Since I spend a lot of time making them, I listen to records obsessively. It’s what I do. I love to seek out patterns and similarities as I pore through my record library. Many of them involve what I know to be artifacts of the actual recording process. They show up in my recordings too. It’s also fascinating how regardless of the genre, making records can bring out the same fallibilities in even the best musicians. The act of attempting to capture the definitive version of a particular composition in a recording is about judgment, environment, ability and unfortunately sometimes, compromise. Many mistakes are made and parts done over. Technology allows all kinds of magic, especially now. In fact, part of producing a great recording now is about knowing when not to make the work surgically perfect, when to let the humanness of the performance shine through in all of its flawed glory. I heard Todd Rundgren say in an interview once that he sometimes leaves the flaws in a recording, because allowing a flaw to be expressed can be a form of catharsis. Hmm…

Nevertheless, sometimes a recorded performance goes sour almost immediately, in the first measures of the piece. Most of the time, the engineer or producer would just call the take a false start and tell the musicians to start again. For some reason, and probably for one of those I mentioned earlier, sometimes those flubs make the record. I always wonder why, having not ventured very far into a take, they didn’t just try again. Here are some of my favorite examples of “Didn’t that deserve another take?”

Majestic Dance by Return to Forever – I actually just heard this cut again for the first time in years. It has always been my favorite track from the Romantic Warrior album. It featured the most notable line-up of the band, with Al DiMeola on guitar. As early as I can remember, being a musician in grade school, I was hearing my guitarist friends rave about what a monster player Al was and how they hoped they would play as well as Al one day. (To my knowledge, few, if any, ever did.) An experienced guitarist, I can hear a typical guitar flub in measure one of “Majestic Dance.” He plays the chord on beat three, but I know what it sounds like when you just don’t grab it perfectly. Al barely got this one out and, like when I discover such a flaw in one of my own recordings, the weirdness gets louder every time I hear it. It would have been so easy to hit it again. I wonder why they didn’t. The piece is so badass.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out by Bruce Springsteen – This was the first Bruce album on which Max Weinberg appeared. Fresh off a run in the pit orchestra for the Broadway musical Godspell, Max got his break with the E Street Band because he didn’t play like Ginger Baker. This track begins with a nice little soul fanfare. Then, it’s a solo buzz roll by Max leading into the main groove of the tune. They’d only played 3 measures and Max muffs the buzz roll! I’m sure Max had played a million buzz rolls, but this one, for posterity, sucked! Poor Max. I heard him say once in a talk he gave at my college in the 90s about his experiences with the band that the muffed buzz roll always bothered him. Me too. He’s still one of my favorite drummers. I only wish they didn’t allow him to be so horribly misrepresented. Even if the horn section had gone home, it wouldn’t have been impossible to punch in that buzz roll. It’s amazing what you can decide to live with when you’ve been in the studio too long.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? by War – This was a big single from a very interesting 70s band from East LA off an album of the same name. This track’s even got that feel-good off-mic chatter like a 60s party record. I managed to locate an original vinyl pressing of this album, still in the shrinkwrap, back in the 90s. It even had the poster in it! I love the sound of this it. It was the soundtrack for my summer barbecues for ages. In this single, there’s a high keyboard riff at the beginning that forms the foundation of the groove when the entire band enters. This record was a major hit, but in the very first measure, Lonnie Jordan just totally butter fingers the chord change! Happens to the best of us, but that’s a false start if I ever heard one! Hey barely even makes it through the second pass! Geez… To misquote a rap that appears earlier in the album, “Lonnie gonna make it real sloppy for you…”

Ventura Highway by America – This one is hard to hear. Maybe that’s what they thought too. With all of that wonderful California acoustic sweetness, your brain might be candied to numbness and never notice. I have a friend who’s a radio producer. He introduced me to the concept of the “post.” The post is that part of a record when the vocal starts. When DJs were important on the radio, it was always fun to hear the good ones talk up a record. A good DJ could run his yap during the intro of a hit record and sound completely effortless, finishing his sentence just in time for the post. It requires a good bit of musical feel and pacing to get it right. I think it works the same mental process involved in merging onto a highway without inconveniencing anyone. Sometimes, a lame DJ wouldn’t make it and he’d step on the post. (My buddy also told me about the unwritten rule of “Hotel California” and its exception to the post convention. Never talk up a record with an intro as long as that one. ) Anyway, listen to the wrong chord at the post of “Ventura Highway.” If the DJ was good, you would never have heard it.

