TWO DAYS TILL CENTRAL POINT...

One more day of work, and I’m off for southern Oregon, and the Southern Oregon Songwriters show in Central Point Friday night, 27 August. (Dan and I are on at 6:50 p.m., on the bandstand in Robert Pfaff Park—behind the post office. If you’re in the area, do come. Should be fun.)

Dan will be doing three new songs at the concert (we’ll practice ahead of time). I’ll do five, I think:

Armadillo on the Interstate—slow & sleazy
Free-Range Person—fast bluegrass
No Good Songs About the War—slow two-step
Hank’s Song—mod. fast two-step
Meet Me at the Stairs—fast bluegrass

Nothing new, but there is one song (“Stairs”) I’m sure they haven’t heard before. Since Dan and I both have CDs for sale, that’s an appropriate one to close with: the chorus openly pitches buying CDs to help the starving musician.

I have a first verse now, I think, to the nostalgia-for-the-‘Sixties song. Need at least one more. Two would be better, but if I’ve got just two verses, I can repeat both bridge and chorus after the break, like I did in “Rotten Candy” and “The Frog Next Door,” and that’ll pad it enough for time. No, I won’t be playing the song on stage in Central Point (or, likely, at any of the other gigs this concert Season), but I may well finish writing it en route—that’ll be my next long trip in the car, and those are always good for writing.

My primary goal at this point is to have the thing done in time to fire it off to the Coventry writers’ group over in England. I missed sending them anything last month because I was just too busy with the new job and all. I’m still busy—but at least I’m not spending five hours every day commuting back and forth any more. I have the recording equipment with me—though I don’t have any way to hook it up to this Windows Vista-afflicted laptop to transfer completed recordings (the little Tascam’s brain is big enough to hold only one song). An alternative to upgrading the laptop (which may not be worth upgrading) would be to use the “line in” port on the old Akai CD burner, dump the Tascam’s song file to a CD, and upload that to the ‘puter—but the Akai is still in the studio, and I’m not sure I feel like hauling it around.

Band practice was good—I’m continually impressed by these guys. Our rendition of “Steamboat Bill,” the 1910 hit, is classic rock ‘n’ roll. I’ve been wondering what a musician (a piano player, probably) back in 1910 would have done with the song; it probably would have been performed as some version of ragtime—which isn’t that far away from rock ‘n’ roll, really: I think the emphasis is just on a different “syllable.” We could use another practice before the gig, to polish the songs that were a little rough; it’s going to be a crammed weekend, but I’ll have to try to make the time.

At practice, my little Yamaha amp had gone into Reverb Mode, which made the acoustic guitar sound very electric and distorted—and made the band play faster. A lot of the songs sounded really good played that way—but that may be a setup that’s hard to create on stage. When we do the show, I’ll be playing through a PA, not the little amp, and I wouldn’t be able to get the distorted-electric sound without an effects pedal—which thus far I’m disinclined to buy. I have looked—I’d still like one for the Electric Banjo—but I’m not buying. I suppose my actions—multiplied many hundreds of times over, of course—are the reason why there’s no economic recovery: people have to invest, to buy durable and frivolous things, and they won’t do that until they think times are going to be better. And right now, I don’t.

Joe