SCHEDULE & CO-WRITES...

One of the folks who’d reviewed this year’s Christmas song, “Song for Polly and Glyn (A Man for Christmas),” told me he’d listened, and re-listened, thinking “There has to be a dead reindeer in here somewhere.” I think I just got given the lead-in for next year’s Christmas song. Thank you.

Spec’d out a recording schedule with John; tentatively, we’ll do the scratch tracks for the album Jan. 23 & 24, with me (guitar and vocal), him (bass), and Chris (drums). John says his portable recorder can hold the whole dozen songs without trouble. He wants to do the Southern Pigfish songs at the same time (and I’m game). Goal is to have both albums done by September, which would be in time for the Christmas market.

Lynn Orloff’s “Wildflowers” is musicated. Bluegrassy—though it can’t be true bluegrass, because nobody dies in the last verse—and almost a polka (but not quite fast enough). You’re not supposed to have electric guitars in bluegrass music, so I put one in anyway—the lead is done on the Strat. And Lynn liked it.

It is another of those songs that really should be sung by a girl—the fourth in a row of those, in fact. The so-called “Underground Joe Club,” which maintains they like the kinkiness of an old, fat guy singing sexy girl tunes, would no doubt be pleased. (Lynn would like to arrange to have it recorded by a girl—ideally, Polly Hager—before taking it public. I understand and agree.)

That brings up to 17 (I think) the number of people whose songs I’ve musicated: April Johns, Beth Williams, Betty Holt, Bill Osofsky, Derek Hines, Diane Ewing, Don Varnell, Donna Devine, Gem Watson, Jody Dickey, Jon Harrington, Lynn Orloff, Marge McKinnis, Odd Vindstad, Polly Hager, Regina Michelle, Stan Good… I’m sure there’s a couple I’ve missed. Add in Bobbie Gallup and Scott Rose, with whom I’ve co-written things that I’ve also done the music for, and it’s 19. Some of those were one-shot deals, some two; with Stan, it’s been many. In each case, they were great lyrics (I have high standards). These are good writers.

The Industry Professionals say you have to co-write if you’re going to make it in Nashville; the “co-writing fever” seems driven by people wanting pieces of the writers’ copyright fees more than anything else (and the result—songs that sound like they were written by committee—isn’t pleasant)—but having multiple authors each trying to pitch the song to everybody they know obviously multiplies marketing efforts, too. I just think being able to work with others is a useful skill to have.

I am providing a useful service to the lyricists (there’s the Virgo rising again—I must provide useful service). Lyrics alone just aren’t marketable any more—one has to have a finished product (despite all that “co-writing fever” in Nashville)—so I can provide an effective (I hope) delivery system for the lyrics that gives the lyricist something he or she can pitch. There are benefits to me, of course. I never have to write anything serious (and I’m paranoid about writing serious stuff—words are weapons, after all, and mine tend to be sharp), because these other folks are doing it—and I can assuage my serious tendencies by musicating their serious stuff. And I can preserve my reputation as the guy who doesn’t take anything seriously, because even if I’m performing their stuff, it’s their stuff, not mine.

More stuff to do—mostly from a paperwork setup standpoint: I want the income taxes ready to be filed right away, and the “FAFSA”—the document every college uses for student financial aid—ready to go as soon as the taxes are done. I get to wrestle, too, with the State of Oregon’s brand-new job application system, that appears designed deliberately to cut down on the number of people they have to interview. (I like challenges.) Another radio spot (tomorrow), thanking everybody for their donations to the Food Pantry and for coming to the Christmas Show. No music this week, but maybe I can play Sunday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday next week.

Joe

RECORDING THOUGHTS...

As I understand it, the way John wants to record the songs on the album is to (1) record a “scratch track” of himself (bass), Chris (drums), and me (rhythm guitar and vocal), then (2) record on separate tracks each of us playing (and in my case, also singing) to the scratch track, then (3) add lead instruments, and (4) mix the tracks, using his fancy computer program—and eliminating the scratch track in the process.

I don’t know for sure if this is how it’s done in commercial studios, but it sounds like it should work. It is a little complicated, but it ought to produce just about perfect results. Then comes mastering, which I believe is both making the volumes of the individual songs consistent with each other and consistent with the volumes one gets out of commercial recordings, so you can pop the CD into any CD player and not have the listener running for the volume control. Might send that part out—I know at least three people who do that commercially (though I don’t know what they charge, and what they charge is going to be important).

Recording the scratch tracks may or may not be a simple process. From the band’s end, it’s a snap; John and Chris are both very good, and the songs on the album are all ones we’ve played a lot. I would expect we could do each one in one take. Scratch tracks for the whole album—an hour’s worth of music—would be part of an afternoon’s work, if the recording equipment can handle it. It may not be able to—I know John’s portable unit is better than my Tascam (which can only hold one song at a time), but I’m not sure how much better. The alternative to spreading the scratch recording out over two, three or four days would be to migrate Chris’s drum set up to John’s living room, so tracks could be dumped to the computer quickly.

Probably another afternoon or evening to overlay each of the individual instruments—rhythm guitar, bass, drums, lead guitar, blues harp and vocal. (Re-recording the dums would entail Chris’s drum set being in John and Sara’s living room one more day.) Might add (or substitute) Bruce’s piano on a couple of the songs, if he’s interested (I think he might be); we could have me playing lead on the simpler stuff, but I’d really rather have Mike doing all the guitar leads if he would—he is many times better a lead player than I am. And with all that work done, John could mix at his leisure.

Next step: a SCHEDULE. Right now, everybody’s got a little free time, but it’s not going to last.

I think I need a revised setlist for the album. I need to eliminate the two co-writes, substituting songs wrote entirely by me, so I can avoid the expense of paying copyright royalties up front. I hate to do it—“Dead Things in the Shower” and “Un-Easy Street” are among our best crowd-pleasers—but I can’t afford it. I’m doing this album for no money, because no money is what I have.

I can substitute “Crosses By the Roadside” for “Un-Easy Street” easily. “Crosses” is a good song (despite having been panned by a Nashville publisher)—it’s more serious and sad, but almost exactly the same tempo, and a two-step, even. (That’s why I won’t play the two songs together.) What can I substitute for “Dead Things”? Just as in a live performance, one wants to lead off with the almost-best stuff. Do I know what that is, any more?

Joe

UPDATE (AND VIDEO THOUGHTS)...

Christmas is over, and it was nice. Time to get back to normal—if I had any idea what “normal” is. (I probably have to take the Bill Clinton route, and define “normal.” What do I want it to be?)

In two weeks—Friday, 8 January—is my appointment to meet the band in Astoria (60 miles away) I’d applied to play rhythm guitar with. New band, no gigs yet; from my end, it’s just an opportunity to do Something Completely Different. The bandleader wants to do covers, old rock ‘n’ roll with some modern country (which is pretty much the same thing), and I know probably half the songs on his list even if I can’t sing ‘em. I have a Lynn Orloff song to musicate (if she’s willing)—a very fast bluegrassy love song (technically not bluegrass music, because no one dies in the last verse). Lynn is a very competent lyricist, and I haven’t done any songs of hers yet. One more copy of the Joe Songbook to mail out, too—along with the last of my thongs.

I have a couple of playing opportunities to take advantage of—the supposedly weekly blues jam down in Newport on Sundays (I’d get to finally meet Jason Jones if I did that), and Whitney Streed’s comedy thing at the Mt. Tabor in Portland (on Thursdays—I could combine the trip with some other business in Portland). Both, again, would be something different.

One problem with making music videos of my songs is the lyrics are usually chock full of imagery that is probably best left up to the imagination—it doesn’t transfer well to video. There’s a way out, though. Porter Wagoner’s “Committed to Parkview” (his last song before he died, I think) simply had footage of him and/or the band playing in what looked like an abandoned nursing home; it was even in black and white. I can “go minimalist,” too, leaving nearly everything up to the imagination.

I sort of did that in the video of “Me and Rufus, and Burnin’ Down the House.” I just filmed Rufus doing Dog Things (mostly eating) out in the yard at Sara’s house (where the fire damage had been repaired), and used still shots (also of Rufus) with the usual snide text commentary during the Rap, and it didn’t come out bad. (My camera work could use work—but I learned a lot about the limitations of the camera in the process.)

I can do “The Dog’s Song” the same way. I can shoot five minutes of footage of a hyperactive kitten doing destructive things (I know someone who’s living with one of those). I never need to show the dog.

In the same vein—only slightly more complicated—is “The Strange Saga of Quoth, the Parrot,” the pre-election talking blues I wrote for Southern Pigfish. Nearly all the song can be beach footage, with maybe some tavern stuff (one verse sort of takes place inside a tavern). I can do it all myself if I don’t have to be in the video—and I probably do not want to be in the video: one of the “mystiques” I’d like to preserve about Southern Pigfish is no one ever sees the band (it isn’t necessary to come out and say that’s because the band doesn’t really exist). I could shoot some footage of someone else lip-synching some of the vocals if I could find someone willing. And in the spirit of Porter Wagoner, one never has to see the parrot.

I could use some feedback on the videos I’ve done; I’d like to show them to an unsuspecting crowd, in other words, and see what their reaction is, much as I’ve done with songs at open mikes. There is a potential venue: Whitney Streed was running a monthly comedy showcase in Portland (I’ve played there once) that included some multi-media stuff. I’ll have to get her the videos and ask if it’s something she’d be interested in.

Joe

THE 2010 WORKLIST...

It was 20 December last year that I published the Worklist; here, a year later, I can say I have accomplished rather little. Except making lists, of course—I am good at lists. Here’s the 2010 Worklist:

FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE A LIVING OFF THIS STUFF. Not just the music, but the related things I do or can do, too—writing, publishing, graphic design, &c. I’ve been told I’m already a household word in the area where I live—but I’m not one people spend money on yet.

FINISH THE JOE ALBUM. Just because most of the stuff is outside my control doesn’t mean it’s not controllable. The pieces are all in place—the band, the setlist, the sound engineer, the equipment, and the process. Now that the Christmas Show is over, I’ll talk to the band about a production schedule.

FINISH SOUTHERN PIGFISH’S ALBUM. That one’s got more sub-pieces; need about four more songs, and every song is going to be a music video because the album is going to be released on flash drive rather than CD.

A WEEK IN NASHVILLE. Sure, why not? The only thing that prevented my going this year was money—I had the time. And I’ve got a good reason to go—being able to film Polly Hager and Glyn Duncan together singing “A Man for Christmas.”

