In the Eye of a Hurricane by George Ziemann -- Sept. 21, 2007 Something happened last weekend that I've never seen happen in the 35 years I've been playing music and doing sound or recording. A simply astounding event that experience had taught me was virtually impossible. After Hayden's Wall broke up, I went to Iowa and tried to open a nightclub. This was a big, big mistake which a) sent me off the deep end, b) ruined the lives of the people who had counted on me, and c) gave me a debt I'll be paying off for at least 14 more years. It did not end well. Soon after, Carl and Cara Hayden moved to New Orleans -- about a week before Katrina hit. When the storm finally passed, they looked at the tree limbs poking through their roof, watched FEMA doing a heckuva job and decided that Arizona wasn't really so bad after all. Since then, we've been trying to do long distance song-building by swapping tracks over the Internet. For various reasons, **cough** Carl putting everything on one track ** cough** we never really got more than a handful of songs to a presentable stage. Those are what we posted under the name Lazy Tiger. In the last few months, Carl has put together an act that he named The Hurricane Band, with a couple of guys named Tim and Manny, whose last names I'm forgetting at the moment. Blatent Promotion -- If you're in the Tucson area, they'll be playing at Famous Sams on Valencia Road on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 28 and 29, as well as the weekend of October 5 and 6. 9 pm to 1 am. No cover charge. They're working this as a rock cover band, with a few originals thrown in. Carl asked me to come down and record some songs that he, Tim and Cara had written. To be honest, I really didn't want to. It took us more than a year to record the Hayden's Wall CD. Carl and Cara have got together with me in the past to do recording and it always turned into a tense "You're not doing it right" kind of thing and we were lucky if we got basic tracks for two songs over a weekend. But it's always like this. Every band I've ever worked with. You tell them you're going to record and suddenly they can't get through an entire song. Or it was too fast or too slow or they were too wasted or you'd get all set up and then they didn't have any idea what they wanted to record so we'd have to have lunch, a few beers and herbal intoxicants to think about it. So I was questioning whether it was worth the effort of tearing apart my own studio space to take it down to Carl's house. In the end, I decided that, what the hell, I wasn't doing anything useful anyway, hadn't seen Carl in three and a half years, so let's go see what he's got. But we didn't do full band recordings. We did acoustic versions of some of the songs that Carl, Cara and Tim have written. Acoustic guitar and vocals. Some of the tunes can be fleshed out a little or re-done as a band. These are just demos, as much for themselves as for anything else. There are even a few covers and some religious songs thrown in for variety. The astounding part was that we recorded 43 tunes in 2 days. To me, this was nothing short of a miracle. They had a plan, they had a list. They sat down and went through the songs one after the other. Blew through them like a hurricane, making me think they picked an apt name. One take for each song, although some songs were done twice with different singers. There was no quibbling, no whining, and we caught what would be, by record label standards, four albums of material in two days. And they've got more. So far, I've only managed to get 17 of them mixed down to mp3s. That was just last Friday's session. Give them a listen. Much more on the way, but only if I get off the Internet and get back to work on the second day's session. Follow-up Sept. 24 -- I ended up posting 36 songs, with one that I'm holding until I add orchestration and six others that just didn't make the cut for various reasons (background noise, etc.). Still, not bad for two days of recording. Carl says they have another 15-20 lined up for the next session.