If Tapeworm stuff leaks tomorrow, people who bitched every day about not having it will be the first ones to bitch about how mediocre it actually is and did they really fucking wait 17 years for this disappointment.
It probably is mediocre. There is no way it can live up to the hype. A monster has been created. The expectations are it will be Fragile meets Lateralus. Its like Axl with his shitty Chinese Democracy album. The hype was so huge, there was no way it would live up to it....Now I could see TR leaking it with a message like "see told you it sucks" or something to that effect.....
Tbh there are lots of (allegedly) recorded but unreleased songs by various artists that I'd absolutely prefer to Tapeworm. Nice idea for a new thread, actually...
Back in the 1990s, I had a musician friend in L.A. who worked on Cirque Du Soleil stuff. He was a friend of Charlie's and I remember him telling me that Charlie had done a remix of Closer. It never surfaced back in the day. Has Charlie ever talked about this or any other unreleased NIN work?
I believe it was a short-notice / surprise gig, at a club in the flats in Cleveland, someplace TR had played back in the day maybe? I had never been there before. And at the time, as the song goes, "The flats looks like a Scooby-Doo ghost town".
But it was a "proper" gig, with an audience and all. Probably one of those deals where they give out tickets on the radio, or just bill the gig under a fake name and whoever shows up gets a nice surprise... something like that. Memory fades.
@charlie_clouser Man, what a treat to see you here on ETS! Sorry to hear that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony isn't happening in person, it would've ruled to see you up on a stage with TR again.
I have lots of geeky questions about your programming duties for the old live shows. I've read that you played drums growing up, but how'd it come to pass that you were playing a second drumkit onstage for NIN's tour with Bowie? Was that something TR asked for specifically, or did it just come up as an idea in rehearsals, when the band were figuring out alternate arrangements for songs? Did you look down the list of songs that were going to get played nightly and suddenly realize "hmm, I have no melodic parts on four of these tunes, better think of something else to do besides tapping eighth notes on a keyboard"? Were you and Podboy challenging each other to drum-offs? Who was Questlove and who was Bieber?
What I'm saying is, the triple-drummer attack on "Hallo Spaceboy" with Zack Alford was cool as shit. I've seen King Crimson three times now with the three drumkits right up front, always awesome!
Me playing auxiliary drums on the Bowie tour was, as you suspected, because there just wasn't anything for me to play on keys on a few of the songs in the crossover part of the set, and once you get all members of both bands up on stage it was a case of creating more visually interesting performances and not, as you said, me just standing there tapping away at eighth notes. Keys are the least interesting thing to watch someone play, so who wants to look at me AND Garson just standing there?
I had played drums since I was a kid but never really kept up my training, so I was quite happy to be just the "spare" drummer. The hardest part was memorizing the order of all the snare fills in Scary Monsters - they actually aren't random, and it would have sounded even more messy than it already did if we were all just playing whatever we felt like at the end of every bar. So there was some math and memorization involved. At the end of just those few songs that I played on I remembered why I switched from playing drums to less exhausting instruments! As with many instruments that I can play (in theory), it's a case of... what's that old saying? My reach exceeds my grasp? In other words, I can come up with and keep track of parts that I don't have the skills or stamina to play at full force and precision night after night. So just whacking along to the snare fills on Scary Monsters was fine by me.
Tech-wise, I used a bunch of my old "gumby-head" Dynacord drum pads and some Dauz "dog bone" triggers going into an old Roland PM-16 trigger>MIDI converter I had lying around, with an acoustic snare that had a trigger on it as well. I used an old trick from a previous band I was in where I needed to play along to a programmed drum part - I had a kick pedal but it wasn't plugged into anything. So I could hammer away behind the kit as though I was playing a full beat, but since my kick didn't make any sound there would be no ugly flams or double-triggering between what I was doing and what Vrenna and Zack were doing, but my brain still thought I was playing a full beat. This is much easier to do than to try and play with just your hands - the foot just can't resist playing along!
Wow, thanks so much for the in-depth answer! I don't want you to run afoul of old contracts or NDAs in answering this, of course, but -- did NIN's set on that tour get recorded properly, to your knowledge? Bowie's record label just put out a great-sounding live album of his set (without the NIN tracks) on streaming sites, called Ouvrez le Chien, from the '95 show in Dallas. Bowie's FOH mixer guy Steve Guest has the credit for engineering, so I assume he was just running ADATs to record Bowie's set, but do you know if NIN's whole set was properly captured that night for a live album or video at the same time? We've seen a little bit of stuff that sounds like it was properly mixed on Closure, and someone leaked part of a "professionally (badly) edited" live video, with the synths WAY up in the mix (see below; your mug behind the kit at 7:45!)... but was NIN's whole show documented like this too? Would love a proper live recording of the "Piggy" rock remix with TR jamming out on bass!