S.A. Sebastian: A View From The Bottom

This past Saturday I finally got my studio back in action, after being out of commission for over a year, due to flood damage. The NYC-band, Blueberry High Heels came in to record tracks for a demo. The band is fronted by Didi Delicious on lead vocals and bass guitar, with Dylan Mitchell (my band mate in Scratcher) on guitar and Greg Jacob (of the Rubber Room Rats and trip with the Teacher) on drums. The band describes themselves as, “a post-punk, powerpop trio of rockers cut from the old school NYC rock and roll cloth.” After spending several hours with them, I’d say that’s a fair assessment. Didi has long been a part of the New York City punk rock scene, seen regularly at CBGBs, Coney Island High, the Continental, Scrap Bar and more, either writing for NYRock.com and the NY Waste or playing with any of her different bands. So, for this session, we really wanted to capture the raw, punk-rockness of the band, so with Dylan taking the lead as producer, we decided to record the band old-school - all together in the same space, playing live, bleed and all, going back later and re-cut vocals.  You can hear the song “Dice,” recorded and engineered by me, and mixed by Dylan, on the band’s MySpace page. 

On Monday, November 19 I was on set for the new NBC Universal television show “Lipstick Jungle” (not to be confused with the Atomic Brother song “Lipstick Lovebite”) featuring Steve’s girlfriend from Beverly Hills 90210, some girl from 24 and Brooke Shields. This came out of the blue, since the last audition I went on was back in September for the role of a musician in the Sex in the City movie. Go figure, I didn’t get the part. I must not look enough like a musician. Of course, I wasn’t told I didn’t get the part, that’s just how things work. I have been seeing them film the movie all over the city since October.

After forgetting that I even went in for that, I got a call from the casting agency that did Sex in the City to play the part of “East Village punk rocker-type” for the new show on Friday afternoon. I figured I could do East Village punk rock-type easy, better than musician apparently, so why not. It took all of 2 minutes for them to convince me and 3 days to clear my calendar and I was in.

Call times were 5:30, 6 and 6:30 AM on Monday morning at the Ace of Clubs in New York City. I had the 6:30 call. There was about 20 people there when I showed up around 6:15, but there was about 50 called for the production, half SAG, half non-union. To my surprise there were a lot of late arrivals, and a lot of whiners and down right angry people. The better part of the morning I spent listening to people fighting over seats, “That’s my seat! I was sitting there a half hour ago. I’m back now, so get up,” complaining that the catering was too far away, complaining that there wasn’t enough choices for breakfast, complaining that the wardrobe supervisor didn’t like their outfit, complaining about just about everything. I was also surprised that so many people showed up late. And these were people who do this regularly. What the hell? Read the rest of this entry »