Hi! Yogi here, with all the poop you can stand about the contents of my first solo record, Any Raw Flesh? I’ve expounded at length about the sessions as they happened on the news page, so I’ll try to talk less about studio stuff and more about inside jokes, inspirations for certain arrangements, and the like. Of course, studio stuff is going to creep in; but hopefully, it will be information I haven’t discussed before.
A Brief Prologue
In late 1997, I was blown away by a record called Sluggo! made by Mike Keneally. I’d been in a musical funk for a long time, wallowing in confusion and self-pity. I hadn’t done anything creative musically in about a year, and was following an ill-advised course that would find me playing to tepid receptions in Top 40 bands for the next fourteen months. Keneally’s record invigorated me when I heard it; it was defiantly strange, defiantly tuneful, and wonderfully played and packaged. I decided that if Mike was going to self-release superb albums against all odds, and be HAPPY about it, then I should at least attempt to follow his example. Why not? Why had I gotten caught up in worrying about whether or not the music I wanted to make had any commercial prospects anyway? Wasn’t it the idea of making music that I had been drawn to in the first place, way back when I first started playing? Shouldn’t I then be making some music, regardless of who would or would not buy it? Of course I should!
The first pre-production rehearsal for Any Raw Flesh? happened at Bellevue’s Evolution Studios on January 17, 1998. That seems like an impossibly long time ago. The first sessions were at Cydonia Sound in Tacoma on February 7 and 8 of that year. There was a guitar session in March, and then another drum session in August with Josh Woodman. There was no more studio activity until February of 1999, when I moved the project to DiPietro Sound in Federal Way. All of the material recorded in 1998 was ultimately removed from the album.
Recording stopped for a while after the February '99 session and started up again in August. Why were there so many delays? In a word: money. I was saving up during periods of inactivity, and so the length of inactivity became a function of how long it took me to save a certain sum. From the beginning, I was determined not to cut corners financially on this project. If making the record sound good was going to cost some serious money, I waited until I had it saved before booking a session. In the meantime, I studied hard and spent a lot of time trying to increase my day job income, so that waiting periods between sessions could get shorter.
A Bit About The Artwork
In the summer of 1998, I contacted artist and old friend Paul Tury to see if he'd have the time and wherewithal to create the artwork for the album. Paul and I had played in Copper Einstein together back in '88-90, and I had been a fan of his art for longer than that. A few months after I contacted him, he sent me ten ideas for an album cover, several of which are represented here. All were amazing designs, but the one with the puppet in the box really leapt out and grabbed me. I knew it was the one. Once I finally had decided on the design, Paul went to town creating the rest of the art for the disc. When he sent me the full-color mockup last September, it took my breath away.
As you can see in the images, at the time Paul first started on the art, I hadn't decided under what name I was going to release the album; my given name, Shawn Farley, or the nickname I picked up over ten years ago, "Yogi". I finally opted for "Yogi" for practical reasons: most of the people in town that I know and/or have worked with over the years call me Yogi. I figured if any of them were to ever find a copy of the album lying around on somebody's soundboard, in a record store, or in someone's ashtray, they'd know who "Yogi" was, but not “Shawn Farley”. The title, Any Raw Flesh? is an anagram of "Shawn Farley", so I snuck my real name in surreptitiously anyway.
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OK, let’s get into the songs, shall we? To wit:
I Have A Very Bad Feeling About This
In April of 1998, the Top 40 band in which I was playing got a week-long engagement in Spokane. The pay was actually going to exceed my weekly salary at the contract job I was working at Microsoft, so I begged off from work, packed a bunch of my recording stuff, and took off across the state. Even though the venue provided a band house for the week (which wasn’t too bad as those things go), I had decided to get a room for myself at a Motel 6 or the closest facsimile I could find. The reason: to have a whole week to myself (during the day at least) with no distractions, where I could just WRITE NEW MUSIC. I distinctly remember writing the opening groove for this tune while sitting on the edge of my hotel bed. There was some kind of “breaking news” report on CNN about tornados striking towns in Tennessee. That riff stayed in the memory banks for about a year before I had the idea to match it up with the part that became the end section (the part with the AHHH vocals), a refrain I wrote five or six years ago. It always seemed like a great ending for a song to me, but I could never think of anything to go in front of it. The working title of this tune was “Soundcheck”, and there’s a hint of where that came from still hovering around the final arrangement. The idea I had was to write a song that would fit well at the beginning of a live show… and I wanted each instrument to come in gradually, one at a time. In my mind, the imaginary soundman took advantage of the build up to get the PERFECT live sound. So that’s why the keyboards start the tune, the drums and bass kick in, the guitars then make their grand entrance, and lastly the vocals.
