HOFFMAN POST-MORTEM--AND ANOTHER NEW SONG...

Packed house (again) at the Hoffman Center Talent Show; all the acts were real good, and this time none were on stage so long they became boring. Jane and I did “The Abomination Two-Step,” and she was right: it was a big hit. There is probably a market here for the “12 Reasons Why Joe Is Going to Hell” album (especially since host Lori mentioned it when introducing us).

There’s also a potential market for the Joe Songbook (people were asking about lyrics). That one, though, is harder to pull off. The 2009 Joe Songbook, in Acrobat (for distribution) and original PageMaker files (so I could keep adding to it), was on Alice’s old hard drive—I checked my “file” CDs, and I never did archive it, because it was a “work in progress.” Re-creating it from scratch is a lot of work—there are over 80 songs—and I’ve shied away from it. The photos especially are irreplaceable: they included a lot of photos from my week-long trip to Nashville in 2007 for the Pineyfest songwriters’ conference. Alternatively, I can have a ‘puter expert try to extract those files off the old hard drive; that will cost money, though—without any idea whether it will work.

I do have some songbook work to do anyway. The Joe Songbook was published in 2009; I have written at least an album’s worth of songs since then, and those need to be organized, too. And while I can’t use any of the “Alice” photo library for illustrations, I have taken a bunch of new photos—with my “videographer” and “news reporter” personae in mind, I make sure to take the new camera with me everywhere I go.

We (Jane and myself) were asked if we’d be playing at the Manzanita Farmer’s Market this summer (the Market is arranging their summer lineup), and we had to tell them if so, it wouldn’t be in the same form as last year, because 45 Degrees North broke up. Still, we probably could arrange something. Three hours worth of music—but they do pay, and it would be fun. I believe the little PA system would work for that, too.

“Dr. Iced-T and the Lemon Tarts,” a local vaudeville-type parody rap group that’s played the Hoffman Talent Show twice now, mentioned “Pole Dancing for Jesus” in their routine (and the audience noticed it, too); and for me, one line in their rap, “one gas station and an old folks’ home,” turned out to be one of those lines that needed (or at least will get) a song to go with it. I guess I’ll be returning the favor.

En route home from the Rapture Room (flood waters had receded temporarily so we could get there—Nehalem had been under two feet of water earlier in the day), I ended up with a chorus and a verse for the song, in complete enough form so I felt comfortable writing them down. It needs at least a couple more verses, I think (I think it got one more while I was writing this). Taken together, they’ll be a snapshot, of sorts, of life in a one-horse town where the horse died. (I don’t know if I’ll use that line in the song—but yes, there should be a dead animal or animals somewhere. How else would people know who wrote it? So there are dead chickens in the first verse.)

The music is a variation on the old traditional fiddle tune “Pig Ankle Rag,” but quite a bit slower, so I can get all the words in—and with extra beats, of course. The melody, if you can call it that, is almost a monotone (which would be perfect for the Lemon Tarts, if they ever wanted to perform it). It’s even got a tentative title—“The Pig Ankle Rap.”

Caller class Tuesday night, square dance meeting Wednesday night, music Thursday, Friday and Sunday nights. Still haven’t heard anything about the job, and I might not.

Joe