Fast forward approximately one year. The song demos were done, and Tony, Dennes and I decided to make high quality recordings of our songs for the first Ten Ton Tide CD. We decided that upgrading my home studio was a much better way to go than using rented recording facilities. The one major drawback of that was that we would have to use electronic drums. Jim Toscano had left Power Windows to make room in his busy schedule for wedding bands, session work, and other things that would pay the rent. One of his specialties is live performance on electronic drums, and he had been telling me of a setup he was working with where everything except the hi-hat was electronic, so the pads could be recorded as MIDI data, and the hi-hat would only take up one precious track of audio. It was the solution to our dilemma, and we hired him instantly.
A few months later, the bass, keyboard, and drum tracks were all done. We were starting to work on guitar tracks, but we were having problems locating a good session guitarist who could work with us in a cooperative, professional way. We had the good fortune to get some of the guitar tracks done by an old pro whose name you may recognize from his stints with Alice Cooper, Asia, and Great White: Al Pitrelli. Al is a fabulous guitarist, and as tends to be the case with established professionals, he had other priorities to take care of. However, Power Windows had just acquired a brilliant new guitar player by name of - you guessed it! - Zak Rizvi, and as soon as Dennes heard Zak play with Power Windows, he said to me, "He's going to play on our CD". And he did. Zak became the fourth player to have entered the Tide through the Power Windows gateway.
The strangest twist of all in this tale of two bands getting twisted together came halfway through the mixing process. As we began to mix the songs, Dennes started getting nervous about putting the finished results into the public market place. Infighting started to break out between him and myself. Our plan had been to release two or three songs as an EP cassette to be distributed while we were working on the rest of the mixes, but as soon as the master tape for the EP was ready to be duplicated, Dennes finally decided that he wasn't comfortable with distributing the EP after all. That decision led naturally to the more general decision that he wasn't comfortable working in partnership with me, and finally that pursuing a career as a singer/songwriter in the rock music business was simply not worth the stress he was enduring. Determined to complete what we had started, Tony and I finished mixing the album while distributing the EP cassette to reviewers and Power Windows audience members.
On Monday, March 13, 1995, the CD was officially released for sale through record stores and mail order houses. As we geared up for the CD release, we gradually concluded that the CD marketing would be much better with a live band to back it up. The problem was where to find a singer who not only could actually sing (I promise you, there are lots of "singers" out there who ought to pursue modelling careers instead), but who could actually sing the wide-ranging parts that Dennes had laid down on the record. It finally occurred to me that the singer/bass player from Power Windows, Joe Scarangella, could play guitar while singing in Ten Ton Tide, thus solving both the singer problem and the problem of multiple guitar parts from overdubbed tracks. He refused the invitation. But fortunately not for long! Joe has now been singing with Ten Ton Tide since our debut performance at the Rock N Roll Cafe in May 1995. The songwriting team has now expanded to include all five members of the live Ten Ton Tide, and we look forward to sending new Ten Ton Tide music your way soon.
Dan Gibson, (c) Copyright 1995 Dan Gibson. All rights reserved.
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