WILLAMETTE WRITERS POST-MORTEM (&C.)...

Had some folks ask me today, as I was making my rounds, how the Willamette Writers gig went. They knew I’d been excited about breaking into a new area. I was going to wait to post a post-mortem, but here ‘tis.

The gig went good, I think. It was outside, and beastly hot—a bottle of lemonade got too hot to drink before I finished drinking it—but the Arts Center’s amp worked well (I guess—people said they could hear me, though I couldn’t hear myself well), and they did like the stuff. I did end up keeping it to an hour; I’d originally planned on going over, but I was sweaty, and my fingers hurt.

54 people (they counted), mostly writers (I think)—and they did listen. I think the only song I didn’t get an appreciative reaction to was “The Taboo Song.” The ones they seemed to like best were “Dead Things in the Shower,” “Pole Dancing for Jesus” (something possesses people to sing along to that song), “Bungee Jumpin’ Jesus,” “Twenty-Four Seven,” “Rotten Candy” and “Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues.” Got to meet in person the two folks I’d corresponded with by e-mail about the gig—and they said they liked the stuff, too. Didn’t sell any CDs, but they did feed me, and that was nice.

I made the point to the audience that I’d made to my correspondents—that it was a good idea to have a writer be entertainment for a writers’ group event. (And I thanked them for thinking of it.) What I hope is that message will be retained when the Willamette Writers’ annual conference comes around in August 2012. They pay the entertainment for that, and I’d like to be it, or part of it. If the pay were enough, I could maybe even supply a band.

RailsNW, which is doing the centennial dinner cruise on the train from Garibaldi to Wheeler and back, would like Deathgrass to perform in the park when the train comes back. Saturday, Oct. 1, 3:30 p.m. for about an hour—and for free. That’s another of those might-turn-into-paying-business-later gigs, maybe; the railroad centennial is going to be a low-key affair, because there isn’t much time to plan anything—but next year, it could be a lot bigger. (They even have a name for it—“Rails 101.”) If we’re in on the ground floor, we can rise with the elevator, so to speak.

I’ve already got confirmation from two of the band that they’d like to do it (I’ll see the other two tomorrow, at the Garibaldi Days gig). I’m sure RailsNW is interested in us because of the “Tillamook Railroad Blues”—I don’t know if any other bands around here know any train songs, much less any about The Local Train; since these are railroad fans, it’d be fun to do a set that was all train songs. Could we pull that off?

Besides the “Tillamook Railroad Blues,” we’ve got one other we’ve done before; “Steamboat Bill,” by Shields and Leighton, was one of the top songs of 1910 (and we played it at Bay City’s centennial last year), but it was also #20 in 1911, the year the railroad was finished—and it does have that “Next time, we’re marrying a railroad man” line in it. Beyond that, there’s a couple more we could do that are public domain—“Wreck of the Old 97,” by that old fellow Traditional, and “The Wabash Cannonball,” by J.A. Hoff (1882). Both are fast-paced bluegrass tunes, and I can play the “signature” riffs on both. That’s 20 minutes’ worth. Could we do more?

Well, maybe. I’ll put out a call to the writers I know (I do seem to know a lot of them) and see if anybody’s got any train songs they’d be willing to let us play—full credit to them, of course. If we can’t get enough, we’ll fill with more of our regular standards. I am insistent about the “we don’t do covers” thing—we play originals and traditionals, and songs by writers who are as unknown as I am. And thus far we have managed to do that, and become popular. (The only exception we’ve made to that rule has been Woody Guthrie—we play a couple of his more obscure numbers. Woody encouraged people to perform his stuff and not pay royalties. “All I wanted to do was write it,” he used to say. “And I done that.”)

Joe