So, here we are again, and we have to begin again. Everyday is new like the sun never came up before if you play your cards correctly.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an airplane. I was a weird kid. Other kids did sports. I thought sports were stupid. I ran around the playground with my arms outstretched like I was an F-4U or a Zero. I wanted to shoot other kids down but there were only a few other planes in the class, and honestly, those guys were even weirder than me. I eventually got old enough such that I cared what other kids thought, and I stopped “flying.”

One day in the early winter, in, I think, second grade, I was on some sort of mission, and I looked over at the jungle gym, and I had a vision. And I mean it — an actual vision. I’ve never had one since.

The jungle gym in this particular section of West Side School’s playground was a curved arch with rungs. Picture a ladder bent in a half-circle with the base and top buried in the ground. It sort of looked like the prosceneum arch of a theatre.

In my vision, under that arch was a rock band, and I was in it over to stage right (house left), and vision me was wearing the same quilted greenish nylon winter coat that airplane me was wearing. And vision me was still a second grader, but vision me was playing an electric guitar.

There was no electric guitar in my house growing up. There wasn’t even rock music. My parents listened to shit. Musak. Montovani and His Orchestra. 1000 and 1 Strings. The coolest record they had was Vaughn Meader’s The First Family, which is actually a really cool record but it was a comedy album about the Kennedys and it sure didn’t rock.

Vision me wasn’t playing an ambiguous, generic electric guitar. I remember it really specifically. It had a light colored neck, the headstock was long and all the tuning pegs were on one side of it. It had two cutaways and a three-toned sunburst finish — black to orange to yellow. White pickguard. Three pickups. It was very clearly one of these:

The back cover of Layla.
Layla came out in 1970, and I might have seen the album cover somewhere. Or maybe I saw someone on TV playing the same guitar. A sunburst Fender Stratocaster is pretty common in rock ‘n’ roll. Whatever. That is what I saw in my vision. At the time I had no idea what I was looking at, really, but the sight of it was clear as traffic lights.

I didn’t start playing guitar in second grade. I didn’t jump into music. I wasn’t haunted by my vision like some North Shore of Long Island Joan of Arc. I didn’t trade in my airplane. I was teased out of my airplane. I just went cluelessly through school like any other kid of average IQ and high laziness.

I finally started on guitar late in 7th grade, after playing and giving up on the piano, the trumpet and the french horn. I was playing a diffident trombone, some guy owed my dad money, and to repay the debt he gave my dad a Guild Starfire Mk III. So I started playing guitar.

Guild Starfire Mk 3. The finish is killer, but it sounds like ass.
I didn’t really like the Guild. The bridge would slide around, one of the pickups was dead, and it sounded all nasal and like shit. I guess it was beautiful if you kinda wanted to look like Ted Nugent. Repulsive thought. Ted used a different guitar, a Gibson, but it looked a lot like the Guild.

I didn’t like my Guild. But I loved to play it.

So, that was basically all I did. School, guitars, and records, and not necessarily in that order.

Eventually I got a Stratocaster knock-off, because I couldn’t afford a real Fender. Mine was a Hohner, and it had a sunburst and a whammy bar — it was the vision guitar. It sorta sounded like shit, too, but I loved it. Wish I still had it. I rewired it and swapped out pickups and eventually it went to lost guitar heaven, I guess sometime between when I moved back from college and when my parents sold their house.

I still don’t have a Fender Strat. I have a sunburst maple neck Tokai Stratocaster from 1985 that is an absolute monster. It plays better than any Fender I’ve ever picked up. And it sounds great.

My Strat with a few of its 14 friends.
I guess that vision on the playground led me to that guitar, to guitars in general, to the Beatles’ Revolver album, which was the first record I ever bought and which BLEW MY MIND. I have to say this: there is almost nothing cooler than choosing goddamn Revolver off the shelf in a record store not knowing anything about the record other than Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine were on it. It’s like the hand of God was involved.

The best record ever recorded.
Revolver… that led me to wanting to make music, specifically records. It made me want to record. And eventually I did that, recorded and produced rock albums (and some jazz and other stuff) all through my twenties and into my thirties until I was stopped dead cold by tinnitus, which wreaked my life.

It wreaked a life. A possible life. A life like in the movie Source Code, in which descisions made split the hero’s path into different possibilities curving off into time-space.

