THE ROAD TRIP...

The Southern Oregon Road Trip was a good adventure—the job interview went well (I think—I’ll find out for sure in a week), I got to see a lot of the people I know, both in city government and in music, got to play music, and got a good new set of strings for the guitar (finally). Even the bartender at the Wild Goose in Ashland remembered me, after my whole year’s absence (and apparently there had been rumors circulating that I’d be coming by). The Wild Goose crowd got 4 songs—“The Taboo Song,” “50 Ways to Cure the Depression,” Stan Good’s “Un-Easy Street,” and for an encore, “Eatin’ Cornflakes from a Hubcap Blues.” (Nice to get an encore.)

“The Taboo Song” did go over well, but it’s hard to tell whether that means it’s a “keeper” or not. The crowd at the Wild Goose—it being a songwriters’ bar, and all—tend to appreciate the sleazier stuff. At the risk of damaging what reputation I may have left, I could try it out on the Friday Night Group and see how they react.

The other fun thing I got to do “down South” is record a lead guitar track on one of Scott Garriott’s songs. He’s recording an album (yay), and says it’s going to be a country album (also yay), and asked me to play lead guitar on it (really yay). The one song I got to work on, “Merrilee,” is classic Scott—compelling melody with very strange lyrics—but it has a great beat. Very danceable two-step. I asked him to e-mail me “base” tracks for the songs, and I can record lead parts at my leisure on the Tascam, and send them back. My little Tascam allows my acoustic guitar to “emulate” 40 different electric guitars, something a lot of professional studio equipment doesn’t seem able to do. Might try an electric banjo lead on “Merrilee,” too, and see how that sounds.

I got back to Garibaldi to find another call for a job interview waiting for me, this one from the City of Gold Beach, also in southern Oregon. I scheduled that one for July 16, so I could do the interview and the RVTV television taping in the same trip.

Some setlists to organize, now; me and The Band have two hours’ worth to play at Garibaldi Days (twice as long as we were going to be playing at the Museum), and I have another 60 to 75 minutes of my songs to organize for the Southern Oregon Songwriters Assn. concert in Central Point August 22. Both those will be family crowds, so I need to concentrate on things little kids will appreciate—cannibalism, missing underwear, and lots of dead animals.

With luck, I can enlist Dan Doshier and his band to help in Central Point, like I did last year. We will need to do mostly familiar stuff, but I have plenty of that. I’ll repeat the tactic—it’s worked out well—of giving everybody a CD with draft recordings of the songs ahead of time. I can do that when I go down for the RVTV taping in July.

It is shaping up to be a potentially busy Concert Season. Besides Garibaldi Days, the RVTV taping, and the Central Point concert, there’s three I haven’t heard from yet; the Museum wants to re-schedule but hasn’t said when (I’ll find out the new date after the middle of July), and no word yet from either the West Linn Library or the Thirsty Lion Pub in Portland. All three, if they happen, will be paying gigs.

I got most of a song out of the trip, too (I’d been hoping that would happen). The reincarnation song—tentatively titled “Always Pet the Dogs”—has three verses now, to go with the chorus I had over a year ago; it could probably use one more, for length’s sake (it just feels short), but the three verses I have just might say everything that needs to be said, and I might leave it at that. Same pattern as the missing-underwear song, “Milepost 43,” which is a fairly short song, too—2 verses, chorus, break, last verse, last chorus. One could of course keep repeating the chorus ad infinitum, if people are dancing. It does have a catchy melody.

And I have another job to apply for. There’s a Chamber of Commerce hereabouts—within commuting distance—looking for an executive director, and I want to tell them it should be me.

Joe