The idea for the lyrical content hit me in the shower one day (I have a LOT of ideas in there; you should see my water bill), and the whole tune just fell into place. I basically sat down and transcribed the final arrangement of the song wholesale from what I was hearing in the shower. The only thing I elected not to reproduce from the demo version was a fade-in of the rhythm section at the beginning. The synth stuff was supposed to go on longer by itself, before the drums and bass fade in together. I scrapped that idea after Chris G and Bryan tracked their rhythm section parts. I drove around in the car for weeks listening to the faders-up mixes, and I grew to love that first kick/bass hit that starts off the track. It’s so… well, “BOOM!”
This was the first song that Bryan Beller tracked for me on this project, so I remember that aspect pretty fondly. As I mentioned in my account of the Beller sessions, it was writing this song that first caused me to think about asking Bryan to work on the project. To have the seed of the idea in early ’99, and then sit in a room watching him track it in November, was a fairly surreal circle of events for me. And of course, I love how giant the rhythm section sounds on this song. It really sets a good tone for the rest of the record. The tempo of the ending is slower than the main body of the piece, which made sequencing the song kind of a challenge. I’m sure it made it a challenge for Chris to play as well, since the tempo change happens right as he’s doing that roll on the floor tom that kicks into the ending. Drummers, try doing THAT with a gradually slowing click track in your ear.
The lyrics, such as they are, go a long way to describe where I’ve come from creatively, once you get past the novelty ha-ha aspect of the content. The SOUND of that ending section really comes from a deep place: it approximates my dazed feelings of wonder after I had seen a certain movie for the first time at age seven, on May 25, 1977. Laugh if you must, but that flick blew open doors in my young mind of which I hadn’t even been aware. It’s one of the reasons I’m as determined as I am to remain attached to creativity as a lifestyle. Lucas wrecked me! I’m done for! And happy about it.
My Love For Lois Is Real
The response to this song has been overwhelmingly positive. This tune is “the single”, no question about it. It’s an older morsel, originally written in January of ’94 or so. It was the first song I finished after the band I moved to Seattle with, Stop Hitting Me, folded. I had written it to be a Stop Hitting Me song, having handed the finished music with a title, concept, and the opening line (“Morning, time to rise and shine”) to lead SHM vocalist/lyricist Tobe Ramsey. He finished the first verse, but got no further before the band broke up. I liked his lines a lot, so I kept them and finished everything else myself. I think it's pretty obvious there was a different person writing the words for each verse. In mine, I borrowed a line from Prince’s “Starfish And Coffee”. The rhythm guitar stuff owes a huge debt to the playing of King’s X guitarist Ty Tabor, who probably had the single largest amount of influence on me of any guitarist in the 1990’s.
My little sister, usually my biggest fan, has a real problem with the lyrical content; she doesn’t find a goofy, up-tempo song about a stalker very funny. I have to remind her: IT’S FICTION! At the time I was writing it, I really enjoyed the “musical irony” of a happy song married to lyrics with a dark undertone. The title came from a bunch of silly inside jokes that were the natural course of living in a band house of bachelor musicians. I won’t go into those jokes here, but they were inspired by the first season of the TV show “Lois And Clark”, starring Teri Hatcher. She was such a babe on that show, and an inspiration for the SHM band house (which had a “No Yokos” sign hanging in the rehearsal room). The three samples of a woman’s voice you hear throughout the tune are of Teri from that first season (after that, the show went to hell quality-wise and we lost interest; I think our next band fixation was “Melrose Place”).
Chris is just a rock monster on this track. If you can believe it, he actually toned his performance down on this version, compared to the original demo we recorded back in ’94. I really love the cymbal stuff he does during the first half of the guitar solo. One of the real pleasures of working with Chris is that he’s a fountain of ideas, and he always “gets it” when I describe the feel of a section. I really love the dual hi-hats in the choruses. Two hi-hats are better than one! That drummer boy is good, and stuff.
This song was one of three songs recorded twice for this album. Chris and I originally recorded them in February of ’98 during the Cydonia Sound sessions, with Tobe Ramsey playing the bass. After moving the work to DiPietro Sound a year later, it became apparent that the first version wasn’t going to cut it sonically compared to the results I'd been getting with Darin, so we re-recorded it in June of 2000. The bass part on the chorus was Bryan’s improv on the day of the session. He came in knowing the part I sent him on the demo (which was very boring, root after root, ho-hum), and I asked him to make up a new part on the spot. He did, and there it is. That bass boy is good, and stuff.
The guitar solo, one of just a few on the whole record, was based on the one I did on the ’94 demo. I always liked that original solo and I got a little caught up in trying to reproduce it, which never works. It got so I could start and finish it well, but what to do in the middle? Darin came to the rescue; the doubled, swampy-slow-bendy-melody section was his idea. He sang it to me and I played it verbatim. And there it is!
The vocals came out well, I think. I actually added some new tweaks to the arrangement for this version, one of which came to me while listening to Bryan track his bass part. Me saying “YOU ROCK” in the solo section came from me addressing Darin through the control room window while tracking the vocals, not knowing the red light was on. The timing of it was unintentional and couldn’t be more perfect - it’s one of those happy accidents that just cracked me up every time I heard it, though Darin wouldn’t let me mix it as loudly as I wanted. That’s probably just as well.
