Take "Too Far Gone," "Ways of Love," "Someday," and "Don't Cry" off the record. Those are the songs that bother me. The older songs all escaped when I wrote them. "Ways of Love" was a great song when I wrote it in '75, and if I had recorded it then... But I made a remake of it. It's hard for me to go back when I feel like I should be taking care of the new ones. If I don't get it when it's new, forget it. Then it gets fucked up. That's another frustration of making records. But I don't really make records - I do performances and I record them.

“Like a Hurricane” is probably the best example of Old Black’s tone, although if you listen too closely, it is all but ruined by all the mistakes and misfires in my playing. That was a memorable recording, though, for the feeling that comes out of our instrumental passages.

I always record every note played, whether it is a run-through or not, and the recording of “Like a Hurricane” is a great illustration of why I do that. When you do that, you catch everything. Most often the first time something is played is the defining moment. That is what I like to capture in my recordings. It is a strict rule that my engineers are there to record everything. The master recording I used for the final version of the track was the run-through when I was showing the Horse how the song went. That is why it just cuts on at the beginning. There was no beginning. There was no end. It is one of those performances you can never repeat; the cherry, the original expression of the song, the essence. We just kept wailing on those changes until we couldn’t move anymore.

One night in late November 1975, I wrote the “Like a Hurricane” lyrics on a piece of newspaper in the back of Taylor Phelps’s 1950 DeSoto Suburban, a huge car that we used to all go to bars in. Taylor was a great friend who lived on the mountain, and everybody loved him. He and Jim Russell were my buds back then. Jim was a cowboy who drove big machinery and was a really nice guy. In the mid-seventies, Jim and I hung out a lot and went to bars looking to get lucky. We had both recently broken up with our kids’ moms, and Zeke and Jenny, our two kids, would be in the truck in the parking lot when we went into the bars for “Daddy’s Boogie.” There was an Alaskan Camper on the back of my new 1975 Dodge Power Wagon, Stretch Armstrong, and Zeke and Jenny used to hang in it while we were doing our thing.

As was our habit between bars, we had stopped at Skeggs Point Scenic Lookout on Skyline Boulevard up on the mountain to do a few lines of coke; I wrote “Hurricane” right there in the back of that giant old car. Then when I got home, I played the chords on this old Univox Stringman mounted in an old ornate pump-organ body set up in the living room. It was painted antique white, and I had gotten it from Dean Stockwell, the great actor and another friend of mine in Topanga. None of the original guts were left inside the thing, but it looked great and sounded like God with this psychedelic Univox Stringman inside it I had hooked up so that it was hammering and overdriving a Fender Deluxe. I played that damn thing through the night. I finished the melody in five minutes, but I was so jacked I couldn’t stop playing.

A few months later at the Village in LA, I put on all the vocals as overdubs. I just had to hear that song finished. Crazy Horse had never sung it or even heard the words. It was just a rundown of the track, and it became the master recording of “Like a Hurricane.”

Brunniepoo schreef:
Such a Woman (Live): 8
Over and Over: 8,5
The Ways of Love: 7,5

En om het eensgezindheidsfeestje maar te verstoren:

Like a Hurricane: 9,5

Overigens wil ik iedereen er even op wijzen dat ik vanaf morgen een week lang een Greatest Hits van Gillian Welch en David Rawlings organiseer. Zijn in dit topic vast ook wel liefhebbers (en deelnemers) voor te vinden...