Beowulf Kingsley's Lab Notes

2012-01-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

So things have been going really well for The Shelter Dogs in the last few months...we've put together a new CD that everybody seems to like, our musical catalog has expanded quite a lot, our playing has gotten tighter and more cohesive and fun, and we're gigging a bit and folks are showing up and enjoying it! I feel good about it. Although, as one of the principal guys in the band doing booking, I would love it if I had a manager who would do that part. Maybe someday. Things still seem to be progressing slowly to me...but that may just be my nature to see it that way. Actually, for the time we've been together, things are doing great.

This week I'm getting ready to start moving my old Magic Attic Studio into my farmhouse...it's gonna be a lot of work but it'll be a better space and I should get a lot more done. I'll have to scrape together a few more pieces (anybody wanna give me a nice beefy computer? Ours melted down), and get the rooms ready, but I'm looking forward to recording the band there, as well as doing some of the Beowulf Kingsley stuff and producing a few of my friend's bands as well.

Still wrasslin' with the Upright Bass! It's a monster...but a good one. Every time I think I'm starting to really get it down, I wind up looking at a Ray Brown video on YouTube and it's "Well, back to the practice room"!! Currently I'm looking at a new fingering method (for me, anyway) by this amazing cat named Francois Rabbath (check HIM playing on YouTube too!), a remarkable soloist and teacher. Thing is with the Upright (BEWARE! Boring tech talk follows): the darn thing is so huge that most practical fingerings have had to be divided up into whole-step and half-step positions, and there's a lot of shifting your hand around the bass. And the traditional method involves a LOT of positions...it's sort of debatable how many there are, but more than a dozen...it's very confusing and easy to get off your intonation (tuning). Rabbath divides the bass up into just 6 positions, and uses a fingering system that apparently helps your intonation stay spot on. So I'm gonna give it a shot! It involves learning a whole different approach, but I like learning new things, so we'll see. I might even start bringing the bow out to gigs. Earth people, tremble in fear!!!

Anyhow, I'm feeling strangely positive for being a 59-year-old looking towards February. It was a mess of a year last year, and there's been a lot of challenges, but I'm still afloat mostly, still living with the coolest girl in the world, still feeding all these dang cats, and still playing music. I'm feeling more creative and energetic these days, even if my back might be a little creaky in the mornings (well, sometimes in the afternoons too). We'll see what the future brings in!

The New CD...A Real One, Too!

2011-11-29T06:21:00.000-08:00

Today I'm taking a little time to enjoy the new CD that I and the other Shelter Dogs have been working on for a while...and hey, it's sounding pretty dang good! It took a good long bit for Pete to mix it down (there were some issues in the original recording) and a bit more for me to do my impression of a Mastering Engineer, but I think for a first album it'll do quite well. I've got the artwork finished (I'm starting to actually understand Photoshop now) and we'll do a short production run here in my studio, just to have some physical product. I know it would be cheaper and less hassle to send it out, but I have all the facilities here and I might as well use what I've got...for now, anyway. I'll send the next run out to the shop.

It took some time to massage the tracks into shape (I think next time we'll use the facilities at my place...my studio computer was down when we did this), but really, we did all the recording in about 12 hours! Two nights, everything live, no overdubs except for vocals which we did all the second night. Very Chess or Sun Records style! After doing one of my very technical records for the Beowulf Kingsley thing, all by myself for three years at a time, that's really refreshing. And I've got to say, the playing is marvelous. I'm so lucky to have gotten together with Tom and Pete, they're both such amazing musicians and the chemistry between us is so good. Those tracks were a joy to lay down! I'm looking forward to where this project takes us in the future.

I'm starting to feel that the physical CD is becoming an anachronism, though...how many people buy them these days? Anybody? I know I often don't bother and just go for the download these days, mostly because all the local record stores are mostly gone (with the exception of the soulful Encore Records in A2, selling used stuff), and because most of what I'm looking for is...well...eccentric, I'd guess. At least eclectic. But not having a physical package bothers me. Not only because of the very real danger of losing all your music if your hard drive blows out without backup, but because for the most part there's no feeling of connection, it's all much more abstract. Yeah, it lives on my PC and on my iPod, but I can't pick it up, I can't see the art, and liner notes? They're gone, baby, gone. Although there's no reason why a digital package can't have all that (and more), most don't seem to bother. So future listeners won't have any idea of who played on what, or who wrote it, or what the original art on classic LPs looked like, or how the artists felt about it, unless they go diggin' online. And how many will? I'm thinking very few.

But at this point I'm still reveling in putting together a CD. I enjoy mixing and mastering, and designing covers and labels...and at the place we're in right now as a band that's just starting out, really, having something to give to a club owner or to sell off the stage is very useful! And I'm proud of this band, I'd like to have people be able to take a little of our music home with them, maybe turn on their friends to it. Share out some of this good time! And I'll figure out a download site later on.

The Joy Of Promo

2011-11-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

I've been working recently on getting The Shelter Dogs, our lovely and talented band, out in front of crowds that can appreciate them...and I tell you, I don't think I was born for this side of the business! Most of my life as a musician I've been a sideman, which has its positives and negatives...the negatives include having little or no say on creative input or song selection, being at the mercy of the bandleader's (sometimes questionable) instincts, and having no control over when and where you'll play. The positives are that you don't have to do promo, or to deal with bar owners, festival promoters and booking agents...stuff I'm now learning to do. In some respects its a very good thing, and when everything works out it's great, but it's a lot of hassle too mostly and a LOT of time on the phone, on the web, and designing and producing the material you need.

There are a lot of useful tools these days that we didn't have till just recently...Facebook, Reverbnation, Twitter (still have to work on that one), Electronic Press Kits, and just getting around on the web makes things a lot easier. But each of the social networks, promo sites, etc. all have a learning curve to them...which takes more time...and also, seeing just how MANY bands and performers there are out there is kind of intimidating. Not that I'm really too worried...I actually think The Shelter Dogs are an amazing band that has a great future...but just getting people to see 'em is the challenge. And hopefully not just at some sports bar where the big screen TV behind the stage is broadcasting the game! I did a sub gig with my pals The Blues Owls last month where we were doing that very thing...crazy.

So I've got some challenges ahead, trying to make ends meet while doing all this promo stuff (hey, and I still have to work on my playing and to rehearse with the band!), while dealing with family, friends and my lovely fiance. Oh yeah, and the seven cats...maybe I should talk about them in a different post though. That's a WHOLE other subject. Anybody want a cat?

Halloween Party!!!

2011-10-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I have to say our Halloween party at the Tap Room with the Six Foot Poles was an complete success!! Not without its little bits of drama...I didn't realize the Ypsilanti Halloween Fun Fair was gonna be quite as huge as it was. All the streets to the club were blocked off when I got there! Luckily a friend of mine was at the barricades and let me in to unload. The streets were chaos as was the inside of the bar...when I got in the Poles were setting up, equipment was all over the place and for some reason water was pouring through the ceiling onto the floor everywhere!! I set my upright up in a dry corner and went to find Cynthia and Joelene, the singer for the Poles, who were both out on the street doing face painting for the kids (Joelene's regular gig). They had a line up the block of kids waiting! I stood by them for ten minutes but they were so busy they didn't even notice me. So I went back inside and helped set up the band.

All the mess and the water got cleaned up well before the audience arrived! A little later on the fair ended and the streets returned to normal, and people started flowing into the bar. Some of the best costumes ever were on hand, and a lot of people intent on having a great time...we Dogs played a big hour and a half set, and then the Poles did two hours, I think. Lots of fun was had for sure! I can't post up all the pictures here, but if you go to HERE (which is The Shelter Dogs Facebook site, a place you oughta know about anyhow), and go to the photos page, you'll see them. I had a blast! Hopefully we can do some more shows with the Six Foot Poles, they're an excellent band and great people, and it's just a super time doing events with them. Thanks especially to Joelene, who took the time to share her makeup talents and made up the entire band as werewolves!! We loved that...what's more fun than being werewolves? Not much, I tell you.

Farewell Calvin

2011-10-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

On a sad note, this month I had to say goodbye to my little ferret pal Calvin. He'd been doing fine, jumping around and bothering the cats like always, but apparently he had a stroke and died while we were at work one day. I know that these guys don't live long...he was our 3rd one...but it's really heartbreaking all the same. He was a fun-loving, affectionate, hilarious weasel and gave us a lot of laughs and love. He also had a great life of fun, and was healthy and happy right up to the end, which is something we would all want I think. If there's a ferret heaven, he's up there, playing around...ferret heaven would be a very exciting and delightful place, I'd think.

In other news, one of the nicer gigs The Shelter Dogs have had happened last Friday...we engineered a Halloween party at our old haunt (sorry) The Tap Room with our friends in The Six Foot Poles, a great local band. Their lead singer Joelene, who is a professional makeup artist for film, worked the band up into werewolves for the show! It's fun to be a werewolf, by the way...Lon Chaney Jr. had it all wrong. Anyhow, many fantastic costumes were displayed, lots of great music played, creative hijinks were had by all and everybody seemed to have a great time! Hopefully we can do a few more things like that...

Return To The Blog

2011-10-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

After a Spring and Summer of much activity and many travails, I think I'm up to starting to post some blogs again. I haven't been around, but man do I have some good excuses! It's been a pretty difficult period...at one point I had two funerals and two weddings in one month, I'm trying hard to get my new band off the ground (check out their site at www.theshelterdogs.com, by the way), Cynthia and I have been scuffling to try and just make ends meet with our business suffering in this crazy economy, and of course my "Little Friend" Bipolarity knocking me periodically into...well, if not total catatonia, then a sort of Walking Pneumonia state of depression where I get my essentials done and then just go lie down...so, as I said, I've got my excuses.

A hopefully quick update then: My old band The Anti-Gravity Kings is no more. While we went on hiatus for a few months (everybody was busy with their other lives) my dear friend and Kings Keyboardist Tom Wall died, quietly at his home from natural causes probably quickened by his alcoholism. He lay there for the better part of two weeks before he was discovered by Cyn and I...it was a very grim and sad thing that still haunts me. I had been calling periodically and getting no reply...and hoping that it was because he'd entered the rehab he'd been talking about...but apparently he'd just lain down on the couch, fallen asleep and his body had just shut down. He'd been so sick for so long, and he'd driven so many of his friends and family away...I hope that wherever he is, that there's some peace for him, and some really great music. It's still very hard to write about this.

My cat population has increased by two, now making seven and putting me firmly in the Crazy Old Cat Man category. Tom's cats, trapped in his house, had broken out through a screen window and were living out in his backyard, totally freaked out and dispirited. The detective who had interviewed us on the night we found Tom had left some kibble outside, but they'd run through that, and they were so traumatized. There was no one else to take them in...so now they're here. Anyone want some lovely cats? Both Winthrop and Inkster were in great condition, I think that at the end Tom was just buying whiskey and cat food. Nice animals...both glossy black cats, one small, one about 25 pounds! I guess we'll just have to keep 'em...they're very sweet and easygoing, and I guess I can deal with the Crazy Old Cat Man thing as long as I can afford the kibble and litter.

