I decided to get creative. Check out the nifty 404 page I made today while the furnace cleaners were here.
Apparently it doesn’t work perfectly on all browsers. Click below to see what I’m seeing on my end:
Jesse Kidd liked the 22-year-old demo of me jammin’ with East Bay Ray from Dead Kennedys. It was recorded when Jesse was a baby before Jesse was born.
Jesse sat down in his room in Australia this week, added drums, and sent me the MP3. It’s cool. GRAB THE MP3 HERE.
So, John Beers mailed me the master tapes (multitrack and mix-down) of the Baby Opaque stuff the other day. Was really neat…first, I don’ have anything from back then, except my body, mind and spirit, and stuff that people who had a more responsible 90s than me, like John have saved. Thanks John!
Second, I haven’t seen multi-track tape in over ten years. Wow. Blast from the past. I felt like an archaeologist excavating my past, and the past…the analogue past.
Third, John also included a cassette I’d lent him. He included a short note apologizing for taking so long to return it, but I want to thank him for taking so long, because I’m finally stable enough not to lose things like that. Thanks John!
The tape was two songs of me and East Bay Ray jamming, around the time Dead Kennedys were breaking up. They had a few gigs booked that they were playing (including a series of shows in Brazil, and they didn’t want to pass that up, because they’d never been there), but they were kaput. Ray was looking to start a new band, as he put it, “A pop band to get on MTV.” He answered my “bassist seeks band” flier and we played music around that time, twice (we later played once more, when he played on my solo record.)
First time was at my friend Beau’s house, where I was couch surfing. That jam included was this first song “I’m Not Restless” (>>GET MP3.) It’s a Baby Opaque song that Bomb later recorded also (the only song both bands did, though Baby Opaque did not record it). The song is good, but this recording isn’t that great…I taught it to him, we played it once, then recorded it and moved on to the next song. (If any drummers wanna play to it and send me the track, I’ll remix and add it on here.)
Since I also sang, and not just played bass, he also gave me a tape that day of a song he’d written and recorded in his home studio. He played guitar, bass and drum machine on it. He asked me to write lyrics and melody to it and come to his house in Oakland the following week, and we did. I recorded the song, which I called “Drivin’ Fast” (>>GET MP3). Ray told me I peed too much, he gave me a rough mix, and I left. He called me the next day and said he was going a “different direction”.
He finally assembled a band, and I went to see them at the Firehouse (a.k.a the 16th note) club on 16th street. He was great, the band was horrible. Skinny pouser female vocalist, like Pat Benatar but not as good, adequit but boring drummer, bass player and keyboard (!) player, and Ray. Ray was fucking great (I love his playing and loved his muted stage presence and his cool look…like Ric Ocasek crossed with Roy Orbison). But the band made me sad.
So….there you have it, the story and the songs. The songs are not me or Ray’s finest work, by FAR, but “Drivin’ Fast” does have it’s moments. And it’s about the world killing itself at an exponential future-shock rate, with traffic and dependence on oil as the metaphor….Something that seems very relavant to me now. It’s also about finding your way in life. Hearing it is sort of like getting a postcard as a middle-aged man from myself as a young man. Neat! Especially since I haven’t heard it in 20 years.
I love the last line “is life the classroom, the waiting room, or the party itself?”
MEW
Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny chat on the phone and there’s no way these two talkers could interview one or the other. So they rap together, in a concentric hypertextual parenthetical way, TCP over IP, about how to make money by releasing things for free, the coming apocalypse, a secret underground lair, and much more.
Indie media mavericks Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny interview each other. (Part two of two. from alterati.com)
Get the podcast here.
I’ve actually been looking for something like this for a long time.
A good program for word count of all files in a folder (not just of a single file like most programs) is Total Assistant. It’s $24.95 for the basic version, with a 14-day working free trial, here: http://www.surefiresoftware.com/totalassistant/
In this episode, Joseph Matheny concludes his conversation with Michael Dean (part 1 here), and discuss how to make money by releasing things for free, the coming apocalypse, a secret underground lair, and much more.
Joseph adds: “We’re hoping to make the G-spot better with your input, we’d dig it if you’d fill out the Standard Audience Survey to help us do that. As always, if you have questions, comments, rants or suggestions, call (213) 784-1035″
The G-Spot 31: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Clone The Homeless - get episode 0066
Indie media mavericks Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny interview each other. (Part one of two. Part two will be up on Greylodge in two weeks.) Fri, 11 April 2008
22 min. from CloneTheHomeless.com
Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny chat on the phone and there’s no way these two talkers could interview one or the other. So they rap together, in a concentric hypertextual parenthetical way, TCP over IP, about how to make money by giving away art, where the Internet is headed, changing views on changing protection of intellectual “property”, Joseph Campbell, suing Disney for intellectual property violation, how to self-publish your brilliant books, Tom Jennings, why control of your art is more important than lots of money, how to assemble your own vigilant army of the damned, The Pirate Bay, cease-and-desist letters, the Church of the Subgenius, BoingBoing, the WELL, Creative Commons, sex, cats, art and an incredible amount of more nifty stuff.
Part two will cover the coming collapse of the infrastructure of the world, why Catholics are killing the world with overpopulation, and why both of these guys just wanna do the judo master thing and step out of the world’s way, while still running it all from their rural bunkers.
I do NOT recommend AT&T U-verse any more. Had tech problems (not out of line for new technology…that’s the price of being a first adopter.) But….after TWO HOURS of having me on hold yesterday, they decided it was their problem and said they were sending a guy out this morning.
I set the alarm, got up earlier than I wanted to, and THE GUY NEVER SHOWED. I called AT&T and they said “WE HAD A U-VERSE OUTAGE IN YOUR AREA THIS MORNING, SO WE CANCELED THE APPOINTMENT.” But….THEY NEVER CALLED ME.
Totally unacceptable.
DO NOT GO WITH AT&T. GO ANYWHERE ELSE. That’s my recommendation.
