Q: Any other Nightfly stories you'd like to share?

A: Here's a classic story from recording The Nightfly at Soundworks. About six months into recording the album -- it took a couple of days less than one year to do -- I was working five days a week, taking weekends off. I came in and Donald was doing some vocals and he goes "Something smells weird." And so we kind of go "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But as the day goes on there "is" a peculiar smell in the control room. So next day we come in and we mention it and it's a little bit worse the next day and Donald's going "I can't work, there's something nauseating in the room." What it is we have no clue. This goes on and on and finally Donald says "I'm not gonna come in and work until you can find out what it is." So he starts to take days off and that is a concern for Charlie Bonatti who owns Soundworks. So we said "Call us if the smell is gone and we'll come in and work." We arrive at the studio and there's candles and sticks of incense burning and that's how they got rid of the smell. They tried checking everything; he has people coming in and going through all the air conditioning and finally they just start to tear apart the studio and literally tear out part of the control room, all the equipment, they take away the console, they tear up carpeting, they tear up floors; the studio is gutted and finally they start tearing up the floorboards and back in one corner of the room is a little drainpipe and there is a very moist, very dead, very big rat. And it just came out of this pipe and died from eating poison. We literally took about a week off from the album because of this dead rat.
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 PM