Live at Legit Dogs + Ice (Episode 1069)

This episode had a long, strange journey.

 

Recorded at Legit Dogs + Ice in South Elgin less than 48 hours before the restaurant closed for good, this episode features guests Lollygagger, Coyote Man, flowersatherfeet, Chris Baker from Ink 180 and Brennan Weaver/Phil Lisiecki of Wild Dogs Comedy.

 

The recording started an hour later than scheduled, due to house audio problems I still don’t understand. Adding to the weird, “closing forever,” vibes was having to watch people leave the room because they didn’t want to wait any longer for the show to begin.

 

And yet… the guests were fantastic. When I do events like this, the interviewees all give their time and energy to be part of the podcast. No money changes hands; it’s all for the love of the game. Each guest delivered in every possible way, and I’m incredibly grateful for their presence.

 

Back to the strange journey … the sound guy told me I’d have the produced audio from the episode within two weeks of the 8/22/25 recording date. At the two week mark, I emailed asking for an update. He told me he wasn’t interested in working on the files, he had walked away from the project, and I’d need to get the audio from one of Legit Dogs’ investors. Of course, it would have been lovely for him to have told me that on the night of the show, or even in the subsequent two weeks. Alas…

 

That led to me to meeting the investor in Schaumburg on 9/13, who handed over a hard drive with several files. 

When I opened up the hard drive, I realized the evening’s recordings were captured in Logic Pro, a program I don’t own, and that is cost-prohibitive to pay for (especially for a one-time use). Luckily, Logic Pro offers a 90-day trial, which I signed up for simply to open the 24-track recording.

 

It’s worth noting at this point that I’ve never mixed live audio like this before, particularly live music performances. I’d like to apologize to the bands for your songs ending up in my unprofessional hands. This obviously wasn’t the way things were supposed to go down. We had a sound guy on board, but he completely bailed on everything.

 

Once in Logic Pro, I exported all 24 tracks as Wav files so I could load them into the digital editor I normally use.

After the export finished, I tried to load the tracks into my editor, but that move kept crashing my computer. After a few frustrating hours, I took a piecemeal approach - I loaded in the specific tracks for each individual segment (e.g. band interview, performance, stage announcement) and exported those as I went. Some of the raw spoken word audio sounded like hot garbage, so I did my best to salvage it with AI - admittedly, it doesn’t sound the way I’d like it to, but it’s more usable than it was.

 

Once I had the audio files produced for each of the segments, I then went through the super challenging task of synchronizing the audio to the video. With very limited exception, the video was captured without audio, so it wasn’t possible to auto sync those files. It was a laborious, manual effort.

 

Two other “Easter eggs” found in the live files: My outro/thank yous after Lollygagger weren’t recorded, so I couldn’t include them here. Also, the recording inexplicably stopped during the second flowersherfeet song, only to be picked back up 10 minutes later.

 

In short, this was an unnecessarily challenging episode to put together, and I regret showcasing my guests in anything less than a super favorable light.

 

A few more notes:

• Due to music publishing concerns, no music performance was included in the audio episode version.

• I included one song from each artist in the video episode version. Both songs performed by each bands are available as individual YouTube files.

• Brennan Weaver’s comedy set is absolutely NSFW. 

• I didn’t include a lot of the Legit Dogs-specific content here. Not out of disrespect, but more because it’s been a month since the restaurant has closed, and the details are already dated. Thanks to Matt, Jenn, Curt, and Jennifer for all their support. Sorry to see a good thing come to an untimely end.

• The lighting on the main camera totally sucks. Not a show-stopper, but I’m aware that the stage left/stage right footage looked better.

 

Thanks again to Lollygagger, Coyote Man, flowersatherfeet, Chris Baker from Ink 180 and Brennan Weaver/Phil Lisiecki of Wild Dogs Comedy.

 

Onward…

 

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