Click to download the Beef People song “Lots”
Click to download the Beef People song “Industrial Jelly”
Of all things, a UK record label (Damaged Records) is releasing VINYL of the Beef People EP, combined with the unreleased tracks, which are great.
The owner, a cool chap named Welly, asked us to do a short interview. His questions and my answers are here:
Beef People interview for Damaged Records – Michael W. Dean’s answers
1. Where and when band formed, and how it came about? Founding members? Reasons for the name?
Formed in 1984 the Blue Ridge School in Dyke, Virginia.
(I think it was 1984, I wasn’t there at the start. Jack? Is this correct?)
Founding members: Brian Childers – throat Willy MacLean – bass Rob Buckingham – guitar Jack Massey – drums
I joined the band replacing Rob Buckingham on guitar, so I’m not the guy to ask about the very inception. But the line up was always the same as above, except I took over on guitar shortly before the EP came out. I was in the band less than nine months, then they broke up. It was one of those hardcore bands that were great, short lived, did an EP and dissolved….As it probably should be, based on a lot of reunions I’ve witnessed lately with sad old men who used to be my heroes more than 20 years ago.
The band name “The Beef People” came from “We’re the Beef People” the motto of a now-defunct supermarket chain in the American south called Winn Dixie. Our EP “Music for Men” was named after a choral sheet music series that the guys had in their music class at their boarding school.
Rob left the band when he got kicked out of school for sneaking a girl into his room. I had been kicked out of my own boarding school for calling the headmaster a “fat, bald, overtly Christian old fart”, so I immediately felt an affinity to the guy I was replacing.
2. Details on early gigs and early demo recordings?
The band played less than a dozen gigs as I remember (not counting a few gigs they played at their boarding school before I joined). Most were under attended, maybe between 15 and 50 people. Remember, this was Virginia in the early 80s.
I remember one gig for about 30 people in a place that held 800. Everyone was in the back of the room, and it felt like we were playing to the Grand Canyon. After a couple songs, I said over the mic, “I’m not playing another note until everyone in this room joins us on stage.” They all did. The stage suddenly became the whole concert, people were only a few feet away, and it got really intimate and fun. Brian had some electric hair trimmers and gave 25 cent haircuts (“money back guarantee!”) to about a third of the audience between songs. He also shaved my head, while I was doing a guitar solo. I was getting a slight electric shock in my scalp as he did it. It felt really exciting, and I didn’t need to sleep much for a few weeks after.
Our biggest gig was for about 100 people, when we opened for Battalion of Saints.
3. First record release, with any interesting stories or nuggets of information connected to it?
The only release was the EP, “Music for Men”, recorded in 1986. We recorded and mixed the EP, and the additional songs that Welly is now putting out along with the songs from the EP, in one session, in about 8 hours total (including a few overdubs), at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia, in Don Zientara’s basement. Don engineered the record. John Beers put the EP out on his label, “Catch Trout Records”.
4. Tours, with details of where and who with, with anything that you may remember from them? The Beef People never toured. They were seniors at the Blue Ridge School in Dyke, Virginia, and broke up when they graduated. I was three years older, and drove from Charlottesville, Virginia (about an hour away) to rehearse.
All of our gigs were in Charlottesville.
The singer, Brian Childers, later played bass some and sang some on one tour in my band Bomb (from San Francisco), in 1989.
5. Record labels you dealt with, how the deals came about, and how they treated you?
We only did that one record on Catch Trout, and John Beers treated us really well. He paid for the record, gave us lots of copies, pressed 1000 copies, sent out a lot of promo copies, got it into stores nationwide, and probably lost money doing so. John loves music, and that’s why he had a label. He was never in it for the money.
Someone else put one of the songs out on a compilation, I forget what it was called, don’t think they had permission, and it doesn’t bother me at all.
6. Subsequent record releases, with dates and details or any story of interest?
None, none and none. Until now. Thank you, Welly!
7. Dynamics of relationships of band members. Any personality clashes or great friendships? Good or bad situations?
We all got along great in the Beef People, as far as every time I was with them. Brian and I clashed in Bomb a few times because I was a junkie by then. That’s why he quit Bomb. I’m sober now, many years.
8. Reasons for band break-up with dates and details? Band graduated from school. Not much details past that.
9. Proudest moment or achievement connected to the band? What are your thoughts on it looking back?
It was all a blast. I’m really proud of the guys, my time in the band, and love how well the music has held up after 23 years.
10. Any kind of reformation happened or due to happen? If so, details please.
Nope. Singer died. I’d sooner dig up my dead grandfather, prop him up on the couch and watch a baseball game with him than play a Beef People gig without Brian.
(Brian’s obituary that I wrote is attached. It’s from the March 2008 issue of Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll magazine. Feel free to reprint. I own it, and anyway, they reprint a lot of stuff without permission, say it’s “fair use under copyright law”, and they’re probably right.)
11. Any other bands or projects the members have worked on then or since?
I’m married, live in the suburbs, have lots of cats, make films and write books. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. My current CV is here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3220
– Michael W. Dean, Los Angeles
Pix of the new dedicated computer that the wife and I bought to serve BitTorrent stuff of our art and friends’ art, 24/7/365.
The ‘pooter was getting HOT, like the components inside burned our fingers to touch them, so we opened up the case and bought a fan (from Bed, Bath and Beyond…I’m becoming such a yuppie!) to keep the li’l torrents cool and happy. Cobbled the cover out of a storage bin (also from Bed, Bath and Beyond). Now the inside of the computer, and all the components, are always room temp or below. Will blow any dust out with canned air every few days, but shouldn’t be an issue, hard drive is only moving part, and it’s well sealed.
We’re keeping the door on this spare bedroom (now known as “the Torrentarium”) closed for now, but are gonna go get chicken wire or a screen and jerry-rig it over the front of the computer stand to keep the kitties out so we can keep the door open and all the pets can lounge in there. They like it.
This is the first tiny acorn of our baby server farm. It will one day turn into a mighty 40-acre T4 industrial complex out in the country. We’ll have curvy women in slips fanning the computer racks with palm fronds, and more gals in camo slips on the roof with sniper rifles.
