BF: Getting back to The Budos Band III, it only took 48 hours to record the entire album, so was every song worked out ahead of time, or were there some that you actually fleshed out in the studio?
BP: One—the cover.
JT: Well, two really. The cover and “Spectral Surface,” a.ka. “Nature’s Wrath.” We had a lot of it, but that was the last song that we wrote for the album, and there was a little bit of work on that in the studio. Everything else…
BP: Like we said, we’d been playing them for (almost) two years, so by the time we went to record the songs, we’d played some of them 300 times already. We didn’t even think about (the studio.) We just looked at it as another gig with a microphone there.
BF: Was it an around-the-clock session?
JT: Friday night we did 8 to 1 in the morning. Saturday was a full day, probably 12 to 12. By Saturday night, everything was really done. Sunday was used for a couple of little overdubs and two songs.
BF: Have you ever had that kind of experience before in a studio?
JT: Well, all of the albums have been recorded in a weekend, more or less, but this album was like…
BP: It was like one-takes. Bam! Done! Bam! Done! We just kept busting them out. By Saturday night we were like “Holy crap. We just recorded ten songs.”
BF: You mentioned the cover. Are we allowed to talk about this, or are you trying to keep that a secret?
JT: “Day Tripper.”
BP: Obviously, you’ve titled it differently.
JT: “Repirt Yad.”
BP: Is it technically considered a cover, or have you changed it enough musically that it is your own song?
JT: Man, if we tried to pass it off as our own song, McCartney and Lennon’s lawyers would be up our asses.
BP: Or Michael Jackson’ lawyers. Who owns that crap?
BF: Sony, I guess, at this point.
BP: We were messing around with different covers, but we picked “Day Tripper” because of that guitar-bass line in the beginning. (_He sings the opening riff to “Day Tripper.”_) A lot of Budos songs have that bass-guitar line, and (it felt like) that one Beatles song was already kind of written for us.
BF: It’s such a great cover because it’s such an upbeat, happy song, and then you put such a dark twist on it.
BP: Yeah, we gave it the Vanilla Fudge treatment.
JT: I like to refer to that song as where we started to spread our psychedelic wings.
BF: What does “Unbroken Unshaven” refer to?
BP: Us…our beards.
JT: A lot of our songs are somewhat self-referential, but..
BP: We like to say that that song…(_pause_)
JT: What?
BP: Well, “Unbroken Unshaven” can be taken a couple of different ways.
Laughter
BF: Okay, we’ll just leave it at that.
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