993 (at the Pachyderm Studio mentioned in the letter).

Nothing to add, beyond read the letter: Albini comes across as everything you would ask for from a record producer (and a human being, more importantly).

(Depending on where you are, you may have to click on the “watch on youtube” link to access this.)

Find a way back home

Not content with one headline gig at The 100 Club – where Muddy Waters, Clapton, the Stones, the Pistols, Metallica and many, many wonderful, disparate artists have played – Radio Seattle are back there again.

The gig’s tomorrow night, Friday 6 September. We’ve stepped into the breach after a late cancellation. And it will be 100 days since our previous gig there too.*

Tickets are £5 advance – tell us you’re coming here. Future rock: pushing forward back.

See the sky blanket you with gems and rhinestones…

…see the path cut by the moon, for you to walk on.

Pearl Jam, Prague, 2 July 2012

One of the big plusses of blogging as a form of communication is its immediacy; you can post your scribblings and upload photos pretty much on the way home from an event – or if you’re like me, right on the cutting edge of technology, as soon as you get home, make a cup of tea and turn your pc on.

Pearl Jam poster, Prague, 2 July 2012, courtesy Spreading the Jam.

Steal the rhythm while you can

Radio Seattle‘s next gig is less than two weeks away – Friday 15 June at The Flag, Watford. We’re putting the finishing touches to a sparkling new setlist (you won’t find one better, man), so ignore England’s tedious 1–1 draw with Sweden and pretend it’s 1993 all over again.*

Rehearsal 23.01.12

Apologies for the delay in posting the latest rehearsal notes, my internet provider stuffed up and I was without internet access for 48 hrs. Eek. The horror. I won’t name names, but the company should stop spending money sticking ginger beards on Olympic sprinters and concentrate on getting faults fixed promptly.

Right, privileged western consumer moan over. They were very nice on the Helpline. Eventually.

Rehearsal this week saw us a man light, singer Dave P hors de combat with man-flu. So it gave us a chance to run through songs without him, work on a few specific problems (such as me and Dave S galumphing all over Richard’s bass run at the end of Alive – to be fair, I have just indulged myself in two minutes of Mike McCready’s finest, I should let him have his moment of glory) and discuss pickup choices, EQs and the balance of the guitars. All the stuff that would have made Dave P ill with boredom if he hadn’t already been off ill anyway.

Dave S took a stack of photos, and I’ll get some of these uploaded this week, either here or on the band’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Radio-Seattle/298277663538939. If you don’t ‘like’ the band already on FB, that’ll be your chance! Ahh, go on now. Go on, go on, go on.

Oh, and we’ve got a couple of demos up from the recordings the week before: Plush and Nearly Lost You. The sound is pretty raw, but worth checking out. Click on the Demos page on the top menu, and spin the black circle! (Or the digital equivalent anyway.) Enjoy!

Demos

Right, we have a couple of demos for your delight and delectation!

Go to the Demos tab, and click on our covers of classic grunge songs by Stone Temple Pilots and Screaming Trees.

We recorded the two songs in rehearsal on 16-01-12. Richard carefully placed a his recording device in the optimal sound position in the rehearsal room… ok, we stuck a mike in the middle of the room and pressed record. Zeek then topped and tailed the files and made a few minor tweaks to the overall sound. One-track technology at its finest.

So please allow for the, err, raw feel of the songs, but we think they sound pretty damn good for what they are, and hopefully they give you a taste of how we’re getting on!

We’re going to record some demos in a grown-up manner in the coming months.

Rehearsal 09.01.12 / Thoughts arrive like butterflies

Please don’t chase it away. Photo: Zeynel Cebeci

Things I learned in rehearsal this week:

• It was quite a long break over the Christmas hols – we were a tad rusty! Blame it on the mince pies. Still, got it out of the way, back on track next week.
• No one else in the band much likes having their picture taken either.
• Watford Cheetahs have snapped up cornerback Dave ‘Ice Man’ Sweet in the first round of the draft pick for, err, Pinner High. More news on our erstwhile guitarist’s second career as the next Charles Woodson to follow. Big Ben Roethlisberger, watch out. And photos, please some photos.
• No insights about pick slides this week, sorry.

Once the rust has been scraped off, we intend to get some tracks down by the end of January, so watch this space (more likely another space on the blog, but I’m sure you get my drift).

