You Keep Me Running Smooth

Posted by davenative on November 6, 2013

Hey Native People!

Dave Thomas here (just back from my successful negotiation of a peace accord between Mongolia and Peru).

Just to bring the Novatates up to speed — when I’m not saving the world from itself, I’m the drummer in the band. Yeah, by day I’m Mister My Brain’s Larger Than Yours, and I speak only in Minutiae; by night, I’m Animal from The Muppets with an I.Q. like a black hole. In between, I harness the music that lies dormant and petulant in the Native Vault, located far below Fort Knox, Switzerland.

As curator of this vast rubble, it has been my solemn task to present a rare Native performance each week in this blog which you now hold between your sweaty thumb and aorta.

We are currently up to Volume 3 of the epic Nativology series, wherein we investigate the mysteries of Native’s oeuvre by making new mixes from these things humans once called cassette tapes, some of which have been unplayed for tens of years.

Usually, we have put forth recordings that emanated from multi-track tapes, produced in our luxurious studio, Marmfington Farm in sunny Mid-Town Manhattan. All the previous tracks in Vol. 3 have been the product of overdubs and weed.

Now, we sadly bid adieu or orderve to that era. All our mighty, unfocused super powers would be slightly more focused on preparing for the recording of a proper album. But, we also were reminded from time-to-time by that wonderful Leprechaun, Gigs O’Plenty, that we had to go play music in public, and it had to be good, and it was!

But, live gig tapes can be a frustrating menace to endure. The first song is almost always going like a flesh freight train, full steam ahead, before the record button was finally engaged. And get ready for vast sea-changes in volume thoughout the next three to ten songs. Bemusedly, I’ve lost count of the face-palms I’ve made as my and Woody’s carefully unscripted drum solo ends mid-cowbell-triplet with the premature end of side one. Side two, yep, we’ve lost the beginning of that song, too.

DAT tapes came along eventually, and ended the practice of making sure we had no complete drum solos (except one – found on Live From Marmfington Farm Vol.1), but these tiny VHS-like tapes had their own set of peculiarities — brittle, digital sound, and the life-expectancy of an ant with a low white blood-cell count.

So, I’m concentrating on Cassettes for now, as we ease full-bore into the second half of Vol. 3, and the John Watts era is encapsulated by the abundance of what I call ‘orphan’ recordings — great performances found on tapes that are otherwise filled with cut songs, drop-outs, & other sound-related issues.

Here’s a tune from our first album, which stars the affable and bizarre John Watts, in a stirring exercise of ivory-tickling —

Running Smooth

Twisting, turning, flying, burning…

Posted by davenative on June 19, 2013

Adding John Watts to the band had really paid off and, by the summer of 1996, the band was really running smooth on all cylinders. Constant, relentless rehearsal and gigging resulted in a band that was air-tight, confident, and armed with the largest playbook of our existence!

In the midst of all the chaos, we continued to write new material, and we were sure-enough of ourselves to play the new music in public, letting it grow and evolve before laying down the demo on our trusty Tascam 8-track recorder.

This week’s tune is a very impressive Mat Hutt composition, inspired by a comment made by our manager, Paul Ducharme.

Paul, ever vigilant against the incursion of fake-hippies into our real-hippies scene, had coined the term ‘krevelers’ to describe those who look, sound, and dress like hippies, but who were actually predators — taking advantage of the naiveté exhibited by so many of us flower children.

Paul’s comment came in the early hours of morning after a gig, when most folks have gone home, but there were a few still hanging around that seemed to have an awful lot of energy considering the hour. “It’s just another junkie sunrise.”

That was all Mat needed to put on his dramatist’s hat and put himself in the place of a lost soul, on the brink of destruction, living not from day-to-day, but score-to-score. He envisioned that soul having a moment of clarity, perhaps the only one of the day, as a stark colorless sun rises overhead.

I’m pretty sure he got some help from Woody and Paul along the way, but however it came about, and whoever helped develop it — it’s a Native masterpiece, in my opinion.

