Knoxville, TN

Before we commence with the text-only Knoxville section, I would like to describe a happening peep I chanced to rendezvous with en the route to Knoxville — Jeremiah Nave, owner of East Coast Mobile Recording. He has the coolest truck I have ever seen in my life:

Jeremiah and the coolest truck in the known world.

Movie Preview Man: It looked like an ordinary truck…

But inside are all kinds of goodies, including a complete recording studio. Definitely check it out in more detail on his website, linked above. It’s kind of like the Lovemobile times 10. Or, squared. Or times ten and then squared. Yes.

(Lovemobile * 10)^2

They both look nondescript, but inside are some serious technological goodies. I was pretty awestruck.

Jeremiah contacted me because he thought my project was awesome, and since he was kind of on the way for me, I made a bit of a jaunt through the Tennessee mountains to pay him a visit. He was showing me around his place when we came across a pretty amazing organ in his garage. He has one of the rarest leslies around for it too, which sounds appropriately trashy, as a good leslie should. He told me about a recording artist who denied that Jeremiah actually had this leslie, since he thought he had the only one left. Ha. Look at this picture, recording artist!

One rare leslie, two nice mics.

When he turned it up to a nice garage-floor-vibrating level, the tubes got nice and warm.

This picture makes a certain type of person happy.  You know who you are.

Of course, once we had dialed in some great sounds, I had to get this organ recorded, so Jeremiah let me include his organ on my project.

Recording some sick organ sounds!

From there it was off to Knoxville, where due to my forgetting to take pictures the world was text-only. Let’s begin now.

Knoxville! Oddly enough, sometimes referred to by locals as Knoxvegas. Actually, some people in Nashville said that too -- Nashvegas. Can you just add "vegas" to placenames like that? I guess I'm from Omavegas, NE. Anyway, I arrived in Knoxville in time to meet my host for a late dinner.

"Who was your host?" asks AG. "And hey -- why does everything look funny? And why aren't there any pictures??"

Calm down, Girl. The funny-looking-ness is temporary. Everything will be back to normal after Knoxville. And my host was my buddy since high school, Paul Coker. We haven't actually seen each other in a number of years, so it was great to reconnect with him and his snappy wife Kris. (Snappy in the "quick perceptive skills" sense, of course.) Paul and I had good times over some fine tex-mex before joining forces with fellow Couchsurfer Julia Zagaya. She and her friend were over at a bar to listen to one of their friends play some music.

Paul and I continued the tradition of great times by also having great times with Julia and her friend. Do you like how I keep talking about this person as a "friend"? That's because I can't remember her name. I'll just come right out and say it.

After a pleasant night's sleep on Paul's couch, I met up with Neel, a guy with a long Indian name that I can't remember so I'll just write Neel.

"Dang," says AG, shaking her head. "You can't remember pictures, Julia's friend's name, Neel's name... I bet you can't even remember the capital of Poland!"

Hey! That should be capitol with an 'o'! HA! Gotcha!

"sigh"

Is it Krakow?

"No, but it used to be. It's Warsaw."

Dang. Anyway, I met up with Neel, a reasearcher at UT who is also a multi-instrumentalist who plays awesome music with a very sensitive, meditative bent. He recorded some guitar, voice, and hand drums for me. I learned a bit about Indian music as well, in particular some interesting things about modes -- which modes apply to which emotions and topics, which is not the same feeling or sense that Western ears have for those modes.

This topic came up because, of course, I wanted him to do a "romantic longing" introduction to a song in Mixo b2 b6, which he didn't feel as easily as he would have if the song were in regular old major. Super interesting.

After that, Neel recommended an excellent Turkish restaurant, where Paul joined up with us again, and where I had an absolutely fantastic beef kabob! Mmmmm.

NEXT: Normalcy returns to the blog, as we re-enter the world of words accompanied by pictures.