Album Notes by Bill Tuli
This album has been in the works for a long time (30 years for me). I have always dreamed of doing something like this and will forever be proud of the final result. When we formed this band in early 2005 I knew we had something special on our hands. Although most people would classify The Psychedelic Mooj as a blues band I’m hoping that after you hear this album you’ll realize that blues is actually only a small part of our overall sound.
This album is basically a mixture of traditional and not so traditional blues, vintage rock, and “something completely different.” I’ll let you figure out which songs fall into which category.
Who’s Gonna Love Ya (Music and Lyrics by R.W. Tuli)
This song uses a classic two-chord riff (E7#9 to an A7) popularized by so many of my favorite blues songs (e.g., Earl King’s Come On Part I & Otis Rush’s Sit Down Baby). I love that E7#9 chord and use it anytime I can. The ‘hook’ that follows each verse was actually something we stumbled upon by accident one night and we often used it as a bridging piece in long jam songs.
I admit the lyrics are a bit mysterious in this song. They were inspired by a former shipmate of mine, whom after returning home from the sea, would often find a house full of strangers doing similar things. Originally there were six verses but I cut it down to three to keep the song short. When we do this song live I might sing more of the verses if I can remember them.
I love the way my ’77 Telecaster sounds in the opening riff. I got the exact tone I wanted using a ’65 Reissue Fender Twin Reverb amp. I had planned to use many different guitars and amps on this project but my telecaster and Twin Reverb set the bar too high for the others; and, so they were pretty much used on almost the whole record.
Richard, playing the rhythm track, used his Telecaster through a Fender Concert Reverb and it made the song sound very clean and crisp. We both play the same notes on the “hook,” except that I’m an octave higher. To deviate from the clean tone I use a phaser and flanger on the first solo and a bit of tube overdrive on the second. That’s Richard kicking in his whaa-whaa pedal toward the end.
Dave and Tracy lay down some great grooves on this song.
Will Ferraro did a fantastic job recording
Now that the record has been out for almost a year, this is, without a doubt, our favorite song on the album. We used to start and end every show with it (but now we just save it for the end). This has proven to be a fan favorite and it has been downloaded 1000s of times (on Myspace, our site, other sites) and always gets good reviews. I hope I can write another one like it for our next album.
Psychedelic Supper
This is one of our first ‘all original’ songs. We have performed ‘Supper every show we’ve ever played and it has always been a crowd pleaser. Richard wrote the chords to ‘Supper before he joined the band. When we met for the first time he played it for me and I loved it and knew exactly what I wanted to play over the overdriven power chords. If you’re a Jeff Beck fan then you should recognize that I’m paying tribute to Freeway Jam—though, when I listen to Freeway Jam these days, it doesn’t sound anything like ‘Supper.
During the bridge(s) of this song I take a psychedelic journey to somewhere while playing octaves up and down the neck of my much abused telecaster. I was basically going for that ‘Pet Sounds’/ ‘super spy’ vibe. It may not sound like it but that’s what I was thinking of in my head anyway.
The original version of this song (featured on our demo recorded in the summer of ’05) had vocals. I’m not sure why we omitted vocals on this version. I would guess that we probably ran out of time in the studio—or, perhaps, no one wanted to sing it. I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Psychedelic Mooj goes through singers like Spinal Tap goes through drummers. Since our founding in January 2005, two vocalists have come and gone. Our first vocalist quit because he felt we weren’t doing enough cover songs; and our second vocalist quit because she moved out of state (just a month before we were scheduled to begin the album). We decided rather than find a new singer—and potentially delay the album—we’d just do the vocals ourselves. This wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except that none of us had ever sung before. We practiced our butts off and by the time we got to the studio we were somewhat ready.
Steel My Heart
My wife woke up one night, told me she dreamed a song, and quickly wrote it down. The next day she and my daughter fixed it up a bit and gave it to me to see if I could do anything with it. I may have changed a few lyrics here and there but the song basically stayed the same. My wife wanted a softer, Chris Isaac-ish type of melody for it but when I got through with it, well … you know.
I love doing this song live. Now that I've sung it for about a year my voice actually stays in tune. I wish we could re-record the vocal parts of this song. If I had it to do over again I'd also overdub the Trower riff I do in the middle of the solo as it seems to stall out the fluidity of the groove. (I purposely tried to play that riff and not let it sound like that riff.) Yes, we played this song when we opened for Robin Trower. And, yes, the crowd loved it.
