Gigantic.40

Tarbox

Dave Fridmann had just bought a half-finished house from a guy who’d changed his mind about building it. Maybe the guy ran out of money. Or maybe he changed his mind when he realized it was the only house on Tarbox Road that wasn’t a trailer or a shotgun shack.

Within a few years, Tarbox Road Studios would earn a legendary reputation. During the winter of 97, besides us and the Flaming Lips, it was pretty empty out there. Part recording studio, part Stephen King novel.

The sub-flooring was still exposed in some areas, elsewhere gray industrial carpeting had been laid down somewhat approximately. Maybe the kitchen had linoleum.

The recording space had vaulted ceilings, a leftover from the first owner’s vision of a dream house. The control room was less ambitious, but had enough space for the whole band. There was a red satin couch that sat three, and ergonomic desk chairs besides.

This was five seconds before Pro Tools, the focus of the control room wasn’t a computer but a giant Mackie board. The board wasn’t even automated, which meant complicated passes literally required all hands on deck, but mostly we took turns re-reading magazines, or the cartoons Wayne from the Lips had doodled and taped to the walls for whoever was interested.

Kitchen Patrol

One of my jobs was feeding everyone. It wasn’t exactly an Anthony Bourdain situation, but the task sort of delighted me. I was given a small budget, and it gave me the excuse to leave the studio and go shopping.

On my first trip to Tops in Fredonia, I noticed that instead of Muzak they were playing the Bills game. When I reported this curiosity back to Dave, he explained:

“It’s bad enough when you run out of beer and have to leave the house. This way the only part you miss is when you’re running from the radio in your car into the supermarket.”

I made a lot of pasta. I tried making sloppy Joes one night because I thought everyone liked sloppy Joes. They were particularly sloppy. Sue would cook sometimes too.

One time Jon tried making coffee. We couldn’t understand how anyone could mess up drip coffee. Turned out he’d put instant instead of regular coffee into the filter. This was why I was put in charge of the kitchen.

Sound Quality

One of the things I loved about Mercury Rev is that no recording experiment was off the table. One day we ran a cable fifty yards into the woods to a Neumann microphone balancing on a fallen birch. We blasted an amp out a window to see what it would sound like. That experiment didn’t work.

But when we suspended a smaller (less expensive) microphone in a two-liter bottle half-filled with water and put it inside the tack piano, that worked. You can hear the glimmering effect on I Collect Coins and a few other songs.

Sleeping Arrangements

At the end of each day, Dave would go back to his house in Fredonia, Jimi would go back to Buffalo, and Hopper and Sue would go back to his folks’ house in Dunkirk.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, that meant Jon and I each got our own room. We’re both avid readers, so rather than stay up watching stupid television, we’d retreat to our separate chambers with our own piles of books. There was something almost monastic about it.

My bed had a Buffalo Bills blanket on it. I could hear mice scurrying in the walls right near my head. This didn’t prevent me from springing the mousetraps downstairs when no one was looking, but Dave caught me and made me stop. Turns out mice like eating speaker wire.

One night I had a very clear dream that Native Americans from these parts came back to life as deer and still roamed the area. The next day I asked Dave, “What’s the history of this land?”

“It was an Indian burial ground,” he said.

“I knew you were going to say that!”

“Did you have a vision?” he asked.

“Mmm, just a dream.”

Dave seemed sort of psychically open to such things, but just the same he smiled and shook his head.

“I was just kidding,” he said. “It was a swamp.”

Cassadaga

Tarbox was at the outskirts of Cassadaga, itself at the outskirts of the outskirts of civilization. Jon would always sleep way later than I would, leaving me to pad around the studio by myself.

One day the sun actually came out. I went out onto the front porch to stretch and greet the morning. I heard a single gunshot. The bullet pinged off the house about five feet from where I was standing.

“Okay then…”

I went back inside. Nice neighbors.

The idea that I couldn’t leave the house was getting to me. Later that day I put on a fluorescent orange hunting vest and decided to try taking a walk up the road.

About a hundred yards up ahead, three German Shepherds appeared and checked me out. I stopped for a moment, debating whether to continue. The dogs began walking toward me. I turned around. The dogs began running toward me. Not wanting to show fear, I continued walking at first, then sprinted the last leg to the porch, went back into the studio, and locked the door.

Dave told me I was lucky, the people who owned the dogs also owned wolves and mountain lions, but apparently kept them caged, for the most part.

I resigned myself to the necessity of driving. You didn’t have to go all the way to Fredonia. Cassadaga had one reliably open business at the crossroads, a small Shur Fine market that always smelled of greasy fried chicken.

My first trip to the Shur Fine, I tried to buy a Cassadaga postcard, but it took them a while to figure out what to charge me because it had been so long since anyone had bought one.

A notable feature at the Shur Fine were the mounted heads of whatever the local hunters had despatched most recently. Deer season had just ended. My journal at the time reads:

“The decapitated heads of The Council of Elders look down on you as you weigh the merits of one brand of imitation syrup or another.”

The Kosciuszko Club

One night we all went with Hopper’s mom and dad to the Friday night fish fry at the Kosciuszko Club in Dunkirk. It was just five bucks plus twenty-five cents a ticket for a chance to win a turkey.

I didn’t win the turkey, but the meal remains the most memorable of our time at Tarbox.

The Commute

We got so used to driving back and forth across New York State, even though it was 300 miles it started to feel more like a commute than an epic roadtrip.

Jon preferred to drive without stopping, even for a pee break.

Hopper was a little more open for a side trip. One time we got off the Thruway and went into Syracuse. I was glad to find that Cosmos on Marshall Street still had reasonably okay pizza, and that Build Me Up Buttercup was still on the jukebox.

In the skies above Leatherstocking Region, we saw flocks of migrating geese. Not enough to block the sun as back in James Fenimore Cooper’s day, but at least there were still geese.

The Albany-to-Kingston leg was always a relief. After weeks of winter skies in western NY which looked like dirty laundry, the Valley always looked like gold.

Big Finish

The process involved not only recording, but re-recording once we started to get a sense of the album we were making. We tweaked individual songs constantly to make them fit.

When we finally agreed on a collection of songs and what order they should be in, we put the whole thing onto a cassette tape. Jon took a pen and scribbled Deserter’s Songs for the first time onto that cassette.

It was a cold night. We brought the cassette out to Jon’s car and all crammed in, parked in the gravel driveway at Tarbox. No comments at this point, just listening to what it would sound like on a car stereo.

It didn’t sound like anything that was out at the time that we knew of. We didn’t really know what we’d done. Whatever it was, it was finished.

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