"Scat" Back Story

10/21/09

I just finished recording a song with Charlie Burton and Scott Stanfield that is a cover of a poetry-to-music ("song poem") tune from the late 50s/early 60s. They used to run ads in the back of magazines like Hit Parader for people to send in their poems and $50 to have them set to music and receive 50 45s in return. Nearly all the records are wonderfully atrocious (hence, I suppose, the "Scat" alternate definition), and now highly collectable curios. There's actually a great documentary out about the whole thing too called Off the Charts:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/offthecharts/film.html

David Suisman also talks about this phenomenon of "song sharking" in his wonderful new book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP). Here's a link to the LA Times review of the book:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/09/how-the-music-industry-became-an-industry-on-selling-sounds.html

Where we came in is that a friend of Charlie's, Pat Moriarty, a visual artist/graphic designer in Seattle who does album covers for many bands and is a collector of this stuff, is putting out a cd of many of his musician friends covering some of these old tunes. Some other people on the album are Dave Davies' (Kinks guitarist) son Daniel Davies, Buzzy Linhart (played vibes for Hendrix!) and the Boss Martians. Pat is also doing a comic-book style booklet for the cd, which may be done around Christmas.

Anyway, we recorded this at Scott's house in Lincoln and I did the little a capella vocal section in the middle (that I'm very pleased with!) in a back bedroom at my Mom's house in Tecumseh. I also programmed the drums/keys and did half the other backing vocals, and Charlie did the lead vocal and lead guitars, with Scott doing bass, rhythm guitar, keys, and backing vocals.

This is totally different than anything I've ever done and I think it's a hoot! It's kind of a spacey sort of hot rod/secret agent/crooner psychedelia with a veritable cinematographic quality: equal parts Two-Lane Blacktop road movie with Tarantino/Lynch dark underside and high plains/Terence Hill/spaghetti western topside. Charlie's vocal on the song has a zany, hip kind of Walker Brothers vibe, and his lead guitar work is scorching. Scott effortlessly fills out the sound with his bass/keys/backing vocals, and also manned the recording controls. Anyway, hope you get a kick out of this--we had a ton of fun doing it!

Dan