Knockin’ on Your
Door
I had originally intended to play very overdriven guitar
fills on this but later decided a uni-vibe and flanger would sound more
“psychedelic.” After all, we are The
Psychedelic Mooj! Sorry
Richard is using some heavy duty reverb on this tune—his amp sounds like it’s ready to burst. I love that Lonny Mack tone he gets! That’s also him playing the solo over my ‘T-Bone Walker’ uni-vibe laden shuffle. Normally we just do a basic 12-bar blues shuffle at that part of the song but right before we started recording I turned to Dave and said, “Let’s give them some T-Bone Walker instead!” Dave, who also loves to do stuff as different as possible, knew exactly what I was talking about.
I love hearing
Since the release of the album we have played this song every show we've done. I'm guessing we've played it 100s of times now. Without a doubt this is a crowd favorite. I have seen this song fill the room with otherwise uninterested people. This song is still played basically the same as it was on the record; however, now I play the fills using only an overdrive. I also parrot the chromatic run and it gives that part of the song a really heavy sound. I wish I did this on the record. By the way, I didn't realize I messed up the T-Bone Walker shuffle part while we were recording the song (I skip two full bars). Believe it or not, when we do this song live, Dave and I still skip that section but play it correctly the second time through. (We play the break for 24 bars instead of just 10, as was done on the record.)
Tired of Being a
Fool
Our first singer was upset that we were doing few traditional-style blues songs so I wrote this trying to reinvigorate him. But he quit anyway. Maybe he thought I was trying to tell him something with the song lyrics.
This was one of the last songs we did in the studio and I
wasn’t happy with how it turned out. I
really wanted it to have more of a
We had a hell of a time starting this song at the same time so Dave had to start with that descending bass line. We were going to pull it out in the end but I sort of liked the ‘lazy’ way it started the song (especially when introducing my indolent guitar intro) so we left it in. Actually, the more I hear this song the more I like it.
Man, I wish I could re-record this song. Now that all these months have gone by I hear how off it is from what I wanted originally. If I had it to do over again I'd totally minimize the guitar parts. Perhaps just play some heavy Les Paul/Marshall riffs and let the vocals, bass and drums dominate. We hardly do this song live anymore. I think it's because I have to do too much thinking trying to remember the words.
Monsoon Soul
One night during the summer of ’05 we were practicing and
somehow locked into this fantastic groove. At
that very instant one of those typical
The disco/marching theme toward the end of the song is something we threw in just to make the song more out of the ordinary. That’s typical Psychedelic Mooj thinking. After we recorded the song I found out that I was actually playing the solos in the wrong key. But it works for reasons only a musicologist would know.
Of all the songs on this album I think this one comes closest to our live sound. I’m not sure exactly why that is. Perhaps it’s the way we all kick in on the third bar in the first verse. When we play live we attack every song like this. It was hard to achieve that intensity in the studio because we had to be recorded at separate times.
We hardly play this song live anymore. We reserve it for nights when we need lots of material. I sense that our audiences don't like this type of song unless they're totally into our overall sound. If the crowd is in a blues mood this song can empty the room.
Shadow Chaser
This is also one of our earliest songs and it appears on our demo. I think Richard wrote this song before he joined the band. This version of the song is pretty much the same as the demo version, except I simplified my solo and eliminated some of the fills. Richard got a fantastic tone out of his Schecter. I believe he used the same set up as he did on Psychedelic Supper. I basically crank my amp up and let the tube overdrive speak for itself during the fills and solos. Believe it or not, I think I’m actually playing in the correct key on this one.
We usually open with this song when performing live because it’s is a great way to warm up ourselves and the crowd. My wife thinks this is one of our best songs because it has such a “vintage garage band” sound.
Richard does a good job on the vocals. I think he sort of sounds like a mixture of Bob Dylan and Delbert McClinton on this.
Dave’s bass lines totally blow me away on this song. I remember when we were listening to the bass and drum tracks (before guitar and vocal tracks were put down) I thought, “Damn, this is a good song! Which one is it anyway?”
We're now using this song to open all our sets again. We had been using Who's Gonna Love Ya but I think everyone in the band likes to start off with this song because it is hard to screw up. It gives us the push we need to warm up and then we can transition into anything afterwards. I like the song because I don't have to do any thinking (I just play riffs). It wasn't until just recently that I realized that I play almost the same exact solo on this song as Monsoon Soul. Sometimes I interchange the two to see if anyone notices (and no body does).
