GARIBALDI DAYS?

Someone actually requested “Hey, Little Chicken” at the Ghost Hole last night. Good night for tips, too—we’re starting to see some five-dollar bills along with the ones. Come Sunday, we actually might have the whole Coast band together for practice for the first time, and I want to make sure I’m ready.

I still need to master the words for Zmulls’ & Tintner’s “The Emperor,” Frank Papa’s “Have A Good Day,” Gene Burnett’s “Things Are Getting Better,” Stan Good’s “WD-40 the Economy,” Coleman’s and Lazzerini’s “So 20th Century,” and four Woody Guthrie songs—“Worried Man Blues,” “Ain’t Got No Home in This World Any More,” Dance a Little Longer,” and “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.” Need to have the music down for Jeff Tanzer’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” too.

On the plus side, I may have finally found a key I can sing “The Emperor” in, and a Keith Richards-style guitar riff for “Dance a little Longer” that’s almost rhythm-and-blues—probably not at all what Woody Guthrie intended, but people can definitely dance to it.

Gem’s “Final Payment” is down pat; so is Stan Good’s “Un-Easy Street,” Stan Bolton’s “Glad That You’re Here,” and Woody’s “Aginst the Law.” And the six songs that are mine, of course. I ought to know my songs by now.

Over the next couple of days, I should assemble CDs with the setlist songs; I’ll have to re-record a lot of them, because the way I play them is different from the way they were sent to me. At very least, my voice range forces them to be performed in different keys than the authors—all of them better singers than I—sent them to me.

I asked the “outside” authors for photos and links to Websites where people can listen to or buy their music, and heard back from most of them the same day (and from a couple of them within minutes). One bright aspect of all this unemployment is it has made communication faster; you don’t have to wait for most people to come home from work because they’re not working.

Went to the Lions Club’s organizational meeting for Garibaldi Days; the top officers weren’t in attendance, so little was done—but I did find out it was the Tillamook Eagles, not the Lions, that shelled out the big bucks for beer garden entertainment last year, and the Eagles’ Sharon Stafford is my next person to contact. The Lions were complaining the open mike scheduled on the Friday night of last year’s Garibaldi Days was a flop; of course it was—any Friday entertainment is going to have to compete with the Friday Night Group up at City Hall, and probably can’t. I told them there was no point. I did offer my graphic-design services to the cause; we’ll see if anybody wants to take advantage of them.

And I was asked the next day (by the Lions president) if I’d be willing to handle the entertainment for Garibaldi Days. I think the answer is yes. I do know people who perform, both individuals and bands; it’s a matter of contacting them and asking them (1) if they’re interested and (2) what they’d charge. (Unlike most festival promoters, I do assume the performers are going to get paid.) I’d want five performers—soloists or bands—playing roughly an hour each. Then I can go back to the Garibaldi Days people and tell them how much I think it’ll cost, and find out how much of an entertainment budget they really have. They’ll need to hire a PA system, too, and somebody to run it—I presume the same people they used last year.

And I do not want to put a lot of effort into it. I want our band to perform at this thing, so I don’t want to get caught up in anything that’d be a distraction from that. I don’t want to babysit the bands, and I don’t want to do sound (tone-deaf sound engineer? Come on…) But finding the people? Sure, I can do that. I’ll talk to people from one band tonight when the Friday Night Group plays.

Joe