So, instead of writing any more about our latest rehearsal, I’m going to waffle on about my favourite subject instead…

Getting ready for rehearsal on Monday afternoon, I listened to Pearl Jam’s Toronto gig from last September (http://wegotshit.blogspot.com/2011/11/toronto-on-091111-pro-mix.html if you’d like to download a high-quality copy). It’s as good a PJ gig as any I’ve heard. You expect a band that’s been together that long to sound tight, especially when newbie (just the 13 years with them) Matt Cameron is on drums, but they also sound energetic, enthused and, well, alive. (Sorry.)

As someone in a grunge covers band, listening to PJ gigs is a bittersweet experience. Uplifting to hear great songs played by classy musicians, demoralising to think that we will never sound that good. Sacking me and hiring Mike McCready would make a good starting point though. Anyway, the point of covering other bands’ songs isn’t to be as good as them, it’s to play songs you love, live, and give others the chance to hear these great songs live.

One of the challenges of covering some Pearl Jam songs is that they possess an organic quality. You can nail the recorded version, and then listen to it live and see how far it’s evolved over time and with regular airings. So I’m on a mission to hear live versions of as many of the songs as we cover as possible, and hopefully our versions will evolve too.

Two of the songs we cover were included in Toronto: Better Man and Alive. Jeremy doesn’t get out much, his arms, raised in a V, probably get stuck in the door; Yellow Ledbetter was sacrificed as the set closer for a lengthy Rockin’ in the Free World with Uncle Neil – it was Toronto after all. Alive sounded pretty much as ever. Better Man starts with Vedder coaxing the audience into singing the first verse and chorus for him (slacker!), and finishes with some vintage McCready noodling and a lengthy outro.

Anyway, enough of that, time to tune up and practise those songs!

Rehearsal 12.12.11

Last rehearsal of the year. I forewent my office Christmas party (sorry, par-tay! yay! smiley happy corporate fun etc) to make it. There’s devotion to the band for you. We were back in the room with the big mirror along one wall, so I spent the evening (un-vampirically) avoiding my reflection whilst getting confused by seeing Dave S and Richard playing left-handed again.

I brought a couple of possible setlists – one juggled a few songs round to see if anything sounded different for cosying up to a new musical friend, the other was essentially the same as last week’s. I was outvoted – we’re nothing if not democratic – and we went for the latter.

No photos or tracks this week, I’m afraid, but I’ll remedy that in the new year. All sounded good, except that, after moving Breed to break up the Alice in Chains section, we forgot to play it. Oh, and I hit the wrong foot pedal for the Alive solo and completely stuffed up the start. I’m sure it happens to Mike McCready all the time.

Say Hello 2 Heaven has incorporated itself elegantly into the setlist. The set finishes with a few more reflective songs, though, and has quite a slow tempo; I wonder if we should move, say, Cherub Rock, to be the penultimate song. It will all shuffle around no doubt once we add some more new songs.

Highlight of the evening: Dave P outing himself as a Skid Row fan with a quick rendition of I Remember You. Très grunge. Dave S then played the start to 18 and Life, which threw me completely as I don’t recall Skid Row being a Bay Area band. (For the record I’ve always rather liked the Skidders, as they never were – but should have been – affectionately referred to. Guilty pleasures…)

Happy Christmas and New Year y’all! Bring on 2012 – we’re ready to dust off the Stonehenge model and start gigging. Hello Cleveland!

Setlist 12-12-11:

Cherub Rock, Nearly Lost You, Plush, Fell on Black Days, Alive, Man in the Box, Breed, Rooster, Would?, Heart-Shaped Box, Outshined, Say Hello 2 Heaven, Better Man, Interstate Love Song, Yellow Ledbetter

Waves roll in my thoughts

Back in the summer, when we put the band together, one of the first things we had to figure out was, well, what would we play? As a grunge covers band, which bands and which songs would we cover: who were the bona fide flannel-wearers and who were the bandwagon jumpers with stick-on goatees and a dodgy metal past?

Since then, the five of us have been kicking these questions round, gathering groups, selecting songs. Some choices are gimmes: the leading Seattle bands of the early 90s, or, to be precise, Washington state bands, as Nirvana hailed from Aberdeen up the road. But how deep should we delve into the Seattle scene (can’t touch the bottom), and how far from Seattle could we stray?