Zak Claxton, Kat Claxton, Bunny and I made our pilgrimmage to Phil O'Keefe's Sound Sanctuary Studios on 15 May 2010 to record the first two songs of the second Zak Claxton album.  The fun begins again!  Phil's a musician's engineer, and everyone is totally great to hang out with...serious fun!

Zak Claxton playin' the Martin.

Relaxing.

Read about the recording session on the Zak Claxton blog!

I'm a photographer. As with many photographers, we're just not all that comfortable when we're in FRONT of the lens. I was initially dismayed when Zak announced that we'd have 12 hours of live streaming? Ugh. My first reality TV show.

For impish good fun (and to deal with my general discomfort of non-stop live streaming), I decided to bring a bunch of different shirts and just keep changing them, and just generally messing with the camera instead of getting worked up about it, and turn it into something fun.

Here is one of probably about five shirt changes!  :)

Photo:  Kat Claxton

And the red dashiki...

Photo:  Kat Claxton

...and AfroKen.

Among the shirts that is missing from these photos (which Kat Claxton took, and which I stole from Zak's blog) is a photo of me in my Domino's Pizza shirt.  Makin' that special delivery!

Zak wrote on his blog:  "Another highlight of the stream was our crazy musical chameleon Ken, who brought five different costume changes for our viewing audience. I nearly lost it at once point when I walked out of the control room and he was standing there in a Domino's pizza delivery uniform."

Photo:  Kat Claxton

I left early, around 10pm.  I needed to wake up early.  Linda Perhacs wanted me to show up early in the morning in Silverlake to photograph our songwriting/arranging process for her second song I'd record, "Intensities". 

On the way home from Sound Sanctuary, I cranked "Heaven and Hell" by Black Sabbath.  I love Ronnie James Dio's voice on this album.

When I returned home from photographing the musical team with Linda, I heard that Ronnie James Dio had passed away of stomach cancer.  This news hit me like a punch to the gut.

I had the pleasure of sitting next to him on a plane for 5-6 hours on the first leg of my journey to India.  Super intelligent, friendly, charismatic, just a great guy. I have an extremely high opinion of him overall, and of course have always loved his singing.

He wanted to go to India and tour there. That's actually what really got us talking...he wanted to hear all about India. He was really curious, and he wanted to bring his music over there to the parts of the world where there were metal fans who didn't get to see metal as much.

I think meeting famous musicians is fun and all, but I don't really get hung up on that all that much. But I felt that RJD was meeting someone who was really special. I would have remembered and valued meeting him even if he weren't famous.  R.I.P., my friend!

Zak Claxton said,  "I can think of no better tribute to any cool musician than his fans having been creating new rock at the time of his passing."  So true.