My new Beowulf Kingsley CD is essentially done...the mastering just needs a final tweak. I have the art and all ready to go, but my finances are so low that I've had to wait on it. Making these albums that only connect with an eclectic few (like hopefully some of you out there) are NOT something I do for profit, they're something I do because I must. That said, I think this one sounds really good, perhaps better than Arphus, and I liked that one a lot. Perhaps there's some genius marketing agent manager Brian Epstein kind of guy somewhere that can find the audience that will love my stuff, I don't know. As I say, I've been busy, and that kind of thing is obviously not my forte...but you can never tell what'll happen. Hopefully though, I can get some of these out before the holidays.

The OTHER band, my Rockabilly/Swing/Country/Old-School Rock ensemble The Shelter Dogs, are a going concern these days. We're playing out a good bit (check that website for dates!) and people seem to like it a lot. They were originally an excuse for me and Pete Bullard to mess around as a duo (and for me to get my chops up on the Upright Bass), but Tom Twiss wound up playing drums for us and it's just a really fine sounding trio! A lot of great standards, and of course some of the Beowulf Kingsley tunes get inserted...Bazinga, Hoodoo Stick, Gumbo and others. Apparently we have a CD coming up with them as well...Recorded in the good old-fashioned way, live in two nights. That was refreshing, and the guys are such good musicians it was easy and fun to do. I'm STILL waiting for Mark from Mac's Traxx to get the mixing done though! It's a little frustrating...I know he's got other fish to fry and he's doing us a big favor, but I coulda got that part done pretty fast myself. I'm gonna try and just get the raw tracks and do that, too, if he doesn't have time in the next week. We'll see what happens!

Booking The Shelter Dogs is part of my life right now too. I was always a sideman, so this is one of my infrequent forays into the world of booking and I have to admit it's one of my least favorite things to do with the world of music. I'm making a LOT of phone calls, and getting the ball rolling is painfully slow. I figure it's 30 to 50 phone calls apiece to venues before I even get a yes or no...I'm not kidding. Where IS that Mr. Epstein anyway? Oh yeah, right, I forgot.

In the mundane world of survival, Cyn and I are hanging on for dear life to our downsized cleaning company. Due to the economy we've lost several clients, which I hate to see but totally understand. This is not the business I'd choose to be in, but it's been keeping us in groceries (and kibble and litter) for the last few years and till our other ventures take off it's what's for dinner. I'm starting a new Di Medici Cleaners ad campaign this week, hopefully we'll have a few new places soon.

My folks have now got Personal Care Assistants in at their house 12 hours a day, mostly watching Dad and making sure he doesn't fall over or forget his meds. It's a great company and allows me a lot of peace of mind...neither I or my Mom can keep track of him every minute, and he's not always gonna use his walker. For a very careful man he's got an incredible talent for denial when it comes to his physical abilities. I'm just glad that his meds are keeping his Parkingson's mostly manageable, and he seems much more with it these days.

I'm starting to realize that I'll have to finish this update in segments, as this is getting to be a much longer post than I anticipated already! But it feels good to get some of this down, whether it's read by anyone or not. At any rate, for those that are interested, yeah, I'm still alive! Sometimes it's good, sometimes not, but there's a lot to like in life, and I'm gonna try to appreciate as much of it as I can. More later.

A much less serious statement of intent

2011-02-18T07:50:00.001-08:00

I'm gonna make sure that I wear something colorful enough to scare the cats at least once a week.

I intend to post up songs that nobody cares about to a website nobody goes to for no particular reason.

I may stop over to your house and tapdance on your roof...don't shoot me.

I'll try to tell stories that amuse you, and play music that moves you, and if I don't suceed, let's neither of us get mad, OK?

I'm gettin' a massage once a week. Or more.

I'll try to get to be a better musician, and a better friend, and more psychic, and richer too...that part might be a trick though...

...And I'll try to make my next post make a little more sense.

Another Serious Statement Of Intent

2010-09-04T10:53:00.001-07:00

So I’ve gotta think here…this is a difficult time for me to get organized, but what time is a good one for that really? I’m mostly talking to myself this post, anybody else can skip it if you want. I know I’m mostly thinking in an autumnal fashion, appropriate to the weather outside…but I need to start working on my composition as if my time is limited, which it surely is. If I don’t die tomorrow my PC sure could! In fact, part of my inactivity is because of my studio computer’s motherboard going down last month. Another part is just laziness I guess.

What I can do is to get started finishing the few pieces that I did on my home system, which is still working at this point. If I can get the hard drives out of the other, and get them going (and I really hope I can) then I’ve got most of the new album done. But I have to be able to work faster, and to finish documenting stuff I’ve already written…which is a kind of big task. I do write a lot, and there’s a huge backlog of stuff that I still think is good that’s been sitting. But I think I can do it now. As I’m getting better with some of this amazing technology (Cubase, Band-In-A-Box, Acid Pro, etc.) I’m able to do things a lot quicker. And working with the bands as a singer has really helped my vocals, so I can get what I want there with fewer takes (although I’ll still sound like Tom Waits with a cold). Real singers don’t have anything to be afraid of, but I think I can get my point across better now.

I’m still writing new stuff quite a lot, but having this huge pool of older material that I haven’t done anything with is bugging me…it’s like having a room full of ghosts looking over your shoulder. And the only way to lay them down and set them free is to record them, play them and let them fly into the air. I’ll post up what I’m doing on my website and elsewhere, at this point I could care less about the “Standard Rich & Famous Contract” that nobody wants to give me anyway. Sure, if someone wants to shower me with shekels that would be great, but I’d just be happy if a few people heard some of these ghosts as they flew off, and I’d be even happier if a few people liked them.

The Return Of The Stolen Guitars

2010-08-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

Well, my guitars that were stolen this Spring have finally been returned! Pretty amazing. They're sitting right here, with the "Evidence" tags still on 'em from the Police station. They all seem to be in perfect shape, although someone had retuned them really high for some reason...but that was easily fixed!

The story of the recovery and subsequent case, as I got from the very friendly and helpful Detective Neumann, revolved around an instrument I don't play at all...a cello. Seems that a very expensive ($30,000-$40,000) cello had been stolen in one of the areas West of Detroit. Later on, this guy (let's call him Mr. X right now) contacts a music store trying to sell it. Of course the music store personnel are aware of this missing cello and alert the police, who wind up raiding X's place. A HUGE amount of stuff ("That was obviously not his" said Neumann) was found in his house, including lots of jewelry, computers, TVs, guns...and guitars. As well as this cello.

The Detroit police made a photo CD of the goods and a lot of them wound up being from this area, where there have been quite a few break-ins this last year. They sent on the photos and descriptions to the other police departments in SE Michigan. I'd given a very detailed description of my lost instruments, which they'd had on file. Deputy Ken Smith emailed me some pictures, and there were my guitars! I was astounded. There were some delays since several of the officers were out for a few weeks, but Detective Neumann saw me today and got me back the guitars, and gave me the word.

It looks like the thing I feared most, that it was someone I knew or that it had something to do with my studio work, was not the case. Mr. X has been hitting areas around Ann Arbor, Westland, Livonia and other close-by towns randomly...but consistently. The fact that my Dad had left a convenient key in an easily-cracked combo lock was just gravy in this case. As Neumann helped me get my axes to the car (he really is a nice guy), he remarked "Do you know how rare this is, for someone to get their property back in this situation? It almost never happens". I know for sure I wasn't expecting to see these guitars again!

It seems surreal to me, but now they're back. It's been a strange time and parts of it very emotionally trying, but actually the experience has been very positive. The guitars are retrieved, and I have a new and much better appreciation of the police force and the work they do, as well as the opportunity for me to meet some of the great people who work in it. And even more importantly, the caring and the support of my friends and the community of musicians in town and around the world online has made me aware just how much I am blessed with the wonderful people around me. I'd like to thank Dave Budzinski especially for making me that Tele to substitute for mine (hey, Bud, I'll wrassle you for the new one!), to Cynthia for being such an amazing and supportive partner through all this, to my band for hanging in there with me, to Deputy Ken Smith, Officer Keith Dalton and Detective Mark Neumann, and very very sincerely to all of you who wrote and called me!! I appreciate it more than I can say. I'm a lucky guy!!!

Yet Another Video

2010-08-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

Here's one more video, a photo collage with pictures from our last gig. It was a fun show!

2010-06-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

And now, the video! I'm actually enjoying this Picasa stuff. Click on the box to watch, of course...

ANTI-GRAVITY KINGS AT THE TAP ROOM, JUNE 5 2010

2010-06-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

We had a GREAT time at the Tap Room show last night! Click on the picture here to get to the online picture album.

Another day in Paradise

2010-05-19T06:27:00.000-07:00

Waking up to a fantastic looking day! I've got a million things to do but one more cup of coffee watching the birds won't hurt anything I think. Work to do everywhere...house, yard, day job, and 4 bands that need a little attention (with gigs coming up for all of them in the next 3 weeks!), I'm getting a little unfocused but I should be OK. Those birds are having a jam session outside my window right now. Actually, I'm gonna play hooky for a half hour and walk in the woods...that should recharge my drained batteries. All the best to all of you...

Someone Stole My Guitars!

2010-04-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Hey, Everybody,The news today is kinda sad. My studio got broken into the other night and three of my guitars were stolen! What a drag. So I'm trying to get the word out to everybody, just in case someone sees one of them. Here's the descriptions:

Fender Squier Telecaster: White Pearescent Pickguard, Black Finish, Maple Fingerboard, Graphite Nut, Pickup Switch is a Pearescent Tuning Machine, Budzguitar Pickups

Fender Fretless Jazz Bass Style (Made from parts): Chandler Neck w/maple strips as fret indicators inlaid on rosewood fingerboard, Blonde Natural Wood Body by Warmouth, Cream Dimarzio PickupsChrome Volume/Tone assembly, No Pickguard

Agile AL 2500 Les Paul Style Guitar: Body is completely covered in White Pearescent material, Pickups are GFS Dream 180s, also finished in White Pearescent, Some scarring on side of guitar near lower strap button, Tiny hole right by the bridge on top of guitar ...

