It was Sunday, October 31, 1988.<\/p>\n
Mark, Bill and I were in the basement of a house on Dupont Avenue, in the “Wedge” neighborhood in South Minneapolis.<\/p>\n
And it was the time of my life.<\/p>\n
After Bill called me in September, the three of us – Mark, Bill and I –\u00a0got back together and started playing again. It worked out very well, actually – all of us worked nights (Bill and Mark were short-order cooks, and I, of course, was in the bars).<\/p>\n
One day in early October, we heard that a couple of musicians who lived around the corner had built a recording studio in their basement. Mark and Bill’s sister’s boyfriend’s band, in fact, had just recorded an album there. The price – $15\/hour for an 8-track recording studio – was right…<\/p>\n
…assuming we planned everything out perfectly.<\/p>\n
And so the plot was hatched. We figured that among us we could pool maybe $200 to put into recording…something. <\/em>That boiled down to about 12-14 hours of recording time. In that time, we figured we’d need to…:<\/p>\n We talked with one of the owners – “Ron” (who was the lead singer of an anarchic, Red-Hot-Chili-Peppers meets Grateful Dead band, the “F**king S**t Biscuits”), and booked three of the slowest nights of the recording week and, as it happens, the recording year – nights when the studio’d be happy to get any revenue at all – Wednesday and Thursday (I took a couple nights off from the bar), and tonight.<\/p>\n Wednesday night, we booked six hours to bang out basic tracks. We settled on five songs: four of mine (“Fourth of July”, “Long Gray Wire”, “Great Northern Avenue” and “Five Bucks and a Transfer”) and one of Mark’s (“Black Window”).<\/p>\n How tight were we? In three hours, we had ’em all done, and managed to put down the lead vocals for a song or two.<\/p>\n Thursday night, it was overdub time. Four hours (which Ron, being a good mensch<\/em>, <\/em>let us stretch to five and a half.\u00a0 I think he was having fun). Mark and I finished the lead vocals pretty quickly, and then it was on to overdubbing. I put down the lead guitars on all of the songs – I managed all of them in one or two takes, except “Fourth of July”, which involved switching guitars and playing one slide-guitar solo between a couple of verses. Then, an organ part on “Fourth of July” (two takes and out, and it sounded great!), and a completely-extemporized piano part on “Long Gray Wire” that sounded a little like Ian Hunter if he’d had a stroke. Next, Bill and I knocked out the background vocals for “Great Northern”, which took a take and a half – we’d been doing the song for almost two years. With the last hour or so, Mark and I noodled around with percussion parts for “Window”, which had morphed from a straight-up minor-key rocker into a psychedelic escape and evasion drill; a bucket of broken glass and me talking through a set of headphones to sound like a police radio completed the effect.<\/p>\n And tonight? The mixdown.<\/p>\n Whether through artistic perfectionism or sheer boredom, Ron wound up throwing in two hours for free, on top of the six we’d booked (and could afford).<\/p>\n And damn, it sounded good. We left the studio around 3AM, and walked around the corner to the band house, lugging our gear about a\u00a0block, very happy with the results.<\/p>\n Hope, as they say, springs eternal.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Well, hope for my career as a rock star did not spring eternal.\u00a0 Indeed, my career as a Minneapolis Underground Rocker was very near an end, although I wouldn’t know that for a while.\u00a0 But Mirror Image Studios seems to be pretty much eternal<\/a>, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.\u00a0 \u00a0I found their website a while ago, and Ron still runs the place, in the same house it was in 20 years ago. They list the band, as well as me<\/a>. No, I didn’t do a solo album – but I did record there on my own. A lot.<\/p>\n But that comes later in the story.<\/p>\n It’s fun reading the list of some of the people who’ve recorded there, before and since – lots of names that had faded into the recesses of my memory get yanked out and slapped awake:<\/p>\n\n