hey this Wrap Music is pretty cool!
Oh, my. I don’t think I’ve ever before seen something that makes me simultaneously want to laugh and throw up. Um, the vomiting is winning out.
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March 29, 2007
March 27, 2007
update
So, like, where have you been? What’s been going on? Oh, me?
Well, I went to Albuquerque for a week. Went up to the tramway at Mount Sandia and took pictures, but it was noontime and the light just flattened everything out. I won’t bore you with the shots. Well, okay, maybe one:
Heard a really great jazz band in Santa Fe with my old friend Susan Hyde Holmes on bass. I also met a former Kansas musician and even sat in on a rehearsal, playing snare and hihat with brushes; the band were all acoustic and I had to play so quietly that my foot tapping on the concrete floor almost worked as a kick drum. Hung out with Elise, which was really nice, of course. We didn’t do a lot because she had some kind of intestinal bug over the weekend, but it was still nice.
This week: getting ready for the appointment with my tax lawyer on Friday. Lots of entering info into Filemaker Pro, finding forms, and so on. Trying to figure out where all the money went, and where it’s going to come from in the future. Working on a logo design for a new client, need to record five or six drum tracks.
My bestest buddy MacBook Pro has been acting up lately. Turns out the battery is bad; I talked to Apple today and a free replacement is on the way out.
And that’s about it. Not much blogworthy, really. How ’bout you?
Sarcasm: just one more service we offer
This is just what we need: a site for the Sarcasm Society.
March 10, 2007
that's not funny!
The always-entertaining d’monkey sent me a link to a page of musician jokes. You know how I am about musician jokes. I can’t resist posting a few of my favorites here:
Q: What do you call a beautiful woman on a trombonist's arm?
A: A tattoo.Q: Why do some people have an instant aversion to banjo players?
A: It saves time in the long run.Q: What's the difference between a folk guitar player and a large pizza?
A: A large pizza can feed a family of four.Q: What do a viola and a lawsuit have in common?
A: Everyone is relieved when the case is closed.Q: How are a banjo player and a blind javelin thrower alike?
A: Both command immediate attention and alarm, and force everyone to move out of range.Q: Why can't voice majors have colostomies?
A: Because they can't find shoes to match the bag.
March 07, 2007
when pat's away, the boys will play
Surely I have mentioned before that I have a recording studio in our house. Actually, I have recording equipment in an otherwise normal house. Except for some absorbent stuff on the wall in a couple of rooms, you would never know that music is made here. Or so I thought.
When we have a session going, I am going full speed all the time, but that’s not true for everybody else. While someone else is doing an overdub or I’m doing an edit, there can be a fair amount of down time for the other player or players. Usually, they sit on the sofa with a cat or two, but I recently became aware that certain musical minds have found ways to keep themselves entertained when no one is looking.
Yes, I’m talking about refrigerator magnets.
You know how it is—you get so used to something that you never look at it. We have a huge collection of those poetry magnets on the refrigerator; I never got around to playing with them, and eventually they became invisible. Then one day I noticed this:
I started looking around:
And then this:
And this:
I knew Elise did the top row below a while back, but what about all this other stuff?
Or this? While there’s rarely even a beer at any of these sessions, I guess musicians try to keep up appearances:
And then there’s my favorite:
Finally, Mikey had to get into the act. He’s had this thing lately of stretching way, way up on the refrigerator, catching a word in his claws and then batting it around the kitchen like a little maniac. I would find them on the floor and put them back up out of reach, only to find he too was composing:
However, after I did that, he also brought down “too” and “elaborate.” He’s a perfectionist, always trying to cut his verbiage down to the bare essence, I guess.
Okay, I guess my office doesn’t really look all that normal. But the rest of the house does!
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March 06, 2007
Dan da man
Just a quick mention that I just finished a site for local guitar wizard Dan Bliss. He will be on KKFI this afternoon from 5:00 to 5:30, as part of the station’s Band Auction. Local musicians donate their time and talent to the highest bidder to benefit community radio, which is a good thing for everyone.
Dan and I played together with Lawrence legend Kelley Hunt back in the early ’90s, and I came to greatly appreciate the sly, dry sense of humor which percolates beneath the surface of his music. Plus he’s a hell of a guitarist, maybe the love child of Robert Johnson and Lyle Lovett. He plays around town a lot, and I highly recommend checking him out. There is a gig schedule as well as some clips from his first CD on the website.
March 05, 2007
love and looks
A few days ago I finally got around to picking up the Beatles’ Love CD that I mentioned previously. It turns out it’s everything I imagined and more. I’ve heard it three times in four days, and the only thing that keeps me from playing it more is that when it’s on I can’t do anything else but listen.
Three things hit me immediately: one, Paul McCartney is an even better bassist than I realized, and that’s saying something; two, Ringo is an effing genius, no ifs, ands, or buts; and three, George Martin wrote some of the finest, most emotional string arrangements I’ve ever heard. Bonus points to the amazing Abbey Road engineers whose quality work can now be even more appreciated—these tracks sound like they were recorded yesterday.
I don’t want to rave on forever about this; I’d rather listen to the CD again. This review by Ken Tucker on Fresh Air pretty much sums up how I feel about it.
In other music news, thanks to my friend Gary Charlson I now have CDs from one of my favorite bands of the early ’80s, Staten Island’s own Dirty Looks (don’t confuse them with the later hard rock band from Pennsylvania. These guys were on the English punk label Stiff Records).
I had the first album on vinyl; the freshly re-issued CDs include that, some live tracks, and the second album, which I never even knew about. Dirty Looks combined pop vocals with punk urgency, and their anthem “Let Go” is one of the most fun songs I’ve ever played in a band. “Don’t you know that rock’n’roll is still the best drug” pretty much says it all, to this day.
March 04, 2007
more sknns
The first few live MP3s are up at the 4 Sknns site. I gotta say, listening to “Skynrd” yesterday, I was laughing so hard tears were running down my cheeks. But maybe that’s just because I know the band. That’s Randy on drums on that one, and also on “Whole Lotta Love,” btw.
In other 4 Sknns news, the CD is now available from Village Records. Thanks, Bill! A new Blayney’s date is mostly confirmed, but we want to make sure it’s completely nailed down before we make an announcement.
March 03, 2007
if you would like to be really depressed
Just read The Iraqi insurgency for beginners at Salon. You will have to watch a brief ad, but then you have access to all of Salon’s content.
The good news? We are fucked, pure and simple. The bad news? It will be much, much worse for everybody, including us, if we just pull out.
There you go. Happy Saturday!
Oh, okay. Isn’t there a tiny bit of silver lining in those clouds? Well, sure: apparently every insurgent group in Iraq is in desperate need of a good graphic designer. Man, those are some ugly-ass logos!
March 02, 2007
DJ Beanie rocks the house
About 6:15 this morning, I was awakened by music. It was pretty quiet, quiet enough it could almost have been someone’s car stereo down the block. But that didn’t seem likely, although I certainly have lived in neighborhoods where it would have been. But that would have been rap or metal.
I got up and went into my office, to find Beanie lying on the music rack (Pro Tools interface and a couple of input pre-amps) as iTunes played a Bruce Cockburn song. Did she just manage to step on the mouse or trackball and space bar in the right order to get iTunes to fire up? iTunes wasn’t even the front application—I had to turn on the computer monitors to click in and stop the music. Looking at my Last.fm stats, it appears Beanie decided to start playing music about 5:45, starting with a great but obscure Leslie Gore track, working her way through the Cocteau Twins and Jonathan Rundman before the Cockburn song woke me up. I guess she was bored, or maybe putting together her demo reel.