Week 8 - Monday 4/29/1991

Recording "Grassheads", "Special"

The day began with Winegar doubling Gates' strummed acoustic guitar part.

Much of the day was devoted to experimentation with echoes, reverbs, and other studio effects on the lead and backing vocals. Wallace tried applying Harmonizer effects to the "Jane Jane Jane" vocal line, but it ended up sounding too much like David Bowie's "Change Change Change" line from "Changes", so he ended up using a Roland Space Echo with plenty of feedback on the repeat echoes. Next, at Gates' suggestion, Puig ran the previously recorded intro vocal part through a Leslie speaker set to its fastest spin rate and printed the effect to a separate track.

Gates had listened to rough mixes of our work so far over the weekend and approved of what he heard. "It needs to be mixed right," he said. "But I listened for performance and spirit, which was all there." Winegar replied that he was relieved to hear this.

Puig placed Gates in the studio lounge to record falsetto vocals for the pre-choruses. Many years ago, Johnny Cash had recorded his vocals in that very same lounge, so Puig was eager to give it a try. Wallace suggested that Winegar sing the falsetto parts too, which he did. Winegar listened to a playback and grumbled, "It fucking sucks." The rest of us thought it was great.

Gates and Winegar added harmonies to the "Heads heads" line before deciding to let Winegar sing that part by himself. He asked Puig to "distort the shit out of it and compress it." Gates didn't like how it sounded. He explained that he wanted an "I am the Walrus" effect on the vocals instead. We sat around in the control room for a while, searching for production ideas that would satisfy Gates. I suggested that we try singing "Heads" on one track and speeding it up one octave on another. This we tried, but Gates and Winegar rejected it. Ignoring them, Wallace sampled one set of these and dropped them onto the pre-choruses throughout the song. Puig said that he'd send the signal through a Leslie speaker during the remix stage.

When Puig is idle in the control room, he often spins the knobs and rapidly flicks the switches on his rack gear. This is called "exercising the controls" and serves to clean electrical contact points.

At 2:30 P.M., Gates, Winegar, Berg, Puig and I stood around a microphone making silly noises to be dropped in throughout the song. I doubt that any of it will end up on the record.

The amplifier technician returned the Masco amp that Winegar had blown up recently. Not only did he replace two burned-out preamp tubes, but he installed a three-way switch that acts as a treble control. Total cost: $102.00, paid for by Geffen Records.

Winegar overdubbed a spacy-sounding guitar for the intro section, using a Strat into a Vox Super Beatle Head driving a blond Vox cabinet. He then doubled the part so that Puig could pan each track to the opposite extremes of the stereo image. Gates wanted something added to the instrumental bridge, so everybody gathered around a microphone and recorded ourselves clapping, laughing, and reading aloud from books. It didn't sound right.

Gates and Winegar recorded additional weird vocal noises to match what had been used on the demo version. We wanted to overlay crowd ambiance effects from a sound library CD, but we had run out of tracks. Puig snipped the 24 track master tape and inserted some leader tape between the intro section and the rest of the song. This enabled him to use two drum tracks for the crowd sounds without accidentally recording over the drums that come in after the intro section. Once the crowd sounds were on tape, Puig removed the leader tape and spliced the master tape back together. At 6:45 P.M., Wallace ordered us to begin working on a new song.

The rest of the evening was spent working on drum and bass sounds for the next song to be tackled: "Special".