Regrets/What went down

Just for fun, the audio here is what went down in the studio when we recorded “Give her my regrets.” As I wrote in the commentary on the track on the Point of Reference page, it’s always been a tricky/innaresting tune for any band I’ve played with to grok. The groove, which has always been obvious to me in my imagination, has never seemed so obvious to musicians who have played the tune with me. So in the recording sessions I left the tune for last and hoped for the best. The end part has always been an open-ended jam when played live, so that’s all the guidance I gave the group here. For posterity, this includes the actual jam as it happened. We all loved what happened, as it had that “everybody solos/nobody solos” feel that Weather Report used to mine so effectively. However, it made the song too long, and the record was already longer than we wanted it to be.

At home I added some guitar parts, including the Andy Summers/Lenny Breau harp harmonics with flanging and echoes and a lap steel part that was more or less a “solo” the way I played it. Then I gave producer/brother Jon the task of reassembling the ending into something coherent that was (a) more focused, (b) substantially shorter, and (c) had a psychedelic feel like the end of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita.” Steve’s keyboard parts were redone to an early draft (which at some point was lost in a hard drive crash and had to be reconstructed) then Jon massaged the whole thing into its final form, with a little bit of kibitzing from Steve. I love the end result, but…