Gotta love a hometown newspaper. And ya gotta love a good tip from wise friends. Before the recording started on this “Starlite Drive-In Saturday Night” record, Sharon Allen told me she took care of the artwork before recording her solo debut record, “Along the Way”. I think most people do the opposite. You record, mix, and master. Yah, you’re done. But you’re not. You remember that you can’t send it out to get duplicated until you write liner notes and finalize your artwork.

You scramble, and it’s really easy to get in a hurry and miss typos. (That happened on the last record.) Sharon said it saved her a lot of stress getting all the non-music part of her project done first, so I followed her example:

I knew I wanted a drive-in theater on the CD cover, and it had to be *our* Starlite Drive-In. (“Starlite” was a common name for drive-in theaters, and many are still operating.) After becoming more than a little obsessed with finding this silly little picture, I did the obvious. I called the Register Pajaronian, our local newspaper.

They found some great pics in their archive. They loaned me their negatives and my pal David Hays, who did the CD layout, reworked the main photo into a really nice looking CD cover. He also tweaked the additional images that the paper dug up to piece together a whole drive-in motif for the CD package. And courtesy of PhotoShop, we even added the advertising lettering from the the Starlite’s opening weekend (March 2nd, 1950) that I found on microfilm at our local library. It does look cool.

Yesterday, the Pajaronian did a nice recap on the whole process, giving a very generous chunk of real estate to the CD, the story of the photo quest, and a little preview of the release concert we’ll be doing at the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds on Saturday, August 11th. Click these images to read the article:

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If you’d like to hear what the new record sounds like, it’s finally up on my Music page. Ordering links are in place, too.

True confession: There’s one typo on the new CD, but I’m not telling you where it is.