Music

There are a lot of great songs I’m ashamed to have ruined. This is a great song and I certainly have ruined it.

But the vibe of the song makes me feel as if it doesn’t mind being turned upside down.

This one was inspired for good or ill by @Decervelage  on twitter. He shared a link to a classic live video of Bowie. The song is too cool not to mess with.

This is one of the very few times recently that I’ve used my Les Paul, but that is the only guitar used here.

I have been practicing more lately and using my strat almost exclusively. I use thick strings (power slinkys) on the Strat and it has jumbo frets so there is a physical element of playing it for long periods when I am first getting back into practicing. I found that I was able to dig into this song more with the Les Paul Custom (which was known as the fretless wonder, and normal size strings). It is a fun one to play.

 

 

Simpler. Better I think.

Here is a real quick one. I know that Reggie from Weird Science DC is going to be doing an all (or mostly) Ramones night on his radio show and the Station Director or whatever, Bobbie, really likes the Ramones. I figured that I should do a Ramones song for them.

This was super quick and far from perfect for how easy it was to do. It wasn’t quite done in one take but if I had any time at all with this song it could have been. After working so much on the Al Green song I was in the mood just to crank one out.

 

 

 

So this is truly an outrage. If you are’t dialing your congressman about me after this, I don’t know what.

Let’s Stay Together by Al Green is one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. I heard it over the speakers in a juice bar and instinctively tried to fit ‘Bat Books for Beginners’ into it. To my surprise it worked.

As you may know I had a bad finger injury and hadn’t been practicing at all. When I started to learn this song I realized I was going to have to get much much better before I could tackle it. For a Rock and Roll guitarist this R&B classic is much more difficult to play than it sounds. I broke my 1 hour rule big time on this song, it took me a long time to learn.

The recording went pretty well, I had a slightly different vibe in mind. I had wanted it to be funkier instead of sultry or whatever this is. I don’t have drums or a bass to keep time and create a groove so this is what naturally happened and that is what this experiment is all about.  I also planned on using two different guitars in the intro: one for the initial bass call, and the other for the chimey guitar reply. Syncing the two parts was fussy and to me it didn’t sound any better than going both at the same time. It gave a bit of swing at the open.

There are several guitar cuts in there, I didn’t want to take weeks to be able to record this song so I broke the guitar parts up into pieces and fit it all together in post. There were also a few vocal clean up bits.

If I was to fix anything I think I’d take out the second chorus at the end. It takes up 20 seconds and doesn’t add anything.

This didn’t turn out anything like I thought it would.

The song is a parody of either Just My Imagination by the Temptations or Imagination by the Rolling Stones. They are basically the same song but have some differences. I tried to meld the two and in doing so created something I didn’t expect.

I cheated a little on this one, typically I give myself an hour to learn a song, rewrite the lyrics, record and edit it. I took more time researching and messing around with the two versions of the song so that put we way over time. It is funny because it is at heart a very simple song to play. But there are some fine points I had to work out.

One of the difficulties in making these parodies is to make the song recognizable in the first few seconds so the parody can play off the recognition. I’m not sure I accomplished that here. The Temptations version has a complicated intro that I didn’t remember so I figured others wouldn’t know it either. The Stones version has a lot of parts coming in and out of the mix, too complicated for a Professor Frenzy special.

So I ended up writing the rhythm intro which evokes the chorus and then simplifying it for the verse.

The guitar lead at the beginning ended up sounding pretty, maybe too pretty because it might be disconcerting when the main vocals start. Heck with it, my logic is that the disorientation makes it funnier. That is the highminded reason I am being lazy.

There are a few flubs. I think the intro to the recording might need to be touched up, it starts too quickly. Also the guitar plays an extra half beat after the chorus. It sounds like I am trying to get fancy with the rhythm. In reality I recorded the very end of the guitar separately because I didn’t know when I was first playing the song if I had time to do an announcer voice so I added some extra bars. Turns out the song was going to be too long so I had to record a new ending to wrap it up quickly. I didn’t quite match the guitar and you can hear a double strum. That’s the seam between the two tracks.

I’m pretty happy with this. Took more trouble than I thought it would and I might revisit it after a few days to fix it. Or not.

This is, of course, a parody of the Blondie song One Way or Another.

If I recall correctly I originally heard it while waiting for the food truck to cook my burger. I started this a few weeks ago but left it because I started working on the Werewolf of Gotham parody, the Slow Ride in the Batmobile  and the WSGF song. I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it back then.

But I had an accident on my left middle finger and can’t really play much so I’ve been looking for some half finished songs to wrap up and use until I can play again.

I had the opening guitar part and the announcer voice done but I wasn’t happy with the main lyrics and the end wasn’t what I wanted. So I re-wrote and recorded the vocals and the ending. The way the song ends is the most fingertip intensive part of the whole song so I probably shouldn’t have done it. But I did. It does sound glued onto the end which it is. Also, the ‘Your gonna like it like it like it like it” singing isn’t quite in rhythm, but it will have to do.

This will go on Episode 175 which is a better book, I hope, than the one we did for Episode 174. Here’s hoping.

 

So bad. I’m so sorry for this. Three Our Houses and three Wind Cries Mary’s.

Fitting ‘Bat Books for Beginners’ into a song is the first step to making one of these parodies. When I first started making these a few months ago I couldn’t imagine that there would be many songs that I could make work. I leave it to others to say whether I was right then or not.

I heard Werewolves of London last Wednesday while waiting for my burger and fries at the Frites and Meats truck on Hudson and Houston streets and it just stuck in my head. I was reminded of it today when I went back for my weekly fix of grease and self loathing. If a song insists on being recorded who am I to argue?

The Warren Zevon original is played on piano and I didn’t know if it would sound good played on guitar. I got the basic riff from YouTube while I was waiting for my burger and was looking forward to coming home to see if it worked. It did. As soon as I played it I knew it would be OK.

I have short fingers and am not practicing guitar at all or stretching my hand so this riff was harder to play than it should have been. It took about three or four takes but I got it eventually.

I am a little confused about which song is the intro to which episode. A month or so ago I recorded the Who’s That Lady parody for the Catwoman One Year Later episode. At the time it was supposed to be 174 but now I think it has been moved up. Anyway, it is done and will find a home eventually.

 

And here is the video