SOUNDING "OFF" PART 3

Whenever I hear something that sounds "off" in a song I love, I like to make a note of it. Usually these "off" items are anomalies or just plain mistakes of some kind that made it onto a finished, master recording. What makes them interesting to me is that I usually don't hear them the first 10 billion times I listen to a song. Even though I know that, I still fret over such things when I'm doing my own recording.

I just heard another one and want to add it to the list, which will make now 7 entries:

1. Vince Guaraldi-"Linus and Lucy" finger slip on piano keys on return to first section :50
2. Neil Young-"After The Goldrush" finger slip on piano keys after the line "hoping it was a lie" (the first time) 1:46
3. Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads-"Crazy Train" notes in solo not doubled exactly (after joining back in unison following a harmony section) 3:05
4. Soft Machine-"10.30 Returns To The Bedroom" finger slip on organ 2:07
5. "Deliverance" soundtrack-"Dueling Banjos" 3:03 the guitar starts to go back around while the banjo is doing an ending lick. The guitar abruptly stops when he realizes that's the end of the song. (Larry G)
6. Flying Burrito Brothers-"Hot Burrito #2" finger slip on piano 0:47...lyrics on top are "And you want me home all night..." [maybe that's not a slip, because the same thing happens at 0:31 when the same part is being played...wait, maybe it is, because it happens at 1:32 and 1:36 and...]Dig the horn-like steel going on in that section...

And the new entry--Flying Burritos again! I was listening to "Christine's Tune" and listening to Sneaky Pete's fine steel work (and looking over at my pedal steel that I haven't played since...uh...). I was enjoying how the two vocal tracks were panned hard left and hard right and then I heard a cough or a throat clearing or something. So I backed it up and heard this:

7. Flying Burrito Brothers- "Christine's Tune" 2:29-2:31: vocal on left starts to hold out the word "lies," stops short, clears throat, and then picks up on next line.

SNEAKY PETE: HOW HE GOT INTO ANIMATION

I was thinking about the Sneaky Pete story I told last night and wanted to make sure I was telling it right. I knew I had the gist, but today I hunted down my CD copy of the interview and did this transcription:

"I saw an ad in the paper that said ‘Animators wanted.’ ‘Animators wanted’–and that’s all it said. In those days, people just let it all hang out--they didn’t sneak it in or anything. So I called them because I was interested in animation in those days. When I was a kid living with my family, I made a big dinosaur out of clay on our dining room table. My folks were photographers and my dad showed my how I could do a single frame at a time with their camera. It didn’t work very well, but anyway..

That leads me to the day when we were living in Glendora and that happened to be near where the studio was that they were working on Gumby. I didn’t know what Gumby was, but I called them up and said ‘I’d like to be an animator.’ Art Cloakey, who was the father of Gumby, said ‘Oh, you’d like to animate–well, why don’t you come on over’–just like that. It was another world in those days.

So I came over. To make a long story short, I walked in and there was a bunch of nice people in there and he asks ‘Have you ever animated before?’ and I said ‘Oh yeah, I know all about it’ [we both laugh]! Well, I kinda knew about it.

So he said ‘Waddy over here, he’s the foreman, he’ll give you a chance.’ Waddy told me to just walk around the stage there and watch these other guys–there was about six other guys there animating in different stages–and they were all nice. And I walked around and looked at it and they were doing lousy animation.

But I walked around there and came back the next day and they set me up with a little stage to do the animation. And it was wonderful because they had ball-joint armatures which you could control and so forth so I was in heaven again there!

So I started animating and the very first day I did some animation that they used! And from that point on I just got better and better and that was my entrance into stop-motion animation...I was a natural at animating, let’s put it that way. I just had a talent for it.

When you look back on it, it seems amazing to me, too..."

Pretty much as I remembered it. So he did have some experience in stop-motion animation--as a kid--but certainly no professional experience or training. However, he did have BALLS and wasn't above a certain amount of BS. Ya gotta fake it to make it, as they say...

Still, though, it's amazing that the studio head just basically took Pete at his word that he knew to do animation. At least in this telling of the story, there was no checking of Pete's resume, calling past employers to verify anything, background checks, credit checks, etc.

