A NEW GIG...

Again, at Johnny B.’s in Medford—Thursday, 1 November. Show starts at 8 p.m., and I’m one of four acts, two of which are bluegrass bands. EIGHT dollar cover this time. I better get more CDs. He did advertise me before asking—but he knew I don’t refuse gigs. I volunteered to bring him some posters of me, and also to design one with all the bands on it..

Johnny is excited about being on the album, and immediately called a studio dude he knows; I’ll have to go see what the fellow’s setup looks like. For fiddle, Johnny suggested the legendary Don Maddox, the lone surviving member of The Maddox Brothers and Rose, who lives in the area and will be playing with one of the bands Nov. 1, the same night I’m on the agenda.

I’d still like to get some more instrumentation if I could. Johnny’s band, The Cheatin’ Hearts, has a lead guitarist (who is good) but no other lead players. Fiddle would be good. It’d be fun to throw in a couple of the Songwriters’ Assn. members (flute, congas, harmonica, and mandolin, say)—not on every song, but on some of ‘em. I emphasized to Johnny the need to make every song sound different, even when they’re being played with the same band. I managed to achieve that on the “Santa’s Fallen” CD, and would like to do it again.

“Alice” the ‘puter is home for the weekend, but goes back to the shop Monday afternoon to get [drum roll] Windows XP. Shop gave me a good price. I will have to re-install all my software, but I should be able to find WinXP versions of all the weird stuff a lot easier than I could find Windows 98 versions. And I’ll be able to have a working printer. The inability of Windows 98 to find the drivers even for a Windows 98 printer is, according to the shop, one of the casualties of Alice’s stay in the computer hospital last June—the hospital, they said, screwed her up. One worry in all this: it’s possible the computer hospital damaged Alice’s motherboard, and that could be hard to replace. Reportedly “Socket A” motherboards have gotten hard to find the last couple of years.

And Alice will get more RAM, too—FIVE TIMES as much as she had (which is more than needed to run Windows XP). And I can go as high as ELEVEN times as much if I feel like it.