Well, that's it. If you hear anything at all, please call K. Dalton at the Washtenaw County Sherrif's Office at 734-971-8400, ext. 67396. It's in reference to complaint 10-15493. It'd be nice to see them again, although I don't hold out great hopes. Thanks, Todd

New Song

2010-03-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE

Sing a song of sixpence, bottle full of rye
Tryin’ to get away from what’s behind my eyes
Like a bent casino cheating on a bet
Lookin’ for the jackpot, hasn’t happened yet

Out of ready answers, staring into space
I look in the mirror, see a stranger’s face
Need to get away, how long I don’t know
Might just take a day off, or a couple years or more

Somewhere, anywhere
Anyplace long as it’s not here
Somewhere, anywhere
Like a traveling bird in the autumn air
Somewhere, anywhere
Anyplace long as it’s not here
Somewhere, anywhere
Set my feet on the road now, I don’t care

Wonder if you’ll miss me when I have to go
Will you wonder where I am, or will you even know
I’ll take my troubles with me? We’ll just have to see
Maybe at the least they’ll get a change of scene

Somewhere, anywhere
Anyplace long as it’s not here
Somewhere, anywhere
Like a traveling bird in the autumn air
Somewhere, anywhere
Anyplace long as it’s not here
Somewhere, anywhere
Set my feet on the road now, I don’t care

Cheapy Slides

2010-03-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been playing a lot more slide guitar...I'm starting to feel more confident on it and it's really great fun. Only real challenge (besides the various factors of playing) for me has been finding the right slide. If you've played guitar with a slide I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Some are too light, some too heavy. Different glass and metal slides feel very different and sound different too...and tone quality is a big deal when you're playing in that style. Some slides I've tried are just too big for my fingers, like the Fathead slide and the Coricidin bottles. I have a few brass slides I like OK, but my fave is a little prescription bottle that Cyn found in a rubbish tip in the woods a few years ago. Right weight, right size, great tone, just felt very comfortable. Problem was that I didn't want to take it anywhere and maybe lose it, or break it, or something! And since they now issue prescriptions in those unfortunate little plastic bottles I wasn't sure what to do. Once again I thank the Internet and my search engine...turns out that 5 dram glass vials are easily available online, and for cheap too! I just got in 12 of them for 8 bucks. Can't even buy one single slide in a music store for that. They seem identical to my favorite slide, and now I'm back in business. May play a little slide at the Jam Session tomorrow...

Spring Stream

2010-03-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Spring stream comes running down, shining refracted light off the snow around it as the water moves along the hillside, its music blending with the new birdsong, creating a composition that signals the end of a long Winter. From tiny tributaries in the frozen fields, the stream gathers its forces, multiplying, growing as the snow gives up its hold on the countryside. A glistening channel through a white and brown palette, reflecting off the earth, the sky. A hand put to the water there would quickly numb and freeze...this is liquid newly converted from its more solid form, still half in its old element. The rippling sound of the water's running is joined by a strange cracking as the ice weakens and starts to break up. The scents of loam and moisture send a heady rush, a sense of the potential growth hiding just under the surface of the soil. The sun shines down out of the blue sky, turning the cycle over out of the darkness and into the light, as in the soon-to-bud trees, oceans of birds sing songs of courtship, joy and of Spring.

Martin Newell on songwriting

2010-01-23T23:34:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd post this excellent bit by one of my great heros Martin Newell (and if you haven't got The Greatest Living Englishman in your CD collection yet, what the HELL is the matter with you? Seriously, one of the great albums of the last century) discussing one of the things he knows a bit about.

Martin on songwriting...
A good way of starting a song is with a title, especially one that's been misheard. "I had too much to dream last night" (Electric Prunes)How could you not be onto a winner with such a title? "Eight Days A Week" Fantastic.You need a chorus. It's got to be your best idea. But then make it into the verse and try to write something even stronger. Try to make your songs about 3 minutes long. Nearly every piece of music that anyone ever remembers, including classical favourites are usually about three minutes long..the salient bits of Bach and Vivaldi for instance.When you have a tried and trusted chord sequence, deliberately go and throw an unmatching chord in there, instead of one of the regulation ones and see if anything good happens.When I was 17 a kindly A and R man called Fritz Fryer told me that if a song is any good, it will usually work with just one voice and one instrument.Does your song stand this test?It is much harder to write a fast cheerful song which makes people want to dance, than it is to write a slow and soulful slowie. This is a fact.When the great Kimberley Rew for instance, wrote Walking On Sunshine for Katrina and the Waves, he was holding pure gold in his hands from the minute he found the first chorus.There's something to be said for well-plumbed misery too, however, or Len Cohen would still merely be a great Canadian poet.You have to be a songwriter because you want to write songs...even if they never discover you.Sonmeone, either Vaughan Williams or Vivian Ellis once said, "Only write the tunes that won't go away."Do make sketches of songs...but don't go making demos of everything. If a tune's really good, it refuses to leave your head and will even crop up years later on another instrument.Great songs often possess holes somewhere in our collective consciousness (If I may be so esoteric)which they wait to be placed in even before they are written. Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" is a prime example of this. When he found the tune, he went around hunmming it to people and asking who'd written it. This is because it already existed in the future somewhere. Both he and the public already knew it. It was just waiting for him to execute the formality of writing it. This converges with a Socratic principle of learning which borders on the occult...that is to say, we already know everything, but we need to relearn it.A really great song, like some really great babies just come out in one pop..a painless delivery...some, however require a long labour and caesarian.Conversely, my title song The Greatest Living Englishman took about 12 years.I wrote the verse part in 1980 on the piano and left it lying around the workshop because I couldn't find anything to go with it. The chorus came to me in 1992. After that I simply constructed a bridge to weld them together and hey presto, another great non-hit was born.When you begin to write a song, ask yourself about its general atmosphere. What season are you in, for instance. Is it summer? Is it autumn? This is an established element of Haiku poetry (not my favourite thing but I admire some of its principles) A good haiku nearly always has some allusion to or sense of its season.If I were to write the title "An Autumn Flower." it would be okay. "An Autumn Tower" would be less pretty and more of a challenge and might tax my imagination more, too.Sometimes though, a common catchphrase will do the job.. Queen's "We Are The Champions." Still sung by drunk boneheads at football matches and business convention parties all over the world.I guess the only rules are that there are very few rules. Just don't confuse a hit record with a great song, though.

The Mirror

2010-01-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

Last night, in the mirror, I saw the devil.
I tried to stare him down, but my eyes fell,
Avoiding the level gaze of that prince of evil
Where he left off and I began I could not tell.

- William David Perkins

I started this post with a poem by my Dad, which seems to relate to some of my feelings recently. It's been a long time since I've done any writing really, certainly since my last blog. I think a lot of it's because for me writing is a way to see into myself, a mirror if you will, and lately I haven't wanted to look in that mirror too much. Many of my deeper feelings have been so dark that I haven't wanted to fess up to them, even to me. Maybe especially to me. Staring into the glass...man, I don't know...I don't know if I want to see what I've become.

A lot of this is of course colored by my ongoing work helping to take care of my folks, and the continuing frustration and despair as I watch those good souls struggling to keep their lives together against the various slings and arrows shot them by time and entropy. Some of it is related to Cyn and I, and our struggles with life and finance and our difficult lifestyle choices...and some of it is just me fighting my many personal demons. Hey, I'm a bucket of fun, eh? But some days are harder than others, and it seems like I've just had a few months of 'em all together.

All bathos aside, it seems like I'm turning another corner. I've been writing again, and actually spending time in the studio (I literally had to dust off the console!), and playing music for fun a lot more. That last has been really important, and I have to thank my friends who've been playing with me for getting me back into it again. Playing music just to play is something I haven't been doing in a long time.

So am I really ready to look in the mirror again? Hell, I don't know. Will I see Satan there staring back at me? Most probably, along with other faces I'm probably gonna be uncomfortable with. But at least there's signs of life in my reflection...and perhaps another and better world on the other side of the glass.

The Last Hummingbirds Of Summer

2009-09-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

You can really tell around here that Fall is nigh...the colors of the trees are starting to peer out from under the green, the air is cool and crisp, and now and then you'll see vast flocks of birds flying overhead, starting their journey south. Our barn swallows are long gone, alas, off to Argentina and presumably Argentinian barns. For a while, I thought all the hummingbirds had split as well...the ones at the nectaries were getting really fat, like flying ping-pong balls, and then they disappeared. Those little guys are really tough, and feisty too...they fight each other for territory, and the nectaries are prime real estate. All Summer you'd see little dogfights as hummingbirds would slam into each other in these tiny turf wars.

These guys are too fierce and independent to migrate in flocks (but just imagine if they did...a cloud of buzzing tiny birds), they go individually on an insane migration, first down to Louisiana, and pretty much non-stop from here in Michigan. That's why they feed so much before leaving...they double their body weight for the trip. Then, they feed up again down south before the final leg of the journey, ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE GULF OF MEXICO!!! That's like 500 miles over open water. Crazy. Then in the Spring they do it all again in reverse.

So I thought my hummingbird watching was over for the season. But just as I was getting ready to pack the feeders up, a new, slimmer bunch of birds started to show up. I've seen this here and down by my folks place too this year...apparently these are the younger, smaller hummers that were getting pushed away from the nectaries earlier. Now they're getting a chance to feed up, hopefully they can get ready before the cold weather hits. They seem to be making up for lost time!

I was out on my upstairs back porch, making a phone call to Cyn, leaning up by the bird feeders, when I heard a buzzing right by my ear...I turned and there was a tiny female ruby-throated hummer, totally ignoring me and taking full advantage of the nectar there, about 2 feet from my head. She and I hung out for quite a while together, and I got a chance to really observe her feeding from a vantage point I'd never had before. Amazing!! Hope that little one makes it safe across the Gulf to sunny Mexico, and back here again next year...

Up From The Deep Water

2009-08-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

Once again, swimming in darkness, deep in the downbelow, pressure in my ears, my chest, I can't see to find which way is up. Slowly rising, a little light above, maybe I can make it to the surface before my lungs burst or I just give up and drink in the black water all around. If I do that I'll just sink back and that'll be that, no more struggles, no more pain, no more nothin'. But for some unreasonable reason I keep rising, lighter now, I can start to look around and see bright colored schools of fish swimming beside me, beautiful things. The water becomes transparent, and warmer, and suddenly I break the surface, sputtering, sucking in lungfuls of blessed air, sun on my wet head as I look around. The sea is everywhere, green sea and blue sky. I'm a long way from anywhere, but hey, I can breathe again.

Inspirations (and Intimidations)

2009-06-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

I've had a couple of very inspiring (and kind of intimidating) musical moments this past week. The first one was seeing Junior Brown in concert! A good friend and client took Cyn and I to see him at the Ark this weekend. Amazing guitarist! The guy plays everything from Hendrix to Honkytonk to Segovia, all brilliantly...and then switches to his steel guitar and plays that brilliantly. Plus, he has a great singing voice and writes excellent songs. For a while after seeing him I was considering just throwing the guitar out the window and hanging it up. I think that would upset Junior if I did, though, so I won't. But Man! Get you over to YouTube and check him out. Beyond belief.

The other very inspirational event was watching a movie documentary of percussionist Evelyn Glennie called "Touch The Sound". Glennie is a Classical percussionist who does unbelievable improvisatory work, from walls of sound with the Kodo drummers to amazing delicate bits playing with chopsticks on plates, and much more. A very strange and almost mystical thing about her is that she is effectively deaf...her ears register very little sound at all. Somehow she has taught herself to "hear" sound using her whole body, and it seems that the experience is very rich and beautiful to her. The movie is a fabulous experience in itself, a dialog about sound and perception, and a treat to watch. Her duets with guitarist Fred Frith are worth the price of admission, seriously! Easily found at video rental shops and worth the time for anyone who ever enjoys music and sound.

So I have a gig tomorrow with my band The Mobsters...will I bring any of this inspiration to the table there? Well, I still don't have Brown's chops or Glennie's sensitivity, but having experienced a little of that kind of artistry sure won't hurt me. Knowing that there are far frontiers to explore, vast horizons to travel toward...music is an endless quest, a toy that keeps changing shape, an infinite journey into yourself and out into everyone else in the universe. And a lot of fun besides!

