Saturday, March 18, 2006

Murdering standards...

Up at 5:30 this morning but immediately back to bed for more sleep. Snoozed rather than slept though, due to ongoing pain in my left arm and shoulder. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore and got up at 6:30...

I transferred all the sessions from Wednesday night to the hard drive whilst updating the photoblog (http://crispycat-pics.blogspot.com/) and having an MSN conversation with webmeister Craig...

He's building a new version of the Crispycat website (www.crispycat.co.uk) which will allow me to run it from home rather than having to relay everything through him...

Took Anne uptown and then spent an hour at the gym, though I couldn't do the rowing exercise and had to use the cross trainer with my hands on the stationery handles, as the pain in my shoulder was growing by the minute...

Back home I spent four hours listening to all the OOTBCD4 sessions and then edited my first choice of songs onto a CD for further listening and evaluation...

With these CDs, because the time constraints are so tough with the people only have 30 minutes for me to get the sound right and for them to come up with a useable performance, there's always an element of compromise in the final song selection. It's more often than not the case that the sound isn't quite right on what was perhaps the better performance of a song, or there's an error in the song where the sound is spot on...

Excellent news on the footie front as Queen of the South thrash local rivals Stranraer 1-0 and leap frog them into third bottom position in the league (the fact that we're only one point ahead and they have two games in hand is neither here nor there)...

Then I burned a CD of last week's Wetton Downes setlist and put my signed Jethro Tull Backstage Pass inside for Dr Prog - it was his birthday on Thursday and we were going out with him and his wife Jacqui tonight..

He's a diehard Tull fan and will have more use for the signed artifact than I will ever have..

After an excellent indian buffet with strange lighting effects due to some kind of "blown fuse" scenario at the restaurant, we retired to Dr Prog Towers for more wine and some coffee...

Phil has recently got into Johnny Cash and played us one of the CDs the now dead country and western singer recorded with Rick Rubin not long before his death....

While Phil had been most impressed with the album, I reckoned if Cash hadn't been at death's door when he recorded it, it may not have received such universal acclaim....

After all, it's basically a karaoke performance of songs by The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Roberta Flack and no doubt many others. Rubin's now trying to revitalise Neil Diamond's career for goodness' sake...

You can hear this type of performance most nights of the week when some old guy gets up in a bar in Glasgow or Edinburgh to murder some standards...

Not tasty...

Highlight of the Day : QoS 1 Stranraer 0

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