Issue No.4 - Sometimes dreams really do come true

In This Issue
• 1992 — Recording in a dilapidated house on Capitol Hill
• Mercury / Polygram Records
• Sequencers and Tape Machines: Recording At Home In The 90s
• ED's PLACE — the song that won't die

Sometimes dreams really do come true.

This is one such story.

I have this song that has stayed permanently in my top Spotify tracks and keeps right on selling and getting radio play.

I wrote and recorded it in late April or early May of 1992.

It's called ED'S PLACE.

In those days, I was living in a leaky 5,000-square-foot classic red-brick dump on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and I had a home studio on the second floor.  

This is the place.

Although I don't remember the paint being quite this bad.

714 6th Street NE - the one in the middle there between the blue and yellow!

At the time, I worked for a big television production company called Atlantic Video here in DC. 

Their biggest clients back then were The Discovery Channel and Black Entertainment Television (BET).

My work at Atlantic consisted of, among other things, doing live audio for BET's VIDEO SOUL, hosted by well-known local DJ Donnie Simpson. The show came on your local cable system at 1pm every weekday afternoon and was sponsored by Budweiser.

Meanwhile, I was writing and recording new tracks constantly in my little home studio and sending them to Mercury/PolyGram Records in New York through a TV producer friend of mine named Jeff, who had recently left BET and gone to work in Manhattan.

A normal day for Jeff might be shooting a music video for Def Leppard or Bon Jovi.

But he was also a friend of mine, and he was regularly giving my homemade cassette demos to a well-known A&R guy named Bruce Carbone.

But this story is more about Jeff and Bruce's boss—a guy named Ed.

Ed Eckstine is the son of famous jazz musician Billy Eckstine and became president of Mercury Records in 1991. He was the first Black president of a major American record label other than Motown.

Jeff had told me a little bit about his and Bruce's boss, Mr. Eckstine, but I had never actually met him or even seen a photo.

I guess the excitement of writing songs and mailing them off to a real record company in New York City had really put the zap on my head, and I must have fixated on the idea that it would be super cool to go to Manhattan and maybe get to meet Mr. E.

And all of that did happen.

But it happened because of a dream.

A real dream. Where you go to sleep, and crazy stuff appears in your imagination.

I had this particular dream on a Friday night in early May 1992.

In the dream, I was in a limousine going to meet Ed.

Mister Eckstine.

How a person has a dream about another person without a clue as to how that person physically looks—I don't know.

In my imagination, I substituted a guy who looked more like Clive Davis.

Cute. Jewish. Record genius. Silver suit. Balding.

That sort of thing.

My friends Julie and Francine were also in this dream-limo with me. They were both video editors I knew at Atlantic, and they became characters in the song.

The rest of the dream was being in this long, long limo, drinking wine with the girls, and listening to a Prince track called "All the Critics Love You in New York."

It was a very weird dream.

But the next day I woke up and wrote a song about it.

And this is basically the beginning of what I wrote down that 
Saturday afternoon:

I dreamed
I was in the back of a big limousine
Winding through the woods
Under a blue sky
I had a Prince CD
And he was singing
“All the critics love you in New York”
And in the backseat
I sipped some wine
With Julie on one side
And Francine on the other

But the girls were getting kinda restless
They kept asking, “Are we there yet?”
And I said, “Be patient darlings”
“We’re on our way to Ed’s house”

Well, we got there
And the door opened
Mister E said “come on in”

I wasn't thinking, This will get me a meeting.

I was just so struck by the wild strangeness of this extremely vivid dream I'd just had, and I felt overwhelmingly inspired to write about it.

The home studio where ED's PLACE was recorded in May 1992

So I went into my little home studio on Capitol Hill.

I put the drum track down first.

This was not some sophisticated computer operation. I played—or really, tapped—the drum pattern manually on a tiny Casio PT-1.

This is the actual keyboard. 

I found a photograph of it recently, taken around 1989 or 1990. It was basically a toy. But it had some surprisingly decent drum sounds and a few useful instrument sounds.

I think I played the bass part on it, too.

I would run the thing through a little Radio Shack EQ and pump up the low end.

Those were the days.

I was sequencing all the basic synth tracks on an Alesis MMT-8, building the arrangement one part at a time.

This is the actual sequencer. 

It was a MIDI recorder—not a digital audio recorder. Basically, it remembered what notes you played and when you played them, and then told the synthesizers what to play back.

