Dyan's Studio Diary, Installment #2: Zachary bangs drums; Jim Morrison is naked

Late Monday night, Zachary wrapped up his fourth and final twelve-hour drum-recording day. While Nathaniel, Zebastian and I went on leisurely walking tours of North Hollywood, our tireless bandmate banged out flawless performances hour after hour. His endurance was truly impressive--I don't know how many times I heard Ariel say "Great take, really good--now let's just do a couple more just like that, then switch the snare drum and do a few more, then we'll put tape on the cymbals and try a few like that…" When we finally finished on Monday night, we asked Zachary if he wanted to go celebrate… to which he replied, "I just want to go to sleep."

Now that the drums are done, we will be relocating to a different studio to record the rest. The new studio is between a used bookstore called the Iliad and Odyssey Video--we'll be making our record between the Iliad and the Odyssey! The studio is run by Doug Messenger,the former guitar player/arranger for Van Morrison. When we went to scope it out a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves listening to Doug tell us wild and borderline unbelievable back-in-the-day stories for upwards of two hours. My personal favorite was his description of the meeting of the Morrisons--Van and Jim.

Apparently, Van was jealous of Jim, who he considered to be the sexier and wilder Morrison. Doug accompanied an anxious Van to a motel party on the Sunset Strip where Jim was going to be, but when they arrived, Jim was nowhere to be found. After awhile, Doug noticed some weird wasted guy crawling on all fours in and out of motel rooms--completely naked. As he started to hear "Hey Jim, put on some clothes, man…" from some of his fellow partygoers, he realized that the naked crawler was Jim Morrison. Soon afterwards, Jim crawled into the street (still naked) and was promptly arrested by a passing police officer. I wonder if Van was still jealous--is it better to be the Sexy Morrison, or the Capable of Standing Morrison? Truly a question for the ages.

Anyway, I better get to my piano… I'm up first when we pick up again on Saturday!

-Dyan Valdés

Categories: Band_News, Dyan_Speaks!, Studio_Diaries, Dyan, Nathaniel, Zachary, Zebastian, Jim_Morrison, Van_Morrison, Doug_Messenger