HARVEST FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS...

Here’s the draft setlist for the Harvest Festival concert:

Dead Things in the Shower
Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues
Bluebird on My Windshield
Armadillo on the Interstate
Doing Battle with the Lawn
Tillamook Railroad Blues
Dead Fishes
Welcome to Hebo Waltz
When They Die, I Put Them in the Cookies
Hey, Little Chicken
Bungee Jumpin’ Jesus
No Good Songs About the War
I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas

And if I get asked to do an encore, it’ll be (I think) “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up.” I’ll take the rest of my CDs (there aren’t many left from the last pressing, which was the fourth) and offer to donate half the proceeds to the school (which could use the money).

13 songs, roughly half of them fast (and alternating with blues, waltzes, and really sleazy-sounding slow country). Eight are about dead animals—we’ve got dead cats, dead dogs, dead birds, dead fish, dead armadillos, and miscellaneous dead things in the cookies. Plus, while the chicken doesn’t die in the song, its fate is clear. Two serious songs, one about pollution (“Dead Fishes”) and one about the war. It’s going to be a fairly liberal audience, so that should be okay. If I run short of time, I’ll take the war song out.

I haven’t seen any advertising of the Festival, and have offered my services in that capacity. Posters should be up now, press releases to the newspapers (two of them, both weeklies), radio stations alerted, and so forth. The Festival is only a week and half away. From my end, I’ll do posters of me, notify the “joelist,” send bulletins to the “friends” on MySpace, and announce it the next two times the Friday Night Group gets together. I’ll also e-mail the one reporter I know at the Tillamook paper (he’s a news reporter, not a social reporter—but he used to be the editor). No stone unturned, as they say.

“Vampire Roumanian Babies” is recorded. I set up the “studio” equipment in the computer room on the second floor of the house—it’s warmer there, and winter is definitely on its way. Set in a different key from normal, so it’d be easier to use a Dylan voice (it’s hard to say “vampire Roumanian babies” without sounding like Dylan).

Judging from the comments I’ve received, I probably hit some folks’ hot buttons with that song, so it may not be a “keeper.” However, I think I’ll still try it out on the Friday Night Group and see how it goes over. The Friday before Hallowe’en, the group tries to play only Hallowe’en songs, and that usually limits me to just a couple of covers I can sing—“Another Man Done Gone,” Shel Silverstein’s ode to voodoo queen Marie Laveau (made famous by Bobby Bare), and Merle Haggard’s “Miner’s Silver Ghost” (which was a hit for The Dodson Drifters, but not, mysteriously, for Merle). There aren’t many good Hallowe’en songs, and it would be nice to have contributed one to the genre—but I don’t know whether I have.

Going through The List again, I have managed to write, on average, one good song a month. Four of them, I think, are probably inclusions for the next album: “Doing Battle with the Lawn,” “Dead Fishes,” “Electronic Love,” and “When They Die, I Put Them in the Cookies. “Dead Fishes” can be the serious song on the album (I try to have only one).

Who will—or can—be “the band” for the next album? Most likely prospects are the Friday Night Group, if I’m still in Garibaldi (and right now, it looks like that will be the case). They’d have to be recorded “live and in concert”—they don’t “do” studio work that well—and that means I’d be looking at the one sound engineer in the area who says he has experience recording live concerts. The alternative is probably putting together a band, which I may want to do anyway. I like playing with a band.

Joe