EXPAND USE OF VIDEO. It is possible most of my songs could be turned into music videos, with very little effort or expense. There’s the gig-soliciting DVDs to do, too. I’ve been learning how to use the camera better, but I could use a better camera.

THE JOE WEBSITE. So I have to take a Website design class. So what?

WIN A COUPLE MORE SONG CONTESTS (sounds better than “enter song contests”)—targeting them, of course, as carefully as I did the “doing Dylan” one this year.

WRITE IN SOME DIFFERENT GENRES. I haven’t done ragtime yet, and I only have one Norwegian Black/Death Metal song, “Evil Dead Fairies in My Mobile Home.” Apply that to the album’s worth of co-writes I want to do in 2010, too. Keep writing in any event.

BECOME A HOUSEHOLD WORD. (Like “toilet paper”? Sure—people spend money on toilet paper.) Be involved in things where I can help people—targeting, again, situations where what I know and can do can be put to the most efficient use. Like fellow songwriter Bobbie Gallup says, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows YOU.”

GET MORE PEOPLE PLAYING MY STUFF. I haven’t a clue how to do this, but it probably ties into the getting-better-known item above. In 2009, one of my songs (“Rotten Candy”) got recorded by the incomparable Polly Hager, and two others are being performed by other folks, and it is because they knew me. How much more of that I can do depends on how well known I am.

TEACH A SONGWRITING CLASS. No clue how to arrange this, either, but I think I’m ready. The Worklist should always include new tasks, even if the old ones aren’t quite done.

I hardly need to add PLAY WITH MORE PEOPLE, but I will. “Deathgrass” may not be able to do concerts for a while, because John will be busy with the city budget, but that shouldn’t prevent me from playing other places. I do know musicians to the east and south, and a fellow to the north trying to assemble a band. I’d like to arrange a St. Leif’s Day concert (March 29).

And there—tentatively—is the Worklist for 2010. Like they said in that Disney movie, “Bring it on.”

Joe

CHRISTMAS CONCERT POST-MORTEM...

The Christmas concert was good. We actually filled most of the chairs in the hall (briefly), and raised a lot of food for the Food Pantry—some cash money, too. Both Doc (blues harp) and Mike (lead guitar) said they want to do it again—and I told them both that could probably be arranged.

Roughly half the people who came were folks I didn’t know, which means they either saw the ads, heard the radio interviews, or heard about the concert from other people. I hope we made some fans. And the rest I did know, and I’m glad they came. We were competing with a number of other Yuletide events, including one right in Garibaldi (at one of the churches) and two in nearby Bay City (5 miles away). Some folks dropped off food and didn’t stay.

They were a generally elderly audience (it’s a generally elderly population), so no dancers; I did see toes tapping, however. Santa made an appearance (I’d talked to him earlier, and told him that would be okay, as long as he didn’t show up while we were playing “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up”), sporting a big red and white umbrella (because it was raining), and Pastor Barry, proprietor of the Food Pantry, stopped by, too, taking a break from the Christmas program at his church.

Our experiment with the sound did work. Setting the band up against one of the concrete-block walls, projecting towards the kitchen (the one wall that isn’t concrete block) and pointing the speakers slightly inward, did produce a much clearer sound. All the people I asked—fans and strangers—said it sounded good. My voice lasted the whole two hours, with infrequent sips of water, and so did my fingers. Two hours is about the limit, though. (Drummer Chris faded early, and had to stop; I think he’s still recovering from the flu.)

I hated to take a break in between the first and second hours of the show, but I think it’s essential for the musicians (including me); it’s really not possible to play (and in my case, also sing) more than an hour at a stretch without a rest. The problem is you stand to lose a large part of your audience when you do take a break—and we did here. What’s the solution? Refreshments, maybe—if there was coffee, juice, cookies, &c., maybe people would stick around to partake, and then feel guilty about not having left when they had the chance. I’ll have to try it.

Judgments on the material: “The Dog’s Song” is hard to sing unless we play it real slow—but we can’t play it slow because it’s got so many words. I either have to figure out a different key for it or not do it. “Test Tube Baby” was a definite hit; we ended up playing it way too fast (my fault, because I start these things off and the rest of the band follows)—but it worked: it wasn’t too hard to play or sing, either. We should continue doing it that way. “Rotten Candy” was fast, too—but I know it sounds good fast; the important thing is to get the stops just before the choruses just right, and they were perfect. (Such good musicians. I am honored to be able to play with them.)

I think people’s favorites among the Other Writers’ Stuff were Stan Good’s “Un-Easy Street” (a consistent hit) and Gem Watson’s “Final Payment,” and among my stuff, “Armadillo on the Interstate,” “Bluebird on My Windshield,” “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas” (of course), “Tillamook Railroad Blues,” and the new Christmas song, “Even Roadkill Gets the Blues.” The roadkill song is so over-the-top sad I don’t think anyone takes it seriously. (I notice four of the abovementioned top five are dead-animal songs.)

Next steps? I don’t have any gigs on the horizon (it is probably too much to hope that somebody would call us after this one to hire us to play somewhere, but you never know). Failing anything else, I’d like to finish the album. (That’s going to be on the 2010 Worklist.) I’ll thank everybody profusely, and see how much people talk about how good the concert was. Hopefully, a lot of people will say it was.

Joe

CHRISTMAS POTLUCK POST-MORTEM...

General judgment of the folks who put on the City-Port Christmas Potluck is they liked everything exactly the way it was, and they’d like to do it again next year. Including having us (John on bass, me on guitar, Bruce on keyboard, and city councilmember Terry Kandle on fiddle—drummer Chris was sick) play music.

I would make a few changes with respect to the music. First, we need more practice, of course; we really needed to play together more than once before we went on stage. Second, we should be consistently rapid-fire—it’s not necessary to do a Rap between songs like I do, but if you don’t, you should be launching into the next song before the applause dies down. Bruce and I should alternate more, too, so there’s less of a contrast between styles. Third, we should be better organized—no hunting for music, and no last-minute changes, either. We know exactly what we’re going to play, and how we’re going to play it, and we don’t deviate from it.

Fourth is the sound. Some folks said the vocals were “mushy” and hard to hear; a lot of that is because of the room—City Hall’s Dance Floor is a rotten acoustic space, a big square room (built in the 1940s) with echoey cinderblock walls and a low, false ceiling of absorbent tile. And the little stage is in one corner (uck)—the only place in the room that has any electric outlets (double uck). John and I decided to try an experiment with the “Deathgrass” Christmas concert: we’ll ignore the stage, and run extension cords for the power, and put the band up against one wall, facing the kitchen (where the wall is made out of less-reflective sheetrock and has openings), and point the speakers slightly inwards to minimize sound bouncing off the side walls. We’ll see how well that works.

IN THE GOOD NEWS DEPARTMENT, I got to see a video of Randy MacNeil and the Whitney Pier Cowboys’ performance in concert of “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up.” They’re from up in Canada. Their rendition of the song has fiddle and piano leads, and harmonies on the chorus—they did a fine job. (And they mentioned my name as the author. Thanks, guys.) And I hear Lorelei Loveridge, over in England, is practicing “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire” so she can do it in concert—and reportedly other people are interested, too. As noted before, that’s success for the writer in the Modern Era—other people performing your stuff.

So how does one take advantage of this? Well, the Canadian band will get a copy of the Songbook (Lorelei already got one), and as I come up with stuff that I think would fit those folks’ style, I’ll tell them about it. Low-key, of course—I don’t want to be annoying, but I do want it understood that all my stuff is available, and it’s free. I’m trying to establish a reputation as a writer, and the way you do that is by other people playing your stuff. I want to create among musicians the kind of “rep” I seem to be acquiring locally—I had one Lions Club person tell me recently, “Everybody I talk to seems to know who you are, and what you do.”

This morning’s radio interview was good, too; got pledges of 100 cans of food for the Food Pantry during the broadcast, and I hope there was more after I was off the air. We are going to define the success of the Christmas concert in terms of how much food we can raise for the Food Pantry, and I hope we get a lot. As this is written, the Failed Economy Christmas Show is less than 24 hours away.

Joe

TWO DAYS TILL THE CHRISTMAS SHOW...

Almost time to publish the 2010 Worklist; I’ll hold off one or two more issues of the blog, though, and let the Christmas concert get out of the way. Updates, first.

The “I see dead things” sweatshirt came out good—I only had to re-print the design four times to get that right, but it ironed on the sweatshirt just fine. I can wear it Saturday night at the Christmas show—if I dare. Lorelei, Polly, Beth and Joanne got their Joe Songbook packages; I have some more to make, but I need more labels (I can get those Friday, when I go into town to help daughter move). Whitney and Dawn, the ringleaders of Life’s SubtleTease, the burlesque troupe, are interested in doing another show (yay!).

I found normal guitar tablature for most of Bruce’s Christmas Potluck songs, and transposed them into the keys he sings ‘em in. I was sure it existed after I looked at Bruce’s sheet music for the Elvis song “Blue Christmas,” and found that full of diminished-ninths and flatted-elevenths and other “fruity” stuff, too—and I know the King didn’t use chords of more than one syllable, because I’ve seen him play on TV. (And I can play “Blue Christmas” myself using only four one-syllable chords.) Same for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—it has only three chords, and there’s not a diminished-ninth among them.

The only song I couldn’t find normal tablature for was “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (not surprising, since it’s a Perry Como song—but why is Perry Como listed on the Internet as a “country guitarist”?).

And the Christmas Potluck gig did come across mostly okay. Bruce sang some, and I sang some; I think I do a better job of working a crowd, but that may be the result of my own paranoia—I don’t want to risk losing the audience’s attention, so I never give them a chance. My stuff is a little less conventional, and I noticed they were listening. Biggest hit of the evening (I was told so) was my rendition of “Santa, Baby.” I even got a scarf and bling-bling (from two ladies in the audience) to wear while I was singing it.

We were missing Chris the drummer; he’s been sick, and we hope he’ll be back in order by Saturday’s Christmas Show. There is no way to tell. This flu season has been real hard on a lot of people.

No word from the Tillamook Revitalization group, which I assume means I did not get the job. (Too bad; it would have been fun, I think, even though the pay would have been absolutely awful.) It’s okay; I’ve got a couple of applications in the pipeline (both city manager jobs, of all things) and a couple more to apply for. Come January, though, I think I might as well become a full-time student if I can figure out a way to afford the classes (and keep the mortgage paid); I am not doing anything productive spinning my wheels applying for jobs nobody wants me for.

