"... And They Were Given Seven Trumpets" (30 years old this month)

So, I am in the process of finally migrating my musical material—ah, the career that (mercifully) never was!—from CD-only to streaming services. No doubt as soon as I am done the music industry will make another quantum leap to, say, telepathy or something. Tech leaps always happen in audio first. 

In my last post, I shared my latest piece: all guitar (rhythm and solo) with finger snaps, no quantizing, no lack of human slippage. Here is a post to serve as a chronological and stylistic counterpoint to that piece. Although I have posted about this and other tracks before, having them immediately accessible via streaming seems like a good opportunity to do so again, so that any interested party (there must be someone out there) can listen in and hopefully gain some idea of what I am prattling on about.   

  

Last Saturday, December 5, it was thirty years since I hoicked a modest collection of gear into Woodland West Recording Studio in Olathe, KS, and recorded the first (musical) track of my first album. The engineer, believe it or not, was a guy named Jack Black, but no, he was no relation to the School of Rock guy. Thank God. This Jack was a good engineer. Quiet, helpful, no nonsense, very efficient. I don't remember the precise dates when we laid down all the other tracks, but I think the rest came together in the span of just two more days. (I had a very limited budget, so we had to fly.) That first night we just did this one track: "... And They Were Given Seven Trumpets." It was inspired, in part, by a meaty trumpet patch on my Yamaha SY77, such a beefy patch in fact that it brought apocalyptic, "last trump" texts to mind. Hence the title, a reference to Revelation 8:2. [And with that, the lifelong habit of reading backwards was begun. But that is a story for another day.] 

[The SY77, BTW, has been under dust covers with a dead battery for several years. I managed to install a fresh one the other day. No mean trick. It felt like doing M*A*S*H-style meatball brain surgery on an old friend. Not something one does very often. I'm not very handy with a soldering iron, but got the job done anyway. The old board sprang to life, defaults reloaded and ready to go, complete with awesome trumpet patch. Oomph! A minor resurrection.]

I remember spending days and days and days, and then a few more days, programming the drums on the HR-16 drum machine. (I haven't had the heart to check its vital signs lately, but fear it may be a goner.) A couple of years later, when Andy Thornton listened to this track, he commented that, where drum machines are concerned, you have to make a decision at the outset: either embrace the synthetic mechanical sound altogether or aim for realism. In this case, I had chosen the latter. I did not want the drums to sound canned, neither here nor on any of these tracks, so I tried to make each fill different, thinking in turn of great drummers like Neal Peart (raining his amazing fills cascading across dozens of toms from high to low), Bill Bruford (wedging weird, ill-timed backbeats between backbeats), and (the early, younger, jazzier) Phil Collins. That much was fun. The tortuous part consisted of flashbacks to the lower brass section of high school band rehearsals, where the snare drums and toms always sat right behind me. For three straight years I had every flam, every roll, every cadence, every paradiddle, every rimshot, every tentative click or maniacal, spasmodic whack drilled into my head (or so it seemed). Thinking through each fill here was like sticking my head between sticks and drums. Ouch! But it was worth the time and trouble to imagine how every hit should sound, every stick would bounce. 

Two other points of observation from those high school years come from being in the stage band. I made for a rather shabby addition to the trombone section, but do remember a guest percussionist performing with us who did some wonderful four-mallet work on the vibes. I've loved their sound ever since and just watching him play was so instructive. It seems obvious now, but there was something so helpful in realizing, if you want to do vibes, then you have four notes to work with. Which ones do you want? A musicologist buddy, on hearing this, said: "The vibes make the track." They certainly are a dynamic part of the foundation of the piece. Dynamic foundation. Sounds like an earthquake, as does this track, if I may say. 

The second lesson from stage band, in which I was more of a fly on the wall or a fish out of water (apologies, Chris Squire), was hearing a couple of great trumpeters — one in particular, a really sweet, affable chap named Jeff Jewsome (God bless you, Jeff!) — do burnouts better than the trombones could, which are designed for such things. I've been fascinated with burnouts ever since. You can hear several of them on this track from the synth trumpets, but they also run throughout the latest guitar piece, the one posted yesterday. Burnouts, pulloffs, downward glissandos—whatever you call them, are a staple of the flamenco guitar style.

The end result of all this: the dated FM keyboard patches notwithstanding, this track still rocks. I love the clean DX7 electric piano. Such a classic, even pastoral sound, it seemed well suited to the section that emerges, clear and undaunted, out of the chaos of the ear-splitting breakstrain. Yes, given enough amperes, this track takes my breath away, even thirty years on. Forgive my regressive adolescence in saying so, but crank it up and listen to it loud. May the Spirit stand your hair on end and remind you: "Aslan is on the move!' Or in more biblical parlance: "Keep awake, for the day of the Lord is near."

Here is a sample on Amazon. Other links may be added as they go live, but the full version is on my YouTube channel (above). To which you are welcome to subscribe. Its free.