And it worked.

I still can't get over how decent that drum track sounds today.

It sounds like a drum machine did it.

But it's me.

Then I mixed the MIDI tracks down to a stereo instrumental and recorded that onto tracks 1 and 2 of my TASCAM half-inch 8-track tape machine at 15 inches per second. Ampex Grand Master 456 tape.

That left me six tracks for vocals.

And I used them.

There are a lot of vocals on ED'S PLACE—high ones, low ones, normal ones, doubled parts and various other things I was doing with my voice.

I spent the afternoon writing the lyrics and recording the vocals one line at a time.

I remember doing one of the vocals with the tape machine running extra fast. Then, by slowing the tape back to normal speed, that vocal would sound like Lurch from The Addams Family.

Very deep and bassy.

Other vocals I did with the machine slowed down so that when played back at normal speed, they made my voice sound extra high.

The chipmunk effect, kind of.

So even though I was working with only eight tracks of tape, I managed to pack a ridiculous amount of stuff into them.

I think the whole thing ended up being around 30 parts of instruments and vocals.

And this was probably the fastest I ever made a completed record.

One sitting. One day.

I never reworked it or changed the tracks or did any further dubs, which was unusual for me. I like to tinker, and sometimes I'll work on a track for months.

But that evening, I made a copy of the mix on a plain white cassette with the label:

ED'S PLACE by Arlin Godwin

Then I mailed the tape to Jeff up in New York.

Two days later, Jeff called.

He said he had played the tape for his boss.

The real Ed Eckstine.

And Ed wanted to meet me.

I felt faint. Like I might pass out.

The phrase “be careful what you wish for” flashed through my brain.

Then, Jeff said they would all be in DC the following Tuesday evening, May 12, 1992, at the Four Seasons in Georgetown.

They were throwing a big party celebrating the release of Brian McKnight's debut album, scheduled to come out in June.

So I went to the party.

And I met Ed in the flesh.

He's not old.

He's not bald.

He's not white.

He's African American, fairly young, and super nice.

There was no silver suit.

He was wearing designer blue jeans and a brown jacket.

I hung out for three hours with Brian McKnight and Vanessa Williams.

Vanessa had heard all my demos and told me she was leaving the next morning for New York and rehearsals as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live that weekend.

It was all extremely surreal.

And a ton of fun.

I'll never forget it.

That weekend I watched Vanessa live on SNL sing SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST.

Beautiful song.

And then, two years later, something else happened with ED'S PLACE.

When I finally released it, it went out as the B-side to a completely different 45 RPM single.

The A-side was called STEREO PORNO GROOVE

And that's where things got weird.

I remember being genuinely shocked when I started hearing that a lot of stations were playing the A-side—but also, quite a few of them were playing ED'S PLACE.

The song I had never really expected to go anywhere.

STEREO PORNO GROOVE had its own life, of course, and it got attention on college radio.

But somehow, over the years, the song on the B-side—the strange little song I had written after having a crazy dream—just kept hanging around. 

Year after year. 

And people kept asking me the same thing:

“When are you gonna release it on vinyl? Please please please!”

Life is weird.

And ED'S PLACE has continued to sell.

But it has never been available as a physical product.

Until now.

I've had many requests for it over the years—mostly from college-age people, which still amazes me.

I never, ever expected this record to have the life it has had.

I thought it was just a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon.

Now, 34 years later, it's finally a physical record.

The new release is available as both a 12-inch vinyl record and a CD, with seven additional tracks from that same 1990s time period included.
 
The track list:
ED's PLACE, GONNA ROUGH YOU UP, DON'T YOU WANT TO LET YOUR BODY MOVE?, THE SECRET'S OUT, STEREO PORNO GROOVE, IT LOOKS LIKE IT WORKS, I KNOW IT'S A LIE & WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME

So, if you're one of those pesky fans who kept pressing me to release it on vinyl—well, I guess good things come to those who wait.

And sometimes dreams really do come true!
______________________________________________________________

Thank you as always for being here.

The studio is open.

I'll see you in the next issue.

Keep making things!

If you've got a story of your own, send it my way.

Just hit Reply.

I read every message.

ED's PLACE at Elastic Stage 

Arlin Godwin Pictures & Sound at YOUTUBE

More STUDIO LIFE & the Official Site at ARLINGODWIN.COM