The Ever-Shorter Attention Span

2009-05-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

Is it because we're all just really busy keeping the hamster wheels moving? Our communications with each other keep getting less and less with all this groovy info-sharing tech we've got going. In the Victorian era people's letters to each other were epic...long, beautifully written, insightful and informative, many of them still worth reading even now by strangers to those long gone friends and lovers. The Brownings correspondence was incredible...later, George Bernard Shaw had many epistolary friendships, long ones (like decades of intense communications) with people, some of whom he never met in the flesh. Ol' H.P. Lovecraft, that shy and crazy guy, seemed to communicate much better by letter...not to mention our old pal Vince Van Gaugh and his bro.

These days we seem to only have time for a brief cellphone call, or perhaps a few words in an email, but most of my emails are pretty darn short! We're a rushed race racing towards a future that's unknown, but we're getting there darned fast. Now we have things like Twitter and MySpace's Status Reports...summing up your life in a sentence and broadcasting it out to the world! Perhaps that will save some time, I dunno. I'm supposedly on Twitter (well, I'm supposedly on a lot of things but really I'm mostly lying on the couch reading comics) and I do fill out my Status Report now and then for a laugh, but I just wonder where all this leads. Will we get to where we just put up One Word every day on some site, and have that represent all our communication to our friends and family? Maybe just One Single Letter. "Yes, I think I'll go with 'Q' today, I'm sure 'X' is already taken"...Man, I just can't say. Maybe I'm overreacting a bit...but if you write me a letter I'll sure write you back.

Mink

2009-04-28T07:10:00.000-07:00

Another day of rain in Spring...watching the puddles sprinkle themselves full, the little creeks run with fresh water, and my lawn get high as my knees...things are beautiful and lush this time of year. The wetlands are full of frogs singing their courting songs, and full of herons and cranes eating the frogs, and turtles coming out of hibernation to snarf up whatever it is they snarf. The other day I was driving down the dirt roads to my rehearsal at John's house, and I narrowly missed hitting a MINK! I hadn't seen one before in Michigan, but unmistakably a mink. Cyn says she's seen one too by that same swampland, so I'm guessing that there's a little minky community out there. This one had caught a vole or something and was carrying it across the street...presumably to its lair, perhaps to feed its little minklets. Very cool!

I'm aware these days of being pretty bipolar, and that's reflected in these posts I know. It's like being trapped in a black hole in space...the gravity of the hole is very strong. Sometimes I'll make my way out for a while, then get sucked back in. The good thing is that even in the worst of it I have the perspective that there's a better reality that I'll eventually get to. The bad thing is that even when I'm out of it I know that there's that black hole, exerting its gravity, ready to pull me in again. All I can do is try to keep positive as I can, stay healthy and all, and hope for the best (St. John's Wort helps a good bit too). But little things like mink sightings are very helpful for me, they show me a world outside of my head that is amazing, constant and beautiful.

LastFM, MySpace & Fun

2009-04-21T15:34:00.000-07:00

Listening to my library of tunes on LastFm.com...what a cool idea for a music site! Type in the bands you like best, and it starts suggesting other bands, which you can accept or deny, and grow your music library fractally in whatever directions you like. Mine seems to have a lot of great obscure Psychedelic Rock (surprise), old R&B, crazy outsider music and eclectic tunes from musicians all over the world. I dig it! Right now the player is kicking out "Silver & Gold", that amazing instrumental from the old Quicksilver band. Cool stuff.

It's nice too, because I'm finding lots of artists I'd never known of before...Finnish rockers, obscure guys from the 60s I missed somehow, South African Mbganga bands...that's fun. And I've been needing some fun! There's times I'm so busy spinning my hamster wheel that I forget what makes me feel good. I'm starting to try to remember though.

I just recently went over 1000 friends on my MySpace account. While nobody sent me a prize, with so many friendlists in the 5 figures these days (!!!), and even though 99% of those people won't ever write me, it did make me think about what I actually have gotten from the MySpace thing. I've met some really fabulous people...folks that I've become good real friends with, that I like to hang out with, be it online or in person. And I've been exposed to all kinds of very cool music, art and poetry done by really creative artists!! (By the way, I'm STILL baffled by people who ban bands from their friend requests...and some of them are band sites themselves! What the heck are you thinking?) Anyhow, thanks to all of you guys for connecting with me, and sharing your work, humor and ideas with me...it's been a gas! Hopefully, much more to come...good things for us all...

New Day (And Possible Concussion)

2009-04-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to feel a little better...sometimes it all just gets to you, yknow? But today's an improvement from yesterday, and perhaps tomorrow will be better still. Cyn (bless her heart) was walking me around the yard showing me her plantings...things are gonna be really pretty if all these trees take. We went into the barn to see if the swallows had arrived yet, and I managed to clock myself a real good one on an overhanging beam! Saw stars and everything. Cyn picked me up off the floor and dusted the hay and horsepoop off me, and I seem OK. I looked in the mirror and my eyeballs seem all right, so probably no concussion or anything. But I've got a really stylish lump on my noggin! Maybe it's knocked some sense into me though...I could use that...

No Way Forward

2009-04-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

If there's a wall to hit, I hit it a while ago. Somehow I feel drained of any strength. I can manage an outward show of optimism, but inside I don't know if I see a way forward right now. And I feel exibitionistic writing this out in a public blog, too, but there it is...I think all the pressures in my life are finally coming to the fore. I was denying that they were getting under my skin, but I guess I was wrong about that. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, it often is. Hope so.

The Woods Are Lovely

2009-03-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Rushing through my busy and rather stress-filled day, talking to recording clients, cleaning clients, new associates, working on websites, ebay guitar deals, and huge offices to swab out...and driving the dirt road to town, saw the wood lot down the street, still with its dusting of snow protected from the sun by the sheltering trees. A magical place, with the creek running through it and the light through the branches reflecting off the water and snow like a million diamonds. I'm a very lucky person, and I'm glad I can sometimes have moments like that one, to put everything else into perspective.

Bigsby Tremolo

2009-03-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

Just got a Bigsby Tremolo put on my new guitar! Mickey managed to set it up in record time...truly he is the Ninja Master of Guitar Techs. For those of you who don't know, the Bigsby is a mechanism that allows you to bend all of your guitar strings up (or down) simultaneously...a whammy bar if you will. If you've heard the Ventures, or any Surf Music, you've heard the sound. I've messed with other tremolos before, but listening to the amazing Johnny A. finally won me over to the world of the Bigsby. If you haven't heard that guy, don't waste any time, go get one of his albums, or go to YouTube and watch him play a little...you'll see what I mean. Of course, a Bigsby sure won't make me into Johnny A., but it's a nice thing to have in the arsenal. Now I just have to mess with it for about 30 years or so...

The Tides Of March

2009-03-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

Things are getting soggy around here...we've had about 4 days of straight rain. Sort of reminds me of the Northwest coast! There's a pretty amazing river running through our eastern field, back through some wetlands and over our neighbor's fields, off into the distance...a huge amount of water on the move. Looks pretty crazy, but this often happens. Then for a while the swamps are really swampy, and the frogs all wake up and start their annual Spring Orgy, and we know that the ice and snow are behind us for a bit. Strangely enough, the cats don't seem to want to get out in this stuff.

I've been feeling better and better recently, with more energy and positivity than is usual for my old cynical self, and having a pretty good time all told. Working on new music, spending a little more time in the gym, getting out and seeing friends. After the flu that almost did me in, and the winter that almost did the same, I'm starting to get that Spring vibe. Yeah, it'll freeze tonight, and maybe we'll get buried in snow again for a while, but I sense the warm coming on, and that's a good thing.

The Slowly Spinning Room

2009-03-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

The lights go down...music rises from the silence. My head begins to spin. A tumult of sensation overwhelms me, and I'm helplessly off my feet and whirling, whirling through time and space, the lights too bright and the sounds too loud, round and round the maelstrom as I'm tossed ever lower, down into the depths...

Opium dream? Satanic attack? Bad NIN concert flashback? Nah, just a really nasty influenza virus that managed to get under my defences and kick my sad butt this week. Worst I've had in a long time...I can understand how epidemics of this stuff carried thousands and thousands off to the underworld, I felt like I got pretty close. I swear I think at one point I saw some guy in Plutonic robes smiling and beckoning me in, but I started swimming towards the surface and got away this time. Now I'm weak like a little kitten, and it all seems like a strange, very painful nightmare...must buy more oranges.

Looking at my folks old editions of encyclopedia, the Britannica and the good ol' World Book, I used to just thumb through those for fun. Now, amazingly, the same amount of information can just sit in a few GB of your hard drive, or even live accessibly out somewhere in cyberspace for instant retrieval. Although somehow I feel I trust Wikipedia less than Britannica, and I know I can't just open it up and read at random the same way (although I must say I use Wiki all the time). It's like I can't really get a charge buying music online the same way I do when I'm in a (now sadly rare) really good music store, I can't wander around the same right-brained way, stumbling into strange and wonderful stuff accidentally...or by hanging around jawing with the hip Record Store Guy. I was one of those once, by the way...not necessarily hip, but a Record Store Guy. I don't miss all of it, but I do miss turning people on to cool music...

Playing music in a state of high fever is an odd experience. You can't really get anything done, but sometimes you get really strange insights. Running through some chord arpeggios and scale sequences while practicing a tune, and suddenly the patterns of "notes available while passing through time" became really clear. I could see the various interlocking scales and chord tones incredibly clearly, and how various choices could lead to different melodic and harmonic outcomes...and how of course that this is only the very first step. The next goal is to completely assimilate those patterns so that there are infinite options...and then, the transcendence of those patterns and into real freedom. If that sounds a bit Metaphysical, it's because I think it really is! Mastering music as a metaphor for the Spiritual journey...yeah, you've heard it before, but hey, it's my cosmology and I'm stickin' with it. But anything can have that metaphorical cosmology I think...what about that Zen butcher? He did his job so perfectly that his knives never got dull, and his focus on his actions was clearer than the monks in the monastery. But I'm stickin' with the music thing, you get shiny guitars and the chicks dig it.

Perhaps I'm still recovering a little...my mind seems to be wandering. Sometimes that's actually a pretty good thing, and I wonder if maybe a little stumbling around in the right side of the brain might not be just the thing in these strange dark pre-Spring weeks. But I'd much rather do it without the incredible sinus and joint pain, thanks!

Dire February

2009-02-21T06:26:00.001-08:00

February is a month in Michigan where people are just really hanging on, trying to get through to Spring, still held by the icy teeth of Winter. Some types probably blog more during these periods...I seem to do less. Less is happening. I get to work. I get back. I lie on the couch. Cyn and I try hard not to get in each others way and to respect space, since we work together as well as live together, and that's a kind of weird vibe. I don't get to the studio to work as much as I should, but still practice with the Mobsters when the weather permits...we've had more than a few rehearsals cancelled due to heavy snow. Today may be such a day. A friend who was looking for a bassist with his new group called last week and I went out and played with them...quite a good Power Pop band, but I don't know if I'll really have the time to do it. I need to try to focus on working with this Swing stuff, and with my own original music, and that just may preclude any other projects.

