The Adam Russell Project
THE WICKED CARNIVAL (2001)
i’m the only one who remembers anything about this session. gord and his pal adam russell showed up at my place one friday or saturday night already blacked out from all the drinking they had been doing, and proceeded to drink some more. how they remained upright and managed to carry on lucid conversations for the remainder of the evening, i’ll never know. they decided they wanted to record something, and the resulting session was…uh…interesting. it’s amazing to me how well gord was able to play, given how completely trashed he was, and after he got tired of playing bass he gave the old arp omni-2 synth some action for the first time since YOU’RE A NATION. i pulled most of the musical weight and came up with some pretty good guitar ideas (satan welcomes you to las vegas introduces the seed of what would eventually become part of “voyeur” and glass mirror is built around a riff i really should have tried fashioning into a GWD song). it’s just too bad that they were supporting adam’s vocals. you had to be there to get the full entertainment value of him screaming, “I’LL FUCK YOU ALL THE TIME!” at the top of his lungs at 2:00 a.m. while drunk out of his skull. dude thought he was alice cooper or something. he basically sings about three different things: satan, drugs and getting laid. in most of the songs he eventually reveals that he is satan, after getting laid and doing drugs. i have to admit that it is kind of amusing, and he manages to improvise some funny stuff on the later tracks like clown bus, though his voice was pretty shot by then from all the screaming he’d been doing. after a while he got tired of the drawn-out arrangement and started singing things like, “I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU DON’T END THIS SONG!” so, of course, i kept it going.
if you ever saw my shure SM58 (the second microphone i ever bought), you would probably notice that there’s a pretty big dent in the grille. adam made that happen when he accidentally dropped the mic on the floor, too drunk to hold onto it. fortunately it never had any effect on the sound, and the mic is still going strong today, even if i don’t use it that often anymore unless I want to sing through a guitar effects processor or something for an odd sound. when we weren’t recording, adam was helping himself to some peanut butter m&ms (he ate the whole bowl by himself in about two minutes) and talking about the greatness of moosehead beer while looking glassy-eyed. i let out a sweet coyote howl when a guy we went to high school with named will foot walked by while gord and adam were smoking out on the porch, and that pretty much sums up the night for me.
TRACKS:
satan at your door
glass mirror
queasy waltz
satan welcomes you to las vegas
gay circus
clown bus
LISTEN:
