ROCKTOBERFEST SETLIST...

The Rocktoberfest setlist looks like this:

Dead Things in the Shower—fast two-step
Tillamook Railroad Blues—deliberate blues
For Their Own Ends (Southern Pigfish)—folk-rock
Pole Dancing for Jesus—slow Gospel
Test Tube Baby—Elvis-style rock ‘n’ roll
Steamboat Bill (Shields & Leighton)—1910 rock ‘n’ roll
So 20th Century (Coleman & Lazzerini)—ragtime
Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues—slow & sleazy quasi-blues
She Ain’t Starvin’ Herself—fast blues
No Good Songs About the War—slow march
Simple Questions (O.N. Vindstad)—rockabilly
Angel in Chains—country death metal
Writer’s Block Blues—slow & sleazy
The Dog’s Song—rock ‘n’ roll
Aginst the Law (Woody Guthrie)—slow blues
Our Own Little Stimulus Plan (Betty Holt)—Buddy Holly-style rockabilly
Un-Easy Street (Stan Good)—deliberate two-step
Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad (Woody Guthrie)—fast bluegrass

Of 18 songs, only six are classifiable as some variety of country music. We’ve got six that are rock, folk-rock, or rockabilly, plus some blues (3), ragtime (1), and country death metal (1). The one bluegrass song doesn’t sound bluegrass at all when Larry plays it on saxophone (it didn’t sound bluegrass when the Grateful Dead did it, either). There’s a mix of tempos and keys, too.

Next step: CDs for the band—and lyric sheets for Larry and Charlie for the songs they haven’t played before. (I think “Pole Dancing for Jesus” is the only one that nobody’s played before. Deathgrass never played it because 45 Degrees North was playing it—but 45 Degrees North has broken up.) I can distribute the stuff tomorrow when I go to play music at the Tillamook Library.

Music with the Friday Night Group wasn’t bad; I concentrated on old, familiar tunes I was pretty sure everybody knew, and that Elsie could or would play accordion lead on. She (accordion) and I (guitar) were the only musicians there who could play lead, and I can’t do a lead while I’m singing. At least, with new strings on the guitar, I can pull off a mostly acceptable quasi-bass (no bass player there, either). Did have a good audience, though.

One new person (another poet) at the Writers’ Guild Thursday night In Jim’s absence, and with Vaughn moved, I seem to have ended up as Team Leader of this outfit, and I’m not sure what to do with it. I’ve been trying to steer everybody toward “oral tradition” poetry—the sort of stuff that’s recited, rather than read—because that kind of poetry is susceptible to musication, and as Leonard Cohen once said, that’s how a poet gets to make a living in the modern world. It would be neat if these poets could turn into polished lyricists, whose stuff could be set to music by people like me (and hopefully many more people than just me)—we’d have a miniature Tin Pan Alley song factory here on the Coast. I’m hoping my musication of Ahna’s “airship mechanic” song (which I do think will come out good) will show them the sort of thing that’s possible, and get them excited.

I have loaded all the “new” hardware into the “Hulk” computer, and it still can’t find either hard drive, or the CD drive. Makes one wonder if the motherboard’s bad. I have no way to test it, except by switching everything to another hulk (I have two more in reserve I can use). And “Alice” the ‘puter’s hard drive is still 99.9% full, making it difficult to do anything major. (Her motherboard’s going, too. She is over 7 years old, which is longer than most computers live—though “Ben,” the PC that I resurrected for the Arts Center, is 12 years old.) Got the old laptop to do a brain-wipe on, also.

Joe