THE KIDS ARE STILL ALRIGHT

Tonight we'll be working with our old friend Koichi. I hope I'm spelling that right.

We first met Koichi several years ago when he was a fresh faced 15 year old with a Strat and a band. They were all 15, in high school, and had come to the studio (this was before the name "Smoke and Mirrors" was dreamt up in a cloud of blue fumes) via a cousin of our old bandmate Rob.

The band was called the Naked Basics, and their music was bluesy rock, certainly much more sophisticated that anything I was playing at 15 (learning the keyboard riff to "The Final Countdown" just doesn't cut it). They were very good, and for a while their tune "South of the Border" was up on the old Smoke and Mirrors site, mostly to make older musicians feel bad about themselves. People used to reference the Naked Basics all the time when they came in to do sessions; I think Mikedot or the Misanthrope may have commented on them back in the day.

We did 4 or 5 tunes with them before bedtime, which was pretty late since they were all native New Yorkers. For them it was back to High School and for us it was back to whatever we were doing, probably arguing over snare EQ's until the band broke up.

Well, Koichi graduated and took his Strat to college, where he's still playing and undoubtedly doing well with the ladies. Tonight we'll meet his new band (I don't know their name) and try to do four songs in two nights. I guess winter break is shorter now than it was in my college days, when we basked in a full month of down time, but never recorded a damn thing.