There Is No More Evil In This World
If there was one song on the record of which I’m most proud, this would be it. From where I sit, it’s the most original sounding of the bunch. I tend to be comfortable writing mid-tempo rockers, judging by the large stack of them I’ve piled up over the years. This song was a conscious effort to write a “fast” song; it was inspired in part by a song Stone Temple Pilots released called “Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart”. I really enjoyed the frenetic feel of that song, the way the guitars blended in with the drums. I felt like trying something along those lines, and PLOP! This song appeared.
Most of the music was written in one weekend, but it took about two-and-a-half years for me to get the lyrics finished, mainly because the arrangement kept mutating. I had the title and end melody from the beginning; it’s one of those lines that came out of my mouth when I first wrote the ending vocal melody. I try not to argue with lines like that, even though it took a long time for me to decide on a context.
This song is also a potent demonstration of why it’s important to me to work with the best musicians I can find. Both Chris and Bryan completely transformed this song with their performances. Chris swears he found his chorus drum part in the drum machine demo I gave him, but I don’t hear it. In my mind, the magic is all his. That groove is my favorite thing I’ve ever heard Chris play. It’s really fun to watch him play it too. Chris’ absolute focus in the studio has to be observed to be believed.
And Bryan’s parts are a revelation. I had no idea coming into the sessions that he was planning to double the synth bass line. I didn’t give him explicit instructions as to what I was looking for (mostly because I had no idea what to tell him). There is a part of it that was pretty much impossible for a human to dupe (it happens in the choruses, and is played by the filtered synth). It ended up not mattering, as I asked Bryan to overdub a fuzz-tone melody during that part (another thing I sprung on him the day of the session). Bryan took that second melody part and mopped the floor with it, adding the harmonics and tying it into the existing parts without the bottom end turning to mush. This song was the only one of the lot that caused Bryan to break out in a visible sweat, as he tracked the dupe of the synth bass part. One thing he didn't mention in his comments was that he ran his bass through a Boss Octave pedal for the main line.
Darin DiPietro taught me a lot of lessons on this project, and here's one of them: you can record everything AND the kitchen sink on your songs (and I did, many of the songs on this album used 32 tracks), but when it comes time to mix them, you aren’t going to hear everything perfectly. And that’s… OK. There is just a ton of crap piled into this tune: three different bass parts, synth strings and bells, five vocal tracks, three heavy guitar tracks, and I insisted during mixing that I had to be able to hear EVERYTHING. There are some incredible bass licks Beller played that aren’t audible simply because there just aren’t enough frequencies available in which to hear them. This really bugged me at first. Finally, Darin was able to cajole me into seeing the big picture, and as I said, I’m really pleased overall with how this one turned out.
More props to Darin for suggesting I play the guitar solo on a 12-string Rickenbacker, a beast that I had never touched before. I had tried a few takes on my Strat and had a decent solo down, but it wasn't anything "special”. I’m proud of the final solo because I got it in one take (once I switched to the 12-string), even though parts of it flirt with being a bit “out of time” (sue me, it was improvised). I transcribed the melody of the section that’s doubled by synths after it was tracked and added it to the sequence, which is a fun thing to do. The working title of this was “No More Evil”, much shorter than the final title, but the short title sounded too Iron Maiden-ish to me. I changed the title to the longer version very late in the game.
Strange Ways
I love happy accidents, both while writing and recording. This song has a good example of one that happened during the writing stage. During the verses, the main groove goes in and out of a swing feel, which is dictated by the tom tom fills Chris plays. While working on the drum machine part of the sequence, I was typing in tom tom fills by hand into the sequencer. I had meant for the sequencer to count what I was typing as straight 16th notes, but I had set the input to triplets without knowing it. So my 16th note tom tom fills came out sounding like swing sixteenths, which to my ear was way cool. So it stayed in, much to the chagrin of all the musicians who had to play it – both Bryan and Chris mentioned the difficulty of dealing with such abrupt changes in feel. Sorry, guys!
I was listening to Seal’s second album quite a bit when I was writing this one, and the original arrangement has a lot more strings and a pretty prominent piano part. Darin made the decision to mix most of those things WAY back and I agreed with his decision. Bringing all that extra stuff to the forefront would have made the tune needlessly busy, and distracted from the vocals. You can hear the piano if you really listen hard, especially during the half-time breakdown. The other reason I don't mind that we mixed the keyboards nearly out of this one is that I'm not very good at faking piano playing. I'm a rudimentary keyboard player at best, and all the keyboard parts are painstakingly constructed in the sequencer. I can hear what keyboard parts SHOULD be in my head, and usually I can get out a reasonable facsimile, but there are certain things I just don't know what to do to make it sound like a real player. For the next album, I'm going to work with a real keyboard player, and maybe sequence only the easy parts or the boop-beep stuff to save time.
