Tales of the Treadmill
Tales of the Treadmill
General Babble 4 - God has Chlamydia
Monday, February 18, 2008
Drove down to Columbia on Friday. Had a photo shoot and practice on Saturday and then rehearsed again on Sunday for awhile. The photo shoot was pretty fun. Tony had met this guy named Brad Allen. I saw his work in that new mag- i think it’s called Undefined, and he’s pretty god damn good. Has a really distinct style. He wanted to have a say in what we wore, so Tony met him on Thursday or something and Heidi and I met him down at Sid and Nancy on Saturday morning for a little shop. Heidi was in her glory and found a pretty great get up. I scored some cool shoes, but the heels on them still don’t help me look any less short next to Heidi. Especially since the boots she found have four inch heels. That makes her about seven foot three I think.
Sid and Nancy gave us a nice discount and let us borrow their sofa for the shoot. Did most of the shoot at a parking garage downtown, and the photos I’ve seen came out really well. Tony looks like Donnie Brasco, Mike looks like the Aviator, I look stupid, and there’s one shot of Heidi that could be on the cover of London Vogue. Here’s a few untweaked samples.
tony took this one- damn good.
and the favorite:
Then we went to Tony’s place to practice and started drinking beer.
Here’s what I have to look at all during rehearsals:
We did a few of the old songs, but really we wanted to dig into the new stuff pretty much right away. Heidi bought a distortion pedal that we tried out with the cello. Sounds okay, but I think there are better products out there for her to use. Just need to go to a big music store and line them all up. We started with ‘Hands Off’ which sounded pretty good for the first run though. The structure changed very little from the demo. Anyway, it’s pretty rockin’. We didn’t get to ‘Least I’m Feeling’ til Sunday. That one did end up changing a little. I had an ending all worked out that Tony and Heidi nixed right away because they though it sounded too much like the ending of another of our songs. So, Tony argued for a slow down, weird sort of molasses part at the end. I like it, but it’ll take me awhile to get the other thing out of my head. Be prepared to kill your darlings....
All in all, it was a really productive weekend. Now we just need to get a press release out and see if we can get any press in the papers that will be filled with Columbia’s St Pat’s Day Festival info. Not sure how much luck we’ll have there. There’s a lot to compete with that weekend.
We only really get two more rehearsals, which for the old Treadmill would be unheard of. That’s all we’ll really need - I never really realized that we are all pretty competent musicians. It’s hard for me to let go of the old ethic we had where we practiced relentlessly and non-stop. Tony reminding me of a time I think as far back as Root Cellar where we were all working and the only time we could find to get one more practice in for a show in Charleston was at 3:30am. Dan Cook didn’t show up for that one, and we were pissed! Anyway, it’s just weird for me to practice so little as a band. It makes me feel unprepared, but we’re really not. It might be a little loser than it used to be, but not enough for anyone but me to notice probably. And the drive to Columbia to practice is truly a pain in the ass. I probably will try to go down the Wed before the show to get one more in.
This week my goal is to run through the set at least once a day. I’m still not as comfortable with all the songs as I used to be. Something about playing them every night for seven years really helps you get a song into your head. I’m also really trying my best to actually memorize every one of the lyrics instead of singing gibberish. Doubtful I’ll have complete success, but I can try I suppose. Also working on tweaking my amp a bit- trying to get some good guitar sounds. Now that’s something I’m really not good at.
Tony said there was a little blurb in the Weekend section of the paper about our St. Pat’s show- and the blurb is spreading a rumor that Les Hall might be playing with us that night. Not sure where they got that, but maybe it’ll be one of them there self-fulfilling prophecies. Still don’t know if he or Conrad will be able to produce. Tony’s supposed to meet with Les this week sometime to listen to everything and to talk about it.
Heidi demands that we do our old favorite cover, ‘Come on Eileen’ for the St. Pat’s show. I groaned about it because for some reason I remember it as being hard to play- but I tried it last night and I have no clue what I was talking about. It’s easy as shit. Now that’s one where I won’t bother learning the lyrics. We thought (for about half a second) about working up this song that was written for the people at Bessie’s, this club that we used to play in Wilmington. We played there one St Pat’s day and they wanted us to do an Irish song, so we wrote a little dumb song called, ‘Don’t Take My Guinness Away.’ Really dumb song. If I can find a copy, I’ll post it.
We’re discussing maybe adding some spoken word stuff for the acoustic show in September. I know that’s totally pretentious or something, but we want it to have a hint of theatrics and not just be a normal show. We’ll see. If we do, I don’t wan to be the only one reading. I also need to see if someone can do some kind of opening DVD for the St. Pat’s show. We won’t have the Projection Project ready for that, but just something as an intro might be cool. I think it should somehow marry Apocalypse Now and AC/DC. Like, the scene that has to do with Pile of LIttle Arms, or just a bunch of helicopters coming to spray your face with Napalm. I also want something cool with our logo. Not sure what.
What does any of this have to do with god having chlamydia? Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s a whole other story.
I’m off to find some footage for an intro projection.
moments later...
Well, I just watched the helicopter scene from A.N., and I’d say that doesn’t project the message I was going for. Back to the drawing board.
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