This version comes from August, 14, 1996 and, appropriately, it was the last song of a long set which puts it at the right hour — around four a.m.

Our good buddy and compatriot, Kregg Ajamu, can be heard trading off with Mat at the end.

The band would pack up, go home and sleep, but for some tortured souls in the room, what awaited was a —

Junkie Sunrise

December Roses (Blue)

Posted by davenative on January 8, 2013

“December Roses” is a song that went through a long gestation period before the final version was reached, and even then it waited over ten years to reach the public with the release of the simply fabulous December Roses mini-LP two weeks ago.

Originally intended to be part of a quite long and ambitious medley, the song now exists as a quite concise three-minute exercise in everything Native does well, whilst also treading very new ground.

I remember very well the occasion of recording the original demo of the song, shortly after finalizing the Exhale On Spring Street album. In a fit of nostalgia, Mike Jaimes & I had set up the old analog tape machines we had lying around, one at his house & the other at Marmfington Farm Studio. This enabled Mike to work at home & allowed me to do follow-up work at the Farm. The plan didn’t last long however, as the device at Mike’s place broke immediately after our first endeavor with this set-up. That singular piece was the December Roses demo.

In that first attempt, my ambitious structure for the song ran close to eight minutes long, and incorporated a short section entitled Thunderstruck. (The demo is still in our vault, and I intend to put it out in a future Nativology post.)

The band thought the whole thing a bit, shall we say, lugubrious and not unjustifiably so. It featured a long verse section before getting to what was for all intents and purposes two back-to-back choruses – plus the aforementioned secondary song in the place of what normally would have been a bridge of no more than eight bars.

The first thing cut was the verse, which admittedly was very autobiographical on my part. The next section that got axed was the lyric to Thunderstruck which was quite good, but had the sad distinction of sharing a title with a famous AC/DC song. So long, Thunderstruck!

What was left was the two choruses, the first of which became the verse, while the now-wordless chords to Thunderstruck remained as a bridge.

This is what we recorded in 2001.

Now, jump-cut to 2004, wherein Mike & I have revived the project. Not much was done to the track with the exception of adding some background voices (myself & guest star Lizzie Loves). At the mixing stage, engineer extraordinaire Craig Randall and I noticed that there was a very good acoustic version of the song laying there under the electric version. In a fit of genius, we made a mix of the under-mix. That became what we now have —

December Roses (Blue)

Running Smooth

Posted by davenative on December 18, 2012

I have few recollections of recording our first album. I was ill with walking pneumonia, which meant I was operating on auto-pilot for three long days as I laid down my drum tracks in a studio adjacent to Union Square on 17th Street.

I remember a few scant pieces of it — wondering why our co-producer was wearing spandex (it was 1994, for gosh sake — nobody wore spandex in 1994, except our co-producer. I, wondering why the same guy was hating on my drum style (and why was a guy in spandex with bad taste in drumming co-producing our record?). I can faintly remember a few moments of the last track we did, The Sea, and having an equipment breakdown with the Alesis D4 drum module I used to get tabla sounds. Woody quickly jumped into the fray and played the sounds on a different device, but it was nearly the last straw for me. In my delirium, I drummed along with a click track that played only in my headphones while the rest of the band had only my drums in their cans. Doing my part of the song without the tabla patterns I was used to playing was bad enough but, when the click track broke down mid-way through, I simply soldiered on and ignored it. But, let me tell you — playing music in spite of an out-of-control drum machine in my ear was a nightmare. And no one believed me later, when I complained about it. The engineer told me it couldn’t have happened, “It’s quantized, man!” Nevertheless, they kept that take and it’s what’s on the album.

I was extremely ill for weeks after that, and I never again attended a session. Mat would come home with tapes of the ‘Ruff Mixes’ and they sounded pretty good, although to this day I can’t listen to The Sea without wincing from the memory of that poorly-quantized drum machine, my valiant but unsteady performance, and the ridicule of the engineers.

That terrible experience eventually led to my learning about record production — I was never again going to be at the mercy of technology that I didn’t understand, or engineering staff that were hostile to the very sounds and styles that got us into the studio in the first place. I guess I wouldn’t be a record producer at all, had it not been for all that agony and frustration.