I really like the vocal arrangement on this song, and some parts of the chorus are among the hardest parts on the album for me to sing. I’m also fond of the string section “solo melody”, which evolved quite a bit and was going to be a lead guitar/strings duet. Once again, as happens with increasing regularity for me, I ended up scaling back the arrangement for a more direct approach. Chris' fills at the end of the choruses just slay me. This whole song was originally written completely on acoustic guitar which is a rare occurrence. I don’t consider myself much of an acoustic player. I have one of those round-back Ovations that I despise so I seldom touch it. But I guess you never know what song might pop out of the ether at you at any given time, and this one did on one of the days I braved the Ovation. Maybe I should give it another chance?
Firefly
There are parts of "Firefly" that I think might be the best work I’ve ever done, and there are parts that drive me crazy because I think I could have done better. Unfortunately, Darin had to deal with my perfectionist nature a great deal on this song, as I recorded the rhythm guitar parts at least three times.
I love playing rhythm guitar. I really admire the Jimmy Page/Edward Van Halen school of rock rhythm players, folks who favor intricate and very musical rhythm guitar parts. EVH rarely settled on playing parts built from just “power chords”. His parts were melodic pieces of their own, and often were detailed enough to stand apart from any vocals that might have been floating on top. I miss this kind of rhythm playing in pop music nowadays, as everything seems to be “power fifths… ready, GO!” I feel GUILTY making up songs built only with power chords, like I'm cheating somehow. I guess I just like to come up with very active things to do on rhythm, and I’m very proud of the stuff I did on “Firefly”. The piano melody was actually taken from a guitar part, which I felt was a little too bland. Something about playing that section on the piano really gives this song an eerie lift, at least in my view.
Chris does an incredible bit of four-limbed independence in the brief interlude between verses 1 and 2, and the whole last chorus build up he came up with using the china type gives me goose bumps. Bryan did a great job on the fly with this song in the studio; I love what he does on the intro and in the breakdown spacey section between the two final choruses particularly. Mixing this song was a bear. Trying to get just the right balance between huge guitars and huge drums was a touchy matter, and I was being a stickler about hearing certain things. We had a difficult time getting the snare to cut through the heavy sections. Chris was whacking the piss out of it, but I think the guitar and bass tones were taking up a lot of frequency space on their own and didn’t feel like sharing. Turning the rhythm guitars down in the mix only sent a lot of the song’s power flying off into the stratosphere. We eventually ended up adding more reverb to the snare hits in the pre-choruses and choruses to make the snare stand out, much to Darin's chagrin. Darin likes to keep things effects-free for the most part, but in a few cases I had to insist on a little extra something.
I think lyrically this song is one of the strongest on the record. I consider myself a “young” lyricist, as I’ve only been actively writing lyrics the last five or six years. I’ll likely never approach the genius wordplay of someone like Andy Partridge or Mike Keneally, but it is important to me that the words I write not be drowning in clichés. Any time you use the word “fire” in a song, you’re walking a tightrope. You’ve got to try to avoid the obvious “fire/desire/take me higher/Fred Meyer” traps.
Darin had a really neat idea for the vocals in the verses. I first tracked the main vocal line and then we overdubbed two passes of the same part, with me intentionally messing with the delivery. These are panned hard left and right in the final mix. Darin was barking instructions as I frantically tried to figure out how to do it like he wanted, for example: "Be meaner! Can you kinda whisper? Don't make it be perfectly in time with the main one!" One of the vocal tracks is delivered entirely through gritted teeth with a big Cheshire cat grin on my face without moving my jaw. If I hadn't been in an isolation booth by myself, I doubt I would have had the courage to do something that nutty. I'm glad there weren't any hidden cameras in there. A doctor seeing the footage would probably recommend that I be committed.
Throw Me A Bone
Oh, how I LABORED over this song! How I STRUGGLED to finish the words and come up with melodies! How convinced I was, driving home from the vocal sessions, that I had botched it completely! How SURE I was that this song was going to end up as the "red-headed stepchild" of the album! And oh, how happy I am with it despite all that!
This song in timbre was always supposed to be an obvious tribute to King's X. Gee-tars, bass, drums, pretty harmonies, syncopated riffs, I mean COME ON, you need a road map? The end vamp part was based conceptually on the long instrumental section of "Pleiades" from Gretchen Goes To Nebraska, something Bryan picked up on and mentioned in my very first telephone conversation with him.
The recording of the rhythm section parts was a breeze. Chris would have had it in one take if his bottom snare head hadn't broken in the middle, but he nailed it on take two. I don't recall Bryan having any problems with it either.
The struggles were all mine.
It started with the rhythm guitar. Unlike most of my songs, which are often punctuated by breaks and stops in the guitar parts, this one goes on for six minutes, and the guitars never, ever stop. I wanted the "wall 'o sound" for this track, so I insisted on triple-tracking the rhythm guitar: one track absolutely clean and tinkly, another semi-dirty yet still presentable, and another on full-on grunge death.
