The Big Ragoo | Session Blog
In 1996, The Big Ragoo was formed as a side project for three members of the Atlanta post-punk band Monkey Boy. Jimmy Ether, Ken Whitener and Shawn Christopher -- all prolific songwriters -- would rotate instruments with the principal songwriter playing guitar.
The band broke up shortly after recording their debut Wreck Of The Big Ragoo, but now have reformed 14 years later to release new material. This blog will track that progress.
posted by Jimmy Ether
This past weekend, The Big Ragoo physically reunited at my studio — the first time together in the same room in over 14 years. We are all very different people now… far more mellowed, weathered and wise (comparatively speaking, at least). And yet, it was just like we’d only been apart for a few weeks. The goal was to get together to write and record for three full days, but with no heavy expectations of a lot coming out of it. Just playing music and being creative seemed worthwhile. Instead, we came up with 500 minutes of music… about 14 “themes” altogether. Written, recorded and videotaped all in 72 hours or so. That will all get culled down to the most cherry 37 minutes for arranging and overdubbing.
It was one of the more exhausting things I’ve ever done. I came out of it with every muscle in my body sore, several nasty bruises I can’t remember getting and in a completely depleted mental state. Tuesday, I slept nearly all day. It’s clearly evident that I’m approaching 40 now. Despite all that, it was a pretty magical weekend.
We’ve been working on our “comeback” album, tentatively titled Raising of the Wreck, since about October. It’s all recorded remotely between my studio and Ken’s basement. Very weird for us playing to guide tracks and such, but it sounds great. We have nine songs for that which we need to finish up vocals and a few overdubs on. Then, this stuff we recorded live last weekend will be the follow-up to that, tentatively titled Occupational Hazards. What’s crazy is… in three days we’ve gotten to nearly the same point we are with the Raising record. It’s such a different animal. Very noisy, angular and heavy with giant drum sounds. Where the previous is much more constructed, quirky pop… this is a throw-down.
And that’s what we hope to do year-to-year from now on… release one very slow developing, remotely recorded record of layered tracks followed by a more-or-less live in the studio throw down.
I have a ton of video footage to get edited and posted, both for Raising and Hazards, which I’ll be getting up over the summer and posting here. Then we’re hoping for an early fall release for Raising of the Wreck and maybe late winter for Occupational Hazards. In the meantime, above are some photos from this past weekends session.
posted by Jimmy Ether
Cross-country recording between myself and Ken is kicking into action. I sent a care-package of microphones, cables and a microphone preamp up to Ithica for Ken to use with his existing gear for tracking his drums, bass, guitar, vocals… the whole deal. Once that is all set up to our liking we should be rockin’ with efficiency.
We’ve been passing back and forth demo ideas for a new song called “Mow Down The Messenger”… which is getting a nice groove to it. It started with a quick guitar demo of mine, which Ken threw some drum and bass ideas over. This week, he put down a revised drum part for a second demo round. My original had been way fast, and Ken’s new one is a touch slow. I sped it up 5% and it felt perfect. So today is me throwing down a new version of my guitar with changes that lock into Ken’s drum ideas. Then he’ll redo the bass and I guess we’ll start working out the vocals. When that’s feeling pretty close, we’ll re-record the single version from the ground up with more attention to the recordings and detail.
We Skyped a bit yesterday about more changes and such. It’s kind of a strange way to work for both of us. If we were in the room together, changes would be discussed and set in minutes. Remotely — and with our schedules — it takes a week or more. We’ll get faster at it. But, it really illustrates the advantage of live interaction between musicians. We’re still really excited just to be working on Ragoo stuff again, regardless.
Word is Ken has a new tune called “Congress of the Cow”, which I’m excited to hear. For that one, I get to throw down the drums and probably bass with Shawn adding a guitar. Bass was always my favorite role in this band, so I’m looking forward to digging into that.
Shawn is planning on coming down to Headphone Treats for the first time next weekend. Neither of us is sure what we’ll work on. We’ll probably try to put together the start of a few new songs and maybe dabble with second guitar ideas on “Mow Down The Messenger” and Ken’s new one. Time is limited for Shawn as well and most of his own attention to writing is going into his own band. So whatever we come up with will likely be on the spot, which as I remember it was how a lot of the better original Ragoo material came into being anyway.
Hopefully our next few posts will start digging into the recording of new material, but please excuse us while we share a few links. We’ve finally gotten ourselves properly established on all the music-oriented social networks. It’d be awesome of you could “like” us on Facebook, friend our Myspace and check out a few of our free downloads over at Last.fm. There are also a couple of interactive sites we’re on:
TheSixtyOne is this massive multi-player game based around listening to and discovering new music. Pretty awesome. “Heart” our tracks and you’ll earn points in the game. We’ve discovered tons of great bands through this. Really perfect if you are the type who likes to explore new music.
WeLoveYourSongs is another fairly new service that lets fans vote and rank underground music. We’ve just started messing about with that, but could be good for finding other new music as well.
As far as buying merch, our main Bandcamp site allows you to order from us directly. It’s also the only place you can download lossless digital audio and where we plan to exclusively release some limited edition vinyl runs of new material soon (we’re all really excited about that).
Or you can download MP3s at the usual suspects: CDBaby, iTunes, Emusic, Amazon, Napster
In 1996, The Big Ragoo was formed as a side project of three members of Atlanta post-punk band Monkey Boy. Jimmy Ether (hey, that’s me!), Ken Whitener and Shawn Christopher — all prolific songwriters — would rotate instruments with the principal songwriter playing guitar. Lyrics were written communally based on what each member thought the others were singing, resulting in both interesting motifs and complete absurdity. Musically, the trio pulled heavily from the influence of Trumans Water, fIREHOSE, Soul-Junk, Sebadoh and Archers of Loaf.
This set of 13 songs was recorded one weekend in August of 1996. The music was tracked live to two-track in a wonderfully large room reminiscent of The Pixies Surfa Rosa recordings. The music was then dubbed to 4-track cassette and vocals were overdubbed as a group live to the remaining two tracks.
The Big Ragoo disbanded shortly after the making of this album. In 2010, Jimmy Ether synced the overdubbed vocals to the original two-track master, remixed, remastered and reissued the release on the Headphone Treats imprint. The Big Ragoo have plans to reform… more than 14 years later.
In fact… your purchase of this record (just $5 for 13 songs!) goes directly toward a plane ticket to fly Ken down from New York to make said “new record”. We appreciate the purchase!
If you are interested in this release for blog review or airplay, give me a shout.
