BACK FROM NASHVILLE...

Fun trip, except for the plane rides. The plane rides were enough to sour one permanently on the idea of commercial air travel; being marooned overnight in San Francisco (because United Air Lines abruptly cancelled the last leg of my flight) and having to pay for my own hotel room (because United decided my “discomfort level” wasn’t high enough to warrant them doing it) is not an experience I’d care to repeat.

Six demos—one song all mine, the other 5 co-writes—done by Mike Dunbar and a team of consummate professionals, for the most part in one take in one afternoon. I did notice all the guys are getting up in years; I don’t think people aspire to be session men any more. When I was a kid, one of the highest careers one could aspire to in music was to be a session player, and these guys are proof why. They’re very, very good. The product is “radio ready,” and I (and several others) have approached Mike about seeing whether our tracks could be put on CDs that are offered for sale. It would entail paying the session guys more money under Musicians’ Union rules—we just don’t know how much more.

And I got to perform at Lyrix, the downtown club where the Pineyfest sessions were held: twice during Pineyfest, and once for Just Plain Folks, who had one of their “roadtrips” there the last night I was in Nashville. The Pineyfest crowd got “Dead Things in the Shower” (the song I co-wrote with Bobbie Gallup) and “The Termite Song” the first night, and “Armadillo on the Interstate” and “Naked Space Hamsters in Love” the second; the JPF folks got “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas” and “The Abomination Two-Step.”

Reactions were predictably good. I was told by one performing songwriter that Nashville crowds don’t usually act like that (I had ‘em singing along with the dead dog song), and that I did really well; of course, most of the folks in MY “Nashville crowd” were other songwriters from out of town. I think I did impress Barbara Cloyd, the Nashville writer who was running the sound system at Lyrix, and I don’t think Barbara impresses easily (or much). Barbara is a gatekeeper, one of those people who decides what gets heard (and therefore published and recorded) in Nashville, and a lot of her work is telling aspiring writers like me we’re not good enough. I didn’t bother to ask. I probably did get across that what I write plays as well in Nashville as it does anywhere else. The follow-up question is what I can do with that. I don’t know.

Stay tuned.

Joe