WALTER BECKER & LARRY KLEIN
movie: Matt Kerns
Gene:
Page:
Door:
Somebody’s:
Upside:
Deal:
Downtown—
these were some of the names on CD labels and tape canisters while Circus Money was being made. Every song — from the music charts to the tape on the mixing board — was known by an abbreviated name only. The reasons and history behind this longstanding convention — and some of the unexpected, Keystone-Kops effects of violating it — would make for a fairly amusing story we could tell about the 2vN era, and perhaps some day we will.
But hold on — what’s this — other names? on other labels: Building: Mayor: Mouse: Lucky: Lucy: Danger: and more! They didn’t make the cut. Ouch.
And perhaps oddest of all, you find one apparently called “Couchies”
We posted the demo for Couchies way back in April.
When you superimpose a melody on some tracks, their character changes rather dramatically, because the melody isn’t really echoed, particularly, by the harmonic structure of the track itself. We felt this was true here. What do you think?
Take a listen to some of your favorite musicians, playing along with Walter’s scratch vocal, on
Couchriders in the Sky
Stay wait: Couch, um, ride um, Huh!? For those not old enough to remember quasi-novelty songs from the mid-century, you might want to look it up. Except it wasn’t Couches anybody was riding. Burl Ives; Gene Autry: Johnny Cash — it was a classic.
A brief word about vocals. Oooooo so tempting to apply just a touch of auto-tune….just 3 notes!? Can we? Should we? We learned the plug-ins, we tried them out, we tweaked and leaked, squinted and squirmed, we wept, we prayed, we microlistened…and then…
… we took all autotune OFF.
That’s what you’re hearing today; Walter’s uncorrected naked scratch vocal.
This issue will become more relevant soon enough: Pitch, especially holding it steady for long notes, may not have been WB’s forte; it is in fact the forte of very few singers, even among the accomplished. But any honest listener of the contents of this site has to admit that Walter was a much better and skillful (natural, uncorrected) singer than usually given credit for. I mean….c’mon people! Re-listen if you need to. And if you’re still not down with it, we’ll be coming for your secret decoder ring forthwith.
But the point, Watson, the point is this: Walter was not inevitably disturbed about an off-pitch warble in a woking vocal. For one thing, a career with Fagen utterly schooled him on the concentration, experience, and practice required for strong, steady vocals in the studio or on the stage. So for Walter, his vocal limitations were just facts, not failures. Certainly an observer wouldn’t find the tsk-tsking, the averted eyes, the oh-dear-that-was-terrible head-drop. Walter took for granted —rather sanely, it seems to me — that informal and non-perfected vocal sessions were just gonna be….informal and imperfect.
But there was a particular type of self-perceived “weak” singing
that did bother him; it was a voice that, given the choice, he would largely keep to himself. As we move deeper into the stacks, we may have to make some hard decisions, and leave some DATS in their cases. But there’s nothing terrible about “hard” decisions, if one’s respect for all Walter has given us will tamp down that impulse for more,, more, more — no matter what.
But later for that!
For now, enjoy Becker/Klein’s
Couchriders in the Sky!
(Thanks again to Uber-mench Larry Klein , a blessing to our boy in every possible way, plus 10).
Couchriders In The Sky
WALTER BECKER & LARRY KLEIN
© 2007/2018 Zeon Music LLC and © 2007/2018 Strange Cargo/ Downtown Music (ASCAP)
This is no Grace Line tour
This is no Disney ride
No hipster buccaneers
Wait on the yonder side
This river's fast and wide
This water cold and deep
And there's no place for you
Where stones and fishes sleep
Spliff and chalice
Chalice and spliff
Oxi's and dexi's
Like dragon's teeth
I know what happens
And you do too
You seen the rushes
On the pay per view and
Yes
We are leaving
In the morning
For the afternoon and more
Say good evening
Say goodbye
Couchriders
Couchriders in the sky
And who goes on this boat
I guess we don't know yet
We see through low-res eyes
In dusky silhouette
This couch is long and low
The bolsters warm and deep
And there is room for you
Where kings and counsellors sleep
Switchblades and matches
And black cat bones
Spacecones in batches
And casing stones
The headland’s rising
And don't you know
As up above so is it
Down below and
Yes
We are leaving
In the morning
For the afternoon and more
Say good evening
Say goodbye
Couchriders
Couchriders in the sky
Vocal, bass- Walter Becker
Drums- Keith Carlock
Electric piano - Ted Baker
Piano - Jim Beard
Guitar - Jon Herington
Producer: Larry Klein
Engineer: Elliot Scheiner
Wow, great stuff! I love it, thank you D-Mod and Happy Holidays to you too!
What a GEM! ruff? w t ? That's Walters style the way he liked it! Very cool, and so glad they didn't screw it up! Thanks for sharing this!
