CHRISTMAS POTLUCK POST-MORTEM...

General judgment of the folks who put on the City-Port Christmas Potluck is they liked everything exactly the way it was, and they’d like to do it again next year. Including having us (John on bass, me on guitar, Bruce on keyboard, and city councilmember Terry Kandle on fiddle—drummer Chris was sick) play music.

I would make a few changes with respect to the music. First, we need more practice, of course; we really needed to play together more than once before we went on stage. Second, we should be consistently rapid-fire—it’s not necessary to do a Rap between songs like I do, but if you don’t, you should be launching into the next song before the applause dies down. Bruce and I should alternate more, too, so there’s less of a contrast between styles. Third, we should be better organized—no hunting for music, and no last-minute changes, either. We know exactly what we’re going to play, and how we’re going to play it, and we don’t deviate from it.

Fourth is the sound. Some folks said the vocals were “mushy” and hard to hear; a lot of that is because of the room—City Hall’s Dance Floor is a rotten acoustic space, a big square room (built in the 1940s) with echoey cinderblock walls and a low, false ceiling of absorbent tile. And the little stage is in one corner (uck)—the only place in the room that has any electric outlets (double uck). John and I decided to try an experiment with the “Deathgrass” Christmas concert: we’ll ignore the stage, and run extension cords for the power, and put the band up against one wall, facing the kitchen (where the wall is made out of less-reflective sheetrock and has openings), and point the speakers slightly inwards to minimize sound bouncing off the side walls. We’ll see how well that works.

IN THE GOOD NEWS DEPARTMENT, I got to see a video of Randy MacNeil and the Whitney Pier Cowboys’ performance in concert of “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up.” They’re from up in Canada. Their rendition of the song has fiddle and piano leads, and harmonies on the chorus—they did a fine job. (And they mentioned my name as the author. Thanks, guys.) And I hear Lorelei Loveridge, over in England, is practicing “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire” so she can do it in concert—and reportedly other people are interested, too. As noted before, that’s success for the writer in the Modern Era—other people performing your stuff.

So how does one take advantage of this? Well, the Canadian band will get a copy of the Songbook (Lorelei already got one), and as I come up with stuff that I think would fit those folks’ style, I’ll tell them about it. Low-key, of course—I don’t want to be annoying, but I do want it understood that all my stuff is available, and it’s free. I’m trying to establish a reputation as a writer, and the way you do that is by other people playing your stuff. I want to create among musicians the kind of “rep” I seem to be acquiring locally—I had one Lions Club person tell me recently, “Everybody I talk to seems to know who you are, and what you do.”

This morning’s radio interview was good, too; got pledges of 100 cans of food for the Food Pantry during the broadcast, and I hope there was more after I was off the air. We are going to define the success of the Christmas concert in terms of how much food we can raise for the Food Pantry, and I hope we get a lot. As this is written, the Failed Economy Christmas Show is less than 24 hours away.

Joe