—
P.S.
OH…Julie asked me:
what is a baby server farm?
I wrote:
Server farm is computer server room. Racks of dedicated servers for web and media hosting. Usually in a climate-controlled air-conditioned room.
This is our LITTLE server farm. A baby one. A starter server farm.
(It’s NOT a farm for serving babies! Though we look at our media and little torrents as “our babies.”)
Here’s pix of server farms we like:
(above) our next step up.
(above) Our next step after that. (Not pictured- cats asleep on top and around it.)
(above) Our fourth server farm.
(above) After that - a server farm in a former church.
(above) Then we buy Google’s server farm (above, a tiny tiny few of Google’s servers.)
(above) Going too far…the IRS’ chrome-plated servers.
Hate Fed Love video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAUw2znLK-E
Bomb live in Houston in 1992, at Emo’s.
Bomb at the peak of their rockatude, and me really skinny and cute. And drinking beer.
More vids from this show:
http://youtube.com/dwarfbilly
all vids from this show:
http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=dwarfbilly&p=r
Shot on analog video by dwarfbilly (Glen Fader). Thank you Glen, so much, for shooting the many vids, for not losing the tapes like so many have done, and for putting on the ‘tube.
–
Note: unlike most Bomb shows, I remember this one well. And also remember that between sound check and the show, I got some paper and a pen from the bartender, sat outside, watched the sun set in the summer night, and decided, “I’m going to be a writer”, and began writing my first novel.
(Peer Guardian 2 running, with I.P. addresses blocked out to mask my own I.P.)
Amazing program. I’m running it and it’s blocking about 10 attempts a minute to get into my network, from everyone from the office of the president of Lithuania, to cops in China to the Sony corporation in Los Angeles. It blocks unwanted traffic, both incoming and outgoing.
Download PeerGuardian 2 free, here.
By the way, China is posing massive attacks on US servers this week…no one’s sure if it’s the gov or hackers there. Pentagon has shut off some of their own computers, though. So it must be a serious deal.
Though judging from the number of Chinese Government sites showing up in my logs (images above), I really must assume some of it is Chinese Government computers turned into zombies by hackers to attack many other computers anonymously. I really can’t imagine that so many people in the Chinese gov would really be that concerned with what I’m doing on StinkFight, etc….
My router has a built-in firewall, and I’m running Norton firewall too. The traffic being stopped by Peer Guardian is getting past BOTH of those firewalls.
EVERYONE should have this program.
(Note, occasionally it will block a site you want to see. You can simply right click on the name/i.p. in the protection log window, and allow it for fifteen minutes, or for an hour, or permanently.)
MWD
Went to look for a FireWire cable today, had to fight through a huge box of tangled junk. Had too many of everything, all my cable crap from the past 15 years…stuff not being used, but taking up space (and taking up sanity when I go to find something.) I had cables representing technology from 1920 to now.
I ended up throwing out:
11 USB cables
3 FireWire cables
1 S-video cable
2 Coax cable TV cables
3 CAT-5 networking cables
2 telephone cables
7 assorted audio micro- and mini-cables
3 guitar cables
6 RCA audio cables
2 DSL modems
1 Wireless router
1 two-prong ungrounded extension cord
3 new printer cartridges from a printer that died and got replaced by a better printer
2 computer monitor power cables
5 “wall wart” power adapters for gear that died a long time ago
…….and a partridge in a pear tree.
I thought about putting them on Freecycle.org, but I really hate having people come to my house. Also thought about putting it all up on a MySpace bulletin and mailing the box out to someone, but MySpace recently blocked one of my sites and called it “head lice”, so I don’t like going there any more.
The “obsolete/excess technology” idea of having all these cables and boxes I don’t use made me think about one of the only performance art things I’ve ever seen that I loved. It was Attaboy and a friend standing on a couple tons of last year’s computers in 1999 at the San Francisco dump, doing an impassioned spoken word thing about the tentative nature of evolving technology, in front of a crowd of about 60 really happy people. I loved it.
UPDATE: I sold the monitor. For a quarter. Here’s pix of my satisfied customer:
(Original post): My friend gave me a flat screen monitor, so I’m getting rid of my clunky old CTR. But you can’t throw those out, they need to be taken to special centers.
To save me the trip, I just posted this on CraigsList:
====================
Working computer monitor - 25 cents.
(not 25 dollars, 25 CENTS!)
16-inch CRT ViewSonic A70 monitor.
I bought it last year on CraigsList for ten bucks. I just upgraded, so I’m willing to pass the savings on to you at ONE-FORTIETH THE ORIGINAL PRICE!!!
Must give me a one-hour window of what time you’ll be here.
I just got a new book deal with O’Reilly (will blog details next week.)
Update: I do NOT recommend U-verse!!!!
To celebrate, I just ordered an AT&T U-verse fat pipe….a a 10 Mbps fiber optic line.
Yay! With cable TV. From the phone company. 100 bucks a month, no setup fee, no contract commitment, (and it also comes with 100 TV channels). Ten times faster than a DSL line, at three times the price. And it doesn’t slow down when your neighbors go on like with cable modems.
Also ordered a third computer, which I’m gonna use dedicated to nothing but BitTorrenting huge archive zips of our podcast episodes:
LENOVO ThinkCentre A61E 641712U computer,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883108133
also got two 1-gig sticks of server RAM and got heat-sinks for them.
AT&T U-verse is not available in most of the country yet. Should be in a year or three. It’s available here:
* California: Corona, Los Angeles/Orange County, Riverside, Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto, San Diego, San Francisco/Oakland, and San Jose/Santa Clara
* Connecticut: Hartford, New Haven, New London, Stamford
* Illinois: Chicago
* Indiana: Anderson, Bloomington, Indianapolis, Kokomo, Muncie
* Kansas:Kansas City
* Michigan: Detroit
* Mississippi: Jackson
* Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
* Ohio: Akron, Cleveland, Columbus
* Oklahoma: Oklahoma City
* Texas: Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Round Rock, San Antonio
* Wisconsin: Milwaukee, Racine, West Bend
I had DSL in early 1997. I lived in downtown San Fran, and within 1200 feet of the phone company building. Mine was one of the first city blocks in the country that had it.
