Well, dear readers, there I was, driving home from seeing a production of Damn Yankees. The freeway was pretty wide open and as I drove in the carpool lane I noticed a billboard or something like a billboard for Hollywood Park. I don’t know why that took me aback, but it did. I think that was because I didn’t really think there were any racetracks left in Los Angeles. I don’t know why I thought that, but in my experience, you simply never hear about them anymore, at least in the way I heard about them from my earliest years. In fact, I haven’t thought about a racetrack in decades, maybe forty years. So, I looked up Hollywood Park and was surprised to find that it did, in fact, close at the end of 2013. I was also surprised that there was a casino there, too. I have no clew when that was added. The casino is still open, and I think the rest will be razed and replaced by, guess what – apartment complexes, shopping complexes and restaurants. Just what we need. Then I searched Santa Anita racetrack – it’s still operating but doesn’t really seem like a racetrack of old, plus the current owners have recently declared bankruptcy. And the other racetrack I knew was Delmar in San Diego – that one is still operating but only seven weeks out of the year. It’s nothing like the halcyon days of the California racetrack. “And they’re off and running!”
I used to go to the races quite often with my father and mother, and sometimes just with my father. I vividly remember all three racetracks listed above, but especially Hollywood Park which was located not in Hollywood but in Inglewood. I believe I was probably six or seven the first time I went, but I suppose I might have been even younger. My father, thanks to his restaurant, always had great seats, we always ate there, and he’d show me the list of who was in each race, I’d pick a horse and he’d bet on it for me – I won many times. It was a world both exotic and sometimes scary, scary meaning the seedy types that were there. But I loved the color and the sound and the excitement and I’d root loudly for my horse. I probably went into the early 1960s, but I really cannot remember ever going to the track after about 1962. To show you how vivid my memory is of that time, I always ate the same thing at every track – a club sandwich on white bread. End of nostalgia moment.
Yesterday was kind of an okay day. I was up early and to the studio by nine-thirty. We had our downbeat precisely at ten. Our main work, replacing the two horns and woodwind on about six numbers (but only two of those were top to bottom, the rest just certain sections) – my boys are such pros that they’d hear the track play down once, then our conductor Dana would say “Let’s record” and they’d nail it in one take. So, we got the first four in the first hour, then the last two in the second hour and had plenty of time to redo all the play-offs. Those won’t be on the album, but we were told that the stock and amateur licensing folks would be interested in licensing just the orchestral tracks – that would enable them to license those out for groups that can’t afford live musicians. Whether we do that or not will wholly depend on the money that’s offered because we’re certainly not going to just give them the tracks.
Then those players left and we did three teeny-tiny piano fixes and we were through. And at long last we can insert those fixes into the mixes and we will be through. We have avoided the drama that was happening, so once the mixes are final then I’ll send them off to New York and they’ll have a short period of time to make comments, which I will then either address or not, depending on what they may be and whether I agree with them. So, I’m still hoping we can get this released by the final week of September. We shall see.
Then I picked up some packages, then came home, where I listened to music, relaxed a bit, and then got ready to go to see the show.
Adryan Russ tagged along and we went out to Redondo Beach and ate at a little hamburger jernt called Tomboy. It was pretty good – not quite Astroburger, but tasty, and the onion rings were very good, too. Then we moseyed back to the theater and got our tickets, which turned out to be a little irritating because they weren’t at Will Call as they should have been and we had to go to another window where some woman who thought she was very amusing told us our tickets had been printed but she didn’t know where they were and so printed another set for us. We took our seats and five minutes later others showed up with the same seats. Oops. So, out I went to the box-office and of course there was a line, and I finally got up there and got a little attitude and then was told our tickets were for Friday night, the night before. One wonders how they could even print out tickets for a performance that had already occurred, but what do I know. She said we’d get seats and I said, rather testily, that seats would not be acceptable and that they had to be the equal of the seats we had and that none of this was my fault as I’d been very clear with the box-office person with whom I’d booked the seats over a week ago that it was for the Saturday evening performance and she’d confirmed that. It was really quite inept and we had to wait around another ten minutes till we finally were given new seats, which turned out to be better anyway, so that part was okay.
The show was Damn Yankees – I had a few friends in the cast, so I’m not going to go on about it, but Damn Yankees is a show I have always loved, but this production just didn’t do it for me, for a whole slew of reasons, beginning with a director who, from my point of view, didn’t understand the comedy portion of the show, which is very large – and that’s kind of a problem. My pals were the best in the show, as I knew they would be. There was one disastrous casting faux pas and it was pretty much a deal breaker for me as I could not get past it. And I really wish choreographers would stop channeling and channeling poorly Bob Fosse. Of course, Mr. Fosse did the original Damn Yankees, but it wasn’t the style that he became famous for later, but in this production that’s what we got – the later Fosse and Rob Marshall doing Fosse stuff – so in Two Lost Souls for no reason whatsoever, out came the boys in pants and suspenders and bare chests right out of Cabaret, and the girls in their garter belts and chairs, also right out of Cabaret. Not only was it without point, it took away from what the number is actually about. Also, the sound was horrible – they actually have full bands at these shows, but it sounded canned, actually canned, thanks to bad levels and terrible EQ and it was frequently much louder than the singers. Also, it was the revival orchestrations, which I wasn’t in love with back then and am less in love with now. Still, always fun to hear the score, and fun to see my chums.
We hung out and said our hellos to those we knew, and then we came home – no traffic at all and got home very quickly. I answered e-mails and that was that.
Today, I’m hoping we finish the mix fixes so we can finally put this thing to bed. If it’s to happen, the engineer will work on his own for several hours then I’ll go and listen and finesse, then he’ll upload the whole deal onto Dropbox and we’ll be done. We’ll probably celebrate and go to Astroburger after we’re done. Then I’ll relax.
This week is very busy with meetings and meals, setting a guest star, picking the final two songs, getting everything to the singers by Monday night, and various and sundried other things.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, hopefully finish a mix, eat, jog, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. But to kick start it, what are your racetrack experiences? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall bet to win, place and show and then say, “And they’re off and running!”