On the way home

I've been on a music memoir/biography kick lately. The most recent book I read was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, a 2019 biography by Peter Doggett. It focuses on the years between 1969, when David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash formed the band and released their first album, and 1974, the year of the last tour that wasn't actually more like a reunion.

In 1969, I was at the beginning of high school. In 1974, I was in the middle of university. The book covers so many events that are touchstones in my early life. Most of those are events in music and in the wider world, but many relate directly to those four guys and their music.

The book yanked me back to when I was 10, hearing and seeing the Beatles for the first time, to when I was 12, absorbing AM radio, to when I was 14, seeing my heroes murdered and the world lose its mind, to when I was 16, seeing university kids gunned down, to when I was 18 and the goddamn war had only gotten wider, to when I was 20 and spending a great deal of time ostensibly for school on making music instead.

I remember when Crosby, Stills & Nash came out. At the time, I was really into harmony groups, like the Seekers, the Mamas and the Papas, and Simon and Garfunkel. The CS&N harmony sound was astounding. I didn't own the album, but the singles got a lot of airplay. It was similar when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released Déjà Vu, a good half of which was a CS&N follow-up.

I knew who these guys were too, having been a fan of the Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield. "For What It's Worth" and "Mr. Soul" were two of my favourite songs. And this idea of being a kind of collective was intriguing.

A curious thing happened in the midst of this harmony fest. I remember going to buy the first CSN album and being mysteriously drawn instead to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which is pretty much Neil Young's antithesis to CSN. That album, which Neil did with Crazy Horse (a stripped-down Rockets), was one of the most wonderful mind-bending records I had ever heard. I didn't have an electric guitar yet, but later on both my playing and my aesthetic drew heavily on EKTIN.

And then, my young mind got well and fully blown again in 1971 when my sister brought home a college radio promo copy (possibly purloined) of Four-Way Street, which she didn't like and passed on to me. I devoured all four sides of that double album on the parental stereo until it had pops and scratches pretty much everywhere.

I was learning to play guitar, and this album was perfect for me. These guys had a sound I could aspire to. The acoustic side was very influential, since I had only an acoustic guitar. I learned to play "On the Way Home," "Teach Your Children," and "The Lee Shore." I thought it was cool that they would play a concert with half acoustic music and half electric. I didn't know about David Crosby's tunings yet, but from hearing the sound I learned how to play open ninth chords that sounded ringy but slightly unsettling. I still do that a lot.

The electric sides were glorious in their spirited sloppiness. I have always found this live version of "Long Time Gone" to be superior to the rather turgid studio version on CS&N, despite its marginal high harmonies (the version on Spotify does not say "remaster," but I'm pretty sure Nash's missed high harmonies, thanks to the poor stage monitors of the time, are mixed lower). "Ohio" was a mess but still astounding and hugely influential on my playing and my youthful politics. And that 14-minute "Carry On" with the interplay of the three guitars is just magnificent.

And after that album, there was no group thing that I really cared about. I followed their individual careers for a while. Neil is the only one I've stuck with, maybe because he and Crazy Horse got to my brain first, maybe because he's the only one who continued to produce great music (most of the time). By the time I bought my first electric guitar in 1973, I had moved on to other things. But CSN and CSNY when they were together making great music were cemented into my life.

The book was not just a nostalgia trip. I learned a lot of details about a story I knew only the general outline of. Did you know that Cass Elliot was responsible for bringing Stephen, David, and Graham together, and that originally she wanted to sing with them? I also hadn't known how CSN were persuaded to add Neil to the mix after being a huge hit on their own. And it's easy to tell that the guitar in "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" is in some kind of open tuning, but I had never known that the tuning was EEEEBE, and that it was Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer who showed it to Stills.

Reading the book was an incredibly enjoyable ride, even the bad parts, of which there are many. I had always known about how much weed tended to be smoked, but I had not known that they were all into cocaine so early, and that the albums were as cocaine-fuelled as they were. I think of coke more as a 1970s and 80s drug. I guess they could afford to be early adopters. It had a lot to do with why they broke up and/or never really came together.

Doggett is a critical fan. He doesn't gloss over the low points, but he also cites the many high points. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the people or the time they lived in. And if you lived through that time yourself, it's a must.

Best buddy

His shelter name was Hornby, which we kept. Like all pets, more names became attached to him, including The Dude, Bodhi, and Willis (as in "whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?" from Different Strokes). We also used things that weren't really names, like "funny boy," "puddin'," and especially "buddy" or "buddy boy."

He was what cat behaviourist Jackson Galaxy calls a "beach dweller." He didn't especially like being up high. He never had a thing for empty boxes. Instead, he would lie in the middle of a floor, taking up space, completely at ease.

He was a lover, not a fighter. When VOKRA brought him in from a cat colony at a fish plant, he had a nasty gash across the bridge of his nose, as well as evidence of earlier fights, like his chewed up right ear. But with us, from the start, he was a big cuddle bug. He looked like a bruiser, but he wasn't belligerent. We figured his wounds were probably defensive.

He loved our scents and our warmth. He sniffed our shoes and boots after we took them off. He would sleep anywhere we had been sitting, whether futon or sofa or office chair. He would sleep or lie down on laps, but he was very particular about where and when. Sometimes he just wanted to be nearby, as when he would sit on the ottoman while we watched TV.

He adored his Nanny K, our long-time cat sitter. We didn't go away often, but when we did, it was almost a treat for him. Nanny would come by once or twice a day. She is the epitome of a cat person, and he just lapped it up. They got along famously. And the rest of the time, he seems to have entertained himself, probably largely by sleeping, as cats do.

