The Recording Session>How I Met Clean Boys>Chapter 8

It wasn’t particularly cold or snowy the week of February 1, 2010 in the Chicago area, as I recall it, but I am certain someone else will correct me-it’s called fading memory, but as always with the winter months, cold and snow always concerned me, especially since I had to drive 45 minutes northwest to the most important recording date of my life. And this day was no exception as I had to arrive to the space early, meaning, when the sun was still out, a strange concept to me, considering that I always performed at Swing State late and never ever saw the sun, but for this night, I had to be there early, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5pm, an hour or two before the regular show began.

We, meaning Clean Boys and I were scheduled to go on at midnight Chicago time, 7 am Copenhagen time, (February 7) but in the meantime, we had to do a sound check. For the sound check itself, Pedro had advised me to have two computers, one to receive and one to monitor sound/performance. So, I brought mine, a Lenovo top-of-the-line laptop at the time-I own a refurbished Dell now and our event coordinator stateside, Hugh Kennedy brought his laptop as well. The Clean Boys were to be projected on a movie screen, via Skype. A fool-proof plan so we thought!

And then of course, the inevitable happened at sound check on their side, apparently their internet wasn’t working so well. Try as they might, Clean Boys couldn’t get a good enough signal to transmit. It was the nearly the straw that broke the camel’s back, so-to-speak and especially for them, since they had been up for nearly 24 hours, testing and retesting everything, making sure their connection worked properly. All that work for nothing, so it seemed.

The night wore on-we continued to text each other, Pedro and I, now reduced to one computer on our end, discovering that one worked just as well as two. They had to have a little sleep, three hours to be exact and that’s probably all they had, by the time it was our turn to hit the stage. As always, I had my session at Swing State recorded. But this time, they recorded it two-fold: recorded full session recording in the left channel, live audience in the right channel.

In the midnight session, only nine people remained, mostly gathered around the bar toward the back-that was typical for Swing State, nobody seemed to care either way, except for a few of the more daring audience members who sat closer to the stage. A symbolic number for me, but even still. Before I hit the stage, I passed out plastic toy instruments; bird whistles, panpipes and maracas (for Jazz Haiku-A-Rama Part 1/Part 2 Swing State version), which I discovered later didn’t seem to pick up so well in the monitors-ah well, I live and learn.

The show began and so did the Skype connection. But as I also discovered throughout our session, nothing was perfect, as our calls dropped at least three times. However, as luck would have it, the calls would drop, just as we would finish each song, not a big worry, as I would call them back every single time, especially upon discovering later that when the call dropped during the recording of 75,000 Miles, the second part of DP: A Soundtext Punk Opera, they had a back-up plan, something that was partially recorded already.

Other than the call dropouts, the night seemed to go okay. Which were aces in my book. With a little time left to spare, I proceeded to throat sing the club owner’s girlfriend happy birthday, sadly she was too reluctant and rude for that matter, to even bother to come up to the stage, until she was coaxed to. After that, she went back to the bar and conversed with all of her friends as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

The session was filmed for posterity and to date remains unreleased. We had a good night. Clean Boys thought so too. I didn’t get out of Swing State until 2 am. Pedro and I continued to text each other, at least until I got into my car and drove back home. Our main job was now complete and temporarily in the can, until step two, which was for me to send the recorded files over to Pedro, who in turn, would get it over to the man (Frede Perle Nielsen) who would produce our record and make it sound sweet, sharp and clear.

Even as I fell asleep at my keyboard in that early morning time period, (I was to call Pedro over Skype and talk about the session-it was something we did in those early days of collaborating) it was one of the greatest nights I could have ever had.

And the world around me agreed.