Really I feel like I'm just waiting for the weather to break for good. So ready for it...I'd love to take a walk without freezing something off. Last night the Coyotes were howling again, and I called the barn cats indoors for protection. They ran in pretty quickly, too! I'm sure those Coyotes are hungry and Bitey or Bluto would be a welcome snack. Much as I admire the wild things, I'd like to avoid that.

I'm playing my new guitar quite a bit right now...it's made by Agile, a Korean company. Essentially a Les Paul knockoff, I've had a few Paul players tell me it's a good as many an LP. Sounds great and looks crazy...the top is all white pearlescent pickguard finish. I didn't expect it to sound as good as it does, but there's solid mahogany underneath that, and the pickups, hardware and electronics are surprisingly very high quality. And it's less than a tenth the price of a LP...which makes it possible for this particular starving musician to own one. Watch out, Korea is taking over the world...

Actually, it feels good to write in this journal again. I think it's easy this time of year to just get torpid and hibernate as much as possible...I know I've done that a lot. But writing kind of gets my internal motor going again, which is important anytime really. Now I've just gotta get out to the studio and finish off those pesky tunes of mine!

Catching My Breath

2009-01-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

I took a little break from writing after the holidays...I'd just been a bit overwhelmed and there was so much going on. Now that the social obligations are down to a funky few, and the cookies have all been et (back to the gym for me!), and my folks have been packed off on the plane and delivered to Florida's land of Sunshine & Geezers, I've been relaxing a bit and playing catch-up with everything else in my life. Feels good! It's gonna take a little time to decompress...maybe take a holiday from the holidays...

Playing a lot more too, at least on guitar. The Mobsters band is a good impetus for me to woodshed, and I seem to be leaning into the Swing side of my influences again, which is really fun. Mickey Richard, Guitarist and Luthier Extraordinaire, found and gave me an old old old Doghouse Bass last week. Very Cool! It's gonna need some work, but not too much I think. I'm looking forward to stringing it up and working with that thing, maybe do a little Swing Duet action with Mickey...that would be great.

I also went Tech again and got Band-In-A-Box, a cool and kind of frightening tool. It's a software/MIDI/loops program, and what you do is basically type in your chords and time signature, etc, and then bango! The thing starts pumping out a full arrangement with drums, bass, guitar, horns and more. Scary really, but GREAT for practicing. I'd been just running through the Mobsters swing songs at home by myself, but typing them into BIAB and playing with a full band, much more fun! And strangely I find myself playing LESS notes, and leaving a lot more space. If this tool can help me then I'm gonna use it.

At any rate, hopefully I'm back writing again...who knows, perhaps writing songs again too. I find that creative periods can occasionally be goosed into being, but for the most part they come when they will, and I've got to respect that and enjoy it when it's happening. Right now though, I'm off to work again...

Happy New Year (Or Thereabouts)

2009-01-04T14:02:00.000-08:00

A new year in a strange century! The earth shifts, and the people wake to unusual changes in their world each day. New technologies appear and bend our lives and minds into bizarre new places, a bold new President prepares to lead this country into the future and who knows where, new arts and musics and more swarm into view to create beauty, chaos and controversy. And, all the while on a shelf in the shed, Kenny's Little Creatures on display.

As for me, I survived the onslaught of the Holiday Season, although barely. I get bombarded by friends and family who appear as if by magic and hijack any plans I may have made to get stuff done, and I have to kind of go with that and keep my seasonal cheer intact at the same time. I think I did pretty well considering...no fatalities (yet)! And there was indeed some good fun had by all. Although we were hampered a bit by some of the crappiest weather I can remember in the Xmas/New Year's period...we were snowed in a few days, iced in a few days more, and then camped out on my parent's floor for three more days when the windstorms knocked out power for about 30,000 people around these parts. Just glad me Ma & Dad were OK! Basically I just stopped over to our farm during the day, fed the completely demoralised cats and weasel, and turned on the generator to pump out the flooded basement, usually twice a day. Cleaning that is big fun! But that's part of the joy of country living. I'm just really glad to have things working again, and to have things a bit quieter. Now maybe I can get some music done again.

It's true, my upcoming CD has been sidelined by the Holidays, the weather and rehearsals for my new live band, but I've been back dusting off the studio and doing a little polishing of the existing recordings. This should be an interesting one...a little different from the last, with for some reason, a lot more electric piano (well it's just cool) and a good deal of groove-oriented post -beat songs. But as always, I'm not sure what'll happen till I'm done. Maybe it'll end up a Polka CD, I just don't know.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all, and I hope you are having less travails with life and weather than us. If not, my condolences...please hang in there!

P.S. It's amazing! I wrote this out and the spellchecker only found one misspelled word..."what'll", which I guess isn't even officially a word. Can I be becoming a better speller in my old age? Very strange.

New Challenges

2008-12-18T21:57:00.001-08:00

As I lie like a eastern pasha on my silken cushions in my library, fez askew, with the opium smoke wafting above me like the ectoplasmic ghost of Coleridge, I'm musing on my taking on the Front Man/Lead Guitarist role in the Mobsters band. My trusty but insanely unusual Custom Deacon Limited leans against a pillow, its pearlescent pickguard gleaming in the light of the oil lamps. Have I bitten off a bit more than I can chew here? Not, I think, for my bandmates, they seem to like my singing and playing well enough, but for me? I'm pretty picky (usually) about the guitarists I work for...and now I work for myself...I think I've got more shedding to do.

I know that I'm hard on myself about trying for excellence in music, but I can't fool myself in knowing where the bar has been placed in the areas that I want to be good at, and they're pretty darn high. I was feeling OK about my playing, and then the other night I went out with some friends to see George Bedard and Bill Kirtchen play...man! What amazing and tasteful musicians they are. Beautiful melodies and harmonies just flow out of those guys so naturally, it's a fantastic thing to see. Makes me realise where the heights are, and wonder about how high up the mountain I can climb. Thing is, I love to learn, I just wish I had a few more lifetimes to work on it all. In those strange hazy conversations I sometimes have with friends the question comes up, what if you had unlimited time to live? I always keep thinking, damn, I'd really have time to become a musician then. I think I could master that chord melody stuff in a couple centuries if I applied myself! And after a bit more of that for guitar I could concentrate on learning composition and orchestration. Then, a few more centuries for anthropology, science, literature...then some time for mysticism, and a millennia or so in meditation...

Thing is, my time is a lot shorter than that, and a lot of it is taken up with fairly mundane stuff. So I have to get a lot more focused on what I want to do with the little time I have to do it in! Believe me, I'm working at it. Tomorrow it looks like we'll be snowed in, and I'm planning on spending as much time as I can playing some music. And to anyone who thinks this is like hard work or something, think again! Really, it's as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. Although I've played lots of fine music in the nude as well...but perhaps the less said about that the better...

Alternative Transportation

2008-12-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

December here in Michigan has hit us all hard with its icy fist...temperatures in the low teens at night and not much warmer in the day. Snow and ice make walking difficult and dangerous, and driving is an unpleasantly exciting adventure sometimes. That is if your car will even start! The cold tends to make any minor problem with an automotive system much worse, and several times in the last week my poor Ford Escort just wouldn't respond to my attempts to engage. Fortunately I had a spare vehicle...in the barn here the former resident had left an old army tank from the 50's, purchased no doubt at one of those government auctions. It wasn't running of course, but with a little help from my friend and neighbor Bill we've fixed it up and it's pretty reliable! The thing goes like a champ through the snow, on the road or off it. Bad gas mileage, but fortunately prices are low right now...and although its top speed is only about 60 MPH, people tend to keep out of my way on the highway. Heck, even Hummers give way to a TANK!! They better too...the gun turret is still operational.

OK, well maybe that was a fantasy, but if anyone wants to know what I'd like for Xmas, now you do. And really, it HAS been mighty cold, I'm not kidding about that. All the cats are spending their time on the heating registers or close to them, and I'm not that far away either! Everybody take care out there, driving or walking...and may you have a hot and refreshing beverage waiting when you get to your destination.

Shot Out The Holiday Cannon

2008-12-05T06:29:00.001-08:00

OK, OK, OK, I got the lights up here and at my folks house! And at my friend/client Tom's as well. Actually I got my folks lights up in October...they're a lot more work and more elaborate, I should just leave them up all year. Cyn and I will go and get a tree today from our good friend Duke, who drives his trees down from his farm up north and lives for a month in his Airstream trailer up on Washtenaw Avenue purveying them, making most of his cash for the year that way.

This holiday stuff is a little much sometimes, as I wind up having to shift things around with the cleaning biz (everybody's schedule changes at once), and lots of my friend's bands seem to have emergencies where I do sub gigs (I have two this weekend). Plus friends and family descending on us at unexpected times, social obligations popping up like mushrooms on a muggy day, Cyn's got the most crazy busy time of the year for her jewelry business, and there's a general frenzy in the stores. That said, I love this time of year...I love the lights on people's yards, the music, the sense of excitement that I feel everywhere, and maybe there's a little aura of spiritual energy that comes from having the central yearly celebration for at least three major religions happening at once. Plus, there's pie. It's cool.

Another cool thing going on is that I seem to be in another band! The Mobsters have made me an offer I couldn't refuse...looks like I'll be doing the Front Man/Lead Singer/Lead Guitarist duties for this Swing/Funk/Roots ensemble. Sounds like fun to me! They've assured me that I can have full control of the schedule, so I can keep doing my primary caregiver thing with my folks, and I'm hoping that works out well. They're a cool bunch, and I think I can help make it happen with them...I'll keep you posted!

Speaking of my caregiver functions, I'm back and forth this next two weeks (adding another layer into the holiday complexities) driving my Dad back and forth to the hospital for a battery of tests. His mental acuity seems to have taken a dive, and he's had some strange hallucinations. Talking to people who aren't in the room occasionally is kind of disturbing. He's also gotten confused later at night when he goes to bed...the other morning my Mom woke up and found the dishwasher sitting in the bedroom! Somehow he must of confused it with his walker. I asked him if he remembered doing it and he said "No, but I sort of remember thinking 'Man, this thing is hard to push around!'". So we've been off to the neurologists to see what there is to do, if anything, about that. So far the doc has ruled out Alzheimer's, thank God. He said it may be something as simple to address as a vitamin deficiency...so hence the tests. Hopefully he'll be right in that, and Dad won't have to lug that darn dishwasher around.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to having everybody around this Xmastime...it was nice to see my bros on Thanksgiving, and everybody should be here for the December fiesta as well. I'm lucky that everybody can make it and be in reasonable health, we're a pretty close family, even though we're often pretty far away from each other(me on tour in Germany, Aaron out in Poland, Stu working in Chile, etc.). This should be a good time for all! And I hope, for you all as well.

Coyotes

2008-11-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

After midnight, and I'm sitting up late listening to the coyotes howling in the field next door. I've been hating Michigan, and the cold, and all, but hearing them I realize what a strange and beautiful place I live in. It's an eerie, wonderful thing...ah, these creatures of the night...what music they make...

Birthdays

2008-11-02T07:32:00.000-08:00

Just sitting with another cup of coffee, prying my eyes open after a festive evening last night celebrating my Birthday...my 56th! How the hell did that happen? I was 12 last week, 15 or 16 just a little while ago. You blink, turn around a couple of times and Wham! Suddenly there's all this grey hair and stuff. Weird.

