Then it was the mix of act two of the ALW show. We got two-thirds through and then just got very giddy. The Jesus Christ Superstar stuff was okay and I think we saved quite a few numbers in act two and got them to sound decent. And Carole Cook's usual fifteen-minute monologue edited down to two hilarious minutes perfectly. At the point the began the Sunset Blvd. section, the band just seemed to give up completely - that song, one of the most horrifyingly bad things I've ever heard, will not be on the album, unless we want to sell this as a comedy album. We just starting howling with laughter the more we tried to fix it. Every instrument seems to be playing in whatever key they feel like - or perhaps they were just playing the wrong bars, and the screeching violin (with only the DI pickup - no natural sound) was so pathetic I began saying, "That sounds like a cat in the throes of being strangled to death. That sounds like a cat choking on its own vomit. That sounds like a cat having having its appendix out without an anasthetic." And that's exactly what it sounded like. We put it at the end of the show, just so the director could hear what we've been dealing with. Otherwise, we've done as good as we can do. My big suggestion is to switch out the openings of disc one and two - the Superstar segment on disc two is much stronger - then we'd move the original opening segment, Joseph, to disc two. That will help things, I think, and then some judicious repositioning of other numbers will help, too.