And in grand irony — the D4 module started working again. I still have it!

So, for me, it’s a compromised album, and one I want to revisit. Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of that recording, and I’d like to remix it for that occasion. But, I may not be able to remix my bad memories of pneumonia, spandex, and ‘quantized’ click tracks.

In the weeks after the recording was done, I recuperated and we were back on the road, playing bigger and better shows, and the ordeal of making the record subsided. Times were good again…

We were Running Smooth

The Year Of The Cat

Posted by davenative on October 10, 2012

I first saw Catherine Russell in a small West Village club singing Meters songs in 1989. I was gaga over The Meters and instantly in love with her voice and commanding stage presence. I managed to talk her into joining a motley crew I had assembled at The Radon Room Studio on Mott Street for some sessions. We wrote some tunes and it sounded great, at least to my ears.

For Catherine, it was a bit of a trial dealing with the motley-ness of the crew and though she like everyone a lot she moved on with her career, and I went on to form other still-motley crews. But Catherine and I remained good friends afterward, and she was gracious enough to score me tickets to Grateful Dead shows which I did not have the money for. We had lots of fun.

Eventually, Native (still a motley bunch) was formed and Catherine started appearing with us every now and then. The recording you are about to hear is from a cassette recorded early in the evening of March 6, 1993. Later that evening, Native played Nightingale Bar and Catherine joined us to play it for the peoples.

I Don’t Care No More

Looking back, if I’d known that Catherine was singing with the likes of Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Al Green, etc., if I’d known her father was Louis Armstrong’s arranger—well, I probably would have been too scared to ever invite her down to a sub-level studio beneath Little Italy to play with such a motley crew.

Cat is on tour now, check out her webpage www.catherinerussell.net and give her a shout. She’s one of the greats, and we were damned lucky, and honored to have her join us on so many wonderful occasions.

The Jazzie Hippie

Posted by davenative on September 26, 2012

As January and February of 1993 rolled by, Native was avoiding the winter cold down in the always humid environs of The Radon Room, located conveniently four stories underground. Here, in our secret lair far beneath the unsuspecting tourists of Little Italy, we jammed heavily and constantly. We had written, demoed, and redemoed nearly all the songs that would appear on our first album.

During that time, Mike Jaimes made a tape at home as he tried out an old standard, and two songs which would become staples of our shows for the rest of our touring years. Here is that tape, motor noise and all.

Trouble In Mind is a wonderful 1924 blues tune written by jazx pianist Richard M. Jones. There are many famous versions of it by everyone from Dinah Washington, to Sister Rosetta Tharp, to Eddy Arnold all the way to Hot Tuna and Jerry Garcia. The latter two undoubtedly influenced Mike’s version, although he may have heard the tape of Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen doing the song whilst Jorma’s wife hammered away on a typewriter in the background. This is my favorite version of them all.

Next, Mike worked up an original tune called The Jazzie Hippie. Native would give it an epic arrangement, and it served us well over the years. From day one, it was a real crowd-pleaser, and it was a handy opener if there had been no sound-check. It gave the soundman a chance to dial in the instrument levels, and wait to get the vocals later. Native finally got around to doing a proper recording of it on the And Then What album. If you compare that version you’ll hear that this early demo is missing the uptempo middle jam. That’s because Mike wrote it later. Mike was great at writing middle jams.

The next tune is the very first recording of what would become Mike’s most famous song — Down To The River. I think you could say it’s his signature tune. It’s the rare Native tape, indeed, that does not include it. Interestingly, Mike had not yet worked out the incredible finger-picked intro to the song, but he had a good idea about the stop-start pauses at the finale.

Trouble In Mind likely served as a jumping off point for what Mike would write — it even has the line, “Going down to the river.“ But Mike took it and made it indelibly his own. For me, these are the best kind of rare tapes, where you get to hear the process of genius using that genius to create works of genius. Did I mention genius? That was Mike Jaimes — The Jazzie Hippie.