I suppose there’s a life somewhere in which I didn’t get tinnitus, in which I still make records. And another one where I play the french horn. And in yet another one… I’m still an airplane!

I’m starting this bit of writing, this whole enterprise (endeavor, extravaganza, disaster, etc.) stuck. I don’t know what to write. I just exhaled and made a “fluppping” sound because my lips sort of buzzed and flapped. Stuck.

It seems impossible to be stuck. I have a million things in my head and heart to write about. I have tremendous motivation — financial, personal, psychological. I want to help people. I want to change the world. I want to have an impact. I’m 56, it’s time to do something big, damnit! And here I am stuck at the very beginning.

Well, not quite stuck at the beginning anymore — I’m on the third paragraph and at 100+ words not really stuck, but not really saying anything either.

When I was sitting stuck, 120 words ago, I had a thought, which was to get out my Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies deck, and pick a card.

For those not familiar with the above mentioned, it is a deck of cards that have prompts written on them. Developed by music producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies found use on David Bowie albums, U2 records, and still turn up in recording studios from time to time.

You pick a card and implement the prompt. Now, the deck doesn’t have writing prompts. Whatever is on the card is deliberately oblique — the cards are subtitled, “Over 100 worthwhile dilemmas.” So, rather than clear instruction like, “Write a story in which something seemingly innocent symbolizes something much darker,” an Oblique Strategy might be …let me just grab a card here… hmmm. “In total darkness or in a very large room, very quietly.” Hmmm…

In a recording studio, you might immediatly turn off all the lights and listen to the playback of the song at low volume. Or maybe set-up microphones all over the studio and have the lead singer cut a vocal while sneaking around in the dark. For a visual artist, maybe it’s a painting done in blacks with a tiny brush, or maybe it’s working in the dark, or maybe you apply it more literally: you paint a picture of a large dark room with many small quiet animals in it. A mouse. A sloth. A bat. Hmmmm.

For a poet it could be a first line, or one could cut up the words on the card and re-arrange them into something else (another Eno Bowie technique for writing lyrics). A dancer — choreograph something in the dark? Turn off the theatre lights and make the audience strain to hear the slap of feet and the creak of joints?

My head lights up with ideas as it tries to solve the worthwhile dilemma! I love my Oblique Strategies cards! But where to use them for this blog post?

It turns out the moment I reached for the cards, in that split second of movement, in which, unbidden, an image of me opening the box and flipping over a card appeared in my head, another thought hit me, which was: Write about being stuck. Write about starting.

And where else can one begin this sort of venture, this expedition, except at the beginning, except that the stuck point?

Accept the beginning. Accept the stuck point. Start from stuck. Admit it. Confess it. There is no shame to hide, although it feels that way. Shame. Of course shame. After all, we’re creatives, right? We’re suppose to always have ideas. We’re suppose to know what to do. And when we don’t, we feel broken. A misfit toy. The water pistol that shoots jelly, ashamed and stuck with the other losers like the Charlie in a Box. Maybe I’m confusing my issues, my personal myth (“You always have an idea, Luke”) with the way of the world. I don’t think so. I think shame is the bag into which an artist stuffs all their baggage.

Over 650 words. I think I’ve said something finally, but I’m not sure what. Regardless, for this endeavor, for the purposes of this enterprise, I’ve made a start.

Remember, Luke! Remember: There must always be a start. It can be awful, it can be great, it can be anywhere inbetween, but it has to BE. Something to criticize is better than nothing to notice, and it’s impossible to improve on nothing.

Begin!

It’s verging on summer but the temperature hovers at 59

If you were visiting from another planet you might think it was a lucky day in a mild winter

So you do a magic trick for that kid in the shop where you get your coffee

There’s people walking to the stadium like sports at church on Sunday

Sitting on a bench eating a plain bagel

Plain New York bagel

Why do people think these things are special?

They’re just bland out of shape donuts that no one paid attention to in the manufacturing process

They’re only good as a sherpa for something else — salmon, peanut butter, bacon, a schmear of something:

“That’s you, Lenny,” says Lenny to Lenny.

The kid in the shop is too young to grow up remembering that guy who got the coffee and a bagel, and did a magic trick

You, Lenny: God has decided that you die texting

A new project! Congratulations! You’re starting off on a new project!

It doesn’t have to be art, necessarily. It could be design, writing, a new job, entrepreneurship, whatever. There’s something you want to do and there it is, right before you!

