Usual Suspects recording session, 2/22/08

You know what's more fun than a gig? Well, nothing. You know what's a lot of fun? Going into a studio, getting yourself toasted, and recording a bunch of stupid music. Now that's a buttload of fun.

That's what I just did in Kensington, Md., with the Usual Suspects. Over a five-hour evening session on a Friday night, we laid down three classic tunes and got them all pretty much perfect on the first take.

The tunes we recorded were the Stevie Wonder tune "I Wish," Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' "Breakdown," and that song "I Can't Get Enough of You Baby," which was recently used on a Pizza Hut commercial in its popular cover version by Smash Mouth. Update: All three songs from the demo have now been uploaded to the band's Myspace page.

We killed all three tunes to anybody's satisfaction in a take or two. Really nice. We were all in sync on that stuff. Couldn't have been much better.

These three tracks are coming out on a promotional demo we will use to get ourselves gigs. We'll pass them out to places and see if we can land gigs that way. We're pretty sure that, the way we all played tonight, after any split second of any song bar owners will say, "I'll hire you."

As our lead singer and guitarist pointed out, my solo on "I Wish" was a lot like Jon Lord's in the Deep Purple track "Hush." I was thinking it was from the Doors' "Peace Frog." But either way, I was the one playing it, not Ray Manzarek or Jon Lord. I also took keyboard solos on both of the other tunes and was pretty happy with each.

I'll have the disc with me this Thursday to hand over to the guys at Okra's Louisiana Bistro. When I was there two times ago, on the last day of January, I gave the head bartender a disc of my other group, World Peace Party. Since then, we've sort of broken up. But it was a DVD, so the guy who needed to hear it in order to make a decision on us hasn't heard it. I said I would be back with an audio disc for him by the end of February. Of course, the audio disc will be a different band, but that's only a minor detail. Come on, we're the Usual Suspects!

Incidentally, our rhythm guitarist showed us his one-hour video of our show last Saturday, and we enjoyed learning from our own performance. The video was from only the first half of the concert, so it was my more sober half. I didn't drop my keyboard at all until the second half. I remember it happening twice, but multiple sources insist it happened three times. Oh well. Without video evidence of it, you can't prove it happened even once.