LINER NOTES FOR THE LOCKDOWN SESSIONS

In early March 2020, The League Of Existence was preparing to launch a new album project. We booked time for Friday, March 20, at our favorite studio, Night Train, in Westford, MA. The cast was being assembled: in addition to the usual LOE suspects, our friend Howlin’ Dave Ambrose would lend his talents on tenor sax, and Night Train engineer Brent Godin would help out on bass guitar, as he often did. Members actually gathered to practice some of the proposed tunes, something of an abnormality for the highly spontaneous League.

And then, quite literally, the world changed, as the coronavirus pandemic blazed a path through Asia and Europe and then began its rapid spread across the US. On Friday, March 13, schools in Massachusetts shut down - temporarily, so they thought - to do some preventative “deep cleaning.” But the situation escalated, seemingly hour by hour. Over that weekend, toilet paper disappeared from store shelves everywhere. By Monday, schools had announced a further closure of at least two weeks. And we received notice that our 3/20 recording session would have to be canceled.

The frustration of the artistic postponement was of course diluted somewhat by the more pressing needs of basic survival, such as finding toilet paper and avoiding the deadly Covid-19 bug. But by Summer 2020 we had learned to leap those hurdles, and began to think about returning to the album project. Night Train, however, was yet to reopen. As much as I hated to go elsewhere, the drive to produce our music led to a search for a new studio. Fortunately, there were still a few in operation in the general vicinity, and after scoping them out, I settled on Electric Tree House in Bedford, MA, where owner-engineer Alec Francesconi booked us in for an evening session on July 7, 2020. For this first session, it was just Gary Gagnon and I laying down drum & guitar basic tracks. We recorded eight songs, six of them for concurrent Four Last Things projects. The League numbers were Ballerina Ninja and Haystacks & Clairvoyance.

We quickly booked a session for the following week, and were joined at the Treehouse by Brian Farrell on July 10. This time the focus was on League material and we cut basic tracks for four more songs - Droolings, Rose Glasses, Paper Minou, Retro Futuristic Gizmo, as well as a remake of Ballerina Ninja. All of these except Paper Minou were Farrell compositions, and he sang vocals live with the guitar & drums.

The big group session we had been aiming for prior to the Covid shutdown in March finally took place on August 13. In attendance at the Treehouse that night besides Gary, Brian and I, were Don Cogswell on vocals and Dave Ambrose on tenor sax. We started with a new version of Lama Blues, originally recorded in May 2008 as part of our homemade Music For Tibet album. Donny & Brian sang alternating live vocals on this one. Then came the album’s magnum opus. Back in 2011, during a home-recording session, Donny had taken the lead on a free-form spoken word piece based on his reading of the biography of Vernon Dent, a supporting actor in tons of Three Stooges classics. Brian and I improvised a lugubrious and spooky accompaniment on electric keyboard and guitar. Thus was born the original version of I Remember The Icemen, lasting about six & a half minutes. For a time, this version was slated to appear on 2020’s A Quiet Night At Home with The LOE, but was pulled from that compilation

Before wrapping for the night, Gary & I cut the basic track for What Happened To The Brine, a Stephen McMillen composition from the mid-1980s.

One final session at the Treehouse, November 2, was about evenly split between 4LT and LOE work. On the League side of the ledger, Brian added harmony vocals to Droolings and Ballerina Ninja, and did some vocal patch-ups on Retro Futuristic Gizmo. I did some additional vocals on Brine, and Gary & I made a basic track for the McCusker spoken word piece, Crop.

Over the course of the Bedford sessions, I had been working at home on guitar, bass, and keyboard overdubs for our basic tracks, with an eye towards an as-of-yet unknown mixing date. Scheduling at the Treehouse became problematic, and as Night Train was still not up & running, I revisited my list of studio possibilities to continue work on the multiple projects. The basic tracks for the LOE album were finished, but there was still much to get done on the 4LT projects, so I just needed a small place that could accommodate guitar & drums. I latched onto Boy & Dog Studios in Methuen, MA, and booked an afternoon session there for December 15. The bulk of the musical output was 4LT material. I tried some more vocal overdubs for Brine and Haystacks, but neither was to be a final version. Another Methuen session in February of the new year was exclusively devoted to 4LT projects.

We continued to hope for a return to Night Train, but various issues there kept them unavailable. I again looked at the list of studios I had researched in mid-2020, and decided to give Clark Creative Studios in Amherst, NH, a try. I had rejected it initially because it seemed too distant for most of the musical crew, but it was not too far from me, so I thought it would be a good place for me to go and get the mixing & mastering work done. Sessions on March 2, 8, 19, and 23, resulted in masters for Droolings, Rose Glasses, Lama Blues, Retro Futuristic Gizmo, Crop, Brine, and Ninja. In the session for Brine, I redid the vocals, managing to nail down the melody and two harmony parts in just a couple of takes. Gary sat in for one of the sessions, and Brian for another.

This brought us very close to completion, with just two more songs to finalize.

Unfortunately (for us, not for him), owner-engineer Mike Clark was heavily booked already and I had to either sit on my hands for two weeks between sessions, or go studio-hopping once again. I decided to hop, and contacted Jordan Schuh - the “Boy” of Boy & Dog Studio - to see if he cared to do a mix & master session for the Icemen epic. He was willing - didn’t know what he was in for - and so Gary and I met up there on March 26. Battling some initial technical obstacles, perseverance paid off, as we came away with a master track of Icemen.

That left only Haystacks, and it was completed on April 12 at Clark Creative, as I finally put the “keeper” vocal on it and Mike mixed & mastered.

Thus the League made its contribution to a world in crisis.