Actually, no. What’s right before you looks exactly like a dark, scary forest. Trees with spasmed branches, tangles of vines, leaves clotting the ground — all that stuff. Perhaps there’s a mist, the sun goes behind a cloud, and someone cues the ominous music.

And there’s an entranceway — a break in the forest wall that reveals a sliver of a path. And that’s the path you’re going to go down.

Standing at the entrance, contemplating the path, there you are.

The hair on your back, the rows of hair on either side of your spine, your hackles, twitch and stand up. It occurs to you that in that forest, down that path, somewhere on it, is a bear.

A huge bear. And it’s waiting for specifically you, in the forest, so it can kill you.

If you go down that path, you’re going to have to fight that bear. You know this. You see the battle in a flash in your imagination, the bear pulling your arms off, a swipe of its paw knocking half your face into pulp.

Are you going down that path into that forest? Your project lies through it.

You going, or is the bear scaring you off?

One time, I stood at the forest entrance, and softly called, “Bear… Mr Bear…” and waved around a piece of raw steak. Eventually, I heard a snuffling and shuffling, the cracking of twigs, and then the bear, it appeared.

It was about my height, and kind of mangy. As it got closer, I thought I could see a zipper, and… well, it was clear that the damn bear was actually some fucking guy in a bear suit.

Man, I was pissed!

I threw down the steak, strode over to the “Bear,” gave it a huge push, knocking it to the ground. Before it could recover, I grabbed its head and pulled. It popped of easily, and behind it was a scared, confused face.

It was the face of boy that was just tearing up after getting yelled at by dad. It was the face of an awkward kid leaning close to a bathroom mirror to pop a zit before running downstairs to catch a bus to school. It was a face in pain from multiple failures. From criticism. From not quite trying hard enough, and knowing it. It was the face of jealousy, the face of not being the best in the class. The guilty look of too much time on video games and not enough practice.

It was my face.

The two of us sat there looking at each other for a bit: Me, and me in a bear suit.

Finally, I said, “Well, now that I know just what you are, you’re going to go away.”

Me in a bear suit laughed. “Nope. I’m never going away. I’m gonna take that steak and go back in the woods and wait for you. There’s no getting rid of me.”

Bear suit picked up the steak, tucked it under his arm, then recovered his head and slapped it back on. For a moment, the Bear was back in all its awesome threat. Big. Angry. A killer. And then a moment later it was a scared boy. A nothing. A fucking guy in a bear suit.

And then in was gone, down the path somewhere.

That bear will always be there, dressed in the cheap costume of all the worst times of your past. Events half-remembered, fears no longer causal or even logical, the criticism of the dead or the mostly forgotten, and just enough truth so that the claws and teeth have true menance. The bear, after all is you, and it knows you right up to the reading of this next word and then beyond that.

But the bear ultimately can’t kill you, because it IS you. To kill you is to kill itself, and the bear is nothing if not a survivor.

You see, the bear is trying to keep you from going down the path. The bear doesn’t even want you in the forest. Because the bear is afraid, too. Not of you, but for you. The bear knows the path is hard, and it think’s you’re soft. And it’s right, especially if you are going to be afraid of a fucking guy in a bear suit.

Some of what you will face on the path will be real, but the bear you sense at the beginning— the bear that is always ahead of you lurking — is YOU IN A BEAR SUIT.

Don’t let it scare you off. I guarentee once you’re in the forest you might hear it growling or thrashing around in the underbrush, but it will never attack you.

It’s hard to decide what to do with your life. It’s even harder when you don’t know what you want, or who you are.

Here’s something you can do to figure out a bit more about yourself. I did this years ago for myself in grad school, and it’s been useful to my students and people I coach.

We all have many things we find important in our lives, but rather than try to find them all, we’ll focus on three, which we’ll call our Three Core Values. Three is arbitrary — there could be eight or eleven — but if you find the big three, the values at the top of all your values, you’ll be surprised at how much ground is covered.

Now, what is a core value? Really, it’s an orientation, or an outlook, or something consistent within you. It is both a personality trait and a reason for your personality.

Once a student argued that one of her core values was her friend, Amber. The student didn’t get that another person can’t be a value. True friendship can be a value. Companionship can be a value. Values are intangible. Regardless, my student was adamant: Amber is a core value. I don’t think the two are friends anymore. Amber wasn’t a value, but perhaps always having to be right is.