Oh, and that reference to “weak” singing? Fuhgettaboutit! Hearing “weak” vocals is something that’s never bothered me or any serious SD fan I know, especially given some of the bootleg demos we have all enjoyed at one time or another. The most important thing is that we are hearing the Music! The most precious thing of all. So unless Walter left you with his wish that some of those should never be heard, my vote would be to get to all of them in good time. Thanks for all that you do!
yes, there are some types of performances he would not choose to release, and in appointing someone your 'intellectual property rights' trustee or similar, you’re counting on them to follow your directions, and to know and honor your preferences.
You say it wouldn't "bother" you or any real fan to hear "weak" vocals. But remember, I did say that he objected to a *particular type* of performance. You may not have heard many of these, or know how they might differ from the “weak” vocals we think we've already heard.
So while it’s great (and not surprising) that Walter’s fans are forgiving in how they hear the ‘imperfections’, our responsibilities are not concerned with listeners’ judgments about what they hear, but rather with the artist's judgments of what he does and doesn’t want heard.
We’re lucky that Walter wasn’t partucularly vain about his imperfections, and handled what was often a lot of disparagement with a lot of poise. But everybody has their line(s). And if I err in knowing exactly where those lines are, I am goig to err in the direction of being conservative. I hope that even those who disagree with that approach can at least understand it.
As much as Circus Money gets referred to as a reggae influenced album, I think the main influence of the reggae/dub is the bass forward approach to recording. Both Walter and Donald have always insisted that without just the right drum/bass track, there wasn't any point in even working on a song. Drums and bass are the two things that had to click for a song to work, and were often recorded first in the process. I've spoken to a few session guys that recounted taking part in SD sessions that they knew would never make a record because WB and DF were only trying to get a drum track on that date, even though they had a full band playing in the studio. I think Steve Khan may have mentioned that in a Metal Leg article. For the Circus Money album, you can hear that often it is the bass that is propelling or "directing" the song. This is very obvious on songs like Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore, which is built around the repeating bass figure, but with chord changes and interesting phrasing where the figure doesn't necessarily fill each phrase, but can occur at phrase beginning middle and end with pretty interesting results. But even on more traditional SD/expected style songs on Circus Money, like Upside Looking Down or Paging Audrey, the bass is signaling where the song will go and then taking it there. It is easy to understand why this approach appealed to Walter, who was a truly gifted bass player. Go back and listen to that early SD stuff, or even to Snowbound to understand the musical math going on inside that head. For what its worth, Chuck Rainey speaks incredibly highly of Walter as a bass player and composer of bass parts. I guess that's why those two were so simpatico.
Here, you can absolutely hear Walter in his bass player element. He is driving this train.
One thing is that even though this song was tracked, it wasn't finished. So not only the obvious stuff of no background vocals and no final polished lead vocal, but also no solo section or bridge, that would likely have been in a final track. Those sections may well have been written, but weren't in this version of the song. No way to tell why this song wasn't completed when another one was...I think most often those decisions are made in service of the album and not on a case by case or song by song basis. Walter and Larry Klein wrote a lot of songs together, recorded demos for some, tracked fewer, and completed even fewer. Some of those songs were written with no intent on Walter ever recording them, like the songs they wrote for Madeline Peyroux, and a few for other musicians, some of which may still be released by those artists if the right stars align.
That CD Circus Money was a friggen 'Masterpiece'. A little Gin and Tonic with the 300 dollar headphones while looking out the window at dusk.
Snowbound was Awesome!
wow remaking the walter becker/donald fagen mix cd for the car again already <3
My goodness. A couple of overdubs to fill out the arrangement and this bad boy would have been ready for the album. What a treat! I barely recognized it from the original rough demo.
Exactly; I wrote, I think it was on the Couchies Demo page, that demos can foretell of the song to a greater or lesser degree. I always felt that this tune pulled something of a hat trick, the melody a little surprise, compared to the expectation our inner ear had formed on the basis of the demo alone.
... and talk about merry music against heavy lyrics...my lord !
apropos of nothing...when I first heard these lyrics I was blown away. I think they are among Walter's finest of a certain type -- not so much because individual phrases are so extraordinary or poetic, but because of how a linguistically simple and unadorned vocabulary is woven into extremely evocative phrases and images (I find the overall "story" here, and the images used to tell it, incredibly spooky). And I think on display here is something like what Larry Klein said in his video that WB had such "a firm grasp on overview in songwriting"...regardless of the type of language used in a song- its verbal style - (and he had command of such an incredibly wide set of them!), he always knew where the heart of the story was; there was never any strange (unintended) shift in tone or tense or POV or "voice" -- no hiccups in the lyics that jolted the listener out of the world painted by the song, In any case, these lyrics are so simple, the vocabulary so ordinary and unobtrusive, that it may be easy to overlook how skillful and economical they were in evoking a story with several rather complicated aspects in it. I really love and respect these lyrics.