FAILED ECONOMY SHOW SETLIST...

SETLIST for the Failed Economy Show looks like this:

SET #1:
50 Ways to Cure the Depression (me)
Glad That You’re Here (Stan Bolton)
Worried Man Blues (Woody Guthrie)
Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues (me)
Our Own Little Stimulus Plan (Betty Holt)
Have a Good Day (Frank Papa)
So 20th Century (Coleman & Lazzerini)
Ain’t Got No Home in This World Any More (Woody Guthrie)
For Their Own Ends (Southern Pigfish)
WD-40 the Economy (Stan Good)
Alabama Blues (Diane Ewing)

SET #2:
Un-Easy Street (Stan Good)
I May Write You from Jupiter (me)
Aginst the Law (Woody Guthrie)
Oil in the Cornfield (me)
Final Payment (Gem Watson)
Dance a Little Longer (Woody Guthrie)
The Emperor (Zmulls & Tintner)
Things Are Getting Better Now that Things Are Getting Worse (Gene Burnett)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Jeff Tanzer)
Free-Range Person (me)
Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad (Woody Guthrie)

Six by me (I wrote the Southern Pigfish one, too), five by Woody Guthrie, two by Stan Good, one each by nine other writers. We have ragtime, calypso, blues, bluegrass, country, and folk–even one waltz. (And I have nearly all the songs memorized. Recording them was definitely the way to go.) I have CDs for everybody in the band with all the songs recorded, and I’ve delivered lyrics to Dick and will do the same for Jeff. What’s necessary now is more practice, and to make sure the sound system works the way we want it to.

First priority is for a decent sound through the PA system for the audience; the City Hall Dance Floor, with its concrete-block walls and low acoustic ceiling, is a rotten acoustic space to work with. That’s one reason why the Friday Night Group has such a sophisticated PA system. They need it. John and I will check it out Friday.

Second (or third) is to feed mixed sound to at least one of a pair of video cameras (the other camera only needs sound as a tracking device, so that video can be matched up later). We want DVDs of the Show for later airing on cable TV, and to make clips from for getting gigs from other venues. Third (or second) is to feed an audio recorder, so we can produce that “Songs from the Failed Economy Show” CD I’ve been talking about. We will need to use John’s little recorder for that–it records to a real hard drive, rather than a digital-camera chip like the Tascam does, and can hold a couple of hours’ worth of music easily. John thinks he can break both video and audio into one-song increments so they can be played with on the computer. (He can manipulate the video from Dick’s camera, but not mine. He says my camera’s too old.)

For the recording, the plan is to do it separate from the Friday Night Group’s PA--recording instead from some strategically located omnidirectional mikes John thinks he can borrow, using my 6-channel mixer and then splitting the output three ways–one to the audio recorder, and two to the video cameras. When I go to Portland Saturday, I’ll need to pick up a couple of adapters to make the cabling all work.

And one other option for the recording I’ve got to follow up on–I know a local minister (I keep saying “I know people”) who has some good recording equipment; he has a studio set up in his house, but says his experience is all with recording live shows (mostly with Christian bands, I think). Wonder if he’d be interested in recording this one? It’d have to be for no money–everybody’s donating their time on the Failed Economy Show–but it might be a worthy enough cause. We’ll see.

Joe