Friday September 20, 2024
I have to admit that I have seriously under-estimated the effects of my treatment over the past year. My right hip has been seriously weakened by the 13 1/4 hour flight over the Pacific and then a 3 hour 50 minute flight to Nashville with a couple of hours break plus all the walking in airports (my Apple Watch told me it was 10.5km!). Something I coped with easily just last year. I am hoping it is muscular and that some time in a pool and doing exercises will help when I get back. Plus, I am still suffering from severe fatigue. No catch up naps during the day means that by late at night I have had it. The result is that I cannot run around like I used to do. One gig in the evening, after all the day’s events, is enough. Still, I am sleeping pretty well after I collapse into bed.
This was a day of work. Pretty boring for most of it. Up at 5.00am. Not even the panel and listening sessions at Third Man Records on Bob Dylan’s 1974 Recordings later in the day could divert me from the mission to produce my radio program.
The. task this morning is to produce two interviews. First with Gary Hustwit, director of the Eno documentary about to show at ACMI, and then my audio tour of East Nashville with Jordie Lane.
The photo of my work station in my room gives you an idea of the set up. It doesn’t show you how Cubase, – the program I use to produce interviews – developed a mysterious glitch whereby it deleted my voiceovers meaning I had to go and insert them again for some segments (luckily I kept them all). See my technical notes later in a separate post.
Anne McCue and I are scheduled to go into the Sound Stage Studios with a whole lot of guests. My plan is to pre-record the first 90 minutes of the program and then send some of the files we have recorded at Sound Stage straight back for the latter part of the show. The catch is that it is the final weekend of the Radiothon so I also need to go to air to acknowledge subscribers. What could possibly go wrong?
You can hear it here: OFF THE RECORD FROM NASHVILLE
I cannot believe it took me 7 hours to produce 6 segments – including choosing the music and including the voiceovers – but it did. I finished just before midday and sent the files back to the Triple R Google Drive for Geoff Proctor, our panel operator, to use on the playout system.
Then I had to do some more research for our interviews before Anne and I left for Sound Stage at 1.00pm. This is where the Americana Music Association is vital to our plans. Michele Rhoades, from AMA, has organised a studio, an engineer in Chris and two helpers to wrangle the guests. This is a great thing we are able to do each year. Last year I had Michael Mackenzie to help me produce the program and he seemed to spend most of his time doing that. This year I was flying solo. I already had half the program produced so what we recorded at Sound Stage would be spread over at least two weeks.
Although we were booked from 2-4pm nothing ever runs to time, with people being held up at various other places, but we managed to interview the following: Kelsey Waldon, Jessica Breanne, Jana Mila, Mary Gauthier and Jaime Harris, Kelley Mickwee, India Raimey, The Pleasures (Catherine Britt and Lachlan Bryan) and Julian Taylor. This was a lot more than we had originally anticipated and kept us until 5.00pm, so it was lucky that our engineer Chris was so fantastic.
When we had finished, Chris edited the segments and transferred them to my USB. I then got an Uber home where I uploaded the ones I needed to use. (Anne had gone off to the listening session and discussion of Bob Dylan’s 1974 Live Shows which is being released in box set form). I was able to go to air live by Skype as it was the final weekend of the Radiothon and I got to acknowledge some subscribers. The one technical glitch happened when I first went to air and forget to turn on the microphone in the settings! You’d think after 35 years I would have this perfected.
Anne arrived back with tacos for me from Cilantro which I was able to consume while doing the program. Ken McLeish noted this on air as we talked about subscribers and he presented the gig guide.
By 9.00pm I was pretty much finished for the day. The Thirty Tigers Gospel Brunch is tomorrow and needed to get there early, so I hit the sack at 10.30pm! A full day of work done and dusted.
While we had organised interviews