I picked the clean track to do first. It took six hours. I thought I would never get through it. Distorted guitar tones have a way of hiding your mistakes from you. Clean guitar is not as forgiving, and this song's rhythm part is full of arpeggiated chords with notes that ring into each other and for different lengths, and other notes that have to keep ringing while you reach over with whatever fingers are available and play along with the bass. So I had to get it RIGHT, and thank goodness Darin is a god with the punch-in pedal. I thought I had rehearsed this part to death, but something about the unfeeling ears of the Studio Gods just reveal every muffled note, every timing error. The ironic thing of course is that you can barely hear the clean track in the final mix. The other tracks went faster, thankfully, once I had the first one to play along with, and I got a wall of sound, all right.
The words and melody for the chorus came to me at the same time as the music for the chorus. I had written all of the other music for the song a couple of years prior (while listening to a lot of Steve Morse solo albums). I must have had three or four sets of lyrics for the verses and pre-choruses that got thrown out. I was trying to cram WAY too much stuff into WAY too little space. By the time I settled on what I wanted, I was going into the studio to record the vocals with little or no practice or rehearsal. Folks, it’s no fun standing in the studio trying to sing something you just wrote, only to realize your bitchen new idea is NOT GOING TO WORK. When you hear a pretty vocal part in your head, you don't necessarily think about having to EXECUTE that part in real-life. Facing this problem can be pretty humbling, which is why I typically demo out the vocals I want to do ahead of time.
The recording of the vocals took three separate sessions, about three-and-a-half to four hours each. After four hours of singing in the studio, I'm pretty much wiped for the day.
By the time we got to mixing, I was sure that poor little "Bone" was going to be a flop. Then a funny thing happened when I heard the mix: it didn't suck! I even liked it! In fact, the whole ending section turned into one of my favorite things on the record. I'm pretty sure this is Darin's favorite track on the disc, and I've overheard people singing along with this song.
I can't claim to know how this happened. I did my level best to wreck the tune at all times during it's creation and recording. Sometimes, you just need to get out of your own way; good things can happen when you do.
Truth
This is the oldest song on the record, and I almost didn’t record it for that very reason. In the liner notes for his album Boil That Dust Speck, Mike Keneally says of the tune “There Have Been Bad Moments”, “This was written in 1983. Singing it in 1994 feels like doing a cover.” That pretty much summed up my feelings about doing this song, but when it was confirmed that Beller was going to be involved in the production, I got happy about it again. When I wrote it in 1993, I was more than just happy about it, I felt it was the best thing I’d written up to that time. Though originally written as a solo “Yogi” song, “Truth” ended up in the SHM repertoire, and got played live a bunch of times. Obvious elements of my style circa ’93 in this tune include TWO guitar solos (old Yogi songs had a much higher lead-guitar-per-minute ratio, or L.G.P.M.), and vocals that were written with King’s X belter Doug Pinnick in mind (alas, you're stuck with listening to ME sing them).
Darin had some great ideas for this one. Listen to the intro backing guitars on headphones; I think there are like six or seven different guitars fading in and out at various times. One is an unamplified Strat that belongs to Darin. Another is a Danelectro (which I kept re-tuning to DADGAD to play “Kashmir”), and Darin’s two acoustics are on there too. I like the mix of acoustic and electric throughout, especially in the pre-choruses.
Chris reprised most of his parts from our ’93 demo of the tune, but he’s matured a lot as a player since then and this new version is much tighter. We also opened up the drums on what I call the “heavy verse”, the section that crashes in after the quiet interlude in the middle. For this recording (and actually for when we used to do it live), I requested that Chris attempt to channel Tommy Lee for that section. Chris plays some great fills in this version, especially the one right at the beginning of the ending guitar solo.
I LOVE Beller’s use of the BassBalls pedal during the aforementioned “heavy verse” section; it’s such a great texture. I also timed the fade out at the end to finish right after a really cool lick that Bryan does. Hey, you got great players, you want to take care of ‘em, ya know?
I was sure while playing the take of the ending guitar solo that's on the album that I had botched it. Instead of stopping and starting over, I kept going, trying to look for ideas that I could use for the next take. When I was done, Darin insisted on making me listen to it, and I had to admit there were some entertaining moments. The middle solo took FOREVER, as I was stuck in a rut from the get-go and felt completely idea-less for hours as I toiled away on it. As I wrote in my account of those sessions, Darin saved the day by forcing me to play a few takes on his Danelectro baritone guitar which, by virtue of its strings having the circumference of young redwood trees, forced me to try different approaches. After hacking away on that thing for a while, I picked up my regular guitar and knocked out what you hear on the record in two or three tries. I think Tony Robbins calls this kind of thing “pattern-breaking”. Yeah.
Do Not: Disturbed!
