I loved that story! Lots of familiar names and faces in there from my years working with people from the Village crowd, including Geordie. Six hours on two words! That's pretty irritating if you're not the ones doing it.Babz wrote:Steely Dan. 6 hours spent on two words ("well the" on the song Home At Last). Steely Dan stories are always good, but this is one of the best, mostly for the Wayne Shorter story, but the part about "well the" is classic!
http://www.jazzwax.com/2011/07/how-stee ... orter.html
I was co-creating a cover of Stairway in the early 1990s, and there's this place right after the mellotron opening and first stanzas where there is a pause, then it goes into a rhythmic guitar strumming figure, flowing along before getting to the heavy rock solo section. It's that guitar strum that we were trying to do on 5 pianos. (Disklaviers, 4 on MIDI and one solo) It had to have the lightness of guitars, yet be captivating and signal this big change of mood, all in the first two bars. We worked those two bars for 2 and a half days. It was exasperating. You know how the sense leaves a word if you say it over and over? It was like that, only the artist I was working with did not understand why it never sounded right to him. I would explain that it's never going to sound right if we do it that way. He wanted to continue. In the end, I inserted one of the first 5 versions, and he loved it. He didn't know it was an old one. He thought I'd created a new version, and that it was finally the right one. Oh... wow. That was a sore point for years afterward!
Shooshie