When I crawled off of dial-up onto DSL I felt like, as my friend Stephen Elliot put it, “It extended my lifespan.” I think Fiber Optic is going to feel like “Beam me up, Scotty” compared to DSL.
I’ll probably get rug burns from it.
I’m literally having trouble sleeping anticipating my 10 MBPS fiber optic line.
I get it Wednesday. Should have my new pooter (the dedicated BitTorrent one) by then too. Until then I have to suffer with this damn DSL. How very last century.
MWD
p/s
I remember a forwarded e-mail in San Fran in 1998 called “You might be a geek if…..”.
One of the things was “You might be a geek if…..Your apartment has more bandwidth than some universities.” With the fiber line, I’m finally there. They use the same size pipe for 200 computers on some university libraries.
…..Another one on that list was “You might be a geek if…..while hanging out at an industrial/heavy metal fetish club, you get in a fist fight with another guy about which flavor of Linux is best.”
Funny, but that was never me. I have always been a Windows guy, and always will be. I don’t like all that wrenching. XP just fucking WORKS. I’m running XP on both laptops and the new server computer has XP. (I actually had to pay a little more to not have Vista. How fucked is that????)
OH MY GOD! I went to check my mail today and there was a package from my buddy Jem Cohen.
It was Jem’s shooting script from the movie Last Exit To Brooklyn. Jem was a prop guy on the shoot, and this is his slightly tattered script. (It’s in amazing shape for something that was handled daily for months in 1988 and then stored.)
Jem is interviewed in our film Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow. On the set of Last Exit, Jem hung out with Hubert Selby, who wrote the book the movie was based on, and was impressed with how humble and sweet Selby was, in contrast with what one might expect from a writer on a large Hollywood set.
When I opened the package from Jem, I was literally trembling a little as soon as I saw what it was. I am not one to fetishize objects, and I am not easily star struck, but I kinda felt like, well, maybe not a Christian handling the Holy Grail, but at least like an archaeologist being handed an amazing specimen that ties together all the work of three years.
The script, written by Desmond Nakano (who is also interviewed in our film) has wonderfully poetic descriptions in the setting and action. They were faithfully rendered by director Uli Edel (also in our film), but it’s amazing to read the actual words on the page.
Jem also sent his crew T-shirt from the set, along with a postcard that said “Dig it Dean, official ancient crew T-shirt too. Don’t be freaked out by the stains. It’s just movie blood!”
Thank you Jem! This is all like Christmas in March for me. Even better.
=======
(funny self-indulgent side note: The wife and I recently had an essay contest on our podcast to give away our script for the Plump Buffet podiobook with our hand-written notes on it. The woman wrote us and told us she was trembling when she got our e-mail saying she’d won.
(Not to compare our little podiobook story in any way to Last Exit…..I thought it was quaint that the lady was so excited, because I looked at our script as something that had been useful and was no longer useful once we were done, and was a little amazed that she was so happy about it. I was listening to that exact part of our podcast on headphones as I stood in line at the post office. When I opened Jem’s parcel, I knew exactly how she felt.)
My dad sent me an encyclopedia from 1900. It’s in great shape. I was just reading it, and really dig it. The book even has color illustrations, and a lot of science - atomic weight tables, physics of light, and astronomy (though it defines “Black hole” as “a prison cell or dungeon”.)
It made me wonder if any computer media I own now will be readable in 108 years. I kind of doubt it.
(Photo of my friend Sheri’s iPhone, loaded with many many many of my podcasts and songs.)
Hilsinger wrote: On 9/4/94, Roger Water’s 50th birthday , we played a 9-song madley of Pink Floyd songs. The show was at Komotion Int’l, SF (r.i.p.), and included a custom lightshow of Mr Dean blowing cigarette smoke and waving a flashlight around in it. cool. We opened for GIFTHORSE and SUBLIME.
featuring members of BOMB, GIFTHORSE, HELIOS CREED, and M-FAKTER,
the band was:
Doug Hilsinger (lead gtr, bg vox)
Michael Dean (lead vox, rythm gtr)
Bean (bass, bg vox)
Chris McKay (keys)
Paul Delle Pelle (drums)
Jeff Mann engineered the recording live to DAT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAnYj-iNrPQ
Little thing I made that shows examples of good and bad background music for use with talking. Is useful info for both video production and podcast production.
Goes with this O’Reilly article I wrote,
“Put Your Photos on TV, Part 1″:
http://tinyurl.com/2xxnvf
Friday was DJ’s shoulder surgery. She had a bone spur and torn rotator cuff. Two hours arthroscopic surgery…the doctor shaved down the bone spur and sewed the torn cuff. Should relieve the pain she’s been having for some time now.
She’s in a sling and will be off work 3 or 4 weeks. I’m taking care of her, lovingly waiting on her hand and foot. It’s fun. We’re actually enjoying the extra time together, even though it could be under different circumstances.
She’s also got a “cold therapy unit”, it attaches to her shoulder with three tubes and pumps water at 47 degrees, cools her down and helps with pain. Kinda looks like something out of Terminator 2.
I call it her “series of tubes”.
She also had a Novocaine pump, that pumped through a tube into the site…that was only for the first two days, today I had to carefully pull that out. Was interesting. Like pulling a wire out of a hole in your wife’s body. Was a little bloody, went in about five inches.
All in all, it’s going well.
Michael W. Dean
Media Consultant
So, after decades of doling out free advice to anyone who asks, I’m hanging up a shingle and starting to charge. I have to do this, I don’t have time to answer all the “help me with my project!” e-mails AND have a life AND make a living.
My rates are reasonable, and negotiable. Sliding scale. Info here:
MP3 of Supergoose by my old band Slish.
