"DEATHGRASS" BENEFIT CONCERT IDEAS...

Tentatively, SATURDAY, JUNE 17 will be the Deathgrass benefit concert for the Food Pantry. That’s the date we can get the Dance Floor at City Hall—provided we reserve it quickly. I am pretty sure we’ll need a “deputy drummer”—I don’t think Chris will be recovered enough to play (but I could be wrong).

This will be our third concert for the Food Pantry, and I would like to take advantage of every one of our learning experiences to date. I’d like to do this concert as a 2-hour show (again), but have refreshments in between this time. I can bake cookies, and I know a lady who bakes a mean Amish friendship bread (and cinnamon rolls to die for, too—people might come to the concert just for her goodies). One way you can prevent people leaving at the break is to give them something good to eat. Coffee, punch, and water, too. We should have a couple of assistant types manning the door, collecting food, making people sign the mailing list, and the like, so the band don’t have to do it.

I want to have either the minister dude or someone like him record the performance, and tell people, “If the technology works right, there’s going to be a live album out of this—if you want a copy, sign the Red Notebook.” We can pack the album with failed-economy songs—the 12 best performances of the 2-hour show—and announce we’ll split the net proceeds from sales (after production costs) with the Food Pantry. That should get us shelf space for a stack of records and a poster in a whole mess of local stores in the three towns served by the Garibaldi Food Pantry.

And I want to tap the Video Lady this time, too. She’s said twice she wants to film one of our benefit concerts, and the third time might be the proverbial charm. She controls (I’m not sure how or why) the public-information channel on our “local” cable TV system, which covers two counties, and the system is a primitive enough setup so anything broadcast gets broadcast to the whole two counties by default. I want this. Not only do we get to spread the benefit-concert idea (I don’t see anybody but us doing it right now) and hopefully spawn imitators, we also spread the word about ourselves—and hopefully, that turns into gigs down the road. I have suggested to Jane (the Video Lady) putting a trailer on the recording that gives the location and phone number and hours of every food bank in the 2-county territory.

Whether we could use her video footage from the concert to assemble a DVD to sell—again, as a benefit—is something I’d have to ask about. Ditto for whether we could extract any of her footage for a “live in concert” DVD of us. (The former may be more possible than the latter.) I’d like to have the “assistants” (if there are enough of them) use my cheap video camera and my old-but-good digital camera to capture some live footage of the band, too.

An idea, finally, suggested at Saturday afternoon’s performance at the Library—it wasn’t in connection with me, but it seems applicable to my material. Videotape a live performance where you film not the performer, but the AUDIENCE—so what people hear is you performing, but all they SEE is the audience’s reaction to it. That would be fun to do; my stuff usually does produce a reaction in people.

SATURDAY will once again be the only opportunity to play music in the coming week. I do have three more job applications to send out, an article (and my column) to do for the paper, and a graphic-design project to do for the Arts Center, the “Angel in Chains” song to finish, and a couple of other people’s songs to musicate. And maybe a “deputy drummer” to find. I will at least keep busy.

Joe