I have decided—we’ll see how well I can pull it off—that I’m going to stop being dependent on the vagaries of reality. No, that’s not a return to the Glorious ‘60s (I lived a very sedate, normal kid’s life in the ‘60s, anyway); rather, I mean I’ll just go ahead and plan what I want to do, rather than waiting to see what happens with a job or anything else. If I want to go to Nashville for a week next summer (one of the things that was going to end up on the Worklist again), I’ll simply plan on it, and save up for it—and if Divine Intervention wants to throw any curve balls my way, I’ll deal with them as (and if) they happen.

I have developed (or re-developed) a number of things I can do—writing, graphic design, music, &c.—and have managed to get (or get back) a little bit of a reputation for it, I think. The Operative Question is whether it can generate an income—I could use one of those. Probably that should top the 2010 Worklist: “Figure out how to make a living off this stuff.”

Joe

MORE PRACTICE...

Practice with “Deathgrass” Saturday, and with what I think of as “Bruce’s band” (that’s Chris, John, and me, plus Bruce on keyboard) Sunday. As this is written, there are two days until we (Bruce’s band) perform at the City-Port Christmas potluck, four days till the second radio interview promoting the “Deathgrass” Christmas Show, and five days until the Show. Suddenly, time is flyin’ way too fast.

For the Christmas show, “Deathgrass” is ready. We went through the second half of the setlist, and every single song was good. Re-did “Test Tube Baby” to incorporate a few more Elvis touches, too. It’s tempting to have nightmares about people not showing up, but drummer Chris is right: it’s too late to worry about that—what happens, happens, and the important part is our being ready (which we are) and having fun (which I have no doubt we will do). Santa has promised to make an appearance, and so has Pastor Barry, proprietor of the Food Pantry. I’ve gotten apologetic e-mails from our local state representative (who is sending a donation), and our state senator and Congressman (who are not); Oregon’s two U.S. Senators have not deigned to respond (they didn’t last time, either).

With Bruce’s band, it’s mostly me that needs the work, I think. Bruce is a good musician, and a good bandleader, too, and John and Chris can both follow him easily, because they’re good, too. I will have to practice some to keep up. A lot of Bruce’s music is very jazzy, full of ninths and diminisheds, and flatted-elevenths and such ilk, and I’ll have to look a lot of those chords up (and download sheet music for the songs). Bruce does have a setlist (good) for the rough hour of music we’re going to do, and I’ve had him e-mail me what key they’re in (because I can’t tell, being mostly tone-deaf), so I can spend the next couple of days practicing.

The potluck set is all Christmas music, and does include three songs I sing (two of which I wrote): “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas” (of course) and “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up,” plus “Santa, Baby,” which Eartha Kitt made famous. For some reason, that one’s been getting requested a lot this Christmas season. (I’m sure it’s not because of my sexy singing voice.) Bruce wants me to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” and I think I can do it. It’s in my voice range.

Another video idea: I noticed some people on Facebook (at least, I think they were people—you can’t ever tell with the Internet) gushing over the antics of their kittens. If I could get about five minutes’ footage—nice and clear—of a kitten doing generally destructive kitten things, that’s all I’d need to make a music video of “The Dog’s Song.” For the Rap, I could use still photos of Amy, our now-deceased big (4-1/2 feet at the shoulder) Doberman, who was kind of my role model for the dog in the song. Same technique I used in “Me and Rufus, and Burnin’ Down the House,” only (hopefully) better quality.

I had wanted “The Dog’s Song” to be on the Southern Pigfish album, and I want all the Southern Pigfish songs to be videos; that’s the album I want to release on flash drive rather than CD. I’d still like to use one of Mike Simpson’s middle-school bands to “play” Southern Pigfish on the videos, but it really doesn’t matter; since the players don’t really need to be identified, it could be anybody. Alternatively, one could take the same approach as the Grateful Dead—they were simply never photographed, for years. I never knew what they looked like until I saw them in concert. A similar “mystique” would work for Southern Pigfish. How can you photograph a band that doesn’t exist?

Joe

TO DO: DVDS & A WEBSITE...

One way to keep warm while it’s bitterly cold outside is to clean; got daughter, cousin and daughter’s boyfriend coming this weekend, and wanted to be partway presentable. So I verified the upstairs does have a floor, and it is now clean, and things are organized and put away. Job interview this afternoon, music at City Hall tonight, band practice Saturday, and practice again on Sunday with Chris (drums), John (bass), and Bruce (keyboard)—we’ve been invited to play at the City-Port Christmas potluck Dec. 16, three days before the big Christmas concert, and none of us have ever played with Bruce before.

Turns out our newest Port Commissioner is a personal friend of Jane Scott (the video lady), which I found out when I covered the Port Commission meeting for the paper—so Port Commissioner Sarah got a Christmas concert flyer to pass on to Jane, who hasn’t been returning phone calls. Still a couple more newspapers I can e-mail flyers and press releases to, though time is getting short; as this is written, the concert is only eight days away.

I found (while doing some housecleaning of my own) complete copies—printed both sides—of the old “Joe is Great!” brochure. The back side, which I was missing before, has a panel of cogent quotes from reviewers, which I’ll probably keep, the famous “Wanted in 6 states for playing bad country music” poster-turned-logo designed by my daughter, and a photo of me with the impromptu band that won a band scramble contest at one of the “Moograss” bluegrass festivals (we were paid in cheese). I’d probably substitute a photo of “Deathgrass”—I’ve got a good one—but the layout of the brochure is good, and doesn’t need to be changed. I hate re-inventing things, anyway.

I don’t have an immediate need for the “Joe is Great!” brochure, but Getting Heard, my 1970s “operating manual” for working bands, says I should have one. It’s just one of the tools I need to have in my toolbox, along with CDs (check), 8x10 glossy promotional photo (check), letterhead (check) and business cards (check). I’d add one more tool, that hadn’t yet been invented when the manual was written, and that’s DVDs. If you’re soliciting gigs, what better way to tell somebody what a live performance by you or your band is like than to say, “Watch this”?

I have DVDs of the two public-television shows of my stuff the Southern Oregon Songwriters Assn. arranged in Ashland, but I don’t have a way to copy them (yet—I do have a DVD-R drive for “Alice,” that I haven’t installed). What would be ideal, though, would be a couple of video clips (one song, if necessary), filmed before a live audience, one clip with me playing solo, and one with the band. A couple of solo performances by me have been videotaped in the past, at the Bay City Arts Center, but I’ve never seen the tapes (though I’ve asked). And if Jane would videotape the Christmas concert, I’d have video of the band.

That’s something that needs to be on the 2010 work list—VIDEO. I want the performance videos above, and also music videos done of some of my songs. I am anxious to try out the technique I think I puzzled out—recording the song first, and then having the band lip-synch (and finger-synch) to it. A few of my songs lend themselves really well to videography; for the rest, filming a performance by the band probably works well enough. One can be tastefully restrained—Porter Wagoner’s “Committed to Parkview” was just shot in what looked like an abandoned nursing home, with no special effects at all. (It was even in black and white.)

Oh, and a Joe Website—that’s another 21st-century item that wasn’t in the 1970s operating manual. I already have most of the pieces: the “joelist” of e-mail addresses, a couple of OMDs where songs are archived, and the blog. I need to create a “clearinghouse” with links to all those things, plus some photos and a “push here to play a song” button. I saw one musician’s Website that had a “love board” (I don’t think they called it that) where people could leave nice comments; I’d like one of those, too. The Website may be my biggest task of the new year.

Joe

PRACTICE WITH THE BAND...

Practice yesterday with the band. We got through 14 of the 24 songs in 2-1/2 hours. Every single one was good, and some were perfect. In each case, I found myself thinking, “This here is what it’s supposed to sound like.” A 5-piece band—drums, bass, rhythm guitar, “whiny” lead (harmonica) and “non-whiny” lead (guitar), is ideal, I think. Those who come to the Failed Economy Christmas Concert are going to get one heck of a show. We practice again next Saturday. It’d probably be good to have one more practice besides that before Gig Day, but I don’t know if folks’ work schedules will permit it.

The primary value of the practices, besides encouraging me that we’re going to be okay, is it gives everybody a feel for everybody else’s capabilities; I just give ‘em free rein to put their own “spin” on things, and applaud what comes out good (I end up applauding a lot). They don’t need much practice with the material per se, because (1) they are very good, and (2) they have what drummer Chris calls “the homework”—the CDs, setlists, and (for the new guys) lyric sheets with chords. I have noticed they use them. Since I have to have everything organized in advance, the CDs have recordings (draft in some cases, just done on the Tascam) of the songs on the setlist, in the order we’re going to play them, recorded pretty much the way we’re going to play them, because I have thought all that out in advance. We might make some changes as we go along—we’ve done that a couple of times—but we may not.

I don’t know if other bands do this. If they don’t, I wonder why. It sure does minimize the amount of time needed for practice, and that’s important when one is dealing with busy people. (I regularly remind these guys I’m the only one with a lot of free time. I’m unemployed. They’re not.)

We have also developed fairly established patterns. We have started off every show with “Dead Things in the Shower”; it’s a good high-energy piece, and the band falls into it easily. We also finish (the first set, if it’s a long show, or the show, if it’s a short one) with “Un-Easy Street”; it’s a danceable two-step—with a message, no less—that leaves the audience anxious for more. (If you’re about to have a break, you want the audience sticking around for more.) We’ll finish a two-hour concert like this one with “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” the Woody Guthrie tune that the Grateful Dead made famous; they used it as their closing song, too.

I try to keep a constant injection of new stuff—but not a lot: we’ll be doing four new songs at the Christmas concert: two rock ‘n’ roll (“Test Tube Baby” and “The Dog’s Song”), one bluegrass (“Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up”), and one slow and sleazy two-step (“Even Roadkill Gets the Blues,” the Christmas song that doesn’t get played much).

Still to do for the concert: notices to the local Congressman and Senators (by letter), and to the local state legislators (by e-mail); none of them came last time, but it’s cheap and easy to tell them about the show. Press releases to the newspaper I write for, and to a couple of others, are mostly done—they just need to be tweaked a little to make them perfect. The Food Pantry got 50 copies of the poster to put in last week’s food boxes, and I take more posters with me to hand out to local businesses everywhere I go.

I’ve left a message for Jane Scott Productions (Jane is the one who videotapes the county commissioners’ meetings, and a couple of city councils—her stuff is aired on the cable TV system that covers two counties), but no answer back; I’ve noticed she doesn’t check messages very often, and I may have to catch her in person at one of the meetings she’s videotaping. Nothing in Oregon Music News—despite the name, they may really be interested only in musical stuff in Portland. (I guess I’ll just ignore them in the future.)

