OF BEDPANS AND PIGFISH...

This coming weekend is the North American Jew’s Harp Festival in Bay City, Oregon, just 5 miles from Garibaldi, and I’m going. It’s been three years. A chance to play music for most of two days straight, something I haven’t done in the three months since I left southern Oregon. There are resources, too, that come to that gathering (I remember there was one fellow three years ago who owned a recording studio), and one has to be mercenary about this.

At this point, it looks like I’m moving back to the Coast. The city-manager job in Falls City probably is not going to happen (they haven’t called me), and I’ll accordingly become a full-time college student in September. There are a couple of port-manager jobs over there I can apply for, too—one vacant now, the other this coming winter. So I’ll make my peace with it, set the recording studio back up in the garage (plastic flowers and all), and pursue music there.

A few more words about Southern Pigfish. Wrote ‘em a second song, this one more countrified but still in the Dylanesque obscurantist tradition. “Bedpans for Brains” is a lost-love song (that ought to be obvious from the title), with a Wizard of Oz theme; the theory was that if this were a music video, each of the Oz characters could do a verse, relating a long-ago lost love to his or her particular disability. It made for a nice structure to the song.

The Tin Man, of course, has lost his heart, the Lion his courage; the Scarecrow (who is missing his brain) talks of memories. And the poor Wicked Witch lost everything—her sister, the ruby slippers she was supposed to inherit, her kingdom, and ultimately her life. Dorothy just wants to get back to Kansas (but why does she want to do that?). “Bedpans for Brains” ended up with six verses and six choruses, and is a little long at 5-1/2 minutes—but it’s only 5 minutes without the Rap, and the Rap (which sets the stage) wouldn’t be necessary if it were a music video.

And it just might get to be a music video. Sharma says when she gets her studio set up behind her house this fall, she’ll have the technology to do it—and she knows how. We’ve been tentatively lining up a cast among people we know. I am not sure how we’re going to do the flying monkeys. We need them to be the band (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees!”)

I think I have to play Southern Pigfish straight from here on out; they’re starting to develop a life of their own, and I think I have to let them. I’ve decided once they get their next song, they’re getting their own “page” on Soundclick, and maybe a few other places—and at least one of the two songs I’m working on, either “Deep Water Blues” or “21 Steamer Drive” (the title for the latter was suggested by Len Amsterdam) will be a Southern Pigfish song.

Once Southern Pigfish has that album’s worth of songs, we’ll produce it and sell it—why not? The album cover’s done already. Southern Pigfish has even done a commercial—“professionally hokey,” I think one would call it—for Len Amsterdam’s radio show. The one thing the band can’t do is go on tour (it’s hard to do concerts when you don’t exist)—but other bands can cover their songs easily, and should. “This is a Southern Pigfish song written by Joe Wrabek.” It’ll work.

Joe