“No” from the Willamette Writers group—they’re hiring someone other than me to be the entertainment at their annual conference in Portland. (I hope whoever it is is more entertaining. Some writers I know in the organization have expressed doubts about that, and I hope they express them to the conference organizers.) Also on the minus side—not entirely bad, in other words—our band will get just half an hour at Garibaldi Days; I understand we have just two hours to work with, and we’ll be sharing the space with four of Mike Simpson’s “Rockshop” bands plus at least one soloist (Roland, and I think I’ll get to play with him, too) and maybe a couple of talent-show kids. We’ll be using the same PA system for everybody, so we can keep things fairly rapid-fire.
Putting together a half-hour set for Deathgrass is easy. Six of our best songs? We have more than two hours of stuff the band can do really well. For a mix of styles, speeds, and sentiments, how about:
When I Jump Off the Cliff I’ll Think of You—fast bluegrass
Tillamook Railroad Blues—deliberate blues (and a “local color” song)
Things Are Getting Better Now That Things Are Getting Worse (Gene Burnett)—fast two-step
Armadillo on the Interstate—slow & sleazy (and Shakespearean)
For Their Own Ends (Southern Pigfish)—folk-rock
Un-Easy Street (Stan Good)—mod. fast two-step
On the plus side, the Garibaldi Museum does want to have “Deathgrass” back, in October; the Rocktoberfest is going to come off, and we’re on the agenda for that, too (Sept. 19); and Mike is in for the Bay City Arts Center concert (Sept. 25). All those are paying gigs—and that’s three times as many as we had last summer. Progress, I guess. Our benefit concert for the Food Pantry needs to be Saturday, Aug. 21.
The open mike at the Arts Center Saturday night (with me hosting) was good; several times as many audience as performers, but both numbers were small. So after the soloists—Bob Lichner the saw player, a poetess, and Noah, a high-school kid performing for the first time something he’d written—were done, I announced we’d have a jam session, and we did my stuff, with electric guitar and saw for leads, and everybody in the audience with various percussion equipment: drums, spoons, tambourines, gourds, &c. So they got “Tillamook Railroad Blues,” “Angel in Chains,” “The Dead Sweethearts Polka,” “Armadillo on the Interstate,” “Test Tube Baby,” “Naked Space Hamsters in Love,” and “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas.” Wide variety of stuff, but what came off best were the two-steps— “Armadillo” the best by far.
Once again, the open mike didn’t make any money, because nobody collected any (and the host—me, in this case—doesn’t have time to do that on top of everything else); technically, everybody was a “performer,” anyway, after we passed out the percussion stuff. Maybe the best way to go is to simply have a Red Llama (a la the Friday Night Group) positioned strategically by the door, and not ask for money—let the Llama do it, by being an ugly, unignorable reminder.
We did videotape the event (at least until the tape ran out), and I’ll see what I can do with the tape. I’m still stuck with iMovie at this point, with its minimal editing capability; I may be able to get free software that’d convert a Mac video file to a form readable by a PC, so I could do more. Alternatively, the camera can feed video (but no audio) to the PC, and I can get the audio via a USB connection to the soundboard, provided I feed it into the computer live. Synchronization could be a challenge, but one would get way better sound that way. I may try that next open mike.
Music Wednesday, Friday and Saturday this coming week—and meetings Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. It is good to be busy. Now, if I just had an income to go with it…
Joe
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