Too High by Stevie Wonder – This one may or may not have been a candidate for another take. It depends on what instrument Stevie recorded first. He played everything on this. After one measure, the tempo takes a dive. It sounds like a burst of the musician’s energy that quickly got a hold of itself and settled. That’s not interpretation folks. That’s just what happens when you play all of the instruments yourself (I know something about this) without a timing reference. Any mistakes you make in the first track will always be there, no matter how many instruments you layer on top. If you try to overdub with a flawed first track, you’ll be a slave to that track’s idiosyncrasies on every pass and with every new part until you mix. Sounds on tape won’t breathe. They are on the tape, as is, for eternity. I’ve saved timing problems with a tambourine in my day, but no tambourine would have fixed this one. You just gotta follow it. If the rest of the tune was in the can by the time ol’ Stevland did the drums, I can see where they might’ve have wanted to live with it. However, if he did the drums first, they might have tried again, or at least cut the tape to include a more tempo-matched intro.

To be truthful, I kind of dig this one. To hear that even Stevie Wonder can be noticeably flawed makes me feel better about my own tracks. I felt the same way the first time I heard a tape edit on a Nat Cole record. Even Nat Cole’s takes weren’t all perfect. Now that I consider it, I listen to the tempo change on “Too High” for enjoyment.

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty

Derek Sivers reposted this story a little while ago. It was originally published in Reader’s Digest. In it, the journalist describes the night on which he met Albert Einstein and how the physicist taught him to appreciate Bach. Einstein’s analogy equated the appreciation of music to the learning of arithmetic. He explained to the writer that if his teacher had thrown long division or fractions at him the first day, he’d have reacted in panic and forever closed his mind to those concepts. It would’ve been madness to ask a student so new to arithmetic to grasp such concepts before having learned more basic ones. “So it is with music,” Einstein claimed.

As far as I know, Einstein never gave concerts or tried to sell records. Maybe he was right though. I wrestle with a conflict of sophistication in my musical life quite often. It’s my nature to go for something more than the simplest approach to composition and arrangement. I need something more engaging than what is the most predictable to enjoy what I’m playing or listening to. As an artist, that idiosyncrasy can be an obstacle to universal appeal. Instead of becoming frustrated in striving for musical heights in the modern commercial climate, perhaps I should simply make a greater effort to teach long division.

I’ve always had a musical ear, it’s true. Before I completely understood what I was hearing, music would affect me profoundly. The way the parts worked together, the emotional effects that certain harmonic intervals could create in me, these stimulated my brain and heart even as a small child. As I grew up and became a musician, I honed my abilities and began to work my own alchemy with organized sounds. Now that I understand very much about music’s moving parts, I feel sometimes as if I have the key to a golden door. Behind it lay the ability to appreciate a special beauty in life, an enrichment fueled by what I can only equate with the somewhat exclusive perception of another dimension entirely. Since music is my racket, it only makes sense that I would arrive at the “long division and fractions” phase of musical appreciation and creation sooner than someone of a different vocation. If music could be equated with juggling, I’d be tossing a chain saw, a kitten, a raw egg and an apple, and eating the apple along the way. It would be a great show until I severed a limb, but then, I’m not finished learning either.

Sadly, Einstein’s age has passed. Since math is never as cool as music from a cultural standpoint, countless people claim to love music. However, if a recording artist in 2010 creates something of reasonable sophistication, there is an overwhelming contingent of listeners, critics and other musicians who are quick to dismiss the work as “indulgent” or “overblown.” In the most painful of instances, this dismissive ilk has been known to label the music as “prog,” a dreadful-sounding, shortened form of the word “progressive,” which carried with it a certain prestige some 30 years ago.

It’s almost as if the popular culture as a whole has turned its back on ambitious musical expression and achievement. I can’t believe the fuss that is made over some really terrible musicians and singers. My perspective dooms me here, but I’m still fascinated and simultaneously flummoxed when I hear yet another recording of musicians struggling to play songs that essentially reinvent the wheel of the most basic structures. They never seem to become curious about what other possibilities their music might hold.

Punk is my favorite example of this. Punk is great for kids with more passion than musical ability or experience. But even the real wave of the style didn’t last that long. It simply doesn’t take that long to progress musically and emotionally from it. However, “punk” is a connotation that has come to imply a certain creditability in the cultural consciousness of popular music. It’s baffling. I mean, how can you be approaching 50 years old and still be embracing the punk idiom? In that case, I doubt we’re even talking about music anymore. We’re just using the word to describe an affectation instead of an art form. Nevertheless, in music, Americans seem incessantly to celebrate the bird house of high school shop and to ignore the Roman arch.

When did that happen?

