Recording Bandon at Skywalker (video)

Here's another video taken from the recording session for "Two Hands". It's not the take that is on the CD (that take was not caught on camera). If you compare them you can hear the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in performance. This one has some nice moment (but the one on the CD is deeper and better).

This piece, "Bandon", is particularly poignant for me. In the summer of 1964, when I was nearly 8 years old, I took a two-week trip to visit my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Bandon, Oregon. All by myself (along with 18 or so passengers, and a very nice stewardess who had very red nails and gave me a pilot's wing pin), I flew up on a DC3 or DC8 or some such old plane. The visit was much more playful than the music suggests, yet this is the music of the memory: Fishing for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin; the swimming hole with the zip line running from the cliff to the beach; driving a tractor with my uncle; arguments over Elvis vs. Beatles with the local tomboy (in her room lined with posters of the King); picking blueberries; and struggling to sit still while my Aunt Gunny (Gunhilde) painted a watercolor portrait of me. That portrait still hangs on the wall of my parents' house. It's titled "A Poor Attempt at the Beatle - 1964". I must have been a non-stop Beatlemaniac that summer. When they asked if I'd like a souvenir to bring home from the trip (they were probably thinking of one of the locally made toy models of fishing boats) I pulled them to the record shop, where they bought me "Meet the Beatles" - in Stereo! My smile couldn't have been bigger. Their puzzlement couldn't have been deeper (I recall they played nothing but soupy Henry Mancini in their house). Aside from the Beatles, my visit with them was one of the highlights of my elementary school years.