Black Postcards by Dean Wareham

Author:Dean Wareham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

The toy Casio keyboard had some interesting little preset patterns in it. There was one little sample that we called the hemiola. A hemiola is two bars in triple time that you play as if they are three bars in double time. When Pat heard that little pattern, he thought it would be cool if we used it as a click track, to track “Beggar’s Bliss.” We recorded that song together, all of us playing along to a pattern that was neither in the right time signature nor the right key. It was a good exercise, though, to see if we could concentrate on the song while a strange loop played in our headphones. We did it.

It was “Tracy, I Love You” that gave us the most trouble. This composition was left over from the Penthouse sessions. I had written the lyrics, but the chords and guitar riffs were Sean’s. The whole band spent a couple days rewriting the chord progression in the bridge, trying many different permutations. Then we recorded fifteen takes till we had a drum track worth keeping. But neither Sean nor I could record a rhythm guitar track that Pat was happy with. Sean kept hearing a tuning problem, so he removed one string from my Gibson ES-335. It didn’t help. We spent all day trying to get that rhythm guitar right, but it wasn’t sounding so great—not on its own, anyway. I suggested that maybe we should just move on and come back to it later. I said the rhythm guitar track wasn’t the most important element anyway, as we were going to smother the song in synthesizers and lead guitar. But Pat didn’t buy it.

“I’m very worried about the guitars on this record,” he said.

“I’m going to put that in the Pat McCarthy quote library,” said Sean.

Some days, we had a hard time figuring out what this Irishman wanted from us. Pat spoke in riddles. He asked rhetorical questions. His own answers were evasive. He answered questions with questions. He didn’t tell us what to play, he told us what not to play. He was a taskmaster, but he also wanted to collaborate. He invented new descriptions for our music.

“It’s urban prairie music, that’s what it is!”

“It’s an electric Mardi Gras.”

If Pat was in a cranky mood, then we knew we were in for a long day. If I was cranky, he would jokingly accuse me of being “the bad-vibe merchant.”

“Are you the bad-vibe merchant? Are you waving the flag of doubt?”

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