I don’t know what it was about the 70s, but it gave rise to some of the most experimental rock music ever recorded. Musicians had grown in skill and sophistication to the point where certain artists and bands were more aptly described as composers than songwriters. Musicianship soared as well. Rock and roll music, a folk form played by primitive musicians, had grown up. I thought of this while listening to a couple of Yes albums this week. There was such an audience for music played by guys with real chops and unusual musical vision in those days. How could a group that played so well and performed such obtuse variations on the rock style achieve such amazing popularity?

I have a few theories. One is that people had a bit more capacity to appreciate something outside of themselves. People seemed to be more willing to evolve, to go deeper into the object of the obsessions they chose. I believe that progressive rock grew in part out of a raised consciousness and more eclectic philosophical attitudes of the late 60s. Those philosophies were experimental and perhaps ultimately flawed, but at least some people were unafraid to search, to find something new.

That cultural trend has been replaced by one of fear and cynicism. As cynicism grew with each succeeding decade of psychological overload, greatness became less of an inspiration and more an unspoken indictment of one’s own laziness and unwillingness to sacrifice. In music now, it seems like everyone, regardless of true skill, thinks they can make a viable record. It’s the highest form of delusion, but there’s enough encouragement and momentum in that world for aesthetic criteria to have eroded almost to non-existence. Or so it would seem. In the modern musical climate, are skill, passion and vision looked upon as reminders of chores that were never completed, of the ever-present fear that the multitudes of the “three chords and the truth” set might not be as great as they think they are? To cope with the fear, have they created a culture of acceptable mediocrity to disappear into? If enough people use the word “prog,” any divergent musical vision becomes a punchline and it becomes safer to be around. With the right dismissal, any ambition can be controlled and there’ll still be a chance to be great without really trying.

My own cynicism compels me to accuse. Or is it like Einstein said? Has the overload of our “too much, too soon” culture simply turned so many minds off to learning more?

I want more. I want the keys to more golden doors, behind which lay more beauty and enrichment. I don’t think that progressive rock is the only way. Nor do I believe that simple music should be discounted. Not at all. I simply want every chance to experience the extraordinary humanness that only music can provide for me. My challenge then must be to figure a way to take people, as Einstein did, off to a room to listen to records and share the keys to which I believe we are all entitled. Perhaps that’s why I write my little essays here.

In that spirit, I’ll close with something for your heart and head. Maybe you need to be an ace “juggler” to dig it, but I’ll try my best at least to describe what happens when I listen to a piece of music enough times. This is an excerpt from the guitar part of a Yes tune called “The Gates of Delirium” as I remember it. Even if you find progressive rock demanding or annoying, Yes was one of those groups that could take things way out without neglecting beauty or the sublime musical release.

In measure 2 and 3 is an F major chord. It’s technically outside of the key signature, which is D, creating some sense of conflict to my ear. The chord is played in staccato eighths with accents that separate them into groups of 3. It’s tough to find a strong downbeat there, so you’re really being pushed out of your comfort zone. Back into the key, is a glissando up to a G major in measure 4. Some relief, but we’re not there yet. With a single F# that bridges you into beat 4, we’re made to wait just an instant longer before the phrase resolves wonderfully into a Dmaj7, which starting at the F chord two measures before, I had been absolutely yearning for. There it is, and all is right with the world.

This phrase changed my life in the 6th grade. It was like an orange sunset for my ears. Just greater than words. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. I have countless examples of similar experiences too. I wouldn’t part with a single one. If I never searched deeper into music, they would have been lost to me. What a tragedy that would have been.

“I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription… is more cowbell!”

Quotes from the SNL sketch starring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken have leaked mercilessly into popular culture, but I’d gather that few ever consider the degree of truth in them. Little percussion instruments can often add the polish that turns a recording of a song into a great record.

Since this is my 100th post on the New Aquarius blog, I thought I’d do something special. Let’s listen together, shall we? Here are some of my favorite recordings on which I feel that percussion really makes the record.

(Since they are used to demonstrate my points, I believe the clips I provide here represent “fair use.” So don’t be coming at me like a copyright spider monkey. I don’t have a player installed on this server, so I hope whatever program you have on your system to play mp3 files also plays these.)

“She’s Gone” by Daryl Hall and John Oates – The intro has eighth notes of wood block on beat one of each measure, doubling the bass figure. To me, it represents the ticking clock in the quiet empty hours experienced by the singer since the woman in the lyric has left him. There even appears to be a mistake in the pattern, which is wonderfully human.

“D’Yer Mak’er” by Led Zeppelin -  Afuche cabasa is used to accent the stilted rhythm. Once you notice it, you’ll never hear the record the same way again. Led Zeppelin can’t do reggae, but they know how to fill up a weak beat. It’s on the upbeat of 2 and 4.