He would always greet us when we came home, whether we had been away for an evening or were returning from a vacation. As much as he loved Nanny, he was always happy when his peeps were back. If he was awake, we might see him in the front window, mah-ing at us. If he had been asleep, he very quickly ran down the stairs to say hi.

He loved meeting whoever came to the door. He especially loved trades and service people. He sucked up to every one of them who let him. He was quite a charmer.

Clanky noises, metal on metal, were among the few noises that scared him. He must have gone through something bad that involved falling metal, and he never got desensitized to the sound. He didn't like loud sounds in general, and he was sadly not a music lover.

Curiously, one sound he loved was the paper shredder. He would react to the inkjet printer as well. Something about those sounds made him come running. Sweetie thought he must have lived in a house with an electric can opener.

Bird watching

He might have used up a several of his nine lives along the way. He was a stray, so he either got away or was dumped. He survived a cat colony, though not unscathed. He went through a course of radiation treatment for a thyroid issue. Right in the middle of serious Covid restrictions in summer 2020, he had a urinary blockage that quickly went south and put him in Boundary Bay Veterinary Specialty Hospital in Langley.

Probably the most insidious condition he lived with was inflammation. It wasn't from arthritis, because he was always lithe and active. We put him on a limited diet that avoided things (such as grains) that tests showed he was allergic to, but something bothered him that we never identified. Every few months, he would get "bitey," and when he did, we knew he was feeling irritated, and possibly in pain. He would get a steroid shot at the vet that would improve things for several months but could never cure it.

He died on September 23rd during an afternoon nap on "his" (our) bed, one of his favourite places. It was most likely a heart attack, even though the only heart condition that had been identified was a murmur. At any rate, he seems to have gone peacefully.

Sweetie and I are reminded of him pretty much every day, even almost two and a half months later. We never thought of him as our "child," but he was definitely a roommate and part of the life of the house. We still feel his absence.

Stone knives and bearskins remix

With social media fragmenting and in some cases imploding, I figure I might as well do an old-fashioned thing and blog. I haven't written here since May because I haven't felt moved to do so. Now, I feel more like writing. Not many people read what I write here, but that's not really the point. The point is that I went through the process of writing it. It's for me. Sometimes my private journal is not enough.

I'm writing a nerdly blog post about a nerdly thing: sound mixing. Having collaborated over the years with professional sound engineers to create the music people (theoretically) listen to, having gone through the process of recording at home, having improved my knowledge of the free but capable Audacity software, having mixed and mastered a solo album and remastered songs from an old band and then remixed and remastered the solo album, I have realized that this is something I'd like to do a lot of. A new hobby, if you will, that I can focus on the way I have focused on cooking and genealogy. More than just making music — making music better.

I find the process of turning sounds into better sounds immensely satisfying. It's intense brain exercise. I learn something almost every time I sit down to work through a mixing or mastering session, something that feels good to know. Every mixing and mastering run has let me do a better job the next time. It informs my listening, which in turn informs my work. Maybe it even makes my brain work better.

I started remixing a song from Mostly Still Underfoot just to have fun. With me and something I love, however, fun tends to turn into serious fun at some point. I started to compare results of my mix to the studio mix of the same song.

The studio mix is very clean. There's no noise, no extraneous sound. It has a shininess that seems to be a bit of magic that I probably don't have. But it's interesting how close I can come (now that I know a thing or two) to what a professional engineer at a professional board in a professional studio produced.

One thing I don't like about the studio mix is that it sounds somewhat disembodied. The mix is very skilful, but the sounds feel isolated from one another. It's that digital complete lack of noise. It's probably just my own preference to like recordings in which you can hear the room in which the music was played. Even if it was mostly done with overdubs, I like to have some room sound, around the drums anyway.

In the setup the original engineer used, there are four mics that pick up snare sound: close, hi-hat, and two overheads. Most of the snare sound in the studio mix comes from the close mic. The thing is, the recording was tightly gated so that the raw snare sound is very short and very crisp with no natural drum sound. It's a sound with which to drive effects. Adding reverb is the only thing that livens it up.

The hi-hat track is useless. The mic picked up some snare but mostly hi-hat. You rarely need much hi-hat. There's so much of it in the other microphones that I don't really need that track at all.

I am, however, blending in more of the two overhead mics. Those are intended to pick up cymbals, but I like the way they pick up the whole kit and the room as well. Except for some songs that need reinforcement on the toms, I'm using mostly a modified Glynn Johns setup — kick, snare, two overheads.

Bass guitar is often recorded two ways: with a microphone on a bass cabinet in the big room with the drums, and direct from bass to board via a magic box of some kind. We just called it a DI — direct interface. Much as I like live bass through a cabinet, even a heavily gated microphone picks up a lot of drums and other ambient sounds. That track is not useful. The DI track works very well on its own.

I couldn't remember exactly what was done with the guitars in the studio remix. At the time I didn't record, say, two strummed guitars as I probably would now. And each guitar is completely dry — the modified Fender Bassman head had no reverb. Adding reverb wasn't really doing the trick of making the guitar bigger and take up more space.

But I realized that if I duplicated a guitar track and ran it through reverb, retaining only the "wet" part, I could get a blend of dry and wet with the dry in one direction and the wet in the other, and achieve a spaciousness that wasn't there before. I'm surprised I hadn't sussed out this trick already.

I haven't yet figured out how to make the vocals sound quite as good, but they still sound good. The studio had a good vocal mic, and Cilla sang very well. And the overall gloss, well, that's some kind of special sauce I might never figure out.