Having a Birthday around Halloween (I was actually born an hour after, on All Saint's Day, but I usually celebrate on Halloween) makes for lots of opportunities for festivity, and we certainly took advantage of them last night! There was a musical extravaganza out at the Arbor Brewing Company, a local micro brew club, with our friends the Six Foot Poles (hey, they're from Hamtramick). Cyn and I donned our costumes...we went as the Corporate Clowns Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She did some amazing and very disturbing makeup on us...as you can see. We had a gas at the party, the band was great and it was a lot of fun for all! Today, however, for some reason I feel a bit...subdued. Perhaps a side effect of the excellent ABC brews. But you know, it's worth it really.

It's certainly been a year to make me more reflective and maybe a little morbid, with all that's been going on. But if I look back on my life these last 56 years, I realize that I've been pretty fortunate, and I haven't done that badly. I've had the chance to play in wonderful bands, hang out with wonderful people, to do wild and crazy things that lots of other people just dream about. There are a lot of people who love me, I have a wonderful fiance, and a great family. I suppose I have some regrets...I've wasted a lot of time and braincells with drugs and alcohol, especially early on, and I wish often I'd been kinder sometimes to people. But overall, I think I've been pretty OK, and I've had lots of fantastic experiences. This next year I think I just want to try and improve on as many levels as I can...I want to get my recording studio and promotional service together, and try to help other struggling musicians. I want to start working on soundtracks, and to expand my compositional abilities. I want to play music a lot more and with more great musicians, and to grow there as well. And I really want to have more and more fun with Cyn, my family and friends! Life is good, gotta enjoy it as much as possible.

King Arthur and The Beatles

2008-10-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

Still putting myself together with a cup of tea by the PC, after a strange dream where The Beatles were together in the times of King Arthur (Ringo looks really cool in chain mail, by the way). It was a fun dream, and it got me thinking about the strange connections that I see between the story of The Beatles and the Arthurian legends...there’s something that resonates powerfully about Arthur and the Round Table, one reason I keep re-reading Mallory and Mary Stewart (Steinbeck wrote a bitchin’ translation of Mallory, by the way), and I think it’s a good example of what Joseph Campbell wrote about too...Campbell was a fascinating anthropologist/folklorist/rennissance man who had an interesting essay about the "10 points of the Hero". The idea being that all great legends and hero tales change over the many retellings and embellishments in time, and have the main character going through many of the same things that all other heroes do, whether it be Osiris, or Luke Skywalker, or Frodo, or Jesus, or Tarzan, or Arthur. Maybe it says something about human nature or the collective unconcious, I don’t know. I can’t remember all 10 right now, but some of the ones I do are:

The hero is born to greatness, but is raised humbly, unknowing of their status.

Later, in their youth, their deeds show that they are special.

Often the hero leaves to go on a quest to find their birthright.

On the journey, they meet strange friends and wise men who help them.

Their quest often cumulates in their public display of their powers in miraculous ways.

Later in their lives, they are sometimes killed by evil, jealous and deceitful ones, but somehow they magically return and live on, in some special way, although they may not be physically present on earth.

...See the connection with the story of The Beatles there? The quest to Hamburg and beyond, the strange friends Epstein, Evans, Aspinall, the wise Martin. Their miraculous rise...John’s assasination, but his music and message ringing out unkillably through time. The stuff of legend. They were just four guys, but they also seem like Jungian archtypical heros too! Also, it’s the hero legend with the best soundtrack EVER. Just some of the things passing through my mind in the morning...maybe I need another cup of that tea.

Chord Melody Jazz Guitar

2008-09-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

Late at night, when no one can hear, I'm practicing Jazz style Chord Melody guitar. For those who don't know, that's a style of solo playing that incorporates harmony notes simultaneously with the melody...hence the name, hah. I always thought it was a cool style and all, but listening to Joe Pass and Ted Greene when I was younger kind of made me give up...it was like looking up at a mountaintop and realizing you didn't have near enough climbing skills to get there. But now that I'm a decrepit old guy, and I have a little more technique and patience, I'm going back at it and giving it a try. I figure in 30 or 40 years I should have it down pretty well. It's not everything I want to do musically, but I do enjoy it a lot. At this point I'll usually work for a while on exercises or other people's arrangements, and when I get burnt out of bashing my head against the wall I'll go back to playing other stuff. It's fun, and I like working on new things. Maybe later in life (well, not that much later) I'll be that geezer in the fern bar playing "Shadow Of Your Smile" or something. There's worse fates!

Journal By The Window

2008-09-26T07:21:00.000-07:00

Time screams by the world like the winds around a huge tornado, bits of life and experience flying by at amazing speed.Like Dorothy in The Wizard Of OZ I watch various friends and loved ones spin by my window, and then disappear into the swirling funnel of time. Where will they go? Where will I land?

Things happen too fast for me to track them or to try to understand. A loved relative and an old Best Friend from my past both vanished into the mystery of death this month, and two other Old Best Friends appeared out of the void to reconnect. Cyn's aging Mom visited and my Dad recovered from our alarming and difficult Family Reunion, which he unknowingly attended with a fractured spine. Several friends have plunged into depression, and I seem to have the same malady, albeit in a milder form. Cynthia blazes about, a distracting blur of energy, doing a million things at once, like Vishnu. Work, chores, attending to family and basic needs eat up all available time, leaving my studio dusty and my recent CD unpromoted. And speaking of the studio, my PC keeps self-destructing.

So slowing down enough to write a few pages in a journal is a rare and welcome thing. I look out into the blue Autumn sky and listen to the insects and birds...something like peace comes over me and an inner Self relaxes for a moment. Time changes everything, for good or ill, but a little time to myself can only help me. And in turbulent times like these, I need that.

Out Of The Dark

2008-09-24T07:29:00.000-07:00

The other day I went out for a walk...it sounds pretty pedestrian (sorry), but it's actually the first time I've voluntarily gone outside for a few weeks. Sounds crazy, but I think I've had the depressive equivalent of walking pneumonia for a while...I'm getting to work, and getting things done, and putting out the various fires that my life's been starting, but I was doing only what I had to, and then I'd collapse on the couch with a beer and sort of shut down. It's not that there hasn't been enough stuff happening to make me sad (my aunt's death and the death of an old friend in the space of 10 days, among other things) or stressed, but my reactions have been pretty typical of the way my metabolism works when I'm having a serotonin imbalance. I've dealt with this enough to recognise the symptoms, but of course when you're INSIDE it, it can be hard to realize. Apparently it's starting to recede, thank God. I've been getting out and working on the lawn, going to the gym, doing fun stuff that I kind of forgot how to do temporarily. Depression is really irritating...it sneaks up on you and flattens you, and doesn't have any really good dramatic symptoms like having blood spurt from your eyeballs or something that would at least get you a little sympathy from your friends!! Ah well...I guess I'm just hoping that this upswing will continue, and to help that along I'm gonna get out of this office and go out into the beautiful fall day and take another walk. Sounds good right now.

Memories of Charley Tysklind

2008-09-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

I just got the news of my good friend Charley’s passing. I hadn’t been in touch with him in the last few months, and I had no idea he’d been that sick. This is really devastating, and I don’t know what to feel or do.

I think I met Charley in the late 70’s or early 80’s (my memory for dates is awful, and if anybody knows better please correct me). My friend Doug Cameron and I were in a band with his then girlfriend and a drummer, and Doug said that he knew a sax player from Lake Orion area who was good. When he showed up for a rehearsal, he was dressed kind of biker-like, and with his rough whiskey and cigarettes voice and his look I though “Man, here’s one tough customer”. It didn’t take long to find out this was far from the truth. Charley had an inner sweetness of spirit that came through right away, and we wound up getting along immediately. We had similar and complementary senses of humor, were both passionate about music, and were out for as much fun and adventure as we could get out of life. He proved to be a great musician too…I remember being much impressed by his ability to play two saxophones at once, in harmony, something he nabbed from one of his idols Rassan Roland Kirk. It suddenly gave us a horn section, and looked really cool onstage too.

Over the next six years or so we wound up being good friends and off-and-on housemates in various places in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and playing in various ensembles wherever we could. I remember living on Emmet St. in Ypsi with him and some other sordid characters, and our lives of hilarious desperation and amusement. We both had various tiny odd jobs and gigs to keep us afloat, and along with the free pizzas from a sympathetic Pizza Store girl down the street we managed to survive. There were quite a few rather ill-conceived and unsuccessful bands that we were both in…one trio that we had with a amphetamine-fueled pianist whose name escapes me wound up playing in the then very rough Cross Street Club every week for happy hour weekends. The bouncer had a ball-peen hammer that he kept on a leather cord around his wrist, to discourage any messin’ around. Charley said it was a place where they searched you for weapons at the door, and if you didn’t have any they gave you one! But we opened up for everybody in town, playing jazz tunes out of the Real Book. I think we were paid in beer and burgers and stale cigars…we were all smoking like chimneys.

At that time I was going to school at WCC, and I don’t know if Charley was registered there or not, but he was out there a good deal. The Jazz Ensemble I was in played weekly out at the Halfway Inn at East Quad in A2 and he sat in on those sessions a lot. His sax style back then was cleaner in tone than it became later, and his jazz chops were good, especially for the time. At some point we both moved from Emmet St. to Pearl St. in Ypsi, to a house we shared with Wayne Indyk, Brian Tomsic, Ray Torres and several other nefarious souls. There were many parties and good times to be had there, and we had them. We were in our 20’s and into chasing after girls, gigs, mind-altering substances and the meaning of life, usually all at the same time. Charley had a huge appetite for it all, and ebullience that made being around him a gas. He and Wayne and I started the Movie Fun Club, gathering friends and going out to the cheap matinees of cheesy Sci-Fi and Fantasy flicks, laughing and throwing popcorn around. Fantastic afternoons.

Somewhere around that time Charley hooked up with Steve Wethy and the Blue Front Persuaders, who were based in Ann Arbor and just starting to get their Retro-Swing thing together. The first gig I know of they did was out in front of Rick’s American Café during the Art Fair in A2, and Rick’s had just opened. To grab the substantial crowd outside, the owners offered the Blue Fronts a gig that night if they’d just tell the audience they were playing there, and that it was “Quarter Beer Night”. Of course they did, and the crowd swarmed down into the basement club, and the band played all night. Steve and Charley and I shared a table completely covered in full plastic beer glasses. We went through some quarters that night! The Blue Fronts caught on like wildfire in A2, fueled partly by the Blues and Jump resurgence brought on by the Blue Brothers and the like, but mostly by the fun-loving, manic personality of the band itself. On a good night they could kick some serious swingin’ ass! Again, Charley’s persona and stage presence was a key element in the band’s chemistry.

Not too long after that I was recruited to be the band’s bassist, and we started playing at a new level, both musically and professionally, than either of us had before. We had all our weekends booked, and many weekdays too (as well as sub gigs that turned up at places like Mr. Flood’s Party and others). We were doing dates throughout Michigan and Ohio, and I can think of no better band to start doing it with than that one, and no better friends to be sharing the experience with, especially Charley. Many very wild nights were had by all, and hilarious after-gig parties that I mostly remember. It’s true that we were all a pretty hard-drinking, loose-living band at that point, but given the times and our youth I think it was a pretty natural kind of thing really. Charley could always drink me under the table though, and he frequently did!

