Day 9
This was a creative day. We worked on lyrics and music. John needed to finish the lyrics for I Wouldn't Sleep With You and Endless Vacation so he went his own way for the early part of the day. He disappeared into the lounge so we didn't see much of him until later. In the mean time Alan went into the studio to begin work on another piece of material that we had been outlining the night before. It is based on the Irish folk music that we saw on one of John's millions of video tapes.
I joined Alan in the studio and added a part that I had had a dream about last night. I don't usually dream or at least I don't remember them but we are all having vivid dreams here and the music from mine was stuck in my head. When I walked into the studio Alan was playing his new parts and it was easy for me to sit with him and work it out. I ran into the room shouting "I got it, I got it" and the next part of the song was born. Alan did a great job of making the 2 parts merge and we were making some small changes to his parts when Godfrey came in to add his guitar. We knew we were onto to something when Bobby started jigging through the room and whistling the tune we were playing. We promptly name it "Jig-on-the-Wold" (Dance on the Hill). I burst in on John's lyric writing to declare that we had written a great piece of music and he said "leave some room in it for me" which we gladly did. I guess I got his curiosity going because 5 minutes later he peeked in the studio and listened to what we were doing. We received a smile of approval and we felt good about our latest creation.
When we broke for dinner John was just finishing up the 2nd set of lyrics. We took a look and laughed at some of the clever lines he had penned. As always John has found a way to make the obvious hysterical. After our meal John and Bobby disappeared into the studio to begin tracking the new vocals. When I caught up with Alan and Godfrey they were in the lounge watching Raging Bull. I sat down and the sound of hard Ds replacing Ts (dis, dat, dees, dems and doze) made us all home sick for New York and some Italian food. It also made John "homesick for the English language." The end of this film prompted a search for another NY classic, Good Fellas but we had no luck. We asked John if he had it and he said no. We were bummed out and resorted to one of my personal favorites The Godfather pt 2. While we were watching the film Godfrey happened to mention that several people in his neighborhood had car horns that play the Godfather theme. You might have guessed that Godfrey is from Queens.
We took a break to listen to the vocal tracks that Bobby and John had laid down. They were great and we were thrilled. That's 2 down and one to go.
We went back into the lounge and watch the rest of the film. Godfrey dubbed me Mr. Closed Caption because I was reciting the dialogue alone with the characters in the film. John asked " Have you seen this before?"
Now it was time for the ritual dog walking and then off to bed to dream of Johnny's Pizza in Mount Vernon of maybe Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry St. in Little Italy. Either way maybe there's a song in there somewhere.
2am