Wondering
I’ll be the first to admit that the lyrics on this song are a bit lacking. Not to mention grammatically incorrect. I needed to ‘hum’ something while figuring out the chords when composing it and this is what I hummed. In those days we had a great singer/songwriter in the band and I assumed she would write her own lyrics. When she quit the band the lyrics never got written and so when we did this song for the album I sang the old standby lyrics. Vocally, I had a hard time staying in the proper key. This song is in D minor and I can pretty much only sing in E.
On the album this song sounds very country-ish. Normally, live, this song has more of a southern rock feel to it. I simply forgot to ‘kick in’ my overdrive while recoding the solos. Oh well. It works out okay in the end. If nothing else it shows that we can play with a softer edge. I love the way Richard’s acoustic guitar compliments my telecaster and his acoustic 'solo' gives the song a nice rest.
Now that a year has passed I have to say I don't like the arrangement of this song at all. Plus, I hate my vocals. I'm so far off key it's not funny. I had originally envisioned this song to be like Freebird, i.e., starting off slow and then ramping up into a real heavy duty rocker. We hardly do this song live anymore. It's reserved for those nights when we need 3 hrs of material.
Road Trip
Richard wrote this song specifically for acoustic guitar in the early days of the band but it really didn’t get developed until we were getting ready for the studio. About 15 years ago I went through a phase where all I did was play slide guitar. Then, for some odd reason, I stopped playing slide altogether. On this album I wanted to play slide on at least one song so I started messing around with it again. All I do is play the same chords as Richard (playing his acoustic). There’s nothing fancy going on, other than a few high-end chirps, when I slide in as far as I can.
I got the exact tone I wanted using my favorite Les Paul tuned down to open D. I would have used this Les Paul on other songs but was too lazy to re-tune it.
We used to call this song “A Tribute to Duane” in honor of Duane Allman but it was later dubbed “Road Trip” because it had such a nice ‘traveling feel’ to it.
After a year of listening to this song I have to admit I still love it. I'm so glad we put it on the record.
Mondo Mooj
We almost abandoned this song on the album because it was proving too hard to do in the studio (i.e., with all of us being recorded separately). Finally Will used insulators between our amps and Richard and I recorded our guitar parts together in the same room at the same time. When we perform this song live we all feed off each other and Tracy and Dave are quick to respond to any changes Richard or I throw at them. We never play this song the same way twice. The only common element is the D-E-F riff that we come back to after deviating on whatever path we took off the riff.
My favorite memory of playing this song live was the night
we performed it at The Gig (in
We have played this song dozens of times since the record's release and our Mondo Mooj has never sounded even close to what we did this day in the studio. The more I hear it the more I love how Richard played those wah wah'd out cords behind my runs. When we play this song live I can't hear him doing that but I'm sure he is. Also, I have never been able to figure out what I did that day as far as the thing I do with the open E string and the Raga notes. It was one of those things that escaped into the Ether of forgotten riffs once the tape stopped rolling. When we recorded this song it was actually twice as long as is heard on the record. We basically faded it out at the 4 minute mark to avoid mind-numbing the unenlightened. I'd love to hear the whole thing again, as I know we changed themes in the second part (I hint at it with that Santana/Soul Sacrifice-like descending riff as the fade comes.) When we do this song live that theme is featured more prominently and often we transition into Hendrix's Third Stone From the Sun if I can get away with it.
Transcendental Fix
This was a song we came up with in the early days of the band. It was something we added to our ‘out of the ordinary’ catalogue of songs to play when nothing else seems to work. Richard and Dave are playing in E minor and I am plucking randomly in C major (A Mixolydian). How and why this song sounds like we know what we’re doing is a complete mystery to me. One of these days I’ll have to learn music theory to alleviate my troubled mind about such things. Richard uses his Schecter and I use both a telecaster and stratocaster (dubbed over each other) to produce the little harmonies that sometimes filter through all the noise.
I think we had goofed around with this song only once before actually playing it live. Our singer neglected to show up one night and we were forced to take the stage sans vocalist (a harbinger of things to come). Luckily Dave and I were veterans of surf bands so we weren’t totally lost up there. The place was actually divided into two areas, with the drinking part of the bar located in another room. There was hardly anyone in our section watching us. When we ran out of surf melodies Richard suggest we try Transcendental Fix. Hell, what did we have to lose? The place was empty anyway. As soon as we started playing this song our section of the bar began filling up with curious on-lookers. We knew we had a mind bender on our hands. We play this song (in both short and long versions) during many of our shows. It usually gets a favorable response unless we play it longer than we should.