It usualy helps if I explain a bit about my three cores, which are:

Freedom
Integrity
A sense of moving forwards
Freedom. Basically, I hate being told what to do. I don’t like telling other people what to do, unless I’m expressly in charge, like when I’m producing records or directing plays. I hate keeping schedules, I hate waiting. I dislike religion, dogmatic thinking. I don’t like people serving me (for some reason that feels like slavery to me). I don’t like people taking a guess at what food I might want at a restaurant. I almost always prefer to figure out things on my own. I hate zoos, aquariums, but I like pets. We have to parakeets we keep in the biggest cage I could find. I’d love to let them fly around the house but I draw the freedom line at bird shit everywhere.

I get pretty worked up discussing Freedom. This is a clue as to how you find your own values. What gets you worked up?

Integrity was much harder to find. I knew that honor, honesty, some concept like that was important to me, but I couldn’t quite find the word. Honesty was close, but it didn’t convey… for me honesty was more of a verbal expression, whereas integrity was more of a behavioral expression, if that makes any sense. You need to find the words that express it best for you. But Amber still ain’t a value.

So, if there are a few different ways or shades of describing the value, pick the one that rings truest for you.

A Sense of Moving Forward… This one was elusive to the point I had to make up my own word/phrase to describe it.

I love learning. I read self-improvement books all the time. I dislike doing things again and again that lead nowhere. I don’t enjoy conversations that are pointless.

But what is all that? Is the value education? Learning? Autodidacticism? Not wasting time?

What best describes it is a Sense of Moving Forward. That phrase also feels like the top of a hierarchy to me. Autodidacticism is under learning is under education, but a sense of moving forward floats above all of them.

Getting to the top of the hierarchy is important. You might have music and acting as two values, but clearly encompassing both of them is performing. And then you might have performing and being acclaimed as two values, and above that might be “center of attention” or some such.

Don’t think of values pejoratively: values are essentially valueless. I know people who value always being right, being safe, being obstinate, annoying everyone else, avoiding confrontation. The values aren’t good or bad. How you behave because of those values is, of course, another story.

Finding your core values

For some people this is easy, for others difficult. It can be easy to find one or two and hard to find the third. It seems to be easier to do as you get older, which makes sense. I was in my forties when I did this work.

This is pondering type work. Some hints and things to look at:

When you’re happiest, or when you feel like you’re at your best, chances are you’re living within your core values, or at least one of them.
When you are angry at yourself for your behavior — when you’ve done something for which you’re truly regretful, chances are you’ve violated one of your cores. You’ve betrayed yourself.
Look at people you admire, and how they behave. It is likely they’re expressing a core value that you have. If you figure out what it is about them, you’ll get a glimpse of you.
Likewise the opposite is true: People you despise are probably breaking values you have.
What do you avoid doing? As an example, it’s really hard for me to bill clients, and it’s because I don’t want my integrity challenged: “Is this really worth that? Are you ripping me off?” As a side note, I’ve never been accused of that sort of thing. I never think to rip people off, and I can’t understand people who do. How do they feel good about themselves??? Clearly there are different values at play.
What’s your price? What would you do for a million dollars? Avoid your family for a year? Rob someone? Murder? And what wouldn’t you do, no matter how much money is involved?
Your relationship with money and material good might hold some clues as to your values.
When do you lie, and why? When don’t you lie, and why?
When you discover a value it kind of hits you with a loud click — it’s usually very obvious. Sometimes, you might feel really uncomfortable with what you find. Often, you’ve got to thrash things around a bit, bounce ideas off people that know you. It can be really helpful to do this sort of work in a small group. Your values might be the same or similar to someone else’s. Working with other people is almost always good for stretching your thinking out.

The Math of You

Once you have your three core values, you can combine them to make equations that point to additional values.

As an example, I like teaching: Sense of Moving Forward + Freedom = teaching.

To me, parenting is: Sense of Moving Forward + Integrity = parenting.

Freedom / Integrity = Responsibility

Freedom multiplied by a Sense of Moving Forward equals Art. Integrity subtracted from art is equal to shitty pop music.

Procrastination is Freedom and Fear becoming all powerful over Integrity and a Sense of Moving Forward. Love minus Freedom is a relationship I can’t stay in, yet for me Monogamy is Love times Integrity and that fits me well, and I’ve no trouble trading off some Freedom for it.