During this period we both had summer jobs being park rangers in Ypsi’s Jyro Park. It was a pretty place to be, a decent day job and had the perk of many pretty park rangerettes, who we pursued with varying degrees of success. Charley wound up hooking up with Deanna, a lovely and sweet girl who really cared deeply about him. They got closer and closer, and I was happy for them both. I remember very well the night we were playing at the Soup Kitchen in Detroit, when he told me they were going to announce their engagement later that week. He was playing beautifully that night, and sang “I’m Gonna Stay Right Here” with such feeling (and essentially directly to Deanna) that I got choked up on the stand. I was planning to drive home with them that night, but my bass wouldn’t fit in Deanna’s little car, so I rode in the van with Steve and Dennis. It was later in the morning that we found out about the horrific car crash that they were in, the result of a drunk driver in a car chase racing down the wrong way on the highway. Charley was busted up some, and Wayne (our soundman at the time) had serious internal injuries and lost his spleen, but Deanna was killed instantly. We were all devastated. I don’t think Charley ever really got over that. He was a mess for a long time…how could he not be? But even much later, you could see the change that tragedy did to him. I think the dark streak of self-destructive behavior deepened then, his drinking and related consumptions became a little more pronounced and more to cushion himself against the pain than just for fun. He recovered, kept playing, returned to the world and to mostly good humor, but it left its mark.

After I left the band, there was a while were I didn’t see Charley, but we wound up sharing space again in Ann Arbor on Michigan St., in a very large house with a crazy bomb shelter that the Blue Fronts used to record in. I think his darkest period was behind him by then, he had mellowed somewhat and was living with another girlfriend, but we still had the connection of our good friendship and shared humor. We still were able to party, and occasionally we’d stumble across the street to Arwulf’s, either to entertain him with some freeform sax duets (I should mention that I don’t really play sax at all) or just to jabber and listen to Arwulf’s amazing music collection, which we had plundered before in search of obscure Swing tunes in the earlier days of the Persuader’s career. I do remember a few instances of excess during that time…one night I was woken up by an amazing cacophony downstairs in the living room. I stumbled down there and found Charley, wearing stereo headphones, playing Wagner’s “Flight Of The Valkeries” at top volume and waving his arms wildly, conducting into the air! Only problem was he had neglected to actually plug the headphones in! I treasure moments like that though. After our house broke up, we drifted apart, and I would only see him briefly and infrequently over the years. Just last year he contacted me by email and we wrote back and forth for a bit, but one of us (probably me) dropped the ball and I hadn’t heard from him in a bit. I’d just been thinking of reconnecting again when Steve sent me this news.

There was so much I admired and liked about him…he was a master storyteller, specializing in the tall and preposterous tale that was usually based in fact; a gifted artist, who could whip out an off-the-cuff comic or portrait without thinking about it; a great musician and musicologist with a vast knowledge of Jazz and R&B; and a cat with a fantastic imagination, who could entertain himself and everyone around him with nothing but the contents of his beautifully twisted mind. And a really good friend with a huge soul and a warm and generous spirit. I’d always hoped we’d have a little more time to be together and talk, and I’ll always regret I didn’t work harder to make that happen. I feel like a large part of what made me myself has left the planet. Charley, if you’re still out there somewhere, good luck, man, we loved you. I hope you have a fantastic journey, and a sublime destination.

Radio Six

2008-09-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've recently been put on the playlist on Radio Six in Scotland! It's a very cool station indeed, and I reccomend anybody who likes eclectic and interesting music to go check it out...if you're not in Scotland, it's available worldwide on the web at www.radiosix.com ...and I'm not just saying that to plug my CD (although it is quite a fablulous collection of tunes, and available for your listening enjoyment and gift-giving pleasure at www.beowulfkingsley.com ). As I've said before elsewhere, I am on their playlist in the Male Vocalist catagory, something I find both amusing and disturbing. But I'll take it, thanks very much! I was actually kind of blown away by the coverage Radio Six has besides its local broadcast and its web radio presence...here's the total list...

Our broadcasts are carried by a network of transmitters around the world, on shortwave, medium wave, VHF and Satellite, via the facilities of our affiliates WBCQ, Celtic Music Radio, World FM and Radio Tatras International. Our current schedule on 1,530kHz and 88.5MHz analogue and Sky Channel 0195 and Eurobird 1 28.5 east 12.523GHz, Horizontal (Symbol rate: 27.500 MSymb; FEC: 2/3, Original Network ID: 2, Transport stream ID: 2611, Service: 55012 PID: 2322) is as follows:- (All times GMT)
23:00 to 06:00 Daily Sky channel 0195 on digital satellite covering the United Kingdom and Ireland
23:00 to 06:00 Sunday to Friday 94.2 (30kW Stereo) Poprad and 94.8MHz (15kW Stereo)Kosice, Slovakia covering most of the country and with some spill into neighbouring countries.
23:00 to 06:00 Daily on Eurobird 1 satellite at 28 degrees east on 12.523GHz Horizontal 27500 2/3 covering Europe.
00:00 to 02:00 Saturday to Sunday 88.5MHz (500mW Stereo) from Tawa to Redwood and Tawa, New Zealand
06:00 to 07:00 Daily 88.5MHz (500mW Stereo) from Tawa to Redwood and Tawa, Wellington, New Zealand
06:00 to 08:00 Saturdays 88.5MHz (500mW Stereo) from Tawa to Redwood and Tawa, Wellington, New Zealand
06:00 to 08:00 Saturdays Sky channel 0195 on digital satellite covering the United Kingdom and Ireland
06:00 to 08:00 Saturdays Eurobird satellite at 28 degrees east on 12.523GHz Horizontal 27500 2/3 covering Europe.
12:00 to 13:00 Fridays 1530kHz for Glasgow and surrounding area
18:00 to 19:00 Mondays Sky channel 0195 on digital satellite covering the United Kingdom and Ireland
18:00 to 19:00 Mondays 94.2 (30kW Stereo) Poprad and 94.8MHz (15kW Stereo)Kosice, Slovakia covering most of the country and with some spill into neighbouring countries.
18:00 to 19:00 Mondays Eurobird satellite at 28 degrees east on 12.523GHz Horizontal 27500 2/3 covering Europe.
19:00 to 20:00 Thursdays and third Saturday of every month 1530kHz for Glasgow and surrounding area
22:00 to 23:00 Monday and Tuesday 94.2 (30kW Stereo) Poprad and 94.8MHz (15kW Stereo)Kosice, Slovakia covering most of the country and with some spill into neighbouring countries.
VHF Transmissions - 88.5MHz Stereo - Tawa, Wellington, New Zealand; 94.2MHz Stereo - Poprad, Slovakis and 94.8MHz Stereo - Kosice, Slovakia.
We have regular transmissions on World FM a LPFM station in Tawa, serving Tawa & Redwood, on the edge of the city of Wellington. You can hear us daily between 7 and 8pm NZ time, and also on Saturdays and Sundays between Noon and 2pm NZ time. Our programmes are broadcast in stereo. More details on the World FM website. Our programmes between 23:00GMT and 05:00GMT are carried via Radio Tatras International on their FM transmitter network in Slovakia, and can be heard in parts of adjacent countries. This service was suspended earlier this year because of regulatory problems in Slovakia, but these have now been resolved and the FM transmissions will resume on August 27th.
Shortwave transmissions - 5.110 and 9.330MHz
Occasionally, our programmes are carried on 5.110MHz and 9.330MHz from transmitters in Monticello, Maine, USA targeted at Europe and south America. These broadcasts are sporadic and not normally announced in advance.

A Difficult Week

2008-09-12T09:01:00.001-07:00

I've had better weeks, I guess...

This one started with Cynthia's Mom and Brother stopping in to attend the Vietnam Veteran's annual Pig Roast. Now Ellen and Steve are delightful people and I was glad to have them about, but coupling being a house-host with an overbooked work week made things a bit hectic. The Pig Roast was a complete success, by the way...Steve volunteered to stay overnight at the VFW and help some of the other guys do the long BBQ thing. He really is an excellent guy. I managed to get my folks out to it as well, and my rather aging and infirm Dad was greeted by the crew there as a WW ll Vet should be, with honor. I think he was rather nonplussed by that. The entertainment of the event turned out to be an amazingly smarmy Elvis impersonator! Cheese city, man.

Tuesday I got the news from my Mom that my aunt Marg had passed away. We had known that her cancer had metastasized, but I'd been hoping there would be a little more time, if for nothing else than the chance for my Mom and her other sister Ethel to get to see her again. I guess she went very quickly and peacefully. When I think of what a wonderful woman she was and of all the kindnesses that she has done me in my life, I feel both grateful to have known her and sad and angry at losing her. I still don't take mortality and entropy well at all, and I don't know if I ever will. If there is justice in the Universe she should be going somewhere fantastic. As many times before, I wish I had faith of that, but one can't really just wish for faith. Maybe someday it will be given me, though.

The rest of this week has been divided between spending as much time with my folks as I can and rushing about doing lots of work with Di Medici Domestic, mostly crawling around under things and exorcising spiders. That and perhaps drinking a few too many beers at the end of the night. Now that I finally have a day off I feel like I can put things into a better perspective, relax and plot my next move...maybe even get some time in the studio! I still have to get with my parents, and I'm still trying to deal with losing my aunt, but perhaps doing some creative work will help. I'm hoping so! Plus a bit of Doing Absolutely Nothing is good therapy for anyone, and I intend to try that as well.

Family, Festivals & Hummingbird Wars

2008-08-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

Just in from coffee on my front porch...here in the boonies we get a lot of wildlife, and one of the coolest things happening this week is the huge amount of hummingbirds we get coming to our nectary feeders! For those of you who might not know, hummingbirds migrate all by their little selves (they're too feisty to hang in flocks, but imagine if they did! Bzzz), and from here in Michigan they go pretty much non-stop to Lousianna, where they take a break to refuel on the local flowers. Then they fly again non-stop ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE GULF OF MEXICO. That's like 500 miles across open water! Crazy. So they've gotta feed up here, and they often double their weight, and wind up looking like little feathered tennis balls before they go. As you might imagine, our feeders are very popular, and the Hummingbird Nectary Wars Of 2008 are in full swing. These tiny guys are very territorial and really have some amazing dogfights over the feeders. We've added new feeders and are gonna get more, probably today. It's very cool to watch them as closely as we do, they're beautiful and fascinating.

Friday we had our first gig with The Infinitones, out at the Crossroads Festival in Ypsilanti. As is the fate of all new bands, we opened for two other bands, the White Ravens and Muruga's Free Funk band. And also as with all opening acts, we followed the standard etiquette: Headliner sets up first (and does the first sound check), then next act sets up in front of them, and so on. That way the equipment can be hauled off in layers and the time between acts is lessened. Thing was, Muruga's band had 9 people in it!! With lots of equipment for each player...and a separate drum platform for the tabla player...and then the White Ravens had their keyboards up...so we were pretty cramped up there! Very little foot room. I didn't really have enough space to turn around to cue Dan the drummer much, although I didn't really need to...he's always on top of that. We played pretty well all in all, and had fun too. The Ravens sounded great and Muruga and his band are all stellar players, so I think a splendid time was had by all, really. I used my Cort Matt Murphy Signature guitar, the Fender Deluxe Reissue and the Vox Tonelab LE, and I was pretty happy with the tones. That Tonelab solves a lot of problems for me since it's so easy to program, so small (on a stage like that, very handy!) and sounds so warm and good. I still love my old analog pedals, but for now this is working really well.

