Photo by Chris Carroll

Our thanks this week to singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston who took over the XPN blog. He recently released a new collection of original songs (his first collection of originals in 7 years) called Rain On The City. He’s currently on tour and will be playing in Philly on Thursday February 18th at World Cafe Live.

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That’ll Never Make it to the Record

Water Music in Hoboken moved to their current location from a now demolished building at 2nd and Grand Street in 1993. I wanted to record one last song through the venerable old API console they had there before it was unplugged and moved or sold.  It had been constantly powered up for all those years, always ready to rock, and now it was being unplugged for who knows how long, and so my idea was to record one last song through it and pull the power cord during the fadeout, to record the board slowly dying away. I wrote a song called “That’ll Never Make It to the Record”, after a saying of John Siket’s meaning, “we’ll fix that clam later guys, just keep on playing”. Then, I talked John Siket and James Mastro into meeting me at the studio on the morning that the console was scheduled to be taken apart and moved, to record this song. I remember it as a sunny day, even if it wasn’t. The studio, by contrast was dark and gloomy. Most of the gear and furniture was gone. The coffee maker was unplugged with the cord wrapped around it. All the chairs were gone. But, there she sat, the API board, still happily glowing in the deserted control room, only an hour or so away from…having the plug pulled on her. Sad, I thought, but we must rock.  And we did. As I recall, I played drums while James played bass, then we both did guitars, I did a lead vocal and we did backgrounds.  John quickly mixed it, and, during fadeout of the final mixdown to the 1/2″ tape machine, he pulled the big plug on the console’s power supply.  Like the Titanic, all the lights went out, the last, desperate, futile cries of the song faded and distorted and slowly died, until all we could hear was the Hoboken traffic noise outside.