There are a lot of ways to do the math.

What to do once you know

First of all, things about you will start to make more sense. You’ll understand why you’d never want to do certain jobs, why there are some situations you’d prefer to avoid, and why some people light you up. A lot of day-to-day decisions and discomforts will be apparent, and you can take steps towards re-shaping the immediate world in which you exist.

You’ll make better choices about who you want around you. Shared values are important, but non-conflicting values are more so. If Adventure is a value for you, and your significant other values Security, there will be conflict.

You’ll know more about the things you like to do, that fit with you, and you can get some control on future activities and plans. Or not. I recently got back from a “vacation” at a resort in Mexico. Vacations are really hard for me, doubly so at a resort, where it is difficult for me to find Sense of Moving Forward, and while there is a lot to do, much of it I don’t enjoy, so there’s no Freedom for me. Freedom, for me, isn’t a choice of things I don’t want in the first place. My favorite vacation was directing a play in a small town in the Midwest: the experience basically hit all my values. In future, I want less resorts and more living, working and exploring a new city, something that feeds my core three.

I’ll ponder more about using the knowledge of your three core values to further your life in a follow-up to this. For now, give it a try, see what you get, and see if it doesn’t give you a bit more control on things.

When we last saw our hero he was depressed because his girlfriend ditched his ass.

What was wrong with me?

Why am I listening to Journey? I hate those guys. Yes, they can play, and yes, he can sing, and yes, those are competent songs, but… WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME???

Why has Steve Perry become my high priest?

It’s been a mystery
And still they try to see
Why something good can hurt so bad
Caught on a one-way street
The taste of bittersweet
Love will survive somehow, some way

These lyrics are very 8th grade. Even when I was in 8th grade I didn’t write or listen to stuff like that. Who are they and what are they trying to see? Caught on a one-way street? Well, then turn around, you boob.

In 8th grade… hmmm… I think I was listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, which was like:

Oh Dolly Mae girl you must be insane
So unsure of yourself, leaning from your unsure window pane
Do I see a silhouette of somebody pointing something from a tree?
Click bang, what a hang, your daddy just shot poor me
And I hear you say as I fade away

Such a difference! One is a movie. One I can see opening up before me. The other is a series of clichés that serve as carrier waves for rhymes.

That is the measure of how down I am. I’m 23. I’m sitting in my Chevy Citation, in a parking lot in Hauppauge (that is pronounced “Hah pahg,” nothing more interesting than that) and I’m crying. Perhaps it is raining. Or maybe it is the tears from my eyes making it seem like rain and even looking back at that awful time years later my contemporary processing of the event is some massive cliché caca-ball. I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

I hated my job. I was was working for my dad. Somewhere there was the siren call of the recording studio, but I was ignoring it. Instead, I was alternating between slamming my head into the Scilla of imagining my ex-girlfriend screwing another guy… named Randy… who I knew really well… and spirally downwards with the Charybdis of what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? What is wrong with me? Am I that ugly? Ugly as I feel?

Truly, the song that best explained me, her, it, the break-up, the bomb ditch I lived in, was a Mott the Hoople tune by Ian Hunter:

Oh I wish I was your mother
I wish I’d been your father
‘n then I would have seen you
Would have been you as a child
Played houses with your sisters
And wrestled with all your brothers
And then who knows
I might have felt a family for a while

She had a bunch of sisters and brothers. They were Midwestern Irish and had beer for breakfast. I really liked her parents. I knew what Ian was talking about. To love so much that you wanted to be their family. Cognizance that your love is flowing out of your own hole. Surely that is of a magnitude greater than:

Here we stand
Worlds apart, hearts broken in two, two, two
Sleepless nights
Losing ground, I’m reaching for you, you, you
Feeling that it’s gone, can’t change your mind
If we can’t go on to survive the tide, love divides

How did these guys combine sleepless nights, losing ground and the tide going out? I don’t understand the physics of that particular planet. Did they congratulate themselves on writing “two” three times?

