Week 5 - Friday 4/12/1991

Recording 'You Don't Know Me'. Greenberg meets Moon Unit Zappa. The Prank.

Still determined to achieve a rasping guitar tone, Winegar fiddled with the knobs on his Mesa Boogie amp. He did it; the sound knocked our socks off. He managed to record one pass of the melody line before blowing out one of the speakers in the Fender 2X12 cabinet. Working alone in the control room, Wallace sampled the guitar line and carefully overdubbed it throughout the entire song. To do this, he had to separate the guitar line into five samples and reconstruct the phrasing, one section at a time. We listened to a playback and were very impressed with the results. Puig expressed his admiration for Wallace's skill with the sampler.

Next up was Winegar on Hohner clavinet through an MXR phase shifter and a stomp box digital delay, amplified through a Fender Princeton combo amp and miked with a Shure SM-7 (a condenser mike, unlike the dynamic SM-57). He followed up by performing the song's acoustic piano parts.

A member of the band Faith No More dropped by to visit Wallace, who had produced the band's platinum hit 'Epic'. I was introduced to him and a female friend of his. She waved at me and said, "Hello, I'm Moon." I returned the wave, having no idea who she was. I figured it was a girl named Moon, nothing more. Later, Gates told me that I had just met Moon Unit Zappa. Wow! Moon Unit Zappa! Had I known this at the time, I would have been too petrified to wave back and smile.

The song's middle section features a collage of tightly edited samples laid over a steady drum beat. We began with a drum loop sampled off a Lounge Lizards album. To this, Berg, Puig and Gates added dozens of sounds, including:

• Massed clapping and applause
• An Abbey Road recording technician announcing, "Day Tripper, take one"
• An Indian vocalist, played in reverse
• The Emax II's built-in MIDI sequence demo run through a distortion unit
• Classical music recorded off the radio
• John Lennon spouting gibberish, taken from a rare bootleg recording
• Hank Williams, played in reverse

We were in such high spirits, Puig decided it was time to pull a little prank he had been preparing. Yesterday, Puig had secretly recorded (to DAT) a few seconds of a private phone call between Winegar and Jeannette Katz, a musician friend of his. As we listened to a playback of the song's middle section, Puig suddenly lifted a fader that brought up the DAT recording of Winegar's phone call. Everybody laughed, including Winegar. We managed to collect ourselves, but it must have dawned on Winegar that his conversation was now on tape and out of his reach.

Winegar and Jeannette Katz working on her demo tapes at the Pier Southern Mansion Studio

"Give me the tape," he demanded. Wallace explained that he couldn't simply hand over the tape, as it was an archive of material that had to be preserved. "I'll erase the phone call right away," he assured. "I'll do it right now." Winegar panicked. He lunged at Wallace, grabbing the tape and pulling for all he was worth. They struggled over the tape, nearly toppling a nearby equipment rack and sending a lamp crashing down to the floor. It was no longer a laughing matter. Puig joined the fray and tried to pull the frantic Winegar off Wallace. Eventually, Winegar released the tape and backed away, breathing hard and red-faced with anger. He glared at Puig and shouted, "That's fucked what you did, totally fucked! I'll get you back Puig! I'll get you and it will be evil."

Puig defended himself as best he could. "Look, it's over now. Just a harmless joke, two seconds of tape. Wallace is erasing it now, see? Just calm down." Winegar, keeping a wary eye on Puig, sat back down in his chair. Hours later, he had calmed down enough to record guitar parts for the song's verses. Puig, on the other hand, was deeply shaken by the incident and could not stop talking about it whenever Winegar was out of earshot. Urbano offered some sage advice: "Life goes on." I recommended that Puig have a private talk with Winegar to sort everything out.

The session ended at 6:15 P.M.