this is the year of the CMG record. ten years in the making. the deadline is 2010 and i think we got this. here are a few pictures the man himself setting tempos for the 2nd half of the album.

it's official. old people are cuter than babies. i was doing some "research" about copyright laws and i came across this. and i know you might have seen this and maybe its a commercial for mountain dew but it made me smile at 3:30 in the morning so its going up.



p.s. she's dead. here's the tribute.

i think it only took me fifteen years, but my friends and i finally got us a real practice space. i finally feel like i'm in a band. so this is my studio, a desk in the corner. it's all i really need. the space sounds like crap though. sound bounces off everything and the walls are paper thin with a hardcore band on one side (tijuana knife fight) and a death metal band on the other. but i call it home. i started to record a few things. i plan to post something by the end of the week. let's see a few photos from the camera phone.

here we have the control room. my set up right now is a 7 year old i book with a 7 year old mbox and a lamp.



now lets move on to the tracking room. a $50 mxl mic, 80's pearl drum kit and a bob marley poster.

and this incredible view of the port. sometimes i look out into the distance and think about how i should give up music and get a steady job at the port, but then i look up at the bob marley poster and forget about what i was thinking about.

but i am excited to get to work on some new music and also recording the rest of the "cmg and we are the night band" record. 2009 might be my year? let's hope so.

last night i got home from a small road trip with my sister. checked the mail. awesome! 'cliff 'em all' the metallica documentary came in from netflix. it's on! i rented this because everybody hated this and i wanted to know why. it's metallica from 1983 through 1986, what's there to hate?

answer: not a god damn thing.

when i was a kid i spent a long summer in the old country and i went prepared. went to gemco and hooked up a sanyo walkman. no reverse though. lots of tape flipping action. i made a few tapes before i left. i was nine years old so a mix tape consisted of waiting for a song to come on the radio and then taping it. you never could get a whole song, there was always a verse missing and some asshole d.j. talking though the outro. so anyways.... i had a few sweet mixes. combine that with a whitesnake tape my mom borrowed from my aunt and my sister's tiffany tape, and its looking like a pretty sweet summer jam. my cousin got a look at my new tape setup and let me borrow a couple of his tapes. echo and the bunnymen, the 'colors' soundtrack and metallica's master of puppets. as a nine year old, echo and the bunnymen sounded like adult music and colors was a good song but not so good as a soundtrack. master of puppets ruled so hard. and i'd like to talk about this for a second.

the opening track is so weird. spanish guitars into what sounds like a queen song and then some thrash metal. this record still sounds expensive to me compared to the big budget metal that was coming out around the same time even though they probably had like a week to finish it. the whitesnake tape ruled and so did the bon jovi tape (i forgot to mention), but master puppets sounded so dry and precise. it's so american. and the fact that you couldn't ever hear it on the radio made it like a gem. it's still perfect as i listen to it now. it took me years to shake off it's influence in everything i was writing when i started my first few bands. metallica should of sued me at age 15.

when my cousin took back the tape and replaced it with ride the lightning i was bummed. i can't take any other metallica record no matter how hard i try. kill em all was o.k. let's be honest. ride the lightning sounds sloppy. and in justice for all has no grandiose qualities to it. puppets is like the dark side of the moon of metal.

so getting back to watching the movie. it's a bunch of bootleg footage from fans and metallica's own footage of the band getting drunk. it's a perfect movie. it captures that moment in time perfectly with it's sloppy vhs footage and clock radio sound. all these bad reviews because of the quality. its like saying a world war 2 documentary sucked because it wasn't in color and in 5.1 sound. what's wrong with these people on netflix? anyways, that record blew my mind and bettered my life. here is the first song on the album, battery. and then some random clip of jason newsted falling.