Iridescent Dave

"Iridescent Dave" was one of the first tunes that I wrote with Green Chili in mind. And Brian Hill, once again, provided the inspiration for it.

Brian's girlfriend, now wife, Kathy, was taking a production class that required the students to produce a 30 second commercial for a phony product. Kathy's was "Fat Free Oreos." Yummy. Brian asked me if I'd be willing to do the music for the commercial, and I said OK. I had just purchased my M1, and I wanted to try out all the new stuff I could with it. So I worked on this instrumental background and laid a sizzling lead keyboard solo on top of it. To flesh it out (and to provide a little suspense for the commercial) I added in a little bridge section between the first background pattern and the arrival of the lead. Brian loved it. Kathy loved it. I was very pleased. Kathy got an 'A'.

About a year later, I decided that it was time to flesh out this short snippet of music into a full-blown song. Actually, Brian had told Kathy that he wouldn't be surprised if the music from her commercial became a full song, so I was keeping him from being surprised, really. I decided at the time that the name of this new song would be "Iridescent Dave" without having any really good reason for calling it that at all. It just sorta popped into my head. But I added in music for an intro, verses, fleshed out what became the chorus and lead, and tweaked the bridge. I worked with Kurt for a long time on how I wanted the drums to sound for the song, and eventually we had worked out the whole thing. Except for the words. A title like "Iridescent Dave" really needed some slam-bang words.

Sometime after getting the music completely together, I had the opportunity to watch "2001: A Space Odyssey." I had seen it many times before, but not recently. As I was sitting in my living room late at night absorbing the experience of the film, I began to realize just who "Iridescent Dave" really was. Twenty minutes after the film ended, I had the lyrics written.

Once we got into the studio, I was able to create the interpretation of the song that I wanted. Mark Murray and I went to great lengths to find just the right sound for the verse vocals, eventually borrowing an ARP 2600 from Steve Paxton at Texas Tech University to get that growling voice. We also tweaked the chorus vocal with a parametric EQ for almost an hour to get the space-faring, broadcast over a really remote radio quality. Greg was the one who suggested adding "My God! It's full of stars!" right before the solo. It was the perfect touch.