Ashes, The Rain And I

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
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California Girls wasn’t the only song that my high school buddy Tom and I recorded together. We both were very interested in learning about audio recording and we experimented with recording ourselves on our acoustic guitars in Tom’s bedroom. We started off recording with two Sony stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders… I believe that Tom bought his Sony 630 when we were 16, and I already had an older Sony that my dad had given to me. We also had available to us a Radio Shack 6-channel stereo microphone mixer that Tom had modified by adding pan pots - the mixer belonged to our youth group, but we were in charge of the sound equipment so we were able to use it for our projects. And we picked up recording tips where ever we could - sometimes we would hang out at recording studios in Hollywood, but also at that time there was a new audio recording periodical called The Mix, which was published on newsprint. We would get the latest issue from our local music stores and study it intently. We spent hours and hours experimenting, recording ourselves - although most of the tapes have not survived the ensuing years. A few did survive however, like California Girls and a few other songs, like Tom and I with two other friends from high school playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash - although that wasn’t one of our better recordings. One of the songs that did turn out well was Ashes, The Rain And I. This is a song that was originally recorded by The James Gang, one of our favorite bands at the time, and although it featured an orchestra section, it was basically a song played with acoustic guitars, so we decided that we could record our own version. We recorded our guitars - Tom playing his Ventura 12-string and me playing my Ventura 6-string - in stereo (Tom panned towards the right, me towards the left) on one of our tape recorders. Then we played the recorder back through the 6-channel mixer, with Tom singing along and me adding bass guitar, and recorded the whole thing onto the second tape recorder. The final result sounded pretty good, but we were trying to keep the bass guitar mixed pretty low, so it wouldn’t overpower any other instrument and, unfortunately, we mixed it a bit too low - you can only hear the bass on a real good music system, and only very slightly during the verse. But still, the recording came out pretty good, considering our available resources and location - this is the result of two tape recorders, two seventeen-year-olds and their guitars:

Ashes, The Rain And I

California Girls

Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.

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Tom was my best friend on high school. We hung out together so much that when our friends would see one of us, they would ask where the other one was. We met when we were 15 - I had just learned to play guitar and Tom was already playing. We played guitars together, listened to music together, worked at his father’s mushroom plant together, made dorky high school movies together. And we learned about recording music together - we would use two Sony reel-to-reel stereo tape recorders to record ourselves playing guitars at Tom’s house - but while I was spending my 20s and 30s working for the government, Tom was working in music and television studios gaining more and more experience. These days he runs a recording studio, which was our dream as teenagers.

In late 1975 Tom was working part-time in the recording studio of a local college. Since he had access to the studio during off hours, we decided to record a Beach Boys song. So we got together with some friends, spent a few evenings practicing, and recorded “California Girls”. And while I think we did a fairly decent job - sometimes people hear it and say that it sounds alot like The Beach Boys. I don’t think it’s all that close… there are some pretty glaring differences if you listen. First of all, none of us sounded a whole lot like the Wilson Brothers, and The Beach Boys used an organ on their version, but we didn’t have access to one, so we used a harpsichord instead. All in all though, it ended up sounding pretty nice. I sang lead and Tom sang the high harmony part. Tom and I are doing the vocal repeats at the end of the song - I still remember being crammed into the small control room with Tom, crowded around a single mic, singing those parts. Our friends Dale Dimmick and Steve Kiger sang the other vocal harmony parts. Tom played the guitars at the beginning, I played bass, and our high school friend Steve Bollinger played drums. There were a few other musicians (like the guy who played the harpsichord) but I forgot their names long ago. This is what we put together on a Tascam 4-track reel-to-reel:

California Girls