James Lee Stanley

We had a very productive day today.   Getting in here by 10:30 and working like Trojans, we  took on Soul Kitchen and created a rocking guitar track.   We’re doing a lot of two guitar interplay syncopation that may need nothing else but bass and percussion.  

We’ll start playing something and there will be (from one of us, a little less enthusiasm for where it’s going.   Like ESP, the other senses it and we change up, going from blues to rock to waltz time on a tune.  

Suddenly something will click that we both hear and recognize immediately and away it goes; we’re grooving in some new way and the song takes on a life of it’s own.

Soul Kitchen is one of my favorite tunes by the Doors, so I really wanted to do it, but not like they did it.   THEY already did it that way, so we wanted something else to serve the song and we got it.

Then on to their song, People Are Strange, which literally fell together as we played it.  We laid down the basic guitar tracks and a work vocal and moved on.

We then tackled their classic, Light My Fire.    We moved it around in different keys and decided to keep them all, so this song floats thru four different key centers.  

The trick was to make the modulations natural and effortless, so that you don’t even notice that the key has changed.    It unfolded effortlessly.

We layed down two guitar tracks and took a break.

Then we moved on to their blues rocker, Love Me Two Times, which we fooled around with in all the traditional ways, but nothing really clicked, then I suddenly started playing a riff I remembered from somewhere and Cliff took off on it.

He’s got a great bluesy voice and as he sang and played a harmony to the lick I was playing and the song fell together.     The trick here was playing these two syncopated interlocking licks together and not making it sound like a train wreck.  

Finally by 11 or so, we’d nailed it and called it a day.   Four basic track arrangements in one day, starting from square one to recording.   

A good day.