MP3 of The Web by my old band Slish.
MP3 of My God Is A Woman, by my old band, Slish
E-mail that I wrote to my buddy, Chuck:
You know, I’ve actually recorded at the Record Plant. Song is attached. (taken from cassette. The master sounded like God.)
Was my band “Slish”.
Michael Urbano (Smashmouth/Cracker/Cheryl Crow/John Haytt/Third (That guy is, by far, the best drummer I’ve ever played with. And try NOT to tap your feet to this! Dude is a hit maker)
Guitarists were me and David Immergluck (Counting Sheep, I mean Counting Crows.) I played slide.
Bass was my friend Bean, I sang, he sang backup, and we wrote the song together.
It’s about getting off drugs.
This band could have been huge. Except Bean and I were fresh off drugs, insane, and fought so much we drove everyone around us away.
was 1995.
God I love this song. Called “Supergoose”. Could have been a number-one hit. Commercial and great enough, but still fucking weird as hell.
–
We recorded these three songs in one day at the Record Plant, the day before Metallica locked it out for a year. Then did ovedubs elsewhere, some anon studio I forget the name of.
Was mixed at Hyde Street (By Michael Rosen, the guy who engineers Rancid’s records).
Was mastered at some other little home studio. That was the first time I ever saw a computer used to edit an audio file. We cut four bars out of the middle eight to make it more radio friendly.
Now that’s all I do, all day long, every day.
MWD
p/s regarding “…That was the first time I ever saw a computer used to edit an audio file.”
The edit we did? We cut four bars out of the middle eight to make it more radio friendly.
Check out Danny Plotnick’s awesome new short film called “Out of Print” (LINK HERE).
It’s a beautiful little video poem to how hard and sweet it was being an underground art lover before the Internet. Narration by San Fran’s top gutter playboy gadfly, Bucky Sinister.
Oh, and by the way, I did a little post-production audio work on it (and am credited as “Audio Fluffer”.)
The film won a cool national contest, and is also out in time to promote Danny’s new DVD, Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick
It has over 10 films, trailers, audio commentary for everything, tons of photos of the films, as well as fetishistic photos of the equipment used to make the films! You can read more details here.
Ordering
If you want a copy, you can order from my website, from Microcinema, or from Amazon. It’s cheaper through me & Microcinema.
New 90-second song the wife and I wrote and recorded called “Dick and the Debbies”. It’s like a theme show for the Archies, if the Archies did speedballs and had lots of unsafe sex with strangers in bathroom stalls.
It’s for the upcoming Podiobook, The Plump Buffet.
Download MP3 here.
Me: bass and vocal.
Wife: vocal.
London May: Drums.
Officer Hutsskew: Guitar.
Guitar and drums recorded over the Internet.
My wife, the singer!:
HERE’S A SHORT MP3 of a rough mix of a song me and the wife wrote and recorded last night, called “I Love My Little Bitches.” We wrote the lyrics together, I played bass guitar and drum loops, I produced, and “Marky The Sod” played guitar over the Internet. (NOTE: BETTER VERSION WITH NEW VOCALS WAS UPLOADED TO REPLACE OLD VERSION ON FEB 2. IF YOU DOWNLOADED BEFORE THIS, RE-DOWNLOAD AND HEAR HOW MUCH THIS SONG HAS IMPROVED.)
Song is from our upcoming Podiobook radio play, “The Plump Buffet”. In the story, the song is sung by a hot dominatrix cougar with a whip named “Mother”. (Picture Texas Terri, if you’ve seen her perform.)
Mother’s band is “Mother and the Fuckers”.
The guitar player, bass player and drummer are tough leather fags. The bar they’re playing in is called “The Slime Light”. (Picture the SF Eagle, with more drugs and even more sleeze.)
Mother is whipping her “Little Bitches” (femmy mice in slips and pumps) in the audience when you hear the whips.
I’m pretty impressed with DJ’s singing on this. It’s the first singing she’s ever had recorded.
It’s funny, two days ago, GeekDad from Wired Magazine mistakenly called DJ a “singer” on the Internet,
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/01/ipod-plus-delca.html
DJ laughed when she read it. But by today, she is one.
MWD
(book cover image at top by F. Wertham)
Boss Sonova asked me:
Remember a Bomb show at the I-Beam w/Hilsinger on pedal steel, wearing a pope’s gold gown (and perhaps a miter?)
I replied:I don’t remember.
“If you remember a Bomb show, you weren’t there.” lol……..
13-minute high-quality MP3. Engineered by Michael W. Dean. Covered by Creative Commons.
A very cool guy named Torodd Eriksen from a town called Kirkenes (in Norway, on the Russian border) asked me to come tour the region with DIY or DIE and do Q&A and filmmaking seminars. He wrote me:
And after Kirkenes and Norway - you do the same thing in Russia. Russian societies are so hungry for artistic and political impulses. Generally speaking Russia is a safe country, but still it is one of the most unsafe countries for journalists. For that reason alone the skills and tools of citizen-journalism and documentation is very important in Russia……..
Beautiful sunny downtown Kirkenes:
I replied:
Three years ago I would have jumped to do this, and probably would have tried to meet a pretty girl there, get married, and stay.
However, now I’m married here, really happy, and feel I don’t want to travel in an unstable region where journalists get kidnapped. I basically believe I would be considered a “journalist” by some people, because I write for this well-known media company O’Reilly, for the O’Reilly Digital Media site:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3220
How about this. Why don’t you tour this region in my stead, show DIY or DIE, keep the money, and you can bring a laptop and I’ll do a Skype Webcam question-and-answer period at each show? You can hook me up to the video projector, you’ll take questions from the audience, translate to English, ask me, I’ll answer, and you can translate back.
Much respect,
MWD
Back when I was in college with Skip Lunch, in Jamestown, NY, Skip moved to Omaha, Nebraska (!) to “make it big in punk rock (!). He went to live with some women who ran a zine called BEEF, and played in a band with them. Band was called BEEF. HERE is a kick-ass 80s punk rock song by Skip with him on guitar and singing, called “Smell The Shit”. Check it out.