Lost in the
This is my favorite Psychedelic Mooj song of them all.
If any one song defines our unique style, this is it.
And it isn’t even a blues song! Dave wrote this song many years ago and
has done a version of it with every band he had been in since the mid 80s.
When we first started toying with this song it had no vocals and I
thought, perhaps, a poem recited over it might be very interesting.
Dave always referred to it as his “Desert Song” because he was
driving through the desert when he composed it in his head.
He claims it was inspired by the great Duke Ellington’s classic Caravan.
I did a web search for Desert poems and found a wonderful poem by Sylvia Plath
entitled, Sleeping in the Mohave Desert.
I printed it out and gave it to our singer and told him to recite it
while we played—the result was
wonderful!
I will never forget the night we played this song at the
Art Walk in downtown
As we prepared for the studio I contacted the estate of
Sylvia Plath to see if they would grant us permission to use the poem on the
album. There was initial interest at
first and they even requested a copy of the demo (which featured the song).
But, alas, we never heard from them again.
The scratch version of the song was recorded with the Plath poem and when
it was time to cement the final vocal track a few weeks later—and permission
had not yet been given—we had no choice but to abandon the Plath poem.
Richard is playing the acoustic “Spanish” guitar and I am doing my best to sound wild and weary, relying on heavy duty overdrive and tremolo. I have no idea what key this song is actually in (Richard plays in E minor, Dave plays in A minor and I play in D minor). My solos are all in D minor.
A Little Waltz
I have to admit I fought doing this song as we refined material for the album. Richard had been trying to get us to develop it for months but I could never figure out what to play over the verses. I loved the ‘chromatic’ A-Bb-B-C climb he used in the verse but wasn’t sure what to do with it. We went ahead and gave it a try in the studio and I think the end product was fantastic. Yes, I’m using a uni-vibe and flanger. Why not?
To be honest I don't think we have ever played this song live--oh wait, yes we did. Once. Tracy's snare stand broke apart one night so Richard, Dave and I did this song while she fixed it.
Songs on our Summer '05 Demo
I actually found our original Demo the other day. I haven't listened to it in over a year and was surprised at how different we sound now. This was a great 5-song project. We recorded it live in about 4 hours. Cory B. Ellis was our vocalist then and was a great singer. Psychedelic Supper and Shadow Chaser were carried forward from this era and used on our first album.
On Shadow Chaser Cory sounds great and the vocals really drive the song. I like my fills better on the Demo much more than on the album. I recall I just made them up on the spot and really had my amp cranked. I basically used those same fills again on the record but they were much more subdued. My solo is also more 'daring' on the demo, as I used lots of open strings and played up and down the whole neck of my guitar. On the record I play it safe and pretty much stay in that E minor pentatonic scale on the 12th fret. To be honest I think I like this Demo version of this song better than the one we did for the album. It has a rawness to it and a much beefier sound.
I also love the Demo version of P'Supper and it's a toss up which version I like better. I like having vocals on the song so I guess, in hind-sight, I should have sung it when we did the record. I also noticed that I used my wah wah much more on the demo version. My solos are different (sloppy is a good way to describe them) and I took the riffs I liked best from the demo and used them on the album version.
As I mentioned before, The Desert Song originally featured the Sylvia Plath poem Sleeping in The Mojave Desert. Cory did a great job reciting the poem as we played the song live. I love his scream. The tempo is a tad bit faster on the demo version.
I loved Be My Gal. In the early days of the band we were doing a lot of these type of songs and I wrote these lyrics to make something semi-original using a traditional that Bo Diddley beat. (This was actually the first song I wrote for the band.) The lyrics fit Cory's personality to a Tee and he loved them. He adlibbed much of the song when we were recording it live for this demo (much to my horror) and it turned out a bit racier than how it was intended. I wish we still did this song (but I'm not sure I want to memorize all them lyrics).
We had about a half hour remaining of pre-paid studio time by the time we finished all the above Demo tracks so we decided to play one more: Road Runner. This was a song we performed live often. If you came and saw a P'Mooj show in the early days of the band this was the kind of stuff you heard. We didn't really get overtly "Psychedelic" and jam-bandish until much later. I nailed my solo on this song; it's basically a Freddy King Hideaway thing. Richard did the second solo and I did the fills during the last few bars.