Jeff Saxon

One afternoon, returning home from the grocery store, I was hurriedly bringing in 6 or 7 or so gallon containers of bottled spring water from an outdoor parking garage into my condo. And as I was walking with 3 or 4 jugs in each hand, I felt a sharp twinge of pain in my lower back. The twinge turned into a formidable pain, so I decided I should go see my chiropractor.

After he carefully checked me out and cautioned me not to try any more “water relay races”, he said “All you can really do is give it 48 hours of ice”. And even though i was in a great deal of discomfort and movement was at a premium, I just about catapulted off the exam table to shake his hand and thank him profusely. And then i went home and started writing the song; because the second I heard the words “48 Hours Of Ice”, I knew I had a great title and it absolutely needed to become a song. And since me and my aching back were both in a definite bluesy mood, I knew it had to be a blues tune.

The first verse in the song was a condensed retelling of how I wrenched my back and went to see my doctor (I took a little poetic license because i felt the word chiropractor was a bit out of character for this kind of blues tune). The rest of the song was somewhat less autobigraphical, but I tried to keep it honest, gritty and off the cuff.

I didn’t have a home recording studio at the time I wrote it, but a friend of mine had a 4-track cassette recorder (yes, Holy hissy technology of yesteryear, Batman!) and I thought that would be the perfect low-fi approach to capture this Delta-styled blues tune. Luckily he agreed to record it, but we only had about a 3 or 4 hour block to get it all done. So I called another buddy of mine, who’s a really good slide guitarist and the two of us recorded his slide part and my main guitar part and vocal simultaneously “direct-to-cassette”. The only overdub that was done was me tapping the side of my acoustic guitar to a click track. And the only post-production alteration to the track was adding 78 R.P.M. record scratches to one of the final mixes. it was a really fun tune to write and record and to this day I can’t look at another gallon jug of spring water or see a chiropractor’s office without being reminded of this song.