But… I know that feeling of a someone ramming a fist into your chest and ripping your heart out, but I think it’s better expressed by The Judybats:

Hearts cannot be broken, they’re small squishy things
They don’t break like glass but they bruise easily
This one you bruise

Anyway, I drove home from Hauppauge through the blood clot of cars known as the Long Island Expressway. And Journey, with high priest and high-voiced Steve, are on the radio:

Highway run into the midnight sun
Wheels go round and round, you’re on my mind
Restless hearts sleep alone tonight
Sending all my love along the wire

Oh my. Run, sun, wheels, the image of two twin beds with twitching hearts on them, what the hell am I listening to??? And why am I listening to it? I’m driving for chrissakes and I’m not feeling the car metaphor. Why not this Elvis Costello thing:

It’s the last thing I want to do
Pull the curtains on me and you
Pull the carpet from under love
Pull out like young lovers do
You swore you wouldn’t shout
If it’s not your punch, then it’s your pout
Days in silence try my temper
Nights spent drinking to remember
How memories are always tender

It’s all rhymes, yet it’s all motion: a house being pulled apart and the fighting of the couple embodied in the verbs, the jabs of repetitive P’s, and Mr Costello’s typical brilliance at flipping clichés inside out — he’s not drinking to forget, he’s drinking to get back to the time before the fights.

The time before… the time before May, 1985, when I drove home from college, by myself, sick to my stomach. Did somehow I know I would never see her again? Was a part of me in touch with the future? Was it a warning? Was it a tap on the shell of a napping turtle? To wake it up? Urge it to pull in the soft parts?

The road to my parent’s house was narrow and winded through the dark — there were no lights on it other than those which came from houses cuddled in the woods.

I almost ran over a raccoon. I didn’t see it until it looked at my car, the headlights catching its eyes, its retinas glowing a surprising, metallic blue. I didn’t know raccoons had eyes like that. I remember thinking that I only saw those blue raccoon eyes because it was night. There was a long moment, and I made a bizarre connection: I didn’t know what I was made of until I was so down I was a puddle. I knew I would began to solidify and stand up again.

Why the months of shallow, cliché music? I think it was because… there’s nothing real or felt about a cliché. It’s just words. It could be a muffin recipe. Who feels “Love will survive, somehow?” You don’t feel that. You don’t see that. You don’t sense the footsteps of that. That doesn’t crack you across the bridge of your nose. That doesn’t lurk in your head like a certain redhead seen from behind brushing her hair. This Rick Derringer lyric lurks:

Cheap perfume, sweet perfume
Lonely smell that fills the room
Roses in your low-rent tomb
A picture made of cheap perfume

This doesn’t:

A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

Who in their right mind wants someone else’s pain of reality when you’ve got more than enough on your own? Ian Hunter, Elvis Costello, these lyrical heavy weights would have killed me. I could barely shoulder my own shit, let alone invite Elvis Costello over to share his divorce. So, it was Journey for me! Make it a double! Serve it in a sugar cone.

A few months later I heard this on the radio:

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die

It’s become a cliché in its own right — the Smith’s song for people who’ve never heard of The Smiths.

That song… I got it. Rather, it got me.

Love is a gift, however you might find it, or lose it.

I grew to forgive someone who only did what was her right and prerogative to do, to live her life as she wanted, with me, without me. Her choice, with no malice intended.

And I stopped listening to Journey on purpose. And finally followed the sirens that were calling me to the recording studio, where I had the time of my life, at a very steep price. Hmm… Not quite a rhyme, but a couple of clichés.

In the early 1990’s I was freelance producing rock records. There were still big studios and big consoles. Digital recording was taking off but there was still plenty of nice fat analog tape. New, great sounding equipment was being released all the time, and you could still find vintage stuff gear with a bit of poking around. It was a great time to be an engineer.

And the big thing was drum sounds. Everyone was mic’ing the room and gating everything, and triggering samples and doing drum replacement… it was really cool. The Red Hot Chile Peppers released “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” and GASP! They were feeding drum samples into the room and then recording the room sound! Mind blown! And then Steve Albini was making records and Nirvana’s “In Utero” sounded like a wonderful live mess. Drum sounds were the holy grail in the early 90's.

I was doing a lot of work out of a studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, called Water Music. It had two rooms: The A room was nicknamed “Heaven.” It was HUGE, with a Neve 8088 console in it. The other room was affectionately called “Hell.” It was much smaller, and at that time had a ramshackled bunch of mismatched equipment, not even a proper console. Heck, Hell didn’t even have a control room — everything was stuffed into one space. You’d set the band up, take a guess with the mics and settings, record a bit and then play it back to see what you got. It took a bit but you could get great sounds. I loved working in Hell. And Hell was a lot cheaper than Heaven. Typically, smaller budget/Indie projects worked in Hell, and the big money sessions worked in Heaven.

