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Here are some tracks I wasn’t able to fit into the tribute show:

Children of the Future->
The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) – Affordables 10/31/92

Samba in the Rain – Vince w/ XTra Ticket 4/18/03

Scarlet Begonias – Vince with Gent Treadly 5/30/03

Wang Dang Doodle – Vince with Sugar Blue and Terrapin Flyer 9/3/01

Vince’s GD Hour ID

I’ll play more Vince music, esp. GD, next week.

One of the most pleasant and enriching experiences of my musical life was co-producing Might as Well: The Persuasions Sing Grateful Dead in the summer of 2000. The band wanted some instrumental support on this record, and I was responsible for bringing the right talents in.

Vince Welnick was my first and only choice for the piano. Here are some excerpts from my studio diary:

Saturday, June 3

We gathered around the piano to work out the groove and the changes for “One More Saturday Night.” I was in the thick of this, teaching the singers where the changes are in the bridge, which encompasses more than the usual I, IV V and occasional VI chords — there’s an important III in there, and although I honor and respect The Persuasions’ manner of simplifying the songs, I thought these chords belonged in this arrangement. I knew Vince could compensate for anything, but I also knew Vince could help me get the band up to speed quickly. With Andrew wandering around on the outskirts of the circle trying out various instruments and patterns, we went over the vocal stack time and time again until everyone was solid on their parts and Vince had decided how much left hand and how much right hand he was going to offer up in this song. I liked the boogie woogie groove, but it seemed appropriate to play a little less.

And now we had to address the big question of how to record this thing. Lawson wanted to record the lead and the piano and then add the rest, but I was a fierce advocate of the full-ensemble approach.

I got my way, and the payoff was tremendous. Vince counted it down and then came in on piano with Jimmy singing bass, and then there was Jerry on the lead vocal. The ensemble came in with what I call “pads” and the Persuasions call “blowing” — smooth Ooohs through the verse — and then when Jerry sang “Hey uh-huh,” the room exploded with sound. “Hey-hey, Saturday night!” over and over, with Ray and Joe on top as sleek as a twin-blade razor.

This arrangement has two of those bridges that only occur once in the Dead arrangement, and the orchestra does this big huge AAAAHHH-AAAAHHHH thing that tore the roof off the place every time. Everyone in the control room was jumping up and down with the punches, and Andrew upped the electricity by rolling melodically across his “infinite rack tom.”

The excitement was incredible, and as the song ended, everyone knew it was a winner. Suddenly Jerry shouted, “ONE TWO THREE!” and it was “Hey, another Saturday night” one more time, with Vince ripping across the upper registers. Everyone on both sides of the studio glass was out of breath when it ended.

We tried another take, with two false endings, but it was clearly a step down in energy and tightness. We did a third take, which was probably a little tighter then the first take, but the decision to stick with Take One was unanimous. Mike and I spliced the second ending from Take Three onto the reel after Take One, thinking maybe we can edit to make it feel like a real triple ending, but that may prove to be gilding the lily.

[…]

Jerry wanted to rest his voice after all the work he did on “One More Saturday Night,” so after determining that both Vince and Andrew were more than willing to return on Monday afternoon to tackle “Bertha,” we took a break and got ready to go to work on Jimmy Hayes’s favorite song of our collection: “Ship of Fools.”

I call this performance “closing time at the psychedelic cafe.” It’s just Vince playing what he characterized as “the laziest groove ever” behind Jimmy’s deep, rich Brook Benton voice.

Vince wanted to have Andrew playing “drums” on the basic track, and although I was more than skeptical, we went ahead and gave it a try. The result was unsatisfactory in many ways, most notably the intrusion of the drum track into the vocal and piano tracks via headphone leakage. I told Vince that if he wanted a time reference we’d be a lot better off with a metronome than with a human beat box. So Andrew was given the rest of the night off, and Dr. Rhythm (a small electronic beat generator) was plugged in and fed to Vince’s headphones only.

This arrangement worked fine, except that the click track mysteriously disappeared right at the end of a delicious piano solo. We restored the click and recorded a new take, planning to splice the new piece on to the incomplete but entirely wonderful take we had just done. The new solo wasn’t as good, but it wasn’t clear whether we would have a good spot to make the splice. You don’t cut two-inch tape unless you’re absolutely sure of what you re doing, but just as we were deciding that I’d experiment with the edits on my Sonic at home tonight, Vince and Jimmy said they’d like to go in and do the whole thing at least once more.

That did the trick. With a few patches of the piano and the vocal track, we had a keeper basic. As we listened to it, I turned to Lawson and said, in a tone of fake accusation, “Just exactly what do you think you’re going to do with EIGHT vocalists on this track?!” To my relief, he said he was thinking of using only “the girls,” not the Schmaries and the Persuasions. That I can live with — and at that, I think it’ll be a pretty ethereal, minimal choir.

P.S. Anyone who ever doubted the soulfulness, depth and musical ability of Vince Welnick will have to re-evaluate their attitude after hearing his piano playing on “Ship of Fools.”