When Skip got back from Omaha, returned to the town he swore never to see again, I interviewed him on my college radio show on station WTJU. I said, excited, “So? How was it, man?” He replied, “Well, Michael….I slept on the floor a lot. Can I say ‘lesbian’ on the air?”
————
Here, in Skip’s own words, is the story:
The recording was done in a bedroom on an 8-track Tascam cassette recorder. (I thought surly Skip meant “Tascam 4-track”. I’ve never heard of an 8-track cassette recorder. He said, “Nope. 8-track. About 3 grand in 1982.”
Skip continues: I had a vision. Made 6 songs for a demo. Sent them to bars across the country and every night at 5:30 PM I’d break into _______’s dad’s business and use the office “Watts line” (old-school business phone line) to call all over the country. Then we travelled to the last gig in Portland …where the van died.
Here’s the thing: I approached the whole thing like an instant gestalt. I got a daily planner and went to work while I was on welfare in Jamestown sleeping on the couch in a 17-yr-old runaway rich kids house. From the moment I committed, it all JUST HAPPENED , like an EST forum or a “Create Your Dream” seminar or something. I mean, I formed the band at that moment for that purpose and then just MADE IT HAPPEN.
Oddly there was no pressure or stress, just inspiration and free phone calls!!! (I remember breaking and entering, very spiritual!) The point is, it was all done from conception to finale in 3 MONTHS!!! Completely positive energy just rocking the whole time, like MAGIC. I’m sure some of the members fell from the perfect grace along the way, but not much.. We rocked Portland along with bands like POND.
And actually the most intense thing was this…before the eureka moment , I asked myself “What do I want to do with my life?” “Dunno” I said to myself “Well if you can’t make a long-range plan, choose a short-term one, and by putting ENERGY into that, the future will reveal itself.”
Well, it did. In Portland at the end of the tour, I met a Jamestown friend from the early 10,000 Maniacs there and he was in acupuncture school. (I now do acupuncture) *bing0! Whole thing was the point in my life actually and inspirational too!
–Skip
P/S My guitar on that recording was later stolen from me from the building where I made my free phone calls. Karma rocks!
I had Debra Jean read the Constitution of the United States. I produced and engineered (and used our wonderful new piece of rack mount creamy goodness.)
Her reading of it is available as a high-quality MP3 download here.
Anyway, Cory Doctorow blogged it on Boing Boing, here, and we’ve gotten about a billion zillion downloads of it today.
Posted by Cory Doctorow:
Debra Jean Dean has done a wonderful, expertly engineered reading of the US Constitution, one of the most inspiring documents ever penned. The reading is released under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, We The People…!)
Debra Jean Dean reads the US Constitution:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/constitution/index.htm
Free Creative Commons audio book.
United States Constitution (with all amendments), read by Debra Jean Dean, engineered by Michael W. Dean
Audio file covered by Creative Commons, feel free to share and link.
“The best recording with the best voice of any free, non-DRM audiobook of
the US Constitution, anywhere.”
Get Episode 0062 of Clone The Homeless. (You must be 18 or over to listen to this episode!)
Mon, 14 Jan 2008
77 min.
HOW TO DIRECT ACTORS (part 1 of 3)
There’s no right or wrong way to direct, it’s a matter of choice and intuition. But in the first installment of this three-part series, MWD and wife have a tape recorder running in the room as they direct voiceover actress Estrus Godspeed in playing a number of sexy characters for an upcoming cat cartoon Podiobook of “Plump Buffet”.
(taglines:
“50 women aren’t 50 times the fun, they’re 50 times the hassle. And one of them always feels like killing you.”
and
“The Plump Buffet is “Fritz the Cat” meets “Showdown at Waco”.)
There’s some damn good stuff to absorb here, people.
Fire up your pod, sit back and enjoy being a fly on the wall (or a kitty in the corner) as this husband and wife enjoy telling some cute girl what to do, all night long, baby.
(Ignore the slight background noise, I forgot to turn the H2 settings to high, so had to boost a lot. The stuff we recorded directly to the computer sounds GREAT, as you’ll see when the actual Podoibook comes out. But this is a perfectly listenable document for learning.)
Review is here. From the River Cities Reader newspaper. (Paper serves Quad Cities, which is Davenport, Iowa, Moline, Illinois, Rock Island, Illinois and Bettendorf, Iowa).
excerpt:
…518-page tome sharing lessons from his hard-knock years touring with his band Bomb and the 12 records he’s created. Taking this further than his documentary film D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, his new book $30 Music School is just that – an all-inclusive exposé and explanation of the music business for the up-and-coming artist who wants to pull his own strings.
Ya gotta love it when a book that came out four years ago is still getting favorable reviews. Buy the book on Amazon.
Above: Diagram I made of how we soundproofed the window in our studio. It’s not only a useful document, it’s sort of my current view on the world. (Image covered by Creative Commons. Feel free to share.)
So, Debra Jean and I soundproofed the one window in the 10 x 10 foot room that we dedicate to our recording endeavors, and also use as our office (with side-by-side matching laptops. And now that we’ve got the rack mount gear blinking between us, we feel like we’re piloting a jet plane!)
We call our little studio “Casa de Llama” and “The Inter-Nest”.
Our neighborhood is mostly quiet, WAY quieter than where I lived in Echo Park. And we live alone in the house - no roommates (except cats, and they’re pretty quiet). But the studio window faces out to the street and there are cars…also occasional barking dogs, kids playing, and other detritus of suburban life.
The window is the one weak link in the chain of us having a quiet room to record (and think) in.
Above: BEFORE pix
We did some research and found that, other than a foot of concrete, the best simple way to make soundproofing is dead air between layers of wood.
We went to Home Depot and bought two pieces of 1/2-inch plywood. We had it cut to be 1/16 of an inch smaller than the inside of the window frame. We also got one piece of plywood five inches larger in both directions than the inside of the window frame.
