SOME PUBLICITY, SOME PLANS & SOME STATISTICS...

Nice write-up in Oregon Music News (http://www.oregonmusicnews.com --it’s in their “This Just In” section). I hope it brings some traffic to the Thirsty Lion gig—it’d be real fun if it did. (It would also indicate that a lot of people read the Oregon Music News, which would also be good to know.) The article also mentioned Deathgrass and the upcoming Failed Economy Show, giving me an opening to talk to them again.

Is there a lesson there? Persistence, maybe; I had attempted to contact them before—but this time, I wasn’t promoting a performance on the Coast, but rather one in Portland (yes, the Visiting Artist From Out of Town thing). So this time there was the right nexus, too. And the “Portland Songwriter Showcase,” which I don’t think they’ve reported on before, is something they ought to know about and be interested in.

Still waiting on the date for the Failed Economy Show; it’s going to depend on whether Charlie (our lead guitarist) manages to bring jazz guitarist John Stowell out to the Arts Center for another seminar—if he does, the Stowell seminar will be Jan. 29, and we’ll do the Failed Economy Show on Feb. 5. Setlist for the show is done, and distributed to the band; Rap is almost done; and I have another Depression photo from the Farmer’s Home Administration archives to use on the poster.

And we might have a fiddle player with us, too! (Actually, there’s a chance I could also enlist a girl singer—she sang with us at the wedding—and a saxophonist—who played with us at the benefit for Val Folkema last April. We could have quite an ensemble.)

I discovered that Google’s Blogspot keeps STATISTICS. They do make for a fascinating (if incomprehensible) snapshot. I knew, for instance, that some people were actually reading “The Writer’s Blog.” Apparently, since I started, 1,537 people have done so. Thank you, whoever you are (or were).

Biggest number of “hits” happened this past October (the month that daughter got married, and the band played the reception), and the “issue” that got the most reads was the Rocktoberfest post-mortem (Sept. 19, 2010). In fact, three of the top five “issues” in readership were concert post-mortems.

The demographics of the “audience” are a little strange. That 671 readers were from the U.S. is understandable; I live there, too. I can understand having readers from England (52), Canada (51), and Germany (132), because I do know people in those places (I don’t know that many, though). But 133 in Russia? Apparently there’s a Russian service that’s been re-broadcasting the blog in Russian—why, I have no idea. And I have no explanation for the readers in Luxembourg (44?), China (39?), Poland (32?), Brazil (28?), and Latvia (27?). I hadn’t planned on visiting those countries when I did the World Tour, but maybe I should.

Of course, I have no way of knowing who those people are, or how to reach them; the Internet, alas, is like that. Knowing those readers are out there (or at least that Google thinks they are) is tantalizing, but I don’t know how to take advantage of that information. (I suppose I could always do an issue of the blog in, say, Latvian, and see what happened.)

Since the Friday Night Group was short-handed this week, I was the only lead guitarist, which was both fun and challenging. Music Saturday afternoon at the library—and I saw a poster advertising a Saturday night jam session in (of all places) teeny little Hebo, Oregon. Tempting to go just to play them the “Welcome to Hebo Waltz.” It’s never been played in Hebo.

Joe