CD#2-Bad Hair Day
Bad Hair Day.
“Baby stay, don’t go to work today/look at how it’s storming
Take some time, call in sick and stay/and kiss me in the morning.“
To say that the success of Parking Karma surprised us would be as large an understatement as you could make. It changed the trajectory of the Band. We went from guys who had other jobs or were in other bands to becoming A Band. And things began to change very quickly for us.
The First Rule in Mr. Blotto is that nobody plays anything they don’t want to play. The whole purpose of this Project was to take a bunch of Musicians who were working to some degree of success in other bands and put them together playing only the stuff that they really wanted to play. The question was whether anybody would want to listen to that stuff.
Parking Karma changed the game for us. We began to not only see bigger rooms on a regular basis, but were starting to hear “I loved that song by ______, but what was that Song that you wrote? I liked that one even more.” As Songwriters who were finding the voice of the Band they were in, this was immensely encouraging. It fueled the Songwriting fires. As a result, we wrote all the time & everywhere, and the response to the new Songs gave us an approval that the cover Songs, while fun to play and more familiar to the audiences, did not.
We even wrote while driving in the van. Paul and I were headed home after a Show in Rockford when we came up with a song idea. This being before cell phones, we didn’t have a way to record it, so we pulled off the highway and found an abandoned gas station with a pay phone (Remember those?). Paul called our answering machine and we sang the idea into it and figured out what it was when we got home.
There was no such thing as a Sound Check anymore. Ideas were bouncing around on Stage constantly, and Songs assembled during Check would be tried out that very same night. Post-Show, arrangements would be discussed and the new version would be tried out the following night. For a Band that was playing 3 or 4 nights a week, this led to a constant Edit Mode that honed a lot of Songs to the versions that would later show up on Bad Hair Day.
Another thing that changed was that we had added another member. Dave “B3” Allen was now playing Keys of all sorts. While he remains, in my opinion, one of the best Synth players I have heard, his specialty was the Hammond B3 Organ.
The combination of Dave’s fiery soloing and oversize personality gave Bob and Paul something to play off of and brought performances up a notch or ten. In addition, like Paul, Dave could freestyle Rap and the 2 had a great time getting into increasingly funny and absurd verbal spaces. Having a Keyboard player in the Band also let Bob pace his solos in a different way, and, as a result, the dynamics quickly became more complex and powerful.
By the later months of 1993, we had built up a group of Songs that we thought would make up a CD that we would be glad to buy, and by the end of the year we decided to record the follow up to Parking Karma. We didn’t have a name in mind at the time, but we figured that something would suggest itself in due course.
So, on Monday, January 24th, 1994, we went back to the Studio. On that first day we put down On the Tracks, Any Kind of Lover, Sail Away Virginia and Rock Me in your Arms. We also got a version of Mean Potato that never made the CD. The next day we got Standing in the House, Wishing You Well, Dirty Woman Blooze, Got Nothin’, The Jinx, and Low Loretta. Like I said, we were tight on the material having played the songs a lot and they seemed to stick to tape well. We also did a version of Love’s Just the Time and Southern Country Gentleman that, like Mean Potato, didn’t fit on the CD.
Sometimes, when you write a Song, people grow to like or love it over time. This feels really great and affirming. It’s even better when you play a Song for the first time and you see people react strongly right away. But something even cooler happened for a few of the Songs on Bad Hair Day.
People were coming up to us requesting new Originals without knowing the names of the Songs (to be fair-some were too new to have titles at that point). This happened for a few of the Bad Hair Day songs, and it happened enough to make us feel confident in the new material.
There were a couple of songs that we had not yet written though. At a Show, somebody requested a Song in Spanish. Paul, knowing a beautiful song called “De Colores/The Colors” launched into it. The rest us followed his lead and it evolved into a fast Latin Jam that we really liked. As would later become somewhat common, the next day, we had absolutely no idea how to play it, but the Show had been recorded and we worked backwards from the tape. That became “La Dia de Pelo Malo” which roughly translates to “The Day of the Bad Hair” [Note-It has been pointed out by our Latin friends that it should have been El Dia, not La Dia. In our defense, Paul and I are Irish and did the best we could.] It dawned on us at that time that Bad Hair Day would make a great CD Title, and we went with it.
One note to our Bilingual friends. While we included both Spanish and English lyrics to La Dia de Pelo Malo in the Cd booklet, you may find some, shall we say, inconsistencies if you examine all the verses. If you do, please don’t tell anyone-Gracias!
As Recording and Mixing progressed, we continued to play a lot of Shows. On February 5th, we were at a Southside place (P.J. Flaherty’s on 95th Street) and during Sound Check came up with a thing that became “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”. We liked it a lot and Paul and I wrote the lyrics at a table near the sound booth between Check and Show.
Once we recorded these last 2, we felt like we had a solid Album on our hands. Mixing continued into April and May and Bad Hair Day was released at the Vic Theater later that year…
As I look back at the writing and recording of Bad Hair Day I find myself thinking that I’d love to go back and tell the 1994 Me that the CD would really be welcomed by people when it came out. That every Song on it would still be being requested at Shows in 2020, and that all of them still find a place in our ever-changing Sets.
The Songwriter Me would be encouraged, I think, to hear that.
The Musician Me, who was playing those Songs to those people in those Rooms before we recorded them and put them out-I like to think he already knew that. What that guy didn’t know was just how great the support of everybody who got into Bad Hair Day would make us feel.
-Chief