As he said, it was another world back then...

JOBS, INSIDE JOBS, AND SNEAKY PETE

So there are going to be recounts in New Hampshire. That’s good, because the machine tallies confounded the expectations created by the pre-primary and exit polls, while the paper ballot tallies comported with the expectations created by the polls. Not only that, but at least two townships originally reported zero votes for Ron Paul but admitted they had made a “mistake” when voters from the townships said they had in fact voted for Paul.


And it’s not surprising that the voting machine chicanery has already begun. It turns out that Ken Hajjar, the marketing and sales director for LHS Associates--the company in charging of programming all of New Hampshire’s (as well as 4 other states in New England) Diebold voting machines–is a convicted felon. His crime? Selling narcotics.

Traffic Tickets vs. Selling Drugs

Which leads me to a question–how does a convicted felon get hired by an election services company? I mean, ex-cons have to make a living too, but do they have to make a living working in elections? Hajjar must be a REALLY good marketing and sales director to be able to get such a job. Or, as it turns out, being an ex-con is almost a job requirement to work in the elections industry.

But this brings me to my own job search. I fill out applications all the time that ask whether or not I’ve been convicted of a crime (I haven’t) and for details if I have. Some applications ask me to volunteer information about my traffic violations, whether driving is a big part of the job or not.

Was none of this done in Hajjar’s case? Or was he just part of the good ol’ white boy club, in which all is forgiven, and nobody checks a good ol’ boy’s criminal record–it just isn’t done. That shit is for the little people–the little people have to be haunted by the paper trail being created for them to “keep them safe” from “terrorists.” Only the little people have to wear the scarlet letter.

Getting vs. Finding Jobs

A lot of people use the terms “find a job” and “get a job” interchangeably, as if “finding” and “getting” are the same thing. I’ve “found” lots of jobs, but I don’t “get” lots of jobs. What I’ve discovered is that if you want to get a job making say, I don’t know–the tubes that are inside paper towel and toilet paper rolls–you either have to have experience doing THAT job, not one kind of similar, OR you have to have a degree in making paper towel/toilet paper rolls. If you don’t have that, forget it.

But it seems to me that the job market has not always been this way. In fact, my parents always told me it wasn’t–they’d say, “You just need a college degree, it doesn’t really matter all that much what it’s in.” Boy howdy, has that not turned out to be true. But again, I’m not sure it’s always been this way, with a degree for everything and nothing without a degree.

What Sneaky Pete told me

Who told me so? Sneaky Pete. You know, of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Pete Kleinow, who died just over a year ago this month, may he rest in peace.

I interviewed him a few years ago in my last job. The reason I got to talk to him was because his new band Burrito Deluxe had just released their debut album. Anyway, he told me that when he moved to California, he didn’t have a job. This would’ve been in the late 50s or early 60s–I can’t remember exactly. I’m not transcribing this from the tape, I’m just going off what I remember.

So when he got to Los Angeles, he had to look for a job. He looked in the newspaper and saw an ad for a studio that needed animators. He said he’d never done anything like that in his life but was intrigued, so he decided to see if he could get a job there. He said he went down to the studio, and the guy in charge was showing him around. At some point, they let Pete kind of sit in with some of the workers. The guys that worked there showed Pete what they were doing, and being a quick study, he caught on and started doing it also. Long story short–Sneaky Pete got a job in the animation studio even though he’d never done any animation work in his life.

And that animation job wasn’t just something he did for a little while until he got on his feet or whatever. It turned into a career for him. Here’s how the Washington Post described Pete’s animation career:

Mr. Kleinow also won acclaim as an animator, special-effects artist and director of commercials in television and film. His credits ranged from the original "Gumby" series -- he wrote and performed the theme music and designed cartoons -- and the relaunched "Twilight Zone" to the movies "Under Siege," "Fearless" and "The Empire Strikes Back."

To be sure, Sneaky Pete’s a genius, but that’s not the point. The point is that he was able to get a job with no experience or education in the field. That’s virtually unheard of these days.

Just sayin’...