Dusk
Dusk is Badlands's third and final album. It was originally recorded in 1992-1993 as a demo to submit to their label. In an interview on the Racer X site, Jeff Martin talks about Dusk: Dusk, or the tunes put on the album, were intended as demos for the next Badlands album after Voo Doo Hwy. We had worked up that group of tunes at rehearsals at Mates in North Hollywood two months before recording them at Good Night L.A by a friend of Ray's, Shea Baby. It's all 24 track full studio recording, but we did it all in less than 6 to 8 hours. We put the Mic's up, made sure they worked and Go! We recorded them primarily for Atlantic Records to hear and give us a budget for the full recording of the same tunes, if they liked what we had. They did not like the direction of the songs, for what ever the reason. Some months later we were dropped from Atlantic. At the time we were happy with that outcome and so was the Management, being that Atlantic was not doing anything for us anyway. We shopped new prospects. Almost every song was one-take recordings. I remember having floor Tom mic problems where we stopped to fix it, then restarted a song. But all in all, one takes. Even some endings were a little funky on my end, but Jake just flagged it off and we go to the next tune. I think Jake is the only one who did not make one mistake...if he did I did not hear it. Ray had about 50% of his lyrics together. The rest were what he called Jib-A-Jab. He would put a word or two on the front of a line and rest were all vowels. He was amazing at it, and most folks never could tell the difference. He would come up with his melody line by Jib-A-Jabbing. I think he had a harder time finding lyrics that fit his Jabbing, due to the timing and the percussive hooks he would come up with while scatting along. Nothing on Dusk was fixed, that Ray did, obviously due to his passing before the putting together of the tracks. For him to sound like what you hear on the album one take each tune, still amazes me to no end. He was one you could say had true talent, pitch and tone. Jeff commented on the song Sun Red Sun: One thing I must comment about Dusk is a vision I see in my mind every time some brings up the project or I listen to it myself. During the beginning of the song Sun Red Sun, while Jake was doing the intro, I could see Ray in the Vocal booth through a glass partition sitting on a stool giving me that charismatic smile of his. His arm held out in front of him and running his index finger back and forth across ten or twelve thin silver Indian bracelets he always wore. That's the chimes you hear in the track.