CHRISTMAS ROCK?

Well, part of the Tascam’s problem was a dying power adapter, and I was able to get a Radio Shack replacement. The Tascam still has Volume Issues,.and I need to dump all my mixes into Audacity these days and boost the volume. My biggest headache, though, is my favorite soundhole pickup in the guitar—the one that makes the acoustic guitar sound like an acoustic guitar—is about dead, and I don’t have a replacement. (John has been miking my guitar at all our shows since July.)

Nonetheless, by being very, very careful about how and where I stood (I usually don’t need to worry about moving, because I tend to be motionless when I play, in order to not stray from the mike), I was able to get the rhythm, lead, and bass parts, along with my vocal, recorded for Stan Good’s “One More Time,” my latest musication effort. It’s a serious song—Stan, like me, doesn’t often write serious stuff, so the serious ones really get your attention. Since the song could be sung by either a guy or a girl, I suggested we do both, and make it a duet. And the girl’s part is going to be sung by none other than Polly Hager! I am honored. It has been said that if Linda Ronstadt were going to be reincarnated as a higher life form, it’d be as Polly Hager.

So the recording, with my vocal “bits,” has been sent off to Polly. And I am anxious to hear the result.

It was Polly who suggested I write a Christmas rock song (she normally does rock music), and it is an interesting challenge. Rock has very minimalist lyrics (my “Test Tube Baby” probably uses less than 50 words, despite being four minutes long), and Christmas songs are stuck with an extremely limited “stable” of imagery to boot—there’s the Santa stuff, and the winter stuff, and the baby Jesus stuff, and not a lot else. Can one take those limitations and write something new? (I have done it three times, but it was country or bluegrass music, not rock.) And the fans will want their usual dose of dead things, Christmas or not (and I’ll hear about it if I don’t put them in).

It might well be filling a void (and that is normally how these projects start). I’m not sure there are any good Christmas rock songs. The only ones that come to mind—“Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—are pretty poor songs. They may get played a lot around Christmastime because there really isn’t much else.

Since I don’t know where to start, really, it may help to resort to first principles. There are four elements to a song—Genre, Subject, Style, and Point of View—and one can mix them up to make things interesting. If I were teaching a class, that’s how I’d start the kids off, I think—draw elements out of hats, and say, “Okay, what can you do with this?” That was how I got “The Dog’s Song”: it was deliberately a country (genre) love song (subject) in the style of The Ramones (style) from the point of view of the dog (point of view). So we could have (for instance) a rock ‘n’ roll Christmas song in the style of (say) Woody Guthrie from the point of view of… the reindeer? Maybe. It’d be an opportunity to deliver a few caustic comments on the economy and politics that people could dance to. Sounds like another Southern Pigfish song, in fact.

Music Friday this week; I’ll miss music at the library on Saturday because the band is practicing at the same time. It’ll be the first time all five of us have played together, and I am curious what we sound like. I haven’t heard back from the Oregon Music News people; it is quite possible they’re really not interested in any music scene outside Portland (despite advertising for a writer on the Coast). And I’ve been corresponding with a fellow an hour’s drive to the north of here, and one an hour’s drive to the south, both still trying to put together local bands and not having much success at it. It’d be nice to meet them both in person.

Joe