If you know me at all, you know I have a love/hate relationship with "The City." The Barefoot Magic House me hates it. I need long views and nature around me. I need to be able to pee in my backyard and run around out there naked in the moonlight, puddlestompin' in the rain if I want to. I like to have folks over for loud parties full of amplified music that last well into the night or two. In the city, they frown on those activities. Introvert me loves the quieter, slower pace of a small town: fewer people, fewer cars, proportionately fewer assholes and nutjobs per capita.
The city though, oh the city! I'm from New York. I've always kinda missed it. I didn't grow up there - we lived in the 'burbs - but my Granny had an apartment at 55th and Lex, a few blocks from Grand Central Station. I worked in the Macy's downtown for a while, the one from the parade. I've been in the labyrinth of the basement under the store. It's different than LA in its own way, not necessarily better or worse, just different.
There is that city pace. Even in LA. The city, the place you go to get your hustle on. The city, the place you go to be seen or heard. The music, the shows, the food, you go to the city for the good stuff. What LA lacks in taxi cabs and car horns it makes up for with commuters and roadside wildfires. Also, the occasional high-speed car chase which somehow manages to navigate through the everyday chaos of the commute with ease, while you're runnin' out of Tesla juice and Starbucks on the 405. You can't ice skate at Rockefeller Center but you can piss on Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. So each has its charm.
In the city Wakitu's family owns a 100-year-old building that used to be our print shop. When we moved from the Magic House we put a lot of our stuff in one of the units there and we have an office in another one. We spend a lot of time in LA. We have a little apartment there that is close to the doctors and all our stuff. We still have our place in Kern and spend time there as well. I have to say it has been a blessing these last few years to have a spot five minutes from the doctors and the hospital. We got a family discount on the rent in the storage due to the water damage from a leaky roof. Now that we have a new roof I have to get all my crap out of there. I have no idea where in the world I'm gonna put it.
Here we are getting our new roof:
One of the other units is home to a pretty special Recording Studio, TomorrowLabs. They do a lot of good work there for some very famous musicians that everyone knows. They also use the room for rehearsals with some of the best musicians you've heard but never heard of. The backlines for the famous people whose names you know. If conditions are just right I can hang out by the back door there and listen in.
The thing about living out here is you get sort of used to celebrity sightings. In NY they tend to go to places I can't afford to drink in and here they just show up at the Walgreens in shorts or whatever so you get sort of blase about the whole thing. I've been lucky and have been given many opportunities to play music with and talk to literal rock stars, music icons and a legend or two. Spending time with them, you find out they are just people. Talented people but they, too, have a mortgage and a lawnmower, a car that needs brakes soon and they need 100 cookies for the school thing on Tuesday. It helps to ignore the celeb and see the person.
Wakitu is pretty used to it too. While paying the bills for the movies you love she hung around with "industry" people from whose house she could have looked down on Jason Statham's backyard and watch him lounge around the pool. Not that she would have... but she could have.
Anyway, one day a couple of weeks ago my friend from TomorrowLabs asks if I have a PA they could use for a live rehearsal down there. I said of course and brought down the mixer from the Magic House and a couple of speakers on sticks. I kinda forgot all about it and she returned everything and I just put it away.
Well I got some new toys for my studio as we get ready to record the new album. In order to test it out and make sure everything is gonna work I set up an area in the shop to hopefully make a quick Green Screen Trio video. So I dug out the PA to plug everybody into. So, spoiler alert, when I make those videos I record one instrument at a time. In studio, however, I plug everybody into the board, set all the levels and EQ one at a time and then mute all the tracks. Then I can send any track to the preamp and into the DAW by unmuting it and playing that guy. At any point in the process I can pick up any instrument, unmute it and go. Nice.
This time when I popped the lid on the mixer rack I found the tape strip for channel assignments with names scribbled in for each. Those names all in a row for some reason rang a bell. Carnie and Wendy? A few minutes on the net and I figured it out. It's two generations of genius.
As it turns out the last person who sang through MY personal vocal channel on MY Allen and Heath ZED 18 was a friggin' Beach Boy! Also any of you who kids sang lead vocals on any of our stages you share that channel with us. He's part of the family now, he just doesn't know it.
