Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 39-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Dave’s main guitar riff on this song is more like a bass line with some squiggly higher stuff swirling around like fumes from farm gas barrels. Now-deceased drummer Charlie Quintana (Bob Dylan, Social Distortion) was great to work with. We required him to play over some of the stuff we’d recorded without a click track. I don’t recall him minding. Hell of a thing to ask a drummer to do. Excellent work on this song by both these guys!
The lower register of the guitar nudged me lower, too. Singing lower requires more air in general, so I opted for an ominous, somewhat-above-a-whisper quality befitting the strangeness of the tale.
“Medieval Man” from Who Shot Elvis? (Matador, 1997) (download):
