The session started with high hopes and the best of intentions. I had introduced Jason Lytle of the late, great band Grandaddy, to engineer Thom Monahan. They were mixing a record together at The Hangar that Jason had recorded in France for the band Maarten. I picked up Jason at the airport on Monday morning, and we had a nice Mexican breakfast at Nopalitos. Back at the studio though, things quickly turned to shit.
Jason brought two hard drives in a padded carrying case. I joked with him that he needed a handcuff between him and the case because he was being so careful with it. I hooked up the main drive to our Pro Tools computer and nothing showed up on the desktop. I knew Jason was using PT 5.xx and OS9, so I thought there might be driver issues and I figured I'd just try the backup drive. It mounted fine, so I thought I'd open up a song and make sure everything loaded fine while we were waiting for Thom, who was driving up from L.A. I opened up a song and got the dreaded "84 audio and fade files missing, do you want to start crying now?" dialog box. Thom showed up and we spent the next hour or so confirming our worst fears: The backup drive was incomplete and we were missing lots of the overdubs and processed audio tracks that Jason had been working on for the past few weeks. At this point we split up our tasks. Thom stayed super calm and went about opening up every song to determine whether or not any of them could be mixed with what we had on hand. He came up with an ingenious method of using screen shots of the different mix windows of each song version to determine exactly what was needed. By the end of the day they had determined that of the twelve songs, they could mix two. While Thom and Jason assessed the damage, I went about trying to resurrect the dead drive. I've had a fair amount of success in the past rescuing bad drives that had lost their catalog or experienced similar problems, but both Thom and I — along with a friend of his who had offered some help — struck out completely with this drive. It was mechanically dead, making the dreaded rhythmic head crash sound.