The Making of a Maxterpiece

Wake up commander…time to have your cake and light the candle.

If good things take time, then our new album, Max Q, is a very good thing indeed. Looking back over the three and a half years we took to write, rewrite, record, rerecord, mix, remix, master, and yes, remaster this project, it’s almost hard to believe it’s finally complete. It’s surreal to look back and see how much time has passed and how many trials, tribulations, and thankfully, triumphs took place in that time period. I feel very much like our hero, Max, being awoken a few hours before the launch. It’s finally time to have our cake, put our spacesuits on, and light this candle.

I am yesterday’s thoughts, I am yesterday’s dreams, I am yesterday’s desires…

The Max Q sessions commenced on New Year’s day, 2001. A fitting date to begin our grand odyssey into the unknown. Having mastered the technique of recording ourselves in our practice space (not!) we were ready to put the mics up, and go for it. The first song we recorded was The Longer Now. (We didn’t realize just how long this Now might become.)

Traditionally, when you make a record, you record the drum tracks for a bunch of songs at one sitting. The reason you do this is that it takes a long time to get good drum sounds. It's not unusual to spend four or five hours or even a whole day just tweaking the drum sound before recording a single note. And studio time costs lots of money. So once you've got the drums really rockin', you blow through as many songs as you can. This might save time and money, but this also makes the poor drummer have to work out all of his parts for an entire album's worth of material up front.

And this would’ve required Dan to exceed Max Q (I’ll explain that term more in a minute). So we took a different approach. We recorded a maximum of two songs per session. This allowed Dan to really perfect each song before recording it (what a novel idea!). So when the red light on our home studio went on, he was ready. Which was good because the AC was so lousy in our space. Anything more than that, and he might have overheated as well. Plus, he was patiently dealing with some serious health issues and we wanted him to actually survive the process and maybe even tour when it was all done!

5, 4, 3, 2, In a minute we’ll be Max Q…

What is Max Q? Good question. If you’ve ever listened to the crew of the space shuttle the first few minutes after takeoff, you may have heard them mention “We’ve passed through Max Q.”

Max Q stands for maximum dynamic pressure. The shuttle, or any other space vehicle, has to be careful not to go too fast until they’ve cleared this critical point. If they slam on the gas to try and break free of the grip of gravity before the atmospheric pressure is reduced sufficiently, the space ship could actually break apart from the extreme stress.

So they wait patiently with engines running about 65% of maximum for the coast to clear before putting the pedal to the metal and launching themselves into orbit. In the same way, The Reverse Engineers had to push hard enough to achieve escape velocity, but not so hard that our band—and all our dreams—broke apart under the stress. So we toiled away, slowly and deliberately, one song at a time, each of us having our moments of operating at 65% of full power.

Sleep disorders, mechanical breakdowns, extreme work schedules, all of these intruded into our world during the making of this record. But then stress often creates the best results. Take a dirty black lump of coal, put it under extreme stress, and voila! You’ve got something so pure and beautiful that you give it to your wife as a symbol of your everlasting devotion.

There’s always Sunshine with the Shade…

So it’s not surprising that one of our favorite moments on the record came as a result of the toughest of circumstances. Sunshine with the Shade was born one night because I couldn’t sleep. But this wasn’t just a mild case of insomnia, this was a severe sleep disorder, and as I was to later find out, very dangerous. So the lyrics “another long night till the sunrise” weren’t just poetic meanderings, it was the sad truth. I had woken up once again in the middle of the night, in pain, feeling very disoriented and wandered over to my guitar because going back to sleep was just too scary.

The verse and chorus of that song were written that evening, and true to the lyrics, along with the deepest moment of crisis came the brightest bit of Sunshine on this record. Of course, there were also magic moments on this record that came rather easily. The majority of Tell Me Why was written in one fell swoop during a jam session at practice. We were having fun with a very simple punkish sounding progression that sounded like it came straight off the Emmett Brown EP. And it just so happened that an hour earlier I had put some hand written lyrics on the music stand. This was a beautiful bit of serendipity and kept me from having to sing complete nonsense.

For a change these lyrics (and thankfully, the painful experience that inspired them) were written by someone outside the band. The lyrics had been given to me by a friend at work. He said his 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, had written some lyrics and he proudly presented them to me. I read them and thought they were pretty good, definitely showed potential, and I was impressed that she was already advanced enough to label the sections “verse” and “chorus”. The lyrics had that beautifully simple, direct approach that is so natural for kids.

Then I heard the story behind the words and realized that this wasn’t just some cute song; this was serious business.

So while we were jamming I started singing from Olivia’s poem, Why, and before I knew it, it was taking shape into a very cool song. In fact, we couldn’t stop playing it. Of course, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, so we started adding fun words like “albatross” (I really like to sing that) and “dead-end job” to make it complete. (Some day she’ll get a job and will be able to relate, I’m sure.)

In my daydreams, I’m an astronaut, orbiting the earth…

Having slaved away at our own dead-end jobs for years, we could all relate very well to some lyrics that Dan presented to the band called Worker Drone. It described the cubicle world nightmare that he had endured at an endless string of customer service jobs. These lyrics formed the basis of our most adventurous and challenging piece to date, the 8-minute progressive rock epic, Max Q.

