Graham Higgins Illustration

Rocky’s a very tasteful country keyboard player based in Tulsa, who sent me a cd of one of his protegés in a late-night studio session set up to make her a demo set. Her voice was strong and clear and his arrangements effortlessly cool and adept.

I guess if the session band are expert enough it doesn’t matter if they all hate each other, but in my limited experience of studio recording and lots of stories about sessions, it seems the best recordings are those that conjure up a social event based on playing music, an aural snapshot from the party.

I’m fascinated by the world of the session musician, mercenaries who turn up and do the gig, taking directions to ‘play it more like…’ whatever whim is in the air that day, or off the page in the budgetted time available.

Floyd Cramer’s name appears here, best known for ‘On The Rebound’, an instrumental in a style featuring mini-glisses invented on the spot to mimic the sound of the steel-guitar player who was booked but didn’t turn up.

Rocky had written ‘rough mix’ on the cd, intended to pre-empt raised eyebrows amongst his gigging peers but of a standard I’d have attempted to mask with polite modesty.

Anyway, I had an email from someone surprised that I ‘do poetry’ or whatever-it-is. I bear in mind Frank Zappa’s poke that ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ but  ho-hum, I can be recklessly crass…

Rocky’s rough mix:Susan singing

Rough mix.

Could be the one-take run

At dirty ragged glory. Rough mix

Can be the lumber room where you stack the tracks, Jack.

Then you spend more time explaining why

It’s too toppy on the break and the bass

Is pulled up here to cover for the vocal.

Could be the soundtrack to the dog-end

Of a Saturday night, the cheesy light

Of cheap-rate studio-booths, soundproofed

But not watertight. Somehow the pheremone

Of the Happy Hour clings; the wait, you carry it in.

It hits the heads like ferrochrome,

The future of recording, worn plasticky

Spindle-slick, thinner than the card in the pocket

Of the jacket you hang on the stand,

A number scribbled on the back – the hangover

That will ring you in the a.m., your Okie wake-up call:

Fishnet on your tongue

Last night’s dangled stick-pin heels

Come home to roost and pecking at your corneas.

Sometimes country comes from there

A hair-of-the-dog shot on the house

Sent over from another table

To cradle while you’re killing time.

But you can hear it when they’ve hit their peak

About an hour before they hit Record.

Just, I guess, putting down some tracks.

Well, OK, Tulsa, none of the above

From here in Birming Hum-not-Ham

I wish you nights so sweet, and yes

You don’t deserve to play that solo

In that song in French again; enough

That you finessed the smiling ghost

Of Floyd Cramer in the gallery.

Blind, I listen in

Fade-out, no one speaks: a take.

Haiku very much.