Music Friday this week. Jobs to apply for, too, and a house to clean. I should find a few venues to make brief appearances at, to promote the concert.

Joe

WE WON THE "DOING DYLAN" CONTEST!

BREAKING NEWS… An e-mail from England advised that “No Good Songs About the War” has WON FIRST PRIZE in their “Doing Dylan” contest we entered back this summer. (They wanted to know where to send the prize check for 100 pounds to.) “Deathgrass” (me, John, Dick and Chris) will split it four ways—that was our original arrangement.

Here’s what the judge, John Tams, said:

‘1st “No-one Writes Good Songs About The War.” Ramshackle recording measured against some of the high quality produced offerings. Whilst it holds within it the rough truth-telling of the Carter/Guthrie songbooks it has an economy, topicality and directness that makes this song rise above, most especially to make Katy the heroine. I particularly liked the cyclical ending which took us back to the beginning. I believe Dylan would like this song.’

Ah, that’s nice. Considering that the song was written to prove a point—to show how protest songs are supposed to be written—I guess it proved its point. Now, the Operative Question, as Richard Nixon would say, is how can I parlay this into more business? I’m in contact with a couple of writers in England; I guess the first step is to ask them. The “Doing Dylan” contest appeared pretty small-time, with just one judge (and he not anyone whose name I recognized) and both the entry fee and prize money denominated in British pounds; that’s why I wanted to enter—I like to enter contests I think I can win. (I was surprised to see how many entries they got, and had figured we never had a chance. I guess I was wrong.)

It is, however, fame of a sort—rather like having a song published in The Philippines was last year. If it can’t make any waves in England, it still may be useful for attention-getting in this country. I’ve made sure the radio station DJ who’s interviewing me this Friday about the Failed Economy Christmas Show knows about the award, and I suppose I should put it in the rest of the press releases I send out about the concert. “Deathgrass” may not be the biggest thing to ever hit these parts, but we can sure act like it.

“Song for Polly and Glyn” (subtitled “A Man for Christmas”) is done. Recorded twice, once with my vocal, once without (because Polly wants to sing it, and I’d really like her to), and sent lyrics and recordings to Polly. I can tell it’s an okay song, because I keep wanting to play the recording. I can’t wait to hear it with Polly’s vocals—but I will wait, of course: it’ll be about a week, I’m told, before she’ll be able to record it.

I think this will be the 2009 Christmas song—I try to have a new one every year, and I think last Christmas was the only year I missed.

It’s tempting to try this one out on a live audience—I bet the womenfolk that come to the Friday Night group’s sessions would like it—but I really shouldn’t be the one doing it. It’d be better if it was performed by Polly and her J.D. Jackson Band. And who knows? She might even find a mate with it.

ELSEWHERE: I am out (again) of slimline cases for my CDs, and there’s nowhere around here that sells them; I’ve augmented my supplies in the past when I’ve gone to the big city for job interviews, but I haven’t had one of those in a long time, either. There’s a new blues jam on Sunday afternoons in Newport, an hour and a half’s drive from here, and I could go shopping while I was at it—I don’t think the band will be practicing that day.

The Songbook I’m just putting in thick CD cases (I have some of those, and can get more locally), and printing fancy front and back cover plates. It does look nice. Tempting to craft fancy front and back plates for the “Santa’s Fallen” CD, too, but there’s probably no point—I’ve done without for four years now, and there’s no good reason to change.

Joe

SKYPE-ING...

There’s a songwriter over in England I’d really like to talk to, and it was suggested I check out Skype, a program for making long-distance calls for free with the computer. Yes, “Alice” the ‘puter has the brains to handle Skype (though it would help to have those extra RAM chips installed), and our local version of high-speed Internet should work, even though it’s pretty slow compared to what most people in other areas have. Skype says I need a microphone and a webcam, and I have both, but they were cheap ($1 and $15, respectively) and not very good (and that could always be related to the price).

I used the ‘puter mike briefly, back when I was subscribed to Whitby Shores, the Website started by Canadian deejay Len Amsterdam, but I always had an annoying echo that neither I nor anyone else could figure out how to eliminate. My webcam is one of my worser wastes of money; it works, but the picture quality is horrible. (If I’d gone with the ‘Hello Kitty’ model—just a few dollars more—I could have at least had something decorative.) And I shouldn’t forget that the soundcard itself is an antique—it’s an old Creative Labs SoundBlaster I acquired for free from a computer repair guy after Alice’s onboard sound gave up the ghost about four years ago. “Alice” was never built for music—she was built for graphic design work. (She now has really good speakers, though.)

As I begin dinking (finally) with the computers out in the studio, assembling my three-for-five-bucks units into one good music-and-video computer, I might consider making the new computer I build the “Skype unit.” Odds are the onboard sound on those ex-college computers is way better than Alice’s ancient soundcard, and I have an adapter that will let me use my vocal mike instead of that $1 computer thing. I hadn’t planned on making the new unit an Internettable computer, but I could—“Alice” has the only working network card, but I have a wireless card that may still work, left over from when I was living out of a motel room when I first moved to Phoenix. I still need a decent webcam (Santa? You listening?).

What’s been tentatively titled “A Man for Christmas” now has two verses and a chorus; it needs one more verse, and maybe a bridge. I’m happy with the first verse and the chorus, but am still not sure about the second verse. The song is intended as a gift for fellow writers Polly Hager and Glynda Duncan, both of whom have been making “What’s it take to get a man around here?” noises lately. Having told them both there was a song in it, I now need to demonstrate what I meant.

It is rock ‘n’ roll, of course (folk-rock, actually), because that was in the parameters I set for myself—but I do seem to have defaulted to the same rhythm I used in “The Dog’s Song,” and I don’t want the two being that close. The chord progression in the verses is at least different, and if I record “A Man for Christmas” in a different key (forcing me to play it differently on the guitar), it might sound different enough to be okay.

ELSEWHERE: Three weeks until the Christmas concert—notice has gone out to the “joelist” and to Facebook, but I still need to do the press releases for the newspapers and for Oregon Music News (as an experiment—we’ll see if OMN really are only interested in events in Portland), and there are still more posters to distribute (I’ve been taking some with me everywhere I go). Band practice is scheduled for next Saturday, and our first radio spot (of two) is Friday morning. And it’s time to make copies of the Joe Songbook on CD. There are jobs to apply for, too—several of them, in fact. I just wish I felt more hopeful about the results.

Joe

A PUBLISHER, AGAIN...

Hope everyone within earshot (or eyeshot) had a good Thanksgiving. I baked a whole salmon (traditional), so there’s a lot left; I’ll be making salmon quiche, and salmon fried rice, and other things, out of the carcass for a few days.

There is a Nashville music publisher that apparently came up with the same idea I did, of marketing the songs of unknown writers to regionally well-known artists looking for material—bypassing the Big Boys and the Big Record Companies that aren’t interested in new material anyway. So I’ve been invited (along with a lot of other writers) to send them stuff.

I have no idea who the regionally well-known artists might be. It’s possible the publisher doesn’t know, either; if I were doing this, I’d assemble the library of available songs first, and then go find the artists, and that may be what’s happening here.

What to send? “Rotten Candy,” of course; it’s the most “mainstream” of all the songs I’ve written. “Crosses by the Roadside,” too, even though this publisher is one of the ones that rejected the song earlier (at the time, they were looking only at Big Name Stars as clients, though, and this might be different). Beyond that, I don’t know. I have three songs that I know are being performed in other places by other people, and I could include them: “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas,” “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up,” and “Bluebird on My Windshield.” The first two are obviously seasonal in appeal. Tempting to include the Southern Pigfish song “For Their Own Ends,” too, because just about everybody who’s heard it likes it (I have no idea why).

The collabs, now… There are several of those I could envision being performed by other people or other bands, in either small venues or on big stages: Stan Good’s “Don’t Remind Me You’re On My Mind,” Diane Ewing’s “Distraction,” Marge McKinnis’ “About Love,” Stan Good’s “Un-Easy Street” and Skip Johnson’s “Tune the Strings of My Soul.” I would want the authors’ okay before I submitted anything (though I half expect they’d say yes). Of those, “Un-Easy Street” is the only one being performed in public, but that’s by our band; on the other hand, the reason we’ve been performing it every concert is people like it a lot, and it gets them out of their chairs and dancing.

More “one hand/other hand” considerations: I don’t know for sure if the publisher guy’s legit—he acts legit (a lot of presumed publishers do not), and hasn’t been after money (publishers work on commission, and aren’t supposed to ask for money), and I’ve reviewed (and think I understand) the “licensing” arrangement being proposed for songs in the “library,” and it doesn’t seem to be tying up the material so it couldn’t be pitched to or recorded by someone else. He hasn’t been “gushy” about my material, either (I would consider gushiness a sure sign of illegitmacy).

I am inclined to try things out as experiments on myself, to see how well (or if) they work—but I’m not always the best guinea pig. I am aware that a lot of what I write appeals to a “niche” market; yes, it gets performed a lot, but it’s mostly being performed by me. Would people come (and pay) to hear anyone else perform those songs? Like I told people when I suggested “Serial Killer Starter Kits” (small shovels, knife, lye, cleaning supplies) might be popular Christmas gifts, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

Music tonight at City Hall; practice tomorrow with the band—we’ll have all five of us in one place at the same time, finally. Press releases about the Christmas concert to do for a couple of newspapers (including the local one I write the weekly column for). No Santa gigs this Christmas season—I guess I’ve lost too much weight to be a good fit for the part.

Joe

CHRISTMAS ROCK?

Well, part of the Tascam’s problem was a dying power adapter, and I was able to get a Radio Shack replacement. The Tascam still has Volume Issues,.and I need to dump all my mixes into Audacity these days and boost the volume. My biggest headache, though, is my favorite soundhole pickup in the guitar—the one that makes the acoustic guitar sound like an acoustic guitar—is about dead, and I don’t have a replacement. (John has been miking my guitar at all our shows since July.)

Nonetheless, by being very, very careful about how and where I stood (I usually don’t need to worry about moving, because I tend to be motionless when I play, in order to not stray from the mike), I was able to get the rhythm, lead, and bass parts, along with my vocal, recorded for Stan Good’s “One More Time,” my latest musication effort. It’s a serious song—Stan, like me, doesn’t often write serious stuff, so the serious ones really get your attention. Since the song could be sung by either a guy or a girl, I suggested we do both, and make it a duet. And the girl’s part is going to be sung by none other than Polly Hager! I am honored. It has been said that if Linda Ronstadt were going to be reincarnated as a higher life form, it’d be as Polly Hager.

