From peoples@moe.coe.uga.edu Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 15:08:20 -0700 From: Weirdo Reply to: postcard@lyman.Stanford.EDU To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: UT & Bottle Rockets recording anecdotes Hey, here's some little anecdotes that were told by John Keane. He has the best studio in town and has recorded both UT and the Bottlerockets. Uncle Tupelo ------------ "March 16-20, 1992" was the album title on Rockville Records. Peter Buck produced it. They did the whole thing in five days. I played some banjo, some acoustic guitar, some steel guitar. That's one of my favorite albums that I had ever worked on. It's real gritty, stripped down - totally acoustic, no electric guitars on it at all. Lots of songs about hard luck, coal miners, moonshiners, things like that. There's a lot of diversity in chord progressions and style of music. Some of the songs are just Jay and acoustic guitar. They were so focused and so well prepared for this album that basically we put them all in a room together, sat them in a circle, put a mic on everybody and hit 'record' and let it go. They don't screw up. Every song is first take - maybe fix one thing and then move on. That's the only way we were able to do it in that space of time." The Bottle Rockets ------------------ "Oh yeah... the Seven Shades of Shit! It's not the name of the album... Do you remember when it snowed really bad last winter? They got stuck in that coming down here to work on their album. They were going to spend five days - they spent two days in a parking lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken when the intersate closed, All they could do was sit in the car and drink beer and try to keep from freezing to death. By the time they got down here they were just nuts. They did the album in three days. That's probably the quickest album they've ever done. Every time somebody did something good like a guitar solo or something, they would say, 'Man, you played the seven shades of shit out of that guitar!' So, it became a catch phrase, and when they got home, they made me that plaque [points to plaque on the wall]." Not big stories, but I thought you guys might like to see it. Its a pretty big compliment for him to mention them as John has worked with some pretty notable people (REM, Indigo Girls, Robyn Hitchcock, etc). I have contacts that have those infamous Wilco demos. One is a tape of Wilco backing Syd Straw (who goes out with their manager, Tony) and Jeff also sings a couple of duets with her. The other tape is just Wilco. Wish me luck. If I do procure these things (the Syd tape should be easy), I'll send it to Jake or somebody to set up a tree. cya! Weirdo - peoples@moe.coe.uga.edu