Last week I mentioned Dog Legs & Feet's 1999 live album “Bottom.”  I want to stay with that story just a bit, because it played a fairly big role in the rest of my musical life, and it relates directly to the project I'm working on right now. 

We originally recorded it as a bootleg version of our 3-hour live show at Pato's Good Tacos in East Austin. We wanted to have a record of all the songs we'd written before Michael Mergen left the band, and we recorded it on the night of his last performance. Nowadays you could do this really easily with your phone; in fact I suppose it would be weird, now, for a band to perform together for 6 months without ever making any recordings. But back in 1998 it took a lot more effort.  

We got two friends, Toren Smith and Marshall Hall, to handle the live mixing and recording of it.  We ended up with, I think, three digital minidiscs (do those things even exist anymore?) that each had about an hours worth of the performance.  This was not a multitrack recording that you could rebalance or tweak; it just had a single stereo file of the live mix, and that was it. So there wasn't a whole lot of production that could be done with it. 

We burned it to CD-Rs so we could all listen to it. For almost a year, it stayed in that form. The band broke up soon after, in June of 1998, and then reconstituted in February of 1999 with a slightly different lineup. (With Brett Youens replacing Michael Mergen.)

For DLF 2.0, I thought the Pato's recording could be turned into an album that we could promote and sell at shows. There was just one problem: we didn't have an album, we had a three-hour bootleg.  We needed a way to edit it down. 

Penniless musicians like us did not have expensive digital production software like ProTools at that time, nor computers powerful enough to run it. Nor did any of us know how to use said software even if we wanted to. 

Joe, our bassist, worked in IT at the University of Texas (and I had previously worked there as well), so we arranged for me to access a media lab that had audio editing software.  For a handful of weeks I went in every day during off-hours and did my best to edit and mix the three-hour “Live at Pato's” recording into an hour-long album, mainly by trial and error.  

That was my first effort at digital music production.  I had no idea what I was doing, really, though I had done some analog recording and mixing in my dad's garage studio. How different could it be? (Answer: pretty different.) 

Importantly, though, I had a lot of free time, and I kind of knew what I wanted the end result to sound like. Dog Legs & Feet had a very intimate, engaging live show - by no means free of mistakes, but full of heart and humor.  Above all, I wanted to capture that spirit. 

I was going for something similar to the feeling of the Beatles' “Let It Be,” where some songs sound pretty tight but others fall apart in the middle, and ad libs from the band tie the tracks together.  Because we'd recorded it out on the back patio of a Mexican restaurant, you could hear the staff calling out things like “DARYL, your order's ready” in the middle of the songs, and we rolled with that and made it part of the performance. So it was always going to sound a bit slapdash, but I wanted it to be slapdash in a good way. 

Some other live albums that I had really loved as a teenager also gave me inspiration - Rush's "Exit Stage Left", U2's “Rattle and Hum” - though we definitely had a folkier and less polished sound than those rock giants. 

And I was really inspired by live albums from two Austin legends, the Gourds' “Shinebox” and the Asylum Street Spankers “Live” (the link actually goes to “Spanks for the Memories” because I'm not sure “Live” is even available anywhere nowadays). 

Did our album end up sounding like any of those? Well, maybe a little bit, but let's be honest - it was a seat-of-the-pants, first-stab at producing. Still, I was proud of it. And whenever I've listened back to it in the years since, I'm still proud of it, warts and all.  

We released “Bottom: A Live Collection of Dog Legs & Feet” on CD in the spring of 1999, about a year after we had made the original recording.  We sold a fair number of copies at our shows, but then we broke up again later that summer (a story for another day) and so we had a lot more copies the ol' garage for several years afterwards. Nowadays I have one copy left, autographed by the rest of the fellas. 

Which brings me to the vicinity of my present-day project. I'll talk about that next time.