So the recording, with my vocal “bits,” has been sent off to Polly. And I am anxious to hear the result.

It was Polly who suggested I write a Christmas rock song (she normally does rock music), and it is an interesting challenge. Rock has very minimalist lyrics (my “Test Tube Baby” probably uses less than 50 words, despite being four minutes long), and Christmas songs are stuck with an extremely limited “stable” of imagery to boot—there’s the Santa stuff, and the winter stuff, and the baby Jesus stuff, and not a lot else. Can one take those limitations and write something new? (I have done it three times, but it was country or bluegrass music, not rock.) And the fans will want their usual dose of dead things, Christmas or not (and I’ll hear about it if I don’t put them in).

It might well be filling a void (and that is normally how these projects start). I’m not sure there are any good Christmas rock songs. The only ones that come to mind—“Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—are pretty poor songs. They may get played a lot around Christmastime because there really isn’t much else.

Since I don’t know where to start, really, it may help to resort to first principles. There are four elements to a song—Genre, Subject, Style, and Point of View—and one can mix them up to make things interesting. If I were teaching a class, that’s how I’d start the kids off, I think—draw elements out of hats, and say, “Okay, what can you do with this?” That was how I got “The Dog’s Song”: it was deliberately a country (genre) love song (subject) in the style of The Ramones (style) from the point of view of the dog (point of view). So we could have (for instance) a rock ‘n’ roll Christmas song in the style of (say) Woody Guthrie from the point of view of… the reindeer? Maybe. It’d be an opportunity to deliver a few caustic comments on the economy and politics that people could dance to. Sounds like another Southern Pigfish song, in fact.

Music Friday this week; I’ll miss music at the library on Saturday because the band is practicing at the same time. It’ll be the first time all five of us have played together, and I am curious what we sound like. I haven’t heard back from the Oregon Music News people; it is quite possible they’re really not interested in any music scene outside Portland (despite advertising for a writer on the Coast). And I’ve been corresponding with a fellow an hour’s drive to the north of here, and one an hour’s drive to the south, both still trying to put together local bands and not having much success at it. It’d be nice to meet them both in person.

Joe

WHAT I DID (AND DIDN'T DO) IN 2009...

It was about this time last year that I did the “Year in Review” assessment, to see how many (or how few) of the year’s goals I had managed to accomplish. In 2009, I didn’t do well. I think I spent most of the year waiting for something to happen, and it never did, and if there’s a plus in that, it’s that I finally figured out there’s no point in waiting, and I just have to move on. What I’ve accomplished that was on the list:

FIND/CREATE A BAND. Did that. “Deathgrass” are the best group of musicians I have ever played with, and they want to keep playing together. (And we’re doing mostly my stuff. This is cool.) I did okay in the WRITE department, too—10 new “keepers” thus far this year, plus a dozen musications of others’ lyrics. I did PERFORM ONCE A WEEK, if you count the sessions at the library and with the Friday Night Group; actually, the band’s been doing a concert about every two months, and I’ve had a solo gig about once a month. My attempt to crack the Portland market, both solo and with a band, did not work out, however—it was a waste of time and money, and I see no point in continuing. I learned how to DO VIDEO; the three experiments I did taught me the limitations of my equipment, which are not excessive, and how to get a good product. (The experimental videos also got a little cult following.) I’m ready to try a real music video now.

I did SIGN UP WITH BMI, as a writer (which was free), but not as a publisher (which costs money); I will need to sign up as a publisher for release of the next album, because it will have a couple of co-writes on it with published writers. Didn’t FINISH THE NEXT ALBUM, but we are working on it. Got the band (“Deathgrass”), got a good sound engineer with good equipment (John), and one song is “in the can.” I am inclined to let that take its course—it’s working out the way I’d like it to, even though it’s doing it slowly.

I managed to STAY IN TOUCH WITH EVERYBODY, too, I think, despite not traveling much. More travel next year. One group I need to add to the “must stay in touch with” list is the city managers I used to work with, because I won’t be doing that kind of work again, at least for a while. And some of them are fans, and some are musicians.

I did not FINISH THE SOUTHERN PIGFISH ALBUM, but I got two songs closer; “The Dog’s Song” and “Love Trails of the Zombie Snails” were both “Pigfishies.” I think I know how I want to do the album, but my players haven’t committed yet. The “Doing Dylan” contest in England was the only SONG CONTEST I entered this year, and we didn’t win that. UPGRADE THE RECORDING EQUIPMENT? Nada—my excuse is I couldn’t afford it. (I still hope Santa’s listening. Dude, I have a List…) Ditto for the WEEK IN NASHVILLE.

The CD-BABY ACCOUNT is still deliberately waiting for the new album. For the JOE WEBSITE, I really have no excuse; I’ve started a couple of times, but gave up when I couldn’t produce anything acceptable. I want to take a class in Website design this winter (the community college offers one, and it’s on line).

There were things I did that weren’t on the list (and listing those will help me feel better). I’d done the Joe Songbook last Christmas, but this year I converted it to an “eSongbook” and got production costs down to a reasonable level. I produced an album for somebody else, and managed to make production costs reasonable there, too, even though the thing was (and was intended to be) a gift. I did a couple of PBS shows, too—true, Ashland is a small market, but I never thought anything like that would happen. I performed in a burlesque show—and hooked up with some really neat writers and performers that I hope will continue to tolerate me. I’ve done some graphic-design projects (all for free, to resurrect my reputation, but I’ve finally been invited to bid on a paying one, too). And I’m writing for the local paper—both a column (for four months, now) and (just last week) news stories. And I’ll finally get paid for that, too.

The power has gone out twice while I’ve been writing this (ah, winter on the Oregon Coast), but it hasn’t stopped me from finishing it. I should approach all of life the same way. There are no excuses for not getting things done. You just can’t let things stop you.

Joe

PROMOTING THE CHRISTMAS SHOW...

More Christmas concert promotion: I caught radio station DJ Tommy Boye (Coast105 FM) just as he was finishing his show, and gave him Christmas concert posters; I’m now scheduled for two 15-minute promotional slots, one two weeks before the show, and one the day before. (John suggested he and either Mike or Doc come down with me, and the three of us play “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas” on the air. That’s a great idea. I wonder how we could fit us in Tommy Boye’s little bathroom-sized sound room? Or could they mike us out in the lobby?)

More posters distributed; about the only people not enthusiastic about the show were the local newspaper (I was allowed to put a flyer on their bulletin board, however)—but I mentioned the show in my column I write for the paper. First practice is this Saturday, with John, Chris and Doc. (Mike won’t be there. It’s his birthday.)

I found an outfit called Oregon Music News (they were soliciting on craigslist for a writer); interesting Website, with quite a bit of information. It’s all about the music scene in Portland, though—Portlanders do tend to assume they’re the only part of Oregon that matters—and doesn’t say a word about country music, which I’ve noted before is not a popular genre in Portland, despite being ubiquitous elsewhere. I e-mailed the editor a Christmas concert flyer, and we’ll see what happens.

The Old Mill RV Park says they’re interested in having me play at one of their Christmas bazaars December 11 or 12. That’s a change from last year (they were very much not interested last year), but they also say they’re not paying anybody (and they did pay, last year—they may not have very many performers interested if they don’t want to pay any more). I’ll take them a CD. They say they just want Christmas music, though (again, that wasn’t the case last year), and I can’t give them much of that—nor do I want to.

I have played a lot of places for free, and that’s not going to change. Here, though, I am not so sure it’s a good idea—because they did pay their performers last year. I don’t mind the exposure; I expect I could generate a good crowd, and it’d be a good opportunity to promote the Christmas benefit concert for the Food Pantry the following week. And I might even end up with money in the Big Yellow Bucket, and sell a few CDs—things I’ve never managed to do when I played for free in Portland. On the other hand, a 2-hour solo show is quite a bit of work—I’ll be promoting it, too, because I know they won’t be—and I do not want to get a reputation as the guy who can be counted on to play for free when you were paying everybody else. We will have to talk.

And there’s apparently a band somewhere in Canada that wants to perform “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up.” I told them of course, they can—with my blessings. That’s something that doesn’t happen enough, to me or to other writers. Credibility as a writer entails that your material be performed not just by you, but by other people, and that it still be attracting and pleasing audiences even when it’s not you performing it. Back 30 years ago, if enough other people were performing your stuff, you would get noticed by the music industry and they’d be trying to co-opt you as a writer; these days, with the industry attempting to be a determinedly closed circle, not so much—but it’s still the only way to get noticed as a writer by artists looking for material.

I try to do my part, too, to cover songs by other writers. The Christmas show is going to include songs by Gene Burnett (“Things Are Getting Better Now That Things Are Getting Worse”), Colin Lazzerini and Tom Coleman (“So 20th Century”), Betty Holt (“Our Own little Stimulus Plan”), Stan Good (“Un-Easy Street”), and Gem Watson (“Final Payment”). Somebody needs to be out there saying these guys and gals are good, and encouraging people to listen to their stuff. One of those somebodies is going to be me.

Joe

SONGBOOK AND STRUCTURE...

The 2009 Joe Songbook is done. (Mostly. I’ve found a couple more corrections I can make. I like to be perfect.) The product is a 1.67MB Acrobat (*.pdf) file, that can come on a CD with a cute Depressionistic label if people want. I can sell the CD for five bucks, including mailing, and recover costs. Or e-mail it for free.

(Anyone within earshot (or eyeshot) who’d like one e-mailed for free, contact me through the Usual Outlets and I’ll take care of it. I will need your name and e-mail, of course, and I think we’ll do a trade-off (since things shouldn’t be entirely free or you’ll assume they have no value)—if you do this, I will add you to the “joelist,” if you’re not on it already. Don’t worry—as I routinely tell people at gigs, you’re only going to get notices of gigs, and of when the next CD comes out. So you won’t hear from me a lot unless things get really busy, and you are not going to be bothered with “important news” about what I had for breakfast.)

I was asked how I’m managing to reach this songbook market. I’m not. I don’t think there is a market, really; the only person who’s likely to want a Joe Songbook is another musician who’s interested in performing my stuff, and I think that’s a really limited number of people. I mostly wanted to see if I could do it, and get the production costs down to a reasonable level, and I did that. I expect I will be giving away a dozen or so of the attractively-labeled CDs as Christmas gifts. Sara may want a couple for the county library, and there’s one music-store owner I would like to make sure has one on his shelves.