Max Q, the song, lyrically and musically encapsulates where we came from and where we hope we’re headed. It’s the first song that we decided to just go over the top with. The attitude was, “We’ve given them plenty to like on this record. I think we’ve earned our indulgent progressive epic.” Who knows what people will think of the song, but we sure dig it. And we can definitely relate with the main character, Max, and his desire to escape his day job to live out the world of his dreams.

Plus, Max Q finally provided the perfect vehicle to showcase Chuck’s incredible bass chops. I couldn’t believe the licks he pulled off on this one. He’s always been an incredible bass player, but it’s not often that you can find a way to showcase some serious bass licks in a song. And having purchased a brand new Rick before the recording of this one, he was completely primed to lay down the perfect progressive rock bassline. His bass tone is growling and his fingers are flying on this one. His performance deserves to land him on the cover of Bass Player.

In fact, Chuck’s playing was so punchy and aggressive, I screwed up when I recorded his bass track. Unfortunately I couldn’t just rerecord it because Chuck was 1,000 miles away working 100-hour weeks building what we jokingly referred to as the Universal Business Adapter. So I was forced to perform an engineering trick that I had always wanted to try, but never encountered a situation that required it. It’s called reamping. What happens is you take the original direct-recorded track and you run it back through the bass amp (or guitar amp) and you record it again. It was surreal standing there listening to Chuck’s bass amp cranked up and playing all by itself while I fiddled with the controls and adjusted my microphones. Talk about reverse engineering.

I’d look down from my satellite and see the world both day and night…

But even if Chuck had a hard time being bodily in the studio, a whole lot of his soul is captured on this record. If you want to get to know the real man, all you have to do is take a listen to Weatherman. This song comes straight from the heart.

It was very fitting that the first hurricane to threaten the Tampa Bay area in 80 years was named Charley. I was about a week away from sending our disc to the pressing plant when Charley started swirling towards Tampa. As I was evacuating ahead of the approaching storm, I put the audio master of Max Q (the album) in a sealed Ziploc bag, hid it in my sock drawer and hoped for the best. Dan had the backup copy at his place so the chances of Charley destroying both copies were remote, but with this project, I wasn’t taking my chances.

It’s ten times worse than a full moon, you’re not even safe in your bedroom…

For the most part, our studio equipment held up to our three-year long recording session like a champ. But at the very end of the recording process, Murphy’s Law kicked in big-time. I wasn’t sure if Mercury was in Retrograde or not, but some unseen force certainly seemed to be attempting to thwart our attempts at completing this CD.

With our 12th and final song, Sound of Silence, mixed and ready to be burned to CD, my 16- track recorder finally gave in and said “Uncle.” No more. It had had it up to here with my endless mixing, remixing, recording, rerecording and sonic nitpicking.

My face went pale as I realized that if I couldn’t get my recorder to talk to my CD burner, I would have to reformat the hard drive, and destroy everything on the drive! This included our rendition of Paul Simon’s classic which had taken over a month to get sounding just the way we wanted.

After attempting another dozen or so burns to the CD burner (and creating a good size stack of CD coasters) I finally faced the fact that I would have to find another way to salvage Sounds before it was lost forever into the abyss of my hard drive. And I couldn’t help but think about the other 11 songs that were archived on CDs that sat in a shoebox in the corner. If I couldn’t get the burner working again, I didn’t know how I’d get those back into the machine for mastering.

But I put that doomsday scenario out of mind and thought back to the immortal words of Gene Kranz, the flight director of Apollo 13: “Let’s work the problem, people!”

So work it I did. I ended up renting an old DAT recorder and backed up every bit of the 700 or so megabytes in real time to three DAT tapes. Not a very fun way to spend a day, I assure you. But with the song safely archived (I hoped) I could perform the dreaded reformatting. Of course, I still wasn’t sure this would even solve the problem. Luckily, my machine came back to life, and I rescued the mix. Perhaps we would make it through Max Q after all.

You control my thoughts, you control my moods…

Even though I handled the engineering chores and had to have my grubby hands in every aspect of this record (control issues, anyone?) this record was an intensely collaborative effort. We all spent hours paired up working on different parts of this record. And when something wasn’t working, we sometimes had to realize it was our part that needed fixing. And we had to learn to let go of the reigns and try someone else’s idea to see if it worked better. Often times it did. In fact, the person playing the part is often the least capable of really hearing how it works in the song.

So we spent hours tweaking each other’s parts, so to speak. Even though Dan is the drummer, he had brilliant suggestions for quite a few guitar parts (the opening chords of Weatherman, for instance). And to return the favor, I spent hours helping Dan refine his drum parts (Max Q, for instance). Chuck had input on my vocals, I had input on his bass, and round and round it went.

In fact, one time (at band camp) we even passed around the microphone to record acappella guitar solos for Tell Me Why. Guitar solo karaoke is some of the funniest sounding stuff you’ll ever hear, I assure you.

And now that’s it all done and not a single note can be changed (aargh!!!!), we can all sit back and enjoy it and forget about the sweat and heartache that went into the making of it. We can crank it up in the car and sing along like everybody else as the thousands of hours of labor and millions of decisions that went into it are washed away by a permanent wave of sound that takes us all to a much better place. A place where it’s safe and warm. “Houston, we’ve passed through Max Q.”

William Cote 10/01/04