WEDDING WALTZES (&C.)...

Another week, I think, in which to assemble and organize the Wedding Setlist. After that, we’ll need to concentrate on practicing. We’ll have a fair amount of new material to get familiar with. 10 of 18 songs, I think.

I found in my “I been to Phoenix” stuff a CD of Screamin’ Gulch songs, recorded by Wayne, our slide/steel guitarist (his guitar was literally made out of steel) live when he was testing out his recording equipment. And yes, “Lilly’s Song,” written by the drummer’s 7-year-old daughter, is on it. Very professional recording—you don’t realize it was live until you hear people applauding at the end. The 4-part harmonies really “make” the song—hard to believe it’s a punk-rock band doing it. I wonder if Deathgrass could do the harmonies? I’ll have to ask.

Wayne had recorded eight (I think) of my songs before I left, and I never have heard the recordings. I wonder if he still has them? I didn’t think to ask when I played at our impromptu Screamin’ Gulch “reunion” in August. It is probably time to do another visit—after the wedding, I expect, but if I get called for an interview for that assistant city administrator job in southern Oregon, I’ll go whenever they tell me to.

The Garibaldi Museum will be shutting down operations for the winter October 31 without a Deathgrass concert on the agenda, and I’m not going to try to change that. Yes, it’d be fun, but I have do triage on my time—there is simply not enough to do everything I’d like to do. I hit up the Museum’s manager—who is putting together their schedule for next year—to have us be one of the musical groups they schedule (and promote) next summer. August (when families are still on vacation) or September (when the retirees travel because it’s safe now that kids are back in school) would be ideal. There’s usually good weather on the Coast both months.

The open mike at the Bay City Arts Center Saturday night got “Doing Battle with the Lawn,” “Twenty-Four Seven,” “Vampire Roumanian Babies” and “In the Shadows, I’ll Be Watching You.” The audience—a good three times bigger than came to the Sept. 25 concert—wanted to be entertained, so I gave them stuff to laugh at. Based on their reaction, I’m not sure “Twenty-Four Seven” is a good inclusion in the Wedding Setlist. It may be too funny. We do need a waltz: there has to be at least the Waltz of the Happy Couple (a traditional feature of wedding receptions), and I haven’t found anything really suitable.

I did finally find listen-to-for-free cuts of both John Fahey’s “We Were Waltzing the Night Away and Then a Mosquito Ate Up My Sweetheart” and the much older Segura Brothers’ “A Mosquito Ate My Sweetheart Up.” Fahey’s is a fairly simple instrumental, but finger-picked with very strange guitar tunings; I’m not sure we want to chance it. The Segura Brothers song is a Cajun waltz, not a polka, and is so simple it might be boring, but it does have very strange lyrics that would be fun to learn. Just one verse, repeated, with an instrumental in between (that was the style back in the 1920s). I would want to do it in the original French, which might be a little hard to master—but lines like “Your brother looks like a frog and your niece looks like the corner of a sidewalk” sound a whole lot classier in French.

Maybe for the Dance of the Happy Couple, we should just default to the “Saturday Night Waltz”; it’s a fairly simple instrumental—what one might call a “deliberate waltz”—and is quite danceable, is so old it’s public domain, and has an interesting background we can talk about in the Rap. And it’s German (though I learned it from a Danish accordion player in Nehalem, here on the Coast), and both bride and groom have spent some time in Germany.

Music only Wednesday this week—the open mike in McMinnville (and I can probably give them the same songs I did in Bay City). Nothing Friday or Saturday this time around.

Joe