We started by stapling the window curtain to one side of one of a piece of plywood:
This is so that from the outside of the house it looks like normal window with curtains:
(rather than the meth lab / crack house look you get with raw plywood.)
Above: someone’s house, but not mine.
We left little pull tab pieces of fabric in case there’s ever a fire or earthquake and we have to get out fast.
It would be nearly impossible to get in from the outside (and we have an alarm, we left the contact inside the window and ran the wire in), but I could pull this thing apart from the inside out in less than a minute with the claw hammer I keep hanging on the wall. We had to razor the bottom side off the fabric so the board would fit. Man, did it fit tight. Had to push it in slowly, tapping all around it with a rubber mallet.
SO…then we put weatherstripping all the way around the inside of the window frame, touching the back (studio side) of the first piece of plywood.
This provides sound deadening, as well as being the thing that will hold the next layer of plywood in place.
Then we put in the second layer of plywood, and more weather stripping on the other side of that.
We put synthetic, fire-resistant pillow batting in between the last two layers of plywood. We don’t have pix of that actually getting done because it took four hands. But here it is before we put it in:
It looked like a sheep exploded.
(Don’t pack it TOO tight, or it will actually TRANSMIT sound, not block it.)
This was followed by taking the piece of plywood that was larger than the window frame and nailing it into the window frame and wall with three-inch nails.
And over that we nailed carpet.
Voilà!
Looks like hell, but keeps out about 98% of the noise. We love it.
(Note, it also keeps OUR um…noises…IN. Nice. We make some odd noises sometimes.)
TOTAL COST: 60 bucks.
I believe this technique could be applied, on a lager scale, to an entire wall or even a whole room. You would have to build some wood frames, but it should work.
——
We also laid carpet on the floor and nailed it to all the walls and the ceiling.
TOTAL COST: 40 bucks. (We dumpster dived clean carpet remnants from behind a carpet store, and only had to buy the carpet glue, some nails, and one blanket to cover the closet.)
What we did to the window is soundproofing. What we did to the walls inside the room isn’t really soundproofing (it’s quiet in the rest of the house, we don’t need soundproofing inside), it’s sound conditioning. That is, it cuts out reverberation, and makes a nice dead-sounding room….Which is nice for recording. You can always add reverb later, but you can’t take it away. You want the purest sound you can get, that gives you more control if you wanna mess with it.
And if you don’t wanna mess with it, it just gives you a good sound.
(Also check out our quick-n-dirty sound treatment of our bedroom with our H2 bedcast setup).
–Michael W. Dean
So…..I have been lusting this piece of studio gear for some time:
I have a lust for rack-mount gear. Every time I see some in a documentary about scientists in their lab, in a sci-fi movie, or any time I’ve been in an actual high-end recording studio, I’ve had to excuse myself to masturbate.
A few months back I bought my first piece, a Furman power conditioner. It helps remove noise from the power in my home studio, but isn’t a signal processor. I still wanted some stuff to sweeten up the sound.
Enter the SM Pro Audio TB202 two-channel rack mount tube preamp / compressor /EQ with phantom power. I finally decided to buy one the other day (they’re only 225 bucks). But EVERY online retailer was back-ordered a month or more. Guess Santa delivered too many and has to have his elves make more. So I went on Craiglist and found one used for $125. We drove up to Santa Barbara (an hour each way), tried it out, and bought it.
When I got it home, it sounded good, but was a little crunchy on my mixer whenever we talked loud. So I ordered a new Tungsol 12AX7 tube for it, only 20 bucks with shipping. That made it sound GREAT!
First, the tube in it was old, but the guy swears he only used the unit on Sundays to record a little old lady in Pasadena at church. I have to wonder though, if that’s true, why is all the red paint worn off the front plate? That usually only happens from finger oils, from touching gear daily for a long time.)
(The guy didn’t seem particularly greasy to me. In fact, he was well groomed, and was a very polite young man.)
But the tube included by the factory is a generic Chinese 12AX7 tube. The Tungsol is a superior name-brand tube, manufactured in Russia.
When I opened the TB202 up, I was surprised to find it only has one tube in it. I think it’s interesting the manual says “hand tested 12AX7 tubes used” and it only has one tube. For two separate channels.
It looks like there’s a space on the circuit board for a second tube, but no socket for it.
I wrote the company and found out that the 12AX7 (the most common tube still being manufactured today) is a STEREO tube, with two-channel capability in one unit. The unit is made with only one tube. And both channels work fine.
Damn cool.
So, I recorded a test without the unit, and then with it. It makes a good difference, warms the voice, makes me sound more like the “voice of god”….creamier, and the compressor function clips the peaks without sounding unnatural. For only $145 bucks outlay (along with a $150 Alesis USB8 mixer/digital converter, and a $225 Rode NT1-A microphone), I have the capacity to do stuff at home that sounds like a high-end radio station. (Well, with all that gear, and my modest amount of voice and engineering talent.)
MP3 TEST IS HERE, with both before and after, back to back. (File is eight megs, 320 k 16-bit stereo MP3). You’ll really hear the difference with headphones, but it’s there on speakers too.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS: ***Use the XLR cables (not 1/4 inch cables) in and out. Will eliminate noticeable noise. Run your mic (or mics) directly into the unit, and then run the unit’s out into your mixer or digital converter. ***If you’re plugging it into a mixer, turn off the phantom power on the mixer, it might fry the TB202. The TB202 has switchable phantom power, so that will power any mics plugged directly into it that need them. ***Turn DOWN the input on your mixer. The TB202 has a pretty powerful preamp in it. ***Don’t use too much compression, it will sound unnatural. Start at about 1/3 total, and experiment. I put the attack and release boost buttons on (pushed in). ***Plug the unit in, turn it on and let it run for 10-30 minutes before recording. The tube has to warm up.
ANYWAY, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the SM Pro Audio TB202. Order it now, get it new, when they start shipping in a month…then you’ll have the warranty, and also, it will look spiffy.
