Jerry Harrison: All Blues
Pure Blues
Kenny Wayne Shepherd may be relatively new to the blues scene, but he has the soul of a seasoned bluesman. He likes his blues straight up, no mixers. “I produced one of Kenny’s albums and there was always some tension between Kenny and the record company,” says Harrison. “Kenny wanted to play straight blues, but the record company wanted some blues-rock to appeal to a wider audience.”
Harrison wanted to give Shepherd that pure blues album. In 2005, he took the guitarist on a tour that would put him on stage with blues greats throughout the U.S. Harrison would document it on both DVD and CD.
“I thought, why don’t we get on a bus and record whoever is left?” says Harrison. The tour began in New Orleans, then continued on to Shreveport, La., Indianola, Miss., Gadsden, Ala., Hillsborough, N.C. St. Louis, Mo., and Salina, Kan. Shepherd, with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s old band, Double Trouble, accompanying him, played with the Muddy Waters Band, Honeyboy Edwards, Henry Townsend, Etta Baker, the Howlin’ Wolf Band, B.B. King, and many more. The resulting documentary DVD and CD will be titled “Ten Days Out: Blues from the Backroads.”
Harrison, Thorngren, Cohen, and a 12-man film crew followed Shepherd and Double Trouble for 10 days in two tour buses. They recorded performances in backwoods juke joints, open fields, cramped kitchens, and church halls. The schedule was grueling. “It was such hard work, setting up everyday and moving,” says Harrison. “It was only about 10 days, but it felt like three months.”
Getting the Blues
Harrison and the Sausalito Sound crew packed their entire studio for Shepherd’s tour. They crammed two full Mac-based Pro Tools recording systems into a bus — one primary system and a backup.
They recorded each performance directly to hard drive. In the beginning, they lugged their equipment onto the locations, stringing wires and placing microphones to capture each performance. “We quickly grew tired of that, though, and just ran a snake of cables out of the bus,” says Harrison. From that point on, the recording equipment stayed put in Harrison’s bus.
Sound engineers E.T. Throngren (foreground) and Matt Cohen at the Sausalito Sound studio in Sausalito, California. Photo by Dustin Driver.
The Mac recording platform proved so stable that they quickly abandoned the backup system. “We originally had the audio split off to two separate computers for redundancy,” says engineer Matt Cohen, “but everything was so flawless that we decided to just go with one. The Macs never failed and we didn’t miss a thing.”
When it came time to edit the tracks for the documentary, they went for authenticity. “We were going for the tone of the room,” says remixer Thorngren. “If you’re watching Kenny playing in a garage and it sounds like a concert hall, something’s not right. We wanted the audience to feel like they’re in the room with Kenny.” To achieve that, the Sausalito Sound crew again used filters and effects in moderation, just enough to get the desired effect.
“Ten Days Out: Blues from the Backroads” is scheduled to be released on DVD and featured on PBS in September 2006. When the project is finished, the guys at Sausalito Sound plan to finish remixing some of Harrison’s solo albums in surround sound. They’ll do all of the work on Power Macs. “We’ve all been using Macintoshes for music editing since they came out,” says Harrison. “The machines have just gotten more and more powerful and reliable. I’m looking forward to doing a lot more with them.”