Bad news on my family health front. My aunt seems to have had a re-emergence of her lymphoma. Of course my Mom is very upset indeed, as am I. I've been trying help as much as I can with my Dad's condition (he has Parkingson's Disease and is pretty shaky sometimes), but it seems everybody in their age group is having some real challenges. My aunt didn't make it out to the family reunion this year, and I'm thinking of trying to talk my Mom into going out to Montana to visit her, while I wrangle my Pa. That should be hilarious. As I've said before, this growing old is not for sissies! I know this is probably affecting my mental health too, but at this point I don't have time for that so I'll just soldier on and put out what fires I can. Later if things get better I can schedule a nice mental breakdown, and a comfortable rest in a nice white room with the men in the nice white coats. Ahh...

At some point in this next week I'm resolved to march into my studio and start recording again. I told Steve from the Buzzrats that I'd be working on bass for his new album, and it's time to go and see what I can do. Looks like about 16 songs! Ah, that Steve, ever the prolific songwriter. Once I get started it'll be fun...maybe I'll sneak some Electric Sitar on a few tracks as well. Hehheheh...

Coyotes, Cranes & My Secret Identity

2008-08-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

I find more and more that as I go on as a musician that almost everybody has to have a few hustles to survive, in this incredibly difficult time for the arts and entertainment world...a Secret Identity if you will. I've had many periods where I made my living just playing, but usually that's when you're on the road for 200+ dates a year, which kind of makes having a home life out of the question! So most of us have side gigs or day jobs. I remember playing a show with the keyboardist from Molly Hatchet, who was working a furniture delivery business between tours...and I understand that Colin Moulding was driving a lorry even during the glory days of XTC! So glamour be dammed, I have to pay some bills. Over the years I've done such jobs as House Painting, Psychedelic Drug Reviewer (really), Flower Delivery, Library Clerical, Nude Art Model, Record Store Guy and Prep Cook. I do teach and I do recording, engineering and production for people, but the studio is still just getting off the ground (except on Friday nights, when it is sometimes at an altitude of 40,000 feet). So Cynthia and I own a cleaning business, where we and our associates hop into people's McMansions and office buildings and chase the fearsome dust bunnies around. There are many worse fates!!

The other day we were headed off to one such gig, a summer lakefront cottage rental that we brush up every week. I like to take the back roads out there just because it's such a pretty drive, and we were in no particular hurry. I was turning onto a side road when something ran up from the bushes and stood watching me in the middle of the road. It was a huge coyote! I know that the ones you see out West are little guys, but these Michigan coyotes are really big, as big or bigger than a German Shepherd. I stopped the car and we watched each other for a while, and then he ran off into a field of soybeans on the other side of the road. Cyn and I could see his head appearing and disappearing as he jumped up and down through the beans (I guess he couldn't see where he was going) till he was gone. A nice nature moment!

We finished the cottage and started driving back to town toward our next cleaning gig, and were on a dirt road next to a wheatfield, where we had our next cool animal sighting. Four Sandhill Cranes were in the field, gleaning the leftover wheat and walking about in their weird prehistoric way. I see these guys (I don't know if they're always the same ones) occasionally out by our house, we're out in a major wetlands area (OK, I'll admit it, we live in a swamp). Again, we stopped and sat and watched them for quite a bit...I never really get tired of checking things like this out...

It occurs to me that my Secret Identity allows these kind of moments probably better than most jobs would...we're traveling in rural areas a lot, and we don't have a terribly fixed timetable most of the time, and we both really revel in this stuff. I certainly never had experiences like this when I worked at the record store! The animals there were of a quite different sort. I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had touring in Europe, Canada and the States for anything, and I'll be doing it again I know, but right now things are pretty good. My new CD's getting really good reviews, I'm having fun working on the next one in the studio, my new band is shaping up well and I'm playing out on sub gigs here and there when I want to. Plus, I work a day job with the coolest Redhead ever, and I get to see Coyotes and Cranes!

Yet another Magic Guitar

2008-08-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

I would be totally remiss if I didn't mention another amazing guitar I have...this one is a restoration of a kind of historically notable model, the Ovation Deacon Limited. I got this one for $60 from a co-worker when I worked at a record store, but it was in pieces. I figured I could put it together and at least use it for photo ops, since it looked like an interesting instrument. But getting it playable took a long time, and several very competent luthiers worked on it to no avail. Finally my friend Mickey Richard got ahold of it and wrestled it into submission...by pretty much rebuilding the thing! When I got it there was a hole chiseled into it (to badly accommodate a bad tremolo bar) that you could see daylight through. He filled that with matching mahogany and put a veneer over that, which is so finely done that you have to look very closely indeed to see the difference in woods. Plus he re-fretted it, put in a new bridge, and new pickups, cut a new pickguard and refinished the thing with violin varnish. It looks (and plays) amazingly well...you can see what a nice job he did on it!

...and how does it sound, you may ask? It's a kickass little guitar! Tonally it sounds somewhere between a Gibson SG and a Fender Telecaster, very open and live. Its very thin mahogany neck is somewhat sensitive to changes in humidity so I don't take it out to outdoor gigs, but I'm gonna start taking it out to club dates now and then, since it's a lot of fun to play, sounds so good and also looks crazy cool!

The Magic Guitar

2008-08-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

I have had the chance to play and own a bunch of good guitars and basses...for several decades I just had one acoustic guitar (a little Gibson) and a Fender Jazz Bass, and that was it. But in the last few years I've gotten the bug, and have created a little collection of nice instruments that I use in the studio and out at gigs. Some come and then go, and others are keepers, but I learn something from each one, even if what I learn is that I don't play that particular instrument.

I had that experience recently with a little jazz guitar I bought on ebay. It was a Jay Turser copy of a Gibson 175, and I was excited to get it. I've been getting into the primal stages of chord melody guitar (in another 20 years I might start getting good) and I thought this was the ticket. But for some reason, this just wasn't the guitar that was working for me. Didn't sound right, didn't feel right, although it was a very beautiful and well-made guitar. Dang, I thought, back to Ebay for you I guess.

But as luck would have it, my friend Danny Pratt had been looking around for a nice hollowbody, and when he called me up to play a gig I mentioned the Turser. He offered me a trade for a Tex-Mex Stratocaster, and since it had a whammy bar, and I needed a guitar with one for a studio track I was doing, I said OK. I had never thought I'd want a Strat, I'd always thought of them as kind of sterile in my hands, although I've seen people pull amazing music from them (Hendrix, Clapton and Michael Katon, amongst many others). But he played the Turser at the gig, and he sounded so good on it and seemed so happy, I figured it was cool, if I had to I'd just sell the Strat later.

But then I sat down with it, and time evaporated completely, and when I came to myself I was still playing and it was 3 hours later! Always the sign of a very special axe. Just forget whatever I said before about Strats, this one has made me re-examine my paradigm! It plays like a dream and just sounds beautiful, I'm playing it through an old Epiphone amp and I'm just amazed with the tone. I just used it on a new tune last night in the studio, thinking I was just goofing around, but somehow having that guitar in my hands created something magic. That's a keeper track! I found myself playing melodic phrases I hadn't known I could and might never even have thought of before, there's just something about it. A Magic Guitar!! Amazing.

Loop Composition

2008-08-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

For those crafty individuals who have been following my adventures, you know that I've embraced the Acid Pro 6 program for working with loop-based musical compositions. I started using it because I never could seem to get my drummer friends to make it out to my rather isolated country home, or if they did make it we never seemed to have enough time to do too much. Drum machines seem dreadful to me, and I don't think enough like a good drummer to create a great part that way anyway...and actually I think there are very few people who can pull that off. But with drum loops, you have 2 to 16 bar sections of recordings of actual drummers, and you can mix and match them if you have a good set of collections (thanks, Beta Monkey and Drums On Demand!). It does take time, and (for me at least to get what I want) a LOT of tracks...on average probably 30 to 40 for a drum part, including cymbal hits and such. But I can usually get a part that will be very difficult to tell from a real drummer (at least if that's what I'm trying to do). Hey, it fools many of my professional drummer friends! Is it a replacement for a good percussionist, playing live with a smokin' rhythm section? Hell, no! But try to get those guys out to the farm at 3:30 in the morning...hmm, Cynthia might have something to say about that too...

Now, however, I've been delving into this medium more and more, putting horn parts on tracks for clients as well as percussion...and I've been experimenting with doing compositions that are nearly all loops. At first those experiments all sounded like very bad hip-hop, but as I've gotten more used to working with Acid I've found that I can get a really good-sounding (to me at least) pop song or classical bagatelle happening. Again, it takes a lot of time, lots of slicing and dicing of the material (it helps to have a huge library of loop CDs as well), time moving, reversing, transposing and mangling the stuff into a usable form. But it can be done, and I'm thinking that several of these will be out on my next album!

For a while I was kind of embarrassed about admitting to using this kind of technology...I really am more of a player than an engineer at heart...but I've decided that creativity can transcend those concerns. There are lots of amazing writers using loops, and the collage aspect of making something out of little bits of nothing is very appealing. Plus, I'm will wind up playing on anything I do...I can't help that. It's just part of the fun...and if it's not fun then I'm not doin' it. It's certainly not for the giant dollars! Hm, I must find some of those giant dollars sometime.

The new blog home

2008-08-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm finding that I have to move my headquarters to new digs! While I'll include copies of this log on my other sites, I think that this spot right here will be central for now. We'll just see how it all works, and if I can tie my other sites to this tether! The layout should look nice anyhow.

I'm sitting here with an insistent cat on my lap (Isis the Abbyssinan, a serious love junkie), just minutes before I leave for a foray into the Big City and a quick visit with friends Death Kitten and the Six Foot Poles, who are playing a gig in Liberty Plaza. I'm hoping I'll have a little time after to get back into the studio and work for a while...between trying to maintain this old farmhouse and help out my aging parents, I'm not getting nearly enough time to work on the new CD! There are lots of strange ideas boiling around in my backbrain, and they're gonna blow if I can't get them out onto some virtual vinyl. Of course, they may blow anyway, but I still have to record them. The voices tell me to!

This is also the first day in a couple of weeks without the constant pain I've had in my back...not to whine too much, but after a while it does grate on you. Perhaps the chiropractor's tender ministrations have finally done their good work. I sure hope so! Between me hurting and having to deal with my Dad's problems with his fractured hip, I've been in an ongoing invalid mode...it just feel so good to take a breath without that "stabbed in the back" sensation. There, whine over!

Now I'm off to check with the guy up the road who has the Rhode Island Reds to see if there's any fresh eggs available (living in the country has its perks!), and thence off to Liberty Plaza. I'm gonna try to see my friends from Treatment Bound this evening, too, if the studio doesn't suck me into its evil hypnotic embrace...