I had a LOT of fun coming up with alternate titles for this: “Just Press The Skip Button Now”, “Bathroom Break”, “Is My CD Player Broken”, etc. I like this song a lot and view it as my “License To Be Weird” on future projects. No one can say they weren’t warned.
This started out as something written completely on paper before I ever heard a note of it. I used to work on it in the various dives I played in my Top 40 days, and I did a healthy chunk of it on an airplane flight from Seattle to Chicago to Manchester, NH in May of ‘99. I had been reading about how 12-tone music works and it started out as an attempt at a piece based on a tone row. I think toward the end I started taking liberties with the “rules”, so I doubt it would survive under severe scrutiny by 12-tone scholars. When I got home from my trip, I typed it into Finale, pressed play, and cackled like a loon at what came out.
At some point, I thought it would be deliriously funny to superimpose the whole thing over a hip-hop beat and overdub a whole bunch of silly rapper-isms. I’m glad I left out the rapping.
I did not have a guitar handy when scoring the guitar part, but I paid attention so that nothing I put down was outside of guitar range (I wasn’t so diligent with the other instruments so I have no idea if the other parts are playable by real musicians). There’s a lick in bar 11 that is the single-most practiced part of the album for me. Want to see it? OK!  I’m sure I drove my roomie Amanda to bouts of near-insanity by playing that lick over and over and OVER.
This track was on the original tape I sent to Bryan when inquiring about his availability. As much as I love Finale, as much as it is the best product I’ve encountered for correctly playing simultaneous “impossible polyrhythms”, it has one huge downside: it cannot be synced up with outside sequencers, be they hardware- or software-based. When I found out I was having huge problems getting all of my stuff to sync properly, I took the song off the list for the November ’99 session. With the patient assistance (via email) of Scott Lurowist, I was finally able to get my MIDI/sync stuff straightened out in time to include this track on the album, albeit with a synth bass. Thanks, Scott!
You Fell
I was pounding on my 7-string late one night and was about to turn in, when all of the big heavy riffs started popping out one after the other. I stayed up until 5:00 AM getting down a basic demo. The next day, I wrote the music for the verses and wrote the chord progression for the bridge. All the lyrics for the pre-chorus and choruses came out in the initial blast from beyond. I wish I could make this process happen on demand, but I only get it a few times a year and then only if I’m paying attention. SIGH.
The lyrics for the verses are derived from a nonsense story I scribbled in my lyric book. There’s a lot more to the story, but I think I grabbed the best bits for the song. I completely re-wrote the end of verse two the night before recording it in the studio. I need to stop doing that.
I really enjoyed pretending to be Trent Reznor on the verse sections. I spent some time trying to write something for the guitar to do during those parts, but ultimately realized I was just obscuring all the neat keyboard thingies. I made the verses last fairly long because I found myself really wanting to soak in the vibe that part sets up. Attempts to edit the verses always made the arrangement sound too hurried for me.
This song is the only one to feature Tobe Ramsey on bass guitar. He used three basses; a Carvin fretted 5-string for the rock band parts, a Carvin fretless 5-string during the verses (doubling the stand-up bass sample), and Darin’s Mexican Precision copy for the Abbey Road coda.
I love having a song with a coda! If you haven’t noticed, it’s a reprise of the “Talk To Joan” bridge from the main part of the tune. When I was working out the vocals for that middle bridge, I hadn’t yet come up with the arrangement. So to have something to sing to, I hammered out the chords on a piano patch in full-on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”-style. That section had much more elaborate vocals on the demo than are on the final version (once again, I scaled back at tracking time). So I demo-ed out the vocals while listening to the “bonk-bonk” piano, and found myself giggling like an idiot as I did. I’ve learned over the years that if something makes me laugh a lot, I’m headed in the right direction. At last, it occurred to me to reprise the bridge at the end of the song after a brief message from John Candy, whose dialog from (Guesses? Anyone?) Splash provided me with the name of the song. Darin totally ran with the idea to mix the ending in the style of the old Beatles records (even though he doesn’t LIKE the Beatles), and as Chris detailed in his comments, we completely messed with the drum setup by detuning the snare and bass drum heads to make everything floppy. That’s a real B3 I’m playing, the only “live” keyboards on the record. I was fascinated that you have to “start up” a B3 to play it. How quaint! My initial idea was to overdub several tracks of whistling for that melody; but as it turns out, I’m a really bad whistler. You know who can whistle? Billy Joel can, that’s who. Anybody know his email address?
“You Fell” was the most recent of all the songs, and as such gives the best indication as to where I'd like to see the next CD go. Lyrically, I was determined to get in a fair amount of whimsy to counter the abundance of gloom piling up elsewhere on the album. I’m not the grumpy curmudgeon that the material on Any Raw Flesh? seems to project, OK? I have a hard time writing outright happy tunes, but goofy and upset I’ve got down in spades.
What Have We Here?
