Recording Notes - Osborne, Green Day, Charlie Watts Jim Keltner, Four Seasons

By Blair Jackson

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JOAN OSBORNE
A RIGHTEOUS RETURN

by Blair Jackson
It’s been five years since the release of Joan Osborne’s Top 10, multi-Platinum, major-label debut album, Relish, and three since she got off the road promoting it. That’s a long time to be without “product” (if you’ll excuse the record biz parlance) and out of the public eye. Sure, radio has continued to occasionally play her quirky smash hit, “One of Us” (and to a lesser degree, “St. Theresa”), and she had a song in the 1999 Kevin Costner baseball drama For the Love of the Game and dueted with Bob Dylan on the soundtrack for the TV miniseries The ’60s. Continue...

GREEN DAY
STILL PUNK AFTER ALL
THESE YEARS

by David John Farinella
Mothers don’t let your children grow up to be second engineers…The scene you hear at the opening of “Blood, Sex and Booze” from Green Day’s latest offering, Warning, is second engineer Tone getting a workout from dominatrix Mistress Simone. “I don’t know how much I should say about that,” says engineer Ken Allardyce with a laugh. “You can say there were a couple of dominatrixes in the studio. We needed a whip sound; that’s how it started.” Lo and behold, there was a mic hanging in the room. “This sort of went down incidentally. We found it afterwards and grabbed it.” Continue...

THE CHARLIE WATTS
JIM KELTNER PROJECT
DRUMS AND BEYOND

by Chris J. Walker
Two drummers collaborating on a project is a fairly rare occurrence. And when those two drummers are stalwart session man Jim Keltner and the Rolling Stones’ legendary backbeat man Charlie Watts, one can assume it won’t be a run-of-the-mill production. In fact, the Charlie Watts Jim Keltner Project, released this past summer, doesn’t fit neatly into existing musical categories. There are elements of both avant-garde and electronica due to the project’s unorthodox and highly percussive orientation. However, it lacks the mind-altering dissonance of so much avant-garde and goes beyond the pulsating drum ’n bass grooving of electronica. Continue...

CLASSIC TRACKS

“Rag Doll” by The Four Seasons

by Dan Daley
The Four Seasons were part of America’s last Caucasian bulwark against the British invasion of the early 1960s. The group, who formed on the streets of Newark, N.J., in 1961, epitomized the doo-wop harmony sound and street attitude of the duck-tailed ’50s, but they also blended in R&B vocal influences that kept the sound and the attitude fresh. From 1961 through 1967—the year the Beatles changed music forever with Sgt. Pepper’s—The Four Seasons made the Top 10 13 times, with hits including “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Dawn” and “Let’s Hang On.” These came after nearly a decade in which the members of the group—lead vocalist Frankie Valli, whose piercing falsetto was the group’s trademark; keyboardist and vocal arranger Bob Gaudio; guitarist Tommy DeVito; and Nick Massi on bass—had kicked around the music business, collectively and individually. Continue...

Reprinted with permission from