The primary value of the “eSongbook” may simply be as an example. As noted previously, I do not know of anyone else doing this—but it’s doable (here’s proof). Could I do this for others? Sure, it’s easy; I’d recommend keeping roughly the same format—including a discography, links, and a bio, and peppering the lyrics with lots of photos, in other words—and I’d want everything, including the photos, supplied to me so I didn’t have to spend time either hunting for or creating stuff. (When I ran my own graphic-design shop, I used to charge double for work I had to do that the customers could have done themselves.)

There’s a bigger question being begged here, though. What AM I doing to promote my music? The answer, I’m afraid, is “Not much.” I’m still well-known to only a small group of people. Yes, the fans I have are pretty determined ones—but there’s not a lot of them. And I’ve sold CDs (I’m almost out again)—but again, not a lot of them.

A large part of the “not doing much” problem may stem from the being-unemployed problem. Except for the occasional gig or job interview, my life completely lacks structure: I don’t HAVE to do anything, including eat and get up in the morning; add in a severe paranoia about being rejected (having been rejected for every single job I’ve applied for for 18 months), and I’m encouraged to put just about everything off (not that I needed much encouragement—procrastination has always been one of my strong points).

I did see in a blog by fellow songwriter Vikki Flawith tips for imposing structure on one’s life; the tips were intended for the self-employed, but it seems they’d work equally well for the unemployed. A key point is setting aside blocks of time for certain activities (something I used to do when I was working)—so many hours a day in the studio, for instance. I could expand on that easily, setting aside blocks of time for promotion—and for job applications, even. Doing that stuff simply because “this is the time when I do that stuff” might help defuse the paranoia factor, which has gotten really bothersome.

So I’m up early (high winds and horizontal rain woke me anyway), and I’ll keep to that routine, and since I like to sit at the computer when I first get up to unstiffen my back, I’ll do the Red Queen Thing (“half a dozen impossible things before breakfast”). I do have some promotional things I’ve been putting off (of course). And I took all my rejection letters out to the burn barrel and burned them. I don’t know if that was cathartic or not, but it sure did make a big fire. And as several people have already reminded me, there is probably a song in it.

Joe

RULES FOR WRITING (SORT OF)...

Well, the so-called Big Storm is past—they recorded winds of 89 m.p.h. at the Coast Guard tower, and the power went out four times. We have maybe a day’s respite before the next one (I can see the wall of clouds offshore).

I had someone tell me this week, “Your songs don’t follow that verse-chorus-bridge pattern like you’re supposed to. But they’re good.” It was tempting to applaud them and say, “You got it!” It is not necessary to follow that pattern to write something that’s good. I think the pattern fixation on the part of Nashville “experts” is born partly from not really knowing what makes a good song (“We want something exactly like the last hit, only different”) and partly from gatekeeperness—it is another way to restrict entry to a circle that is intended to remain closed.

What makes a good song? Audiences like ‘em. That’s the only definition of “good” I consider important. There are a handful of rules I try to apply to songs I write. They are rules I made up myself, for myself; I do not know if they’d be applicable to anyone else.

There ought to be a HOOK—it’s the “filename,” to use ‘puter language, that people are going to remember the song by. There’s a TIME FRAME that accommodates people’s short attention spans (I like to keep my songs between 3-1/2 and 5 minutes). It’s a COMPLETE THOUGHT—no loose ends, or unanswered questions. It GETS YOUR ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY, and BUILDS from there. And it’s DIFFERENT: it’s either saying something new, or saying something old in a new way.

Note that pattern didn’t enter into that at all. I’m always experimenting with pattern: I have songs with no choruses (making it a challenge where to put the hook), or with bridges instead of choruses; I have songs where the chorus has the same music as the verses (another no-no), and plenty of songs without bridges—because I consider bridges generally unnecessary. And playing around with pattern helps ensure that every song sounds different—something else I’m insistent about.

I apply the same rules to lyrics I want to musicate. A lot of other folks’ stuff, of course, will be in the “proper” pattern, because they’ve been told it has to be, and I won’t be bothered by it, because it’s their song, not mine. The “proper” pattern is quite capable of producing a good song. (One of mine, “Rotten Candy,” deliberately followed every one of the Nashville Rules as I knew them, and it’s not a bad song. You should hear it sung by Polly Hager.) It’s just not the only way to do it.

The only additional thing I require of “musicatable” lyrics is they HAVE TO SING—I have to be able to hear a melody as I read the words. That doesn’t always happen, even with a well-written piece.

UPDATES: The Songbook “Acrobatted” pretty good (and compressed to 10% of its original size in the process—it ended up only 1.6MB), but there is one problem—Acrobat for some reason doesn’t preserve any underlinings from PageMaker, and when I’m doing lyric sheets, I always underline where the chord changes are. I will have to flag them a different way (italicization, probably)—but it will entail going through all 65 songs and making dozens of little corrections in each one. Otherwise, it’s going to be a good product.

My wife found (while cleaning) a printout of the old “Joe is Great!” brochure I’d designed back in 2005—it was one of the files that got deleted when “Alice” the ‘puter got her Windows XP operating system in 2007. The information is a bit out of date, and I definitely have better concert photos now, but I like the way it starts out: “Dead dogs. (And cats. And birds. And other things.) Injured Santas. Born-again Barbies. The Bible like you never heard it before. Welcome to the songs of Joe Wrabek.” I’d like to include the “Joe is Great!” text in the Songbook, if I can figure out a way to incorporate it without changing all the page numbers.

Joe

UPDATING THE JOE SONGBOOK...

Just finished updating THE JOE SONGBOOK with the 2009 songs. The book is now 103 pages long, with 65 songs (with discography, links and photos—I can’t resist dressing things up). For the record, only 14 of the 65 songs are about dead animals. (Those are still the ones people remember best.)

A copy of the songbook is going off to Lorelei Loveridge in England tomorrow. She said she was interested in performing some of my stuff, and I’m happy to encourage it. I don’t know what (if anything) of my songs she’d like, but the songbook is rather a diverse, “something for everybody” collection. With luck, there’s something for her.

There are only two co-writes in the book—where someone else and I jointly wrote the lyrics, as well as me putting it to music—“Dead Things in the Shower” (with Bobbie Gallup) and “Born Again Barbie” (with Scott Rose). None of the “musications” are in there, because I don’t consider those “my songs”—as far as I’m concerned, the song “belongs” to whoever wrote the lyrics. All I did was provide a delivery system for their excellent lyrics. (And they’re excellent lyrics because I’m not interested in dealing with anything else.)

(There’s a third co-write that’s not in the book—“Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire,” co-written with my daughter Kimberly a couple of years ago. It’s not in there because I really don’t remember the chords. I suppose I will have to puzzle them out again, in case somebody requests it sometime over Christmas. All I remember is I couldn’t do Mel Torme’s music because it was too complicated—all those “fruity” jazz-type chords—so I figured out a country music progression that came close. But I don’t see that I wrote it down anywhere—and writing it down, for me, is the key to remembering it.)

I had originally envisioned the songbook as a saleable item, but production costs ended up way too high; between paper, and ink cartridges for the printer, and a cheap 3-ring binder, I was over five bucks a copy, which meant I’d need to charge ten bucks a copy, and I couldn’t see anybody paying that. Lorelei’s is the third copy I’ve simply given away.

A thought, however: those high production costs were for the songbook in HARD COPY form—printed on paper, in other words. What if it were ELECTRONIC? If I could convert the songbook, which is a gigantic PageMaker file, into an Acrobat (*.pdf) file, and drop it onto a CD (if it’ll fit), I’d have production costs down to a couple of bucks. I’d have an excuse to design a neat label, too. Everybody with a computer and Internet has the free Acrobat Reader program—and I know from experience that the files generated by my old Acrobat program (I have v. 5.0) can be read by the latest version of Acrobat Reader, because I have that. This could work. Is anybody else doing e-songbooks? Not that I know of.

The Christmas Show poster is done; the first copies got distributed yesterday, with many more to do. I want to make sure copies get into the hands of people I’d like to impress with my graphic-design ability (the editors of the two area newspapers, for instance). It is eye-catching; if it’s on a bulletin board with other posters, it’s going to be the one that gets noticed—the rest will fade into the background. And it’s black-and-white—easy to reprint.

We had some of the folks from the 5-1/2 Piece Band from Rockaway at the Library, so I got to try out some new stuff on ‘em. “The Dog’s Song” is a keeper; everybody likes it. Ditto for “Me and Rufus, and Burnin’ Down the House”—though part of its charm, I’m sure, is that librarian Sara likes it, and it was about her house fire. My rendition of “Santa, Baby” came off okay—I’d spent most of the day practicing making my voice drip sultriness—and now I suppose people will be requesting it (it was a small audience, but I’m sure they’ll talk). And I had one lady from the audience ask if “Armadillo on the Interstate” was on a record (which it isn’t—which just reinforces my intention to have it on the next one).

Joe

PLAYING FOR A CHRISTMAS DINNER...

Chris, John and I—what you’d call the core of “Deathgrass,” I guess—have been asked to play at the City and Port of Garibaldi’s Christmas potluck dinner, on 16 December, three days before the Christmas show. We (and our spouses) are all invitees to the dinner: John’s the city administrator, Chris works for the Port, and I’m on the Urban Renewal District’s budget committee. We’ll have a keyboard player—Bruce, the husband of Mary the city finance officer.

And I’m told these City and Port folks want to hear Christmas songs. I’m still expecting the only one who’s going to be singing is me, and that means we’ll have to have Christmas songs I can sing. There aren’t many. Besides the three of mine, I know “White Christmas” (famoused by Bing Crosby) and “Blue Christmas” (famoused by Elvis); both were done by very good singers, but just happen to be in a narrow range that I can sing.

I found a couple of others. There’s a blues number Elvis did on one of his later Christmas albums (during his let’s-see-how-many-drugs-we-can-take-before-we-pass-out period) that was really cute, if a little raunchy, and I found the lyrics; hight “Santa Claus Is Back in Town,” it was originally done by a band called The Mavericks, and I can sing it. I found I can also sing “Santa Baby,” which Eartha Kitt made famous—yes, another one of those songs that really needs to be sung by a girl. After recording Polly Hager’s “Cougars and Cub Scouts,” which came across, somebody said, like “Hugh Hefner drooling over the pool boy,” I’m quite comfortable doing “Santa Baby.” I wonder how a generally staid audience would take it.