And here we come to the closer. For some reason, all the long songs on the album got collected at the end of the running order. I didn't mean for things to turn out that way, I swear. This song went through a long gestation period before it got to its current form. I have at least two demos of it that are completely different from this one. For starters, the tempo used to be about double the current one, and the tune was a lot more guitar-based. There was a riff in the original version that got it briefly entitled "The Whitesnake Song"; needless to say, that riff was jettisoned as quickly as I could manage. Usually when I finish a song, I'm really happy about it and listen to it over and over for a week or two. If I don't get that happy feeling, I don't call it done. I'll keep tweaking and tweaking until I feel good about it. On this one, I kept getting to stopping points where I thought it should be finished, so I'd record a demo... and it would leave me cold. There was something about the ideas going on in the song though, especially the chorus, that would not leave me alone. I HAD to keep fiddling.
This song and "No More Evil" were both influenced strongly by my old roommate (circa 1996), Rocco Polan or Rocky as we call him. Rocky led a band called Thread that did really well in Seattle from 1994-96. In the first part of '96, yours truly occupied the bass chair when Rocky decided he wanted to concentrate solely on singing for live shows. Thread started out as a power trio strongly influenced by Alice In Chains, but inhabited its own niche when Rocky got a keyboard and started writing new songs exclusively with it. Up until that point, I had been pretty resistant to having keys in any bands I was in. I always felt they detracted from the guitar assault I wanted to hear. Listening to the material that ended up on Thread's second CD was a real revelation, and I also picked up The Downward Spiral at about the same time. After that, I was a goner. Keys were more than cool, they were essential. I got myself a Roland sequencer and an EMU Proteus FX sound module, and I was off to the races. One of the first things I did was go after "What Have We Here?" and almost everything in the version on the album came from my first "keyboard" take on the song. In late '96, I briefly had a power trio that was going to get out there and play Yogi music. I borrowed some ideas the drummer came up with for the Any Raw Flesh? arrangement, especially the swishy hi-hats on the end vamp. My original drum machine idea for that section was this really angular tom tom-based thing that didn't groove. One of the big reasons I take as long as I do to finish songs is because I frequently spend time following dead-end ideas all the way to their absurd conclusions. It always takes awhile to find my way back after one of those detours.
Chris does another astonishing job on this track. This is a SLOW tempo to play, but he makes it sound easy as pie. The toms really SPEAK on this one; I sure do love that Darin fella's drum sounds. I love the fill right before the last chorus when Chris goes down, and then back up, on the toms. So cool.
And Beller got the best distorted bass tone EVER, beating what I always thought would be my favorite, Geddy Lee's tone on "Red Barchetta". This song was supposed to have a fadeout ending, but the way the basic tracks ended with all the instruments dropping out and just Beller's snarling bass left behind sounded way too perfect. I LOVE that bass sound. There was a lot of genuine studio magic happening as Bryan tracked the ending chorus and outro in one pass. I held my breath for the whole take; it was humbling watching a musician that talented playing music I wrote that passionately. If I could freeze moments like that and live in them forever, I would. Thanks, Bry. I'll never forget that one.
The vocals are very, very naked and up front and I'm singing probably as quietly as I possibly can; the gain on the preamp was cranked as I sang the non-loud parts. I could hear airplanes flying by through the studio soundproofing in the headphones, the microphone was so hot. I find it pretty unnerving listening to this song because of how bare the vocals are. I usually hide behind the ensemble when I sing, and for this song I couldn’t do that. I love how the layered vocals turned out in the last chorus; that's at least eight tracks of Yogi vocals there, ladies and gents. How I'm going to do that live is anyone's guess.
The Imperial March
OK, this one speaks for itself, doesn’t it? It tickles me that lots of people are not noticing this on their first couple of listens. That’s what so-called “hidden” tracks are for, baby!
I transcribed this from the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition soundtrack and transposed the key from G minor to E minor (a more guitar-friendly key). There are at least ten guitar tracks on this, possibly more. The guitar "orchestra" contains a slew of Darin’s guitars: a Telecaster, a Danelectro, one of those big Gretsch monstrosities, a Les Paul, various Strats, and other stuff I can't remember. Once again, Chris and Bryan played like gods and make me look good. There’s a second movement to this piece that would have been so much fun to do, but I didn’t want to wear out my welcome. I wanted a little piece like “Growth”, that tiny morsel Van Halen stuck at the end of their Women And Children First album. I always thought that was a nice touch. Also, thematically this piece brings the album full-circle – I all but tie the thing with a little bow.
***
Nuts N’ Bolts
People have asked me about the gear used on the album and since I have no “gear page” on Wonky.Net, here's a little info about what stuff got used for those who enjoy that type of information.
Guitars
The main guitar for six of the 11 tracks was a red Ibanez RG 560 that I bought in 1989 at Veneman Music in Springfield, Virginia. That model was a "cheaper" version of the Jem series, with the Ibanez tremolo. The original pickup configuration was single|single|humbucker, but I had the humbucker pulled out and replaced with a Van Zandt single-coil. The guitar is tuned (low to high) to C#, G#, C#, F#, A#, D#, or Drop-D 1/2-step down. That was the main guitar for “I Have A Very Bad Feeling About This”, “Lois”, “Strange Ways”, “Firefly”, “Truth”, and “What Have We Here?” All the solos on those tracks were done with it. I've since retired the 560, and won't be using it except possibly in the studio. I've grown to like Strat necks better.
