A Spiritual Journey

As April of 1979 ended, trying to stay focused on the work that still needed to be done was all I was thinking about. After the record had been played for a while on radio stations, all the problems I had been dealing with inside the band seemed to fade away. Everyone involved had total confidence in the project now, and we were all on a mission to make sure that we finished anything still undone. What surprised me were all the things I hadn't thought of at all, when we began this project...things that were becoming clearly necessary for us to do now...if we were to succeed. Even though we had been in serious rehearsals for well over a year, the public's apparent interest in the record made us aware of the fact that we now had an image to live up to that hadn't existed before. The public's perception and expectation of what we'd be like in performance had suddenly raised the bar for us, and we knew that we had to be better in concert than what the public expected, or else we'd lose that precious momentum. We begin intense five hour daily rehearsals, and we began rehearsing sets, as if on a concert stage. There were no retakes of songs...we would analyze our performances after we had played, to find out what areas were right, and what needed attention. We worked with the roadies on executing guitar switches, so they could get used to the pressure they would be under at a real show. They learned how to use strobe tuners, visually retuning very quickly...while very loud music was happening right next to them. We'd work on changing guitars on every song, so the show wouldn't have to stop for Mark and I to do tune-ups. We worked on presentation...on being so sure of ourselves that we made it look easy. This wouldn't have been possible without all the earlier work we had done...but now, it was beginning to be real...and we were only two months away from our live debut. We fine-tuned the vocals, worked on perfecting the mixes...and we still had to adjust to new equipment, as it arrived. Since most of this gear was so powerful, just learning how to control that much sound energy was a challenge...but everyone just dug in to do the work...and I was very proud of everyone. We were all operating like a well oiled machine...and all the cylinders were firing...

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