One traditional Christmas carol I know I can play (but am not sure I can sing) is “Silent Night.” A couple of years ago, I worked out a lead to it on the banjo (and I now have an Electric Banjo)—just out of perversity, because “Silent Night” was originally written for the guitar. I also found you can make “Silent Night” really danceable (and still recognizable) if it’s played as a two-step instead of a waltz. I should probably include it just for shock value (as if the audience weren’t going to be shocked enough).

And there’s the song daughter Kimberly and I co-wrote, “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire.” I think everybody’ll recognize the old Mel Torme melody, even though that’s not what I’m playing—I had to do it as country music, because I couldn’t play those jazz chords. However, I bet if the keyboard player were picking (or whatever it is keyboard players do) the Mel Torme notes, they’d pretty much fit the chords I’m playing. I did get real close—deliberately.

We’ll have to do my Christmas songs, of course—I know I can sing those. I figure people would request “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas” if we didn’t play it, so we’ll play it and save them the trouble. I don’t know if they’d request “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up,” so we’ll play it and avoid the question. And most of them have not heard “(This Time of Year) Even Roadkill Gets the Blues.”

So… three of mine, one co-write, one traditional Christmas carol, and four covers (three of them recognizable Christmas hits)--two Elvises, one Bing, and one Eartha Kitt. That’s 40 minutes. I wonder how long they want us to play for?

On other fronts: the Christmas Show poster is done—I did use the Depression-era photo of the kids gathered around the scraggly-looking little fir tree, and it came out okay. I’ll show it around a bit before distributing it. And the newspaper wants me to start covering Garibaldi City Council meetings. They’re paying only a pittance, but it’s a pittance more than I had. And I’m getting paid for writing. How cool is that?

Joe

THE CHRISTMAS SHOW IS ON!

I think the Failed Economy Christmas show is a go. Setlist is done, the Rap is done, and we have a lead guitarist—Mike Simpson, the music teacher for the school district. (Mike was the organizer of last month’s “Rocktoberfest,” and has trained a couple of neat middle-school rock bands.) And we have “Doc” Wagner—probably the best blues harp player in the Northwest. I think it’ll be one heck of a show. Wish we could record it.

I delivered CDs and setlists to everybody today (with lyrics for those not familiar with the material). No luck—at least, right now—at re-recording “Test Tube Baby” in a key I can sing it in (the recordings I have are both in A, and I want to do it in E); the old soundhole pickup keeps cutting out. Hey, Santa—if you’re handing out gifts to the possibly undeserving this year, I have a list…

Assembling the Christmas setlist was an opportunity to listen to some stuff I’d done on the Tascam a year ago, and I can tell I’ve become a better guitar player over 12 months’ time (and if I notice, it’s got to be obvious). It’s nice to know my unemployed period has been good for something.

Making the setlist CDs was also an opportunity to use “Alice” the ‘puter’s Audacity program for more than just generating click tracks and adding sound effects. A number of my recent recordings on the Tascam have come out at really low volume (that may mean the old Tascam itself is wearing out—Santa? Are you listening?), but I was able to dump the recordings into Audacity and boost the volume to what might be “normal” levels. I used it to equalize the volumes on all the tracks on the CD while I was at it. I think when this is done by a professional, it’s “mastering.” I’m not sure what you’d call it when I do it.

Audacity also has a nice feature that lets you change the tempo of a song without changing the key. I used that on the Nashville recording of “Dead Things in the Shower” (the band plays it a lot faster than the record), and also on Gem Watson’s recording of “Test Tube Baby” (because I’ll play that a lot faster, too, when I’m with the band).

I’d like us to get together to practice mid-to-late next week (Doc will be out of town until then). That will hopefully give everybody a chance to at least listen to the stuff. I am curious to see what “spin” everybody puts on it; I may have recorded these songs as country music, but I’m the only “country person” in the band—John (bass) and Chris (drums) have heavy-metal backgrounds, Mike (lead guitar) is rock, and Doc (harmonica) is jazz and blues. The product could be very interesting.

I have the poster to design—I’d like to use the soup kitchen photo I had on the last Failed Economy Show poster, but am not sure how to give it a Christmas theme. I might have to find a different photo. I wonder what sorts of Depression Christmas photos might be out there in Internet-land? I have the radio station DJ to contact about publicity, and Jane Scott Productions to try to enlist in videotaping the show for re-broadcast on cable TV (in two counties—it’d be nice if we could get that). And a little over four weeks in which to turn this into the Biggest Event of the Season.

Music this week at City Hall (Friday) and the library (Saturday); the ArtSpace Restaurant in Bay City is open again, and I should take them one of my CDs. The Old Mill RV Park is about to start their Christmas bazaars again, too, and I should hit them up to be part of their live music (they do pay), even though they flatly rejected me last year. I should be used to rejection by now.

Joe

CHRISTMAS SHOW SETLIST?

Here’s a tentative setlist for the Christmas show:

SET #1 (12 SONGS):
Dead Things in the Shower (fast two-step, in C)
Armadillo on the Interstate (slow & sleazy, in C)
[NEW] Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up (fast bluegrass, in C)
Tillamook Railroad Blues (deliberate blues, in D)
Things Are Getting Better Now That Things Are Getting Worse—Burnett (fast two-step, in C)
Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues (slow & sleazy quasi-blues, in C)
For Their Own Ends—Southern Pigfish (folk-rock, in E)
Duct Tape (mod. fast two-step, in C)
Bluebird on My Windshield (fast bluegrass, in C)
[NEW] Test Tube Baby (Elvis-style rock ‘n’ roll, in E)
Bungee Jumpin’ Jesus (mod. fast Gospel, in C)
Un-Easy Street (mod. two-step, in C)

SET #2 (11 SONGS):
[NEW] The Dog’s Song (rock ‘n’ roll, in E)
Hey, Little Chicken (mod. slow quasi-blues, in C)
When I Jump Off the Cliff I’ll Think of You (fast bluegrass, in C)
Our Own Little Stimulus Plan—Holt (Buddy Holly-style rock ‘n’ roll, in D)
[NEW] Even Roadkill Gets the Blues (slow two-step, in C)
So 20th Century—Coleman/Lazzerini (ragtime, in G)
Free-Range Person (fast bluegrass, in C)
Final Payment—Watson (mod. two-step, in G)
Rotten Candy (fast Gospel, in C)
I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas (slow & sleazy, in C)
Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad (fast bluegrass, in C)

Some bluegrass, some rock ‘n’ roll, a little blues, a little ragtime, and a lot of country. Eight tunes from the Failed Economy Show, the rest “Joe songs”—most of them known crowd-pleasers. Includes three Christmas songs (all by me), and one song by Woody Guthrie (with a nod to the Grateful Dead, who made it famous). I’ll put ‘em all onto a couple of CDs and hear how the package sounds.

There are four songs on the list that the band has not played before. Two are Christmas songs; the other two are pretty traditional rock ‘n’ roll. I worried about “Even Roadkill Gets the Blues”—there’s a band back East somewhere that usually does my songs around Christmas season, but they didn’t want to play that one because they thought it was too sad (the lyrics are very dark—I was unemployed at the time, and not feeling at all good about it). So I played it for the Friday Night Group and asked their opinion. They were teary-eyed, all right—but from laughing. I think the song comes across as too over-the-top—especially coming from me—to be taken seriously. It’ll be okay.

Thanks to the awful weather, Saturday’s thing at the library drew only four musicians, including me, and the other three were all really good, and there was virtually no audience, so we got to do fun stuff. For me, that was “The Strange Saga of Quoth, the Parrot” (never played in public before), “Me and Rufus, and Burning Down the House” (for librarian Sara), “Crosses by the Roadside,” and “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up.” All came across real good.

And I finished musicating and recording Polly Hager’s “Cougars & Cub Scouts.” Definitely one of those not-for-everyone songs (especially with the cougar’s part being sung by a guy), but one of the purposes of music is to make people think, and this does that. I could see this being done in a burlesque show. I wonder if I’ll get to be in another burlesque show? I haven’t heard anything from our ringleaders…

Joe

THE MAKING OF THE "RUFUS" VIDEO...

The music video of “Me and Rufus, and Burning Down the House” is finished, and uploaded to YouTube. Link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp2G7K8znZ8. The video footage was shot last Sunday at Sara’s house, and is of Rufus the English bulldog doing Dog Things out in the yard; I matched that up with the soundtrack, and used still photos with text overlays during the Rap. It came out kinda cute. I doubt I’d change anything, though there are things I’d do differently next time around.

What did I learn? First, my little digital camera doesn’t “do” zoom very well. Closeups get fuzzy, and look amateurish. I should not try to do closeup filming in the future. The standard lens setting produces pretty sharp images, and it’d be best to keep it that way.

Second, the “video” setting on the camera generates an audio track (or at least Windows Movie Maker thinks it does—there’s actually nothing there). That with-the-video audio track interferes with any audio track I import, and distorts it something awful. But if I mute the with-the-video audio track, it’s okay—even though the with-the-video audio track doesn’t actually exist.

Third, the camera can only shoot about a minute’s worth of “film” before it has to shut down and save what it did. That makes videoing me playing (which I’d like to do next time) a little problematic, because it could not be done all in one shot. I had originally envisioned filming me from start to finish playing rhythm guitar, and then splicing in pieces—me playing lead, just plain singing, footage of other things, and so on. If I have to work in one-minute increments, it’s still possible, but it’s more work. I have talked to daughter Kimberly about using her camera, which is a lot better (and three years newer) and has a lot more memory.

So we want to do it again, with another song. What I want to do next time is film an entire song’s worth of me playing rhythm guitar—ideally, I’m somewhere where the song can be played through speakers, but otherwise, I can use a portable CD player and headphones. The lip (singing) and hand (guitar) movements will be in time with the music, because I will have been listening to the recorded music as I was being filmed. Then, we (I’ll need help—someone else has to run the camera) film some snippets of me playing lead (including closeups—not zoomed—of the hands during the lead break), and maybe singing. And some extraneous footage of vaguely related subjects, and maybe some still photos, too. The snippets, extraneous footage, and stills get inserted at strategic points, replacing parts of the “base” video track. I think it’s possible to do all of that in Windows Movie Maker.

