The Tune

All of the production decisions for this song flowed from the song itself. It was written about a man close to us who is an extremely talented actor, writer and artist. Yet he is completely lost and has made a mess of his life. He's 65 years old living alone in an RV on the streets of LA digging ditches by day so he can try to land a role on a soap opera.

So, emotionally, this song comes from the frustration, anger and compassion that arises from seeing someone like that, someone you love, just throw it all away and not want any help. You just want to shake them and say "Wake Up!"

Production-wise, we knew we wanted the song to be noisy, loud, aggressive and musical. We were going for a sort of Sergeant Pepper-meets-Tori Amos vibe, which is kind of what the song sounds like. It's got Beatles-influenced 7th chords, vocal harmonies and a piano that follows the bass line. But it's also got strong, dark lyrics and some serious attitude.

The Drums

Following the pre-production roughs of the song, the drums were the first instrument to be tracked on this song. And we went nuts. To echo the aggressiveness of the song, we decided to go for the trashiest sound we possibly could…while still keeping it musical.

First of all, our studio here is completely digital. And I am a huge fan of drums on analog tape. So we went to a small hole-in-the-wall studio where they have a 2" 16-track tape deck and a nice sounding drum room with very tall ceilings. And an engineer who knows how to get some good tones to tape.

We knew we wanted a very loud and ugly drum sound. But instead of relying on mixing wizardry after the fact, we went to work doctoring up the sparkly green Fibes drum kit so the original source would be very close to what we wanted.

On the kick drum we wanted a strong, sharp attack so the drummer (Scott Metko) taped two quarters to his batter head right at the point of impact. An AKG D112 was then placed inside the kick about 2" from the point of impact.

For the snare we wanted a crashing, noisy tone on the verses and a little tighter more controlled sound on the choruses. Scott came up with the crazy idea of putting 1,500 brass BBs inside the snare drum. We gave it a shot and it sounded perfect…just what we were looking for! We mic'ed it on top with a standard SM57. And on the bottom head we put an old Japanese crystal mic of unknown origin. You wouldn't believe how noisy it was when you solo'd just the bottom snare mic. It was the embodiment of the word "trashy"! You can really hear the BB's rattling around on the decay of the last hit of the song.

Digging around in the basement of the studio we came across a couple big metal discs which we realized must have been the plates of an old turntable. Scott took off his top hi-hat cymbal and replaced it with one of these plates. The other metal plate was hung piggyback on his 20" Wuhan China Cymbal.

In place of a traditional ride cymbal we used an old cracked 16" crash cymbal…one Scott had found years earlier on the floor of a local bar after a gig. But it wasn't quite trashy enough so we hung a metal oven rack from it. This gave it noisy attack and a very quick decay.

The stereo overhead mics were augmented by a mono mic that was actually facing away from the drum kit (toward the control room) so it would catch the room reflections as they bounced back off the glass.

Once all was in place we rolled tape and Scott nailed a keeper track on the 2nd take.

We wanted to make sure that we had some really crazy sounds on this track, so after recording the main drum track, Scott placed pots and pans on his toms and used a metal ashtray for a snare and cut a whole new "percussion" part for the final chorus.

The following day I brought my entire Vegas DAW in the studio and we dumped all the tracks directly from the back of the tape deck into Vegas - via a Swissonic AD24 convertor (at 24-bits) and a Dakota soundcard. Back here at Hypersound Studio a reversed drum loop was added on the final chorus of the song. A couple sampled crash cymbals from the Platinum Drums library were also added throughout the song to augment the live drums.

While we were recording percussion for the album, Ricardo Lopez pulled out a Wah Stick, something I had never even heard of before. It's basically a hollow metallic tube, about 8" long. There's a hole in the middle of the tube and slits cut in one end. When the end with the slits is struck with a rubber mallet the tube lets out this long sustained ringing note. By placing your thumb over the hole in the middle you can adjust the pitch of the ringing. And by quickly covering and uncovering the hole you get that high-pitched wah-wah sound you hear at the beginning of the song.

The Bass

We wanted the bass sound to be tight and dry, so we skipped a bass amp altogether and recorded direct through a Presonus MP-20, with a RNC1773 compressor inserted, and into the same Swissonic AD24 convertor.

I played an Ibanez ErgoDyne bass which was recorded fairly flat with all the processing to come later, though I did use a lot of the bridge pick-up to give it some of that Rickenbacker nasal snarl.

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