 The main guitar for “There Is No More Evil In This World”, “You Fell”, and “The Imperial March” is an Ibanez Universe, one of the black ones with green pickups, which I got in 1992. I used it only for rhythms, no leads. It's tuned standard, with a low B string. It has two humbuckers with a single- coil in the middle. I'd rather have three single-coils, but they don't make 'em like that. Oh well.
The guitar used for “Throw Me A Bone” and “Do Not: Disturbed!” is a 1997 Fender Strat Plus, which has the stock gold lace sensors in it. Everybody ranks on those pickups, but they sound good to me through the amps I use. This guitar is tuned standard. I also used this Strat for lead guitar on “You Fell” and “The Imperial March”.
On all instruments, I used D'Addario strings, the .009 to .042 set. On the drop D guitar, I used a .046 on the low string, and I think I have a .055 on the 7-string low B.
Those were all MY guitars. Studio proprietor Darin DiPietro has a ton that I used on various overdub parts.
The acoustic guitars used all belong to Darin. I don't own a decent acoustic. The one we used the most is a Takoma. I think we might have used a Martin on “Truth” as well, but the Takoma sounded best, so we used it for most of the acoustic stuff.
Amps & Things
We only used two amps for the whole album. The one for the distorted sound belongs to me, and it's a Lab Series L5, a solid-state amp. It's most famous for being B.B. King's amp of choice, and was also used exclusively by Ty Tabor on the early King's X albums (including Gretchen Goes To Nebraska), which is how I heard of it. All distorted guitar tones came from this amp. It's a 2x12 combo, but I didn't use the speakers in the amp (one of which isn't connected). We took a line out of the power amp and ran it into Darin's old Marshall 4x12 that has 60 watt Celestions. Yes, I said 60 watt, which Darin says are no longer made. I forget what we miked the cabinet with, but I can tell you it was NOT a SM-57. There was usually a close microphone and a farther microphone, but we almost exclusively used the close one during mix down. During mixing, I know Darin would sometimes mix in the distant microphone track for effect on certain sections. You can hear one instance at the end of “No More Evil”, on the rhythm guitar that keeps slamming a low D chord over and over again.
For lead guitar, I typically ran whatever guitar I was playing through an MXR micro amp for some gain boost. The Wah pedal used was called a Buddah Wah, also Darin’s. It's purple.
The only time we really mucked with the distorted tone was on the solo for “You Fell”. I ran the guitar into the micro amp, and then into a Big Muff Pi turned all the way up, and an MXR Phase 90. That was a seriously out-of-control tone. The feedback at the beginning of the solo is just me turning up the volume knob of the guitar sitting in the control room.
The amp used for clean tones was one of Darin's, a Fender Vibra-King. It sounds amazing. Darin has a ton of vintage amps, and I intend to play with more guitar tones on the next album.
Other
My keyboard setup has three modules: an Alesis DM5 drum module, an EMU Proteus FX, and an EMU Orbit (the old one, not the V2 they came out with later). They are controlled by a Roland MC-50 MKII sequencer, which generates its own sync. “Do Not: Disturbed!” was a Finale 97 piece that was played into Cakewalk 8, which was then synced up to the ADATs via SMPTE generated from an Opcode 8-port MIDI/SMPTE box.
Any Raw Flesh? was recorded on 4 ADATs, with a BRC to control them. The songs were mixed to a Sony analog 2-track machine. The mixes were then transferred to a Sony DAT recorder. During mastering, the DAT was played through a TC Electronic Finalizer (and a big rack of tube pre-amps for added warmth) into Sound Forge on a PC.
Darin’s studio moved in the middle of the project. The drums and bass were all recorded in the original location, which was in an industrial office park. The main room had nice high ceilings. Most, if not all, of the ambience on the drums comes from two room microphones that were about 10 feet in the air on both sides of the room. The new location is in a building on the property of Darin's new house. Tracking was finished and the album was mixed and mastered there.
That’s it! Whew! In closing, let me just reiterate that I’m ecstatic with the way things turned out, and I’m very grateful for the new friends I’ve made in the process. I’m already writing the next record, and promise that it will be made with the same eye toward quality in all aspects of the production as Any Raw Flesh? was.
Thanks to all who have purchased the disc and have generously given me feedback. The reactions have been wonderful and humbling. I hope I’ve been able to provide some new insight into the tracks – there’s plenty of old insight in the news archives.
Thanks for reading,
Yogi
3/28/01
P.S. - Yogi gratefully acknowledges the editorial assistance of Amanda "Beta Girl" Wernert in the preparation of this piece.
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