Album of the Week

Long Timers Dead End



I promised a new "Album of the Week" - here's No. 1. The band used some of the pictures I took of them at various gigs, so to avoid any suggestion of conflict of interest with a review in The Ottawa Sun (not that any money was involved), I'm singing its praises here.
Rock'n'roll veterans Long Timers have done hard rock time in a number of Ottawa outfits (Dead City Rebels and Phantom Shifters, among others) and can currently be seen in other local combos like The Fortunate Sons, Sleeping Pilot and South of 78. Their debut EP is the product of several sessions with Double Pumpers/Ukrainia/Yogi and The Hill People drummer-singer-guitarist Paul "Yogi" Granger. The original foursome - Greg Kerr, guitar; Justin, guitar and vocals; J.P. Sadek, drums; Rene LeClair, bass - has just been joined by Johhny Nash on guitar and vocals; he added his stuff after the musical tracks had been laid down. I e-mailed guitarist Greg to ask who did what when. His reply:

The sessions were done separate for this EP after two other attempts with Yogi at his studio.We put down the bass and drums first one Saturday at the end of February. Justin took a night for guitars and I did the same in March - all mostly in one or two takes. The goal was to get a "cleaner" recording so the bass and drum beds have no guitars bleeding in. And the guitars were kept to a minimum (unlike the Shifters or our previous recordings, where two rhythm guitar tracks are mixed hard left and right and the lead guitar is one track in the middle of the stereo spectrum). I was dead set against that for this recording so we used one of Justin's guitars hard left or right and one of mine hard left or right - to minimize the noise and give it a more vintage "MC5" feel -the exception is Solid Roger where my part differed from Justin's so much we actually mixed it the original way with three tracks and mine in the middle. The music was finished before Johnny joined up and Justin did vocals on (in E Major) and Old 96er - which were kept. After Johnny was comfortable with his parts he added back-up vocals to those two Justin songs and did all the lead and backing vocals on the other three.
Yogi did all the recording, mixing and mastering.
We'd recorded Working Man's Woman but had mostly dropped it from the set and it wasn't going to be on the EP, Justin never had any finished lyrics for it - we'd never even shown the song to Johnny, when he did his vocals, he heard the track and we remembered we liked the song, so he whipped up some lyrics and recorded the song before he'd even practiced it once (or even heard it from us play it). I think it's my favourite song on the EP too!

The resulting EP is a mix of early 70s heavy rock (a la Mountain, who they regularly cover in their live show), Stooges style and protopunk and Southern Rock - more of the latter live, thanks to Johnny's caterwaul and third guitar. Pick it up and check them out live (in any order you like) if you haven't already.