Vegas Archive: Slam Dunk ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead’ Re-Mastered (2006)

For more information about the record, read the commentary from Slam Dunk’s guitarist Travis Naegle.

Slam Dunk formed in 2004. There’s not really an interesting story behind how the band came together, so I’ll skip ahead to the good part. We recorded and released our first demo in the fall of 2004, and played a bunch of shows in Las Vegas at various hot dog stores, churches, coffee shops, and other makeshift venues. Around 2006, we had a batch of songs that we felt were ready for the studio treatment, and we got to work recording what would become Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead. 

Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead was recorded in a pink house. That sentence alone is deserving of its own paragraph.

We wanted these new songs to sound really dark and dirty. I was into a band called Since By Man at the time, and I really loved the way their records sounded so chaotic. I think Evan did a really good job of recording the songs (pretty much by himself), as well as mixing them. I know this isn’t the most polished recording ever produced, but in retrospect, I think it came out just the way we wanted.

There was a problem, however. The finished tracks played a little quiet, so you had to turn the volume way up every time you listened. Even worse, we were running out of time; we had booked a CD release show at Jillian’s downtown and it was approaching quickly. More specifically, we finished recording and mixing and had two days to burn a bunch of copies and package them with artwork by ourselves. Needless to say, we were pretty stressed out for the next 48 hours.

Unfortunately, we had to release Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead as-is; there simply wasn’t enough time to fix the volume issue. We might have sold a hundred or so copies while I was still in the band, but we weren’t really counting, so who knows?

A few months ago, I found an old copy of the record and decided I would try my hand at re-mastering it. I fixed the volume issue fairly easily. Recording technology these days is much easier to figure out. Fixing the volume also brought a couple of other issues to my attention, so I brought up a lot of the low end and ran these sons of bitches through a brick-wall limiter. If only the record had sounded like this when we first released it…

-Travis Naegle

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Slam Dunk
Rock ‘n’ Roll is Dead
2006
download

Mike Lorenzo – Vocals
Travis Naegle – Guitars
Evan Carlisle – Bass
Bryan Lorenzo – Drums
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