I do have a song in mind—“Milepost 43,” the true story about Al David’s missing underwear. It’s a fairly short song, and the “cast of characters” is pretty simple: I need underwear, a suitcase, and a rest area (got all those), and some roadside signs (the hard one to find may be the “Milepost 43” sign, but there should be one nearby—a lot of state highways start at the Coast, and are measured going inland). I could even incorporate the band, if they were willing—just need to record the song with the band, and then film the band and band members as they were playing along to the recording.

I think I just described something that might take a while to finish. I wonder if I’ve got anything I could do sooner?

AND: A quick musication-and-recording job this morning, of a cute song by Polly Hager, “Cougars & Cub Scouts.” Did it as real fast bluegrass, so it comes in under 3 minutes even with a lead break. I shouldn’t be the one singing—it’s obviously a girl song—but Polly asked me to. I figure I didn’t have a reputation to damage, so I did. Music tonight at City hall, tomorrow at the library.

Joe

INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHRISTMAS SHOW...

Well, the November Failed Economy Show isn’t going to happen—can’t get a lead player. With the idea that we could maybe do a pre-Christmas show instead, I reserved the Dance Floor for Saturday, 19 December—six days before Christmas. John (bass) and Chris (drums) are both in. Now the question becomes whether I can nail down a lead player (or two) for that date.

A Christmas show could be fun. We’d still make it a benefit for the food bank, but we can avoid (sort of) the “message” songs (or most of them) and just play fun stuff. For the setlist, I’d envision maybe a dozen of my songs that are consistent hits, and a dozen of the most danceable numbers from last May’s Failed Economy Show. City Hall’s Dance Floor is big, and we might as well take advantage of it.

I have two Christmas songs that need to be on the list—“Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up,” which is pretty fast bluegrass, and the classic “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas,” which is slow and sleazy country. Both were on the last CD. There’s two more Christmas songs I’m not sure of: “(This Time of Year) Even Roadkill Gets the Blues” is a good two-step, and Don Varnell’s “Another Crappy Christmas” (which I did the music for) is calypso. Both have really dark lyrics, though.

On the Joe songs side, I’d like to include “The Dog’s Song,” which I think the band could do a real good job on, and also the old Dodson Drifters hit “Test Tube Baby,” and “Love Trails of the Zombie Snails,” which was going to be a Southern Pigfish song (because the lyrics are so strange). All can be played as rock ‘n’ roll and ought to be right down these guys’ alley. The band has never played them before, though. I haven’t tried to spring that many new songs at once on the band for a while.

On the promotion side, I want to use every minute of the five weeks of time between now and the show. That’s enough lead time to see if Jane Scott Productions can commit to videotaping the show (which would get it on cable TV throughout two counties), and see if the newspaper will promote it (I can promote it in my column, of course, and a surprising number of people appear to read that), see if the one local DJ I know (met him in connection with the Rocktoberfest) will promote it on his show, and get posters up literally everywhere in the area. If I can convey the idea that This Is The Place To Be on Saturday, 19 December, a lot of people may show up, because they’ll think they’d be missing something if they didn’t (which is true).

A prerequisite, though, is a lead player. We are not doing this as a trio. I’ve got a message into music teacher Mike Simpson (lead guitar), and hit up the music store (again) to interest one of their guitar teachers—emphasizing this is a benefit for the Garibaldi Food Pantry and we’re all doing this for free (the last guitar teacher I talked to insisted on being paid, and I had to tell him we just weren’t going to be able to do business). Haven’t talked to “Doc” Wagner (blues harp) yet.

Started work on the “Me and Rufus, and Burning Down the House” video. I have, I think, just enough movie footage of Rufus for the song. (For the Rap—it’s a short Rap—I can use still photos. I wanted to add text overlays, anyway.) I need to re-record the song, however; the only recording I have is the live one from when we performed the song for librarian Sara at the Tillamook Library, and I stumbled over some of the lyrics back then.

Music Friday night (with the Friday Night Group) and Saturday (at the library) this week. Another local job to apply for; it’s part-time, managing a downtown public market thing, but it turns out one of the people doing the hiring remembers me from when I was the local city manager. It’d be nice if that would help.

Joe

PROGRESS?

Had to do a quick reality check on how well I was doing as a writer this year. The answer is I’ve written eight new songs in ten months. (I’d have preferred ten, or an average of one a month.) I only count “keepers”; unless they’ve been played for, and requested by, audiences, they’re “forgetters,” and I don’t count them at all. Some on the list are better than others, of course.

The Dog’s Song (pretty fast rock ‘n’ roll)
Crosses by the Roadside (mod. slow two-step)
Love Trails of the Zombie Snails (folk-rock)
Me and Rufus, and Burnin’ Down the House (mod. fast country)
Always Pet the Dogs (mod. fast two-step)
50 Ways to Cure the Depression (fast Gospel)
I Broke My Girlfriend (slow & sleazy)
The Taboo Song (also slow & sleazy)

Of those, “Crosses” and “The Dog’s Song” are by far the best, and are album material. “Rufus” is going to become a music video (starring Rufus—I got some good footage of him Sunday), “Taboo” is already a “French style” music video, and the zombie snails will go on Southern Pigfish’s album—it’s more their style (politically charged Arkansas bluegrass hip-hop sea chanties) than mine.

“Always Pet the Dogs” was for my wife, for her birthday, and the only thing that mattered was whether she liked it (she did); and “I Broke My Girlfriend” was for Beth Williams’ album of songs about broken things produced earlier this year. “50 Ways” was deliberately written for the Failed Economy Show the band did last May. They’ve all been performed, though, and came across okay.

Then there are the collabs. I’ve done ten of those, over the past ten months (I was surprised), and in all cases, they’re “collaborations” where I’ve simply musicated someone else’s lyrics. Six of the ten are Stan Good songs. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s turning into one of those classic writing partnerships, like Rodgers & Hammerstein or Taupin & John; I’m just on the lookout for good writing wherever I can find it, and Stan has done a lot of good writing. “Un-Easy Street” is some of the best I’ve ever run across, and the band’s been doing that song every show.

I’m still not sure what’s going to happen with the Failed Economy Sequel. I have a call in (not returned as of this writing) to “Doc” Wagner (blues harp); Wayne (lead guitar) doesn’t want to commit, again (I think that means he really doesn’t want to play with us); Mike Simpson (lead guitar) will be out of town that day, but may know somebody. I think our cutoff date has to be Wednesday; if I know by Wednesday we’re going to do it, I can mention it in my column for the newspaper (which a lot of people apparently read), which will come out the Wednesday before the concert. If I don’t have a lead player by Wednesday morning, we’ll have to shine it on.

And since I don’t know, I think I have to act like it’s going to happen. That means finishing the setlist, and seeing if I can get the one new song that’s not recorded—Al David’s “Poverty Blues”—recorded in acceptable form so it can go on a CD for the band. (If I can’t sing it, we can’t perform it.) Need to design a poster, too, even though I don’t know whose names are going on it. If I take the original soup-kitchen photo I used for the last Failed Economy Show poster, and just flip it 180 degrees, it’ll look new, but still recall the “old” photo. I can do that.

Elsewhere, I found another job to apply for (another fun job—I’ve applied for lots of jobs that are not fun). This one’d be to be city finance officer in Rockaway Beach, five miles from Garibaldi. (I wouldn’t have to move, in other words.) I am trying hard to not be too hopeful. I’m sure there are tons of people with armloads of college degrees in this stuff, and all I’ve got to offer is 15 years’ experience—and the tendency these days is to value education as paramount and dismiss experience altogether.

Joe

HALLOWE'EN AND "WIZARD ROCK"...

Judging a high-school speech tournament is a lot like critiquing performers at an open mike (except one doesn’t usually get to critique the performers at an open mike). Whether it’s a prose or poetry recitation, dramatic interpretation, radio commentary, or after-dinner speech, it’s all performance, and I probably know enough about performance to give kids pointers about how to work a crowd. This will be the sixth year I’ve judged speech tournaments for my daughter’s high school (now her former high school—she’s in college)

And you learn new things… One of the “expository” (informative, with posters) speeches was by a girl with a guitar (good prop—and she could even play it a little), about a new genre of music prompted by the J.K. Rowling novels; it’s called “Wizard Rock,” and the genre was begun by a duo calling themselves Harry and the Potters. Now, apparently, there’s a bunch of such bands, and there are tours, and albums. All duly ignored by the “mainstream” music industry, which presumably has no interest in anything not generated within their own closed circle.

It does make one wonder, though: why Harry Potter, and not one of the other kid-obsession “literature” series? Why not the Twilight series, for instance? Is one forced back to simply saying that “the world is a very strange place,” and “there ain’t no accounting for taste”? Or are there really such genres out there, and I just haven’t heard them? What’s outside the tightly-controlled “core” of the music industry is so diverse (and unheard) that almost anything is possible.

Played “The Dog’s Song” for the Friday Night Group (we had a good rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and bass player on hand), and the crowd did like it; songwriter Ricki Bellos was right—people’s interest is grabbed at the Rap, with “There are very few love songs, country or otherwise, written from the point of view of the dog.” Sounds good with a band; I think our band should do it. I played it again today, at the Forestry Center’s bluegrass jam session—a couple of people requested it, who’d heard it Friday night.

(The Friday Night Group got “Vampire Roumanian Babies,” too, of course—it being Hallowe’en and all. That’s the only Hallowe’en song I’ve performed this Hallowe’en.)

I have another Stan Good song musicated—a bouncy, Bob Wills-style lost-love song hight “Don’t Remind Me You’re On My Mind.” A lot of the stuff I’ve done lately has had more of a rock ‘n’ roll beat (undoubtedly the result of playing with heavfy-metal musicians), and it was nice to do something that was openly traditional country. Folks who heard it suggested it be faster, and—surprise!—I could do that: “Alice” the ‘puter’s Audacity program has the ability to change the tempo of a piece without changing the key (I tried it out on one of Scott Garriott’s songs, “Marilee”). So I didn’t have to re-record it to make it faster.

Stan’s got another one I’d really like to put to music, called “When the Blues Got You,” but he says he’s promised the musication to someone else. I just hope they do a good job. I would like to include “When the Blues Got You” in the Failed Economy Sequel (if we do it), provided the song is uptempo enough. It would be uptempo enough if I musicated it, but I don’t know about anybody else.

Good crowd of musicians at the Forestry Center (for a change); it’ll be the last session for a while—the state is closing the Forestry Center for the winter because of the money shortage. All but two of the Center’s employees are being laid off or transferred. One keeps hearing news items saying the recession is over; I’d like to know where that is. If I could afford it, I might try to move there.

Joe