EARLY MAN’S MIKE CONTE WELCOMES YOU TO WHIPLASH
[In which the Early Man guitarist/vocalist shares his thoughts on the world, music, and the usual assortment of drunken adventures/misadventures. Enjoy. -Ed.]
Hello everyone, welcome to WHIPLASH! With this column I plan to give you weekly updates and a behind the scenes look into everything that is going on in the world of Early Man, whether it be drinking, touring, recording, drinking, shredding, drinking, etc., if it’s happening I’ll be writing about it. What I won’t be doing with this column is writing 9 page essays about the “current state of the metal scene” or “my take on the new Metallica record” or any other boring crap like that. Don’t you get enough of that horseshit already? WHO FUCKING CARES! If you want to see what’s actually going on out here in the real world with a working touring metal band, well…it’s your lucky day. And just to make this all that much more interesting I’m going to take your questions and answer them right here on a regular basis via video response. Ain’t technology grand? Just remember, no question is a stupid question, I’ll take them all. Any topic, any subject, fire away. You can send them to: [email protected].
Before I take off I’ll use this opportunity to bring you up to speed with what’s been going on over the past 6 months with the band.
We finished writing for our new record sometime around October of this past year. For most of the month of November we were on tour in the U.S. and Canada with Iced Earth. We started recording the full length around Thanksgiving in Seattle with Jack Endino. Here’s an outtake of me working on some vocal stuff with Endino:
We mixed the record the first week and a half of January, so it’s done and finished. I can’t say enough about how great it was to work with Endino. I like his style. Unfortunately it’s become really common and trendy nowadays to have someone with a name “produce” your record who is not actually a record producer. This person usually has no knowledge at all of how to use a mixing board, how to place mics properly or how to do ANYTHING in a studio for that matter. Jack is the complete opposite end of that spectrum. There’s absolutely no bullshit involved. He does everything himself with regards to the recording process, no assistant, no extra engineer, none of that shit. One man show from start to finish. I believe the record will be out in May.
After we finished up mixing we immediately took off on a 2 week west coast tour with 3 Inches of Blood and Toxic Holocaust. This was one of the best tours we’ve ever done. Good, rowdy all-ages crowds. Here’s some footage from a show on that tour in Orangevale, California at The Boardwalk:
That pretty much brings us up to right now. We’ve been in LA for the past few weeks but we’ll be starting a tour on the east coast on March 2nd that’ll start in NYC and head into Florida and then over to Austin just in time for the The End Records SXSW showcase. Of course, I will be checking in here on a regular basis during all of this so stay posted. Later!
-MC
