02 September 2009

Pop Sandwich


I played baritone sax and flute on some of the tunes up there

[James William Guercio’s Caribou Studios in Nederland, Colorado,
at 8,000-ft elevation], which was really difficult at that level.
And it was god-awful cold. I don’t know how the hell we did
those albums up there — double- and triple-tracking the horns,
going until three in the morning. Sure, we did have oxygen,
but I think it was really just because we were younger,
and when you’re young you just can do things like that.

So no matter what Guercio said about how idyllic it was up there,
and about how we could commune with the elk and things like that,
it was pretty demanding, especially for the horn players. To tell the truth,
we’d stay up for a short time, and I’d have to head down the hill,
to Boulder, to suck some carbon monoxide.

— Walter Parazaider, woodwinds player for Chicago

What we started learning in the ’70s, was the fact that the state
of rock ’n’ roll wasn’t going to allow us to do the sort of extended tunes
that we did in the early days. When we did, it often resulted in people
getting up and going to the bathroom.

— Lee Loughnane, trumpeter for Chicago




Current preoccupations: finishing Après-lullaby, getting in practice for 17 September, mulling ideas for a quartet, half winds half strings.



Separately, it hardly gets more quintessentially ’60s than Michael Nesmith of The Monkees (sic) and Frank Zappa, each pretending to be the other:


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