In 1994, we made plans to record a new album. We were really excited since we'd been pretty separated as a band since 1992's Nature Timeless Rhythm sessions. We found this new place in Brooklyn called Full Moon Studios.
The band got together in the New York area several days before our scheduled session and began hitting the town hard with some friends. By the time session day rolled around, we were dead tired. Ran, Spike, and I headed over to the studio in a rush as we were running late. We didn't have time to clean up or eat anything. Ed had planned to meet us there. We set up for a while, but no Ed. We kept calling him and finally woke him up. He rushed over. You had all The Blanks, exhausted and starving with no prepared tunes. We rolled tape anyway. Full Moon engineers set up the studio mix to record directly to cassette tape. We were going for a live feel. The entire session was a strange stream-of-conscious event.
We wrapped up in the evening, and as we started to leave it poured down rain in Brooklyn. Ran and Spike had to go meet some people for a wedding rehearsal dinner. Ed and I were left to carry instruments in terrible weather. I remember being extremely tired and hungry. And we thought our instruments were being ruined by the heavy rain, even through their cases.
Ed and I finally dropped off the stuff and ate. We were ready to hear the sweet results of the session. We put in the first tape and pressed play. No music, not a sound. We fast forwarded for a while, still nothing ... on either of the two cassettes we had painstakingly created. We just started laughing out of hysteria. When Ran and Spike caught up with us, we pushed play and let them experience the same shock.
The boys at Full Moon had screwed up. During the session we kept double checking with them as something seemed strange. I was just exhausted by the whole experience. The worst part was that since it was getting harder for us to get together as a band, I thought this might be our last release. But there seemed to be nothing to release. Even if there had, I knew the songs were going to be strange.
Luckily, we had a backup recording. For some reason, one of the engineers or owners suggested we video tape the session for prosperity. They had a camera setup and we went ahead and did it. The video didn't capture a good audio mix, but it was the only record from this sad day. We weren't ready to release the sessions off the video, especially if this was our swan song album. For one thing, there was a lot of rehearsal and just strange stuff going on. I remixed, reworked, and added vocals and Moog to a few tunes and released them on the Various Artists Smoothie Town Sampler collection.
We shelved the video and were determined to make a proper album that reinforced our place in music history. Before we released this, we completed King Fred and Elevator Men, obviously two of our greatest albums. At the end of 1996, we did edit the videocassette down to a reasonable amount of audio material and released it as Full Moon Sessions. Overall, it's a really rockin' album. There are a lot of nice songs here like “Gun Shy,” “She Stews,” “L.T. Poko,” and “Summer of '75.” We redid “Summer of '75” on The Warrior Ethos.
This remains a bittersweet album to me. In some ways, I think it put more determination in the band. Or maybe it was just undue pain. I'm glad we have it though.
– Kar
The recording of this album was all about insanity. It's a miracle that it was ever released. By this time The Blanks weren't even all living in the same town. Mr. Ed, Ran and I all lived in NY, and Kar still lived in Texas. Having done Nature's Timeless Rhythm before people moved away, we thought the last Blanks album had already been recorded. It's true that See it Through came out in '93 but that was a recording we had made earlier, and just added the finishing touches on it.
Then a friend of ours ended up announcing his wedding was going to be in NY. We decided that since all four Blanks would be in town for a time, that we should try and put out some new material. First we spent days of intense partying and very little sleeping, with folks that included former Blanks guests Christopher ArahaArohaDej and Kone. Other Blanks Enterprise musicians joined in as well. For some reason the night before recording was to take place, Mr. Ed announced he needed to go to his place to sleep and get his equipment for the next day's session. Of course, after a late night of partying that meant he headed for home probably just a few hours before the session was to begin. The morning of the session Kar, Ran, and I ended up at Ran's house ready to go to the studio, tired, but confident we would make some good music despite having no preconceived ideas in our head at all. Repeated calls to Mr. Ed's went unanswered, but we weren't overly worried at that point. We figured that he might be in mid-transit to Ran's. We left note at Ran's saying that we were going to Full Moon studios, and left a message on his machine as well.
Once we arrived at the studio and acquainted ourselves with the new surroundings and the studio's equipment we still hadn't heard from Mr. Ed. Frustrated the three of us jammed a bit, and made jokes about making a Rattlesnake Band album as opposed to a Blanks album.
Eventually Mr. Ed showed up explaining that he'd overslept and was so out of it that he didn't hear our phone calls for him. With all of us there we set about what I thought was rehearsal for our first song. I finally got an idea for a drum part cemented in my mind and announced that I was ready to do an actual take of the song. Mr. Ed and Kar laughed and informed me that the playing we had just done was the final take and it was time for a new song. We continued making songs in that fashion and frantic pace for hours. Just when I thought I had rehearsed and was ready to try an actual drumbeat throughout the song, it was time to move on to a new song.
In addition, due to sleep deprivation, and frazzled brains I would forget one song totally as soon as we started on the next one. By the time we finished working on “She Stews” I couldn't have hummed a single note of “Gun Shy.” which had probably been written less than an hour before. Our minds were that far gone. I think I can safely say that others in the band had similar experiences which explains why the music for “Occasionally” is the exact same music used for “Gun Shy.” By the time we were doing the music of “Occasionally,” not one of us had any clue that we had already played that music earlier in the session. It was insanity that rivals Blanks II as far as recording studio atmosphere.
The album contains some really rocking songs though, and it does give a pretty good inside look at one of the ways the band writes together. Some of our between song banter is preserved on the album and often the listener is able to tell how one person might start out a piece of the song and others add their own parts to that. The album is fairly close to just being real-time, slice of life, recording.
Full Moon Studios managed to fudge the recording of the music, and only through Kar's masterful engineering and producing was he able to salvage the audio from a live video we had of the session. Thus the album wasn't released until two years later.
Like many times in the past we thought that this might be the last Blanks album. I think part of the delay might have been the thought that while it was a dynamite album, it wasn't what any of us had in mind for a final hoorah. I think after it was clear that we'd go on releasing Blanks album, some of the pressure of the Full Moon Sessions was off, and we were all a lot more comfortable releasing the record.
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