This unit is so cool, it will extend your lifespan.
–Michael W. Dean
DJ had a week off. We don’t party. So we just made a lot of sweet sweet love, and also created six killer episodes (two of one podcast, four of the other.)
Then:
DECEMBER 28: Cleaned the house top to bottom, including vacuuming and dusting everything.
DECEMBER 29: Went through all our receipts for the year, organized for taxes. Created spreadsheets to give our accountant in a couple months.
DECEMBER 30: Backed up everything on both computers to disc AND to backup drive. Shredded old backup DVDs. Virus scanned and defragged computers.
DECEMBER 31: Did spring cleaning. Removed EIGHT GARBAGE BAGS OF old clothes, old dishes, and other assorted crap….some of it from DJ’s first marriage, when her now-adult offspring were little kids.
Drove garbage bags to dumpster drop at Catholic charity, three towns over. (Our town is too snooty to have a charity. Might attract “the wrong element”.) The car was so full we looked like the Beverley Hillbillies driving it.
Shredded two garbage bags of decade-old tax records, crap from when we were in college and even from when we were kids…and assorted newspaper clippings, old bills, etc. etc.
Some of this cleaning, sorting and shredding was kinda emotional, but felt good when we were done. Like the house (and us) had taken a HUGE dump. (And at one point, our big industrial shredder gave a warning message: “Overheating. Please discontinue use for 30 minutes”, so we did. Was fine after the wait.)
Now we’re all ready for the new year. Yay us!
We’re staying in. I hate going out on New Year’s Eve. It’s dangerous and full of drunken fools.
In AA, they call it “amateur night”.
Download episode 0061 of Clone The Homeless
Sun, 30 Dec 2007
Interview about homelessness / and Podcast Expo interviews (2)
Michael W. Dean is interviewed in his home by the Homeless Movie Guy about homelessness. Then we hear chats with podcasting rock stars, (In order): Michael Butler of PodShow, Grammar Girl, Tim Street of French Maid TV, Tee Morris, Tim Bourquin and the Joel Mark Witt (MarylandZoo.TV)
They all expound at length on the past, present and future of portable media.
Entire episode recorded on location at the 2007 New Media Expo in Ontario, California, on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder. (Except Homeless interview with MWD, recorded at MWD’s home on the H2.)
(Small excerpts of these were used in the O’Reilly podcast report I did, but these are the whole, brilliant, uncut chats.)
I was listening to the “Lovesucker” record tonight. I fucking love it. It’s the best-sounding Bomb release, IMHO.
It’s our lowest-selling album ever. It probably sold 500 copies (I never saw any accounting), mostly because the label, the aptly named Wingnut Records, went out of business…But not before the owner, Josh, received mail orders and never filled them. To his credit, he didn’t cash the checks, so it wasn’t stealing, but it was very flaky, and pissed off our fans. But hey…without him, this CD never would have happened, so I can’t be too mad. Also, this record was recorded in 1999 during our three-gig reunion, we never played or toured after that, and touring helps sales. A lot.
I was thinking tonight about the recording processes of our complete discography:
* To Elvis In Hell, Boogadigga LP, (1987)
* Hits of Acid, Boner Records LP & Cass, (1988)
* Happy All The Time EP, Boner Records, LP & Cass (1989)
* Lucy In The Sky With Desi, Boner/Revolver CD & LP, (1990)
* Personal Jesus single (Raid Records, 7″), (1991)
* Hate-Fed Love, Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, LP, (1992)
* Lovesucker, Wingnut Records, CD EP, (1999)
To Elvis In Hell was engineered by Dave Bock. He’s a good engineer, but was less experienced at the time. He had mostly been assistant engineer on other sessions, not the main engineer. The session was sort of an experiment for Dave.
Bomb was new and hadn’t toured much (touring makes bands TIGHT). The studio (Hyde Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco) was one of the best in the world, but we were working late at night, often on short notice when a paying client canceled. And the band members were all drunk and doing speed throughout the recording. Was recorded and mixed in about five nights, spaced out over about a month.
Hits of Acid was recorded too quickly. (All our albums were. A review in UK’s “The Face” magazine said of Lucy In The Sky With Desi: “…given 10,000 pounds and an extra week in the studio, this would have been one of the best records of all time.”) Hits of Acid was recorded on tour. Touring does make bands tight, but that’s best exploited by touring, then resting, THEN recording. And there was speed and too much drink (and some pot, I think) in the studio.
Hits of Acid was engineered by Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys. I kinda felt gypped by that. I’d booked the time with studio owner Don Zientara, who had done great things quickly when engineering my work with Baby Opaque and The Beef People. (He also did Minor Threat and most of the rest of the Dischord stuff.) But when we arrived at Don’s very adequate home basement studio in suburban Arlington, Virginia he said, “My new assistant Eli will be doing your record. I’ll be upstairs hanging out with my wife if you need anything.” The session was sort of an experiment for Eli. He’s a nice guy, and is NOW a good engineer, but he was not nearly as experienced back then. It felt like bait & switch to me. But we were troopers, so we worked, and worked hard. We recorded and mixed in about three long days.
The “Happy All The Time” EP was done in three nights at a small studio (Razor’s Edge in San Francisco….It’s in the house where Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice takes place. The studio is now owned by Fat Mike of NOFX.) Jonathan Burnside engineered “Happy All The Time”. He did a decent job, and Doug Hilsinger actually helped a lot with the producing, which made it better, but the gear was merely adequate, I was on heroin, and again we were in a hurry to beat the clock of our budget.
The “Personal Jesus” single (us covering the Depeche Mode song on one side, and doing the acoustic version of our song “Nineteen” on the flip) was the first recording with both Jay and Doug on guitar, so they were still working that out. We weren’t on drugs, but we were on tour, and it was recorded and mixed by an inexperienced engineer in six freezing hours in a very minimal 8-track studio at an unheated warehouse in Berlin. And Tony and I were arguing about some thing or another the whole day. (We argued a lot in Bomb, but we were professional enough to usually che