One day I came in with a band — I think it was a punk album I was working on — and everyone at at Water Music was excited because in Heaven, cutting an album with some band, was Eddie Kramer.

If you don’t know who Eddie Kramer is… he recorded Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin — enough said, right? In the late 60’s, using maybe four microphones, a pair of compressors and whatever EQ was on the console at that time — we are not talking about sweepable parametric eq’s or anything like that — think high and low shelving and that’s it — Eddie Kramer managed to invent rock drum sounds. And rock guitar sounds.

SO… the God of Rock Drum Sounds was in Heaven cutting an album… and he locked the doors and wouldn’t let anyone in. The word got around that he didn’t want anyone to see his drum mic set-up. It was super secret. Even the main studio assistant, Jim, wasn’t allowed into the main live room where the drums were.

I would see Eddie in the morning walking in a courtyard between the studios — he wasn’t talkative but he would always flash a friendly smile. He made the assistants sweep the courtyard constantly. The whole thing was a big, weird mystery.

What the hell was he up to in there????

It really didn’t take much to stay late one night and wait until the lights were out in the residence part of the studio complex. Water Music was residential, with rooms and suites and a kitchen for artists working in the studios. I once recorded an all girl band in Hell and we all slept together in one huge bed stuffed in a single room. It was platonic.

SO… Jim and I waited until Eddie’s lights were out, and we got the master keys for the studio and burgled our way into Heaven to see the top secret Eddie Kramer drum set-up…

It seemed pretty typical. 421’s on the toms, top and bottom, a SM-57 on the snare top, I think a Neumann KM-84 on the bottom. A Neumann U-47 FET — often called a FET47, stuffed into the kick, and then there was an AKG D-12 outside of it. The overheads were U-87’s or U-67’s. He had KM-84s out in the room maybe twenty-five feet away from the kit, but he had them tucked behind gobos — big absorptive panels. This was a cool trick — the gobos kept the mics from from getting any direct sound from the drums. This was an idea I took.

But so far, the big secret set-up was nothing special. But there was one really weird thing…

Five feet out from the drum set, about chest high, centered on the kick and pointing towards the snare, was a Shure VP-88 stereo microphone. I remember it being a VP-88, but I could be mistaken. It was definitely a stereo condenser mic.

Throwing a stereo mic in front of a drum kit was nothing new. I had inherited a little money and blew most of it on a vintage AKG C-24 and used it all the time as a stereo drum mic. But what Eddie Kramer was doing with the VP-88 was something different.

A VP-88 is an MS stereo microphone rather than an XY. MS (Mid Side) stereo mic’ing is really awesome and someday I’ll write a whole thing about it, but basically, the VP-88 uses two capsules, one set to cardioid that picks up the center (the middle), and the other set to figure 8 and picking up the left and right (the sides). The two signals are combined in a particular way, lots of phase cancellation ensues, and the net result is really nice stereo with a strong, clear center. It’s a very useful technique and I think better sounding than XY.

So, Eddie Kramer had an MS stereo mic in front of the drum set.

That still isn’t weird.

What was really weird, was that he had the left and right side of the stereo mic oriented vertically — down towards the floor and up towards the ceiling — rather than to the right and left of the drum set. Picture rotating a stereo mic 90 degrees, so that the left side picks up the ceiling and the right side picks up the floor.

It made no sense. Jim and I had no idea what the hell was up with the VP-88 pointed at the floor and the ceiling. How would you pan that signal in the mix?? I experimented with it on a few subsequent sessions, turning my C-24 up and down rather than left and right, and it always sounded like ass. There were all sorts of weird cancellations caused by things bouncing off the floor and the ceiling. In a small room it was dreadful. Really, it seemed to me to be an awful idea.

In hindsight, maybe it was a red herring. Maybe the VP-88 was plugged in but not even routed anywhere. Maybe Eddie Kramer came up with that doofy mic set-up just to fuck with anyone that snuck in to steal his secrets. And that there was really no secret other than use good mics, use a good drum set, and most of all, record a great drummer. Like Mitch Mitchell or John Bonham.

Or maybe the secret was to have access to a huge room with great acoustics, and a giant console fourteen feet long, and a two-inch 24 track Studer tape deck.

Maybe the secret… is to claim there is a secret! After all, it worked for Eddie Kramer.