VIVA LA VOX

Spent the weekend recording VIVA LA VOX. What a bunch of great young guys. Wasn't sure of how I would like the music, but I was blown away. The musicianship was superb. James (the bass player) Anthony (the drummer) ans Tony (the guitar player/singer), were one of the tightest groups I have ever recorded. The song structure was very advanced and the lyrics were nothing short of genius. I cornered Tony alone and asked if the songs were autobiographical, he said yes. I knew it. You can't write this shit without living it. Pulled out all the stops for recording techniques. Saturday was great. We nailed down all the instrumentation for all seven songs. Greg showed me what he is really made of, and damn, I was impressed. He ran the whole session while I just ran around doing engineer stuff. It was brilliant. Then came Sunday. I woke up, went out to the studio, and discovered the A/C wasn't working. Not good for my equipment on a 95 degree day. I put a wall unit in the bathroom door and called the man to fix it. Greg ran the session while I ran around obsessing about no air. He sat in there all day and finished every bit of the session in the sweltering heat. If I could I would kiss him. Anyhow, at five p.m. the guy came and the air roared back to life. The room cooled down and Greg went to visit his mom. Did I mention it was mothers day? I ran some bass tracks through the MC77 and then met up with VIVA again after dinner to do some extra percussion. At 9p.m. Greg came back and comped the vocals with Tony. All in all, two marathon recording days and everything went according to schedule. We are done except for the rough mix.
We took a few tricks from that session with us and are going to try them on the John Prine sessions.
JR's doing fine in New Orleans. So far, they have done some neat stuff with Dave. Now Dave is back in Chicago and Derek Dickens is on the way. Mike tells me the songs are brilliant. I hope the boys have enough sense to do some serious drinking before it's all done. P.S., John next time you might want to hide your stuff from Hope! Just kidding, was any of it mine?
Well I'm at work so I will finish this later and post some pics of the session. Later, Marc

P.S. Greg thank you from the bottom of my heart.