“Day By Day” from the Godspell Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – Though the effect of percussion is apparent to some extent on the cast album, the movie soundtrack version of this tune uses percussion wonderfully to build intensity and then provide catharsis. I’ve played the Godspell bass book a number of times. This piece repeats the chorus over and over, but with added percussion every time though. First it’s quarter notes on tambourine on beats 2 and 4, then with straight sixteenths twice through, followed by the entrance at the next cycle of the entire drum set. This development always has an amazing emotional effect on me. My heart leaps every time I hear it, even though I’ve heard it literally thousands of times. This clip is from the movie itself, as I don’t have a copy of the soundtrack album handy.

“Make Me Smile” by Chicago – On this cut from Chicago II, the horn segment before the guitar solo (on the album version, not the chopped up single version) uses a similar cyclical building of percussion every time through, only instead of changing the pattern like in “Day By Day,” another instrument is added first. Initially, it’s tambourine on the left in sixteenths. The next time through, it sounds like maracas added on the right in quarters, held in one hand or used as one percussion instrument in both hands. The recording always sounds to me like the maracas are plastic instead of wood, which I personally might not have chosen to use, but work very well here. Notice how the maracas accelerate to sixteenths with the guitar solo.

“Never Been To Spain” by Elvis Presley – This rather obscure reference is from the 1972 album Elvis As Recorded Live at Madison Square Garden. This song was a hit for Three Dog Night, which was probably good enough for Elvis, but I thought the subtle use of percussion here warranted mention. The songs starts with a vocal, followed by a very sparse pulse-like arrangement that works more like a question and answer. On this particular recording, the first appearance of a castanet part appears in measure two, on the upbeat of beat two. It’s a very subtle but highly effective musical enforcement of the Spanish idea in the lyric. Just a sixteenth note triplet followed by another sixteenth on beat three. This pattern repeats on every other measure and disappears almost as soon as it appeared. Less is more.

“Mono Is King” by me! – This was the title track off my first record. The instrument I used was a ratchet, which is this V-shaped object that places slats of wood against a cog  that you turn with a crank to get the sound. Use of this instrument was more instinctive than by design. I just thought those rim whacks on the snare drum at the top of that ascending figure needed something else. Maybe it was my way of evoking a scratchy vaudevillian flavor to which the bounciness of the tune lent itself. It’s still my favorite part of the arrangement because of how well the effect works.

“Superstition” by Stevie Wonder – Many people are aware that ol’ Stevland played drums on this, but you may not have noticed the overdubs. Stevie must have thought hi-hat needed to do more for the feel, so he added another one. This is a lot harder to hear, but in this clip, the original hi-hat is on the right with the rest of the drum kit. The open hi-hat overdub appears about halfway through on the left. Now try to think of this record without it. It’s not all clavinet, you know?

“Walking On The Moon” by the Police – This record featured the now legendary Stewart Copeland hi-hat overdubs.  They execute the ethereal nature of the production to a T. It could never be performed this way live, because Copeland has only two hands, but the extra hi-hats really help get the point of tune across. Toss in some delay and you get polyrhythms for days! Despite it’s improbability in the real world ensemble, it was an ingenious arrangement decision, I think.

“Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen – The E Street Band is so huge that it’s difficult to play anything in that band that someone else isn’t already playing. To add an amazing sparkle to the top of the arrangement, key melodic figures played on piano or guitar could also appear simultaneously a few octaves higher on glockenspiel. Glockenspiel works well to cut through the cacophony of marching bands, so why not an equally huge rock band? (I’ve used the trick myself. I played the bell chime melody on glock on “It’s Christmas (Let It Touch You).”)  On “Born To Run” and many other tracks, such as “Hungry Heart” and “Something In The Night,” glockenspiel makes the music sound nothing short of majestic to my ear. Live, the late Danny Federici would often play these parts on celeste, a keyboard instrument in which the keys activate hammers that strike high-pitched metal disks. Here’s a sample of all three tunes.

“Nowhere To Run” by Martha & the Vandellas – Speaking of running… On this record, a chain is actually used as a percussion instrument. Where? Check the upbeat of 3. Clinking away, it sounds like it’s rhythmically being dropped from hand to hand. Awesome.

“Living In Sin” by Gene Simmons – This song appears on the 1978 solo album, Gene Simmons. The tune starts a low pitched drumbeat. You can hear the drums resonating and it’s very fat. But the real motion of the figure is handled by sandpaper blocks, rubbing together in an eighth note pattern on the left. After the whole band comes in, they’re still there if you listen closely. Without this bit of percussion tastiness, the recording would have been very different.

That’s all I have for now. Can you think of any others? Get out your headphones and lay them on me. Until then, remember that your record isn’t truly finished until the percussion toys come out!