frederick.fr, Album Human Planes : Ted the Bartender more infos

Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker definitely inspired me on this song, like ‘Boom Boom’ or ‘One Bourbon, one scotch, one beer’: Since my 12 years old I am a big fan of blues music.

I wanted to do a real blues song mixing alcohol, violence and bar atmosphere.

The music base of ‘Ted the bartender’ comes from my first EP, it was in fact my first studio recorded composition when I was 18. The music is not difficult at all, it s based on E, goes to G and A.

Instruments:

- Guitar (my black Yamaha): I played on what I called a violent move (I usually play like that). How I do that ? I play on over used really dirty 2-3 month old strings, with a hard pick (black Jim Dunlop), and have no mercy for my guitar, the difficult part of it is to avoid breaking a string.

2 solos : The first one and the guitar base come from concert improvisation. ACDC ‘Hells bells’ inspired me for the second solo.

- The vocals : I completely fucked up my voice on that song, like after a bad party night drinking whisky and smoking strong cigarettes. I recorded it in one shot.

- the drums : Jim did everything but I oriented the rhythm to a really simple sound, using a couple of toms, like doing the drums on a wood box to keep the blues spirit. On the solos and especially the first one I wanted to have ‘killing machine gun drums’ to make you think that the bartender would kill everybody in that bar. That’s the reason why you can also hear at the end of the first solo a loading gun.

- The Bass : ask Chris.

- Sound effect : Bar atmosphere at the beginning and at the end coming from a mix of 2 bar sound effects downloaded from internet, fading in and out.

- The lyrics : Ted the bartender is the famous bartender from the Bistrot Lepic of Washington DC, USA. I worked with him a bunch of times and we were so tired sometimes that we wanted to break everything and doing like we were going to kill everybody. I first wrote 3 verses and a chorus, but Skye Delamey, a lyricist from Los Angeles re-wrote the 3 verses to transform a cool and hard working bartender called Ted into a psycho-killer-cool dude. The ‘in my shoes’ at the end of the song come from Jimi Hendrix blues album.

It took me 8 years to finish this song. It s like a tribute to 2 of my 4 favorite artists: J.L. Hooker and J. Hendrix (the other ones are Led zep and Bob Marley).