“Seeing somebody like Chris Whitley sitting in a tool shed in the back of his father’s house, just possessed, and you realize that you are in the presence of nature at its purest, you’re in the presence of the divine.”
~ Craig Street, as quoted in Producing Hit Records by DJ Farinella
Craig Street, who produced Dirt Floor, discusses recording the album:
We were going to record it in his apartment, and at the last minute me and Chris and this wonderful engineer named Danny Kadar got in a truck and decided to go up to his dad’s place in Vermont. We did the record in a workshop, where there’s a wood-burning stove and a lot of old motorcyle parts. It’s where Chris does a lot of his writing. He was real comfortable in there. We just hung the mic up by some wire because Chris stomps his foot a lot. Well, also because we forgot the microphone stand, but it was a blessing in disguise. I used two mic pre’s that were designed specifically for a ribbon mic, prototypes made by Tim DeParavicini. We used a pair of those and ran a Speiden into that. We recorded to an old Ampex 440 that the engineer had, and did backup on a little Studer CD-R that I use instead of a DAT for backup and rough mixes. I carried up the ProAcs, and an Audio Research preamp that I use in my work space to monitor with, and we used that as a 2-track select. We set up everything in the kitchen and ran wires back to the shed, and that was it. Chris sat down and played, and we did all the songs in a day. The next morning we got up and made a master reel. Greg Calbi mastered it for us.
Articles
You can access a few dozen articles here.
Bootlegs and Other Audio
1998 gigs including Radio Bremen “Moments”
Rolling Stone interview 1998-04-06 at Martyr’s
J’Open Mike (NYC) 1998-03-10:
Austin Convention Center (Pre-show) 1998-03-21:
KFOG Pull the Plug (San Francisco) 1998-03-25:
Hagstrom Musikk (Bergen, Norway) 1998-04-28 – Chris plays several tracks from Din and TI, perhaps because he seldom appeared in Norway:
Acoustic Cafe 1998-06-02:
Live at Blockbuster (Nashville, TN) 1998-08-02
Amoeba’s (San Francisco, CA) 1998-08-22:
WPLR (New Haven, CT) 1999-03-12:
KMTT (Seattle, WA) 1999-04-14:
KBAC (Santa Fe, NM) 1999-04-26
Martyr’s Pre-show 1999-08-13 WXRT
Videos
Craig Street discusses the recording of Dirt Floor:
Video with Brandon Kessler and the DF street gangs that promoted Dirt Floor:
Scrapyard Lullaby b/w:
Scrapyard Lullaby:
Dirt Floor:
Wild Country:
at CBGB’s for Reverb:
Chris plays Firefighter on Gabereau (Canadian show) April 1999:
Video playlist: CBGB 1998 (professional video)
Video playlist: Quasimodo’s 1999-02-05
Video playlist: Rosebud 1998-04-14
Here’s an early (1993) version of Altitude sounding very much like a DIN song. Trimmed from a video uploaded by WillSalas CymbalMaker [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy5rXUj09o0]:
And, thanks to Hiroshi Suda, you can listen to the audio only here:
Photos
All Things Chris Whitley 
Katie- I really value the articles you posted. Thank you
Jerry Whitley 7/13/16
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Thanks, Jerry. Just doing my part to preserve the record of Chris’s awesomeness, lest we forget.
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Katie, Thought you’d approve of this. Bjorn [image1.PNG] Sent from my iPhone
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Don’t know, Bjorn – no image appears in your comment!
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