Memphis Evans Solo Show!

Here's the deal. I have a solo show coming up December 7. (info) I'm very excited. These only happen once in a great while and then only by accident. Yes, when it comes to booking my own shows, I really put the Lazy back in Lazy Susan Band. It's all for charity, too. Toys For Tots. So bring a toy and get a free CD with exclusive material from Great Uncle Helmer, Doc's Kids, and several other bands.

In this case (as has been the case for the most part) it was a potential GUH show that Karl could not make. I am opening for The Lazy Susan Band and Doc's Kids, so not a lot of pressure or anything, as I know those guys will carry the show, especially in their hometown. Still, I want the Memphis section to be as special as it is rare.

I started rehearsing this week. I finished an acceptable version of "Powerful Statement", which will make its live debut at this show. That's a song my wife actually had the initial idea for and got the writing started. It's based on the Kelly Clarkson formula and comments on itself in lieu of actual lyrics about a direct object or feeling.

This will also be the debut of lots of songs I've written in the last few years that I'm really proud of but that no one has really heard. "Walk Backwards", "Echo Some Tune", "Dirty, Ishy, Sharp, Wet, and Hot", "I'll Actually Love You Forever", and several others are making me really excited about playing. I'm going to try to get a CD and chord sheets to Justin so he can back me up on some of these, but I'm not promising that will happen. I'll play some old stuff as well and of course will take time for requests. After all, what is a show without an audience?

Well, it's a rehearsal. A rehearsal for which everyone has to drive far and someone gets stuck carting a PA to. As I've often learned the hard way. So come on out to the Winona, MN Acoustic Café on Lafayette and support the live!

I am now an eBay seller. I have so much useless junk in my basement and in my parents' basement. I mean...so much incredible, undervalued, potentially treasured memorabilia!! Did I say junk? Is this junk to you?

Nooooo. Not junk. Well worth the quarter it cost me to list it. Buy it now for $9.99!

Fox 9 News: Only Slightly Misleading!

So on Tuesday night the local Fox affiliate had two vans, a towering antenna, bright lights, and the talent (Maury Glover) all set up to show the debris from trees on our front lawn. The debris was used to illustrate a story about recent thunderstorm damage. This was slightly misleading. Here's the backstory.

On Saturday morning at 3:23 a.m. (I woke up immediately) half of the giant tree in our BACK yard fell directly between our shed and our house, a perfect fall for which we are very thankful. It crushed a third of our back yard fence and took out our power, phone, and cable lines. Our usual friendly contractor, who built our bedroom addition and deck, had a crew out chopping up the fallen half and taking down the remaining half of the tree the next day. A tree in our FRONT yard, untouched by the storm, had a similar trunk "fault line" and was deemed likely to fall on the house in a similar future storm, so we had them start taking that one down too.

By Tuesday evening they had done quite a number on it and its branches were scattered around the front yard. This is the debris you see surrounding and menacing the Fox 9 reporter. If they had panned up only a LITTLE bit higher, you would have seen the suspiciously neat cuts of the chainsaws. It was definitively not storm debris and these particular branches had actually damaged nothing. He does say "branches like these" did the damage, so it's not technically an inaccurate report.

It was exciting to see our house on TV and we would have taped it except that, of course, our cable is still out and our VCR doesn't do so well with the plain old airwaves.

Watch the story!

Happy Elvis Week everybody!

Anyone ever play the video game "The Sims"? I was booting up the internets, sitting at a desk looking out a window of my house. A woman pulled up in a minivan, parked in the street, obviously intending to go to the park across the street. She seemed somewhat out of sorts and was apparently moving a child safety seat from one seat in her car to another, a frustrating process with which I am familiar. Anyway, another woman pulled up behind her and she also looked a little sad. It is an overcast day - the kind of day where Dr. Bob would have had to give us a pep talk in Viking Chorus to keep us from singing flat and slow.

So then the two women started talking. I was vaguely listening to them, but the nice weatherproof window here kept me from hearing actual words. They sounded exactly like Sims. And as they talked, their moods both improved. By the time they were ready to walk together over to the volleyball court, they were talking loud, laughing and slapping each other on the back. I imagined pop up menus had appeared next to both of them and someone had set them to "talk...joke...touch...talk...comfort...joke...etc." It was very funny if you've ever played Sims.

This articulates and explains clearly something I have struggled with for years:

http://funl.blogspot.com/2007/06/loudness-war.html

What a great article. I remember mixing and mastering the Urban Rust and Jubilant Dogs CDs and being frustrated at my seeming inability to match the volume of, say, They Might Be Giants' John Henry, which has always struck me as a singularly loud, monolithic slab of continuous volume.

The problem comes when a J. Dogs or UR fan who is also a TMBG fan (someone like me, for example) is listening to their iPod (okay, I don't have or want an iPod) on shuffle and they turn up for something I've produced, then get blown away when some latter day TMBG comes on next. Youch! This is exactly why I don't have an iPod. I'm still waiting for the great leap forward where this problem will somehow be solved.

"I'm at the library. What's up?"

Should answering your phone with this phrase not give you pause? As you are saying "I'm at the library" do you not think "Perhaps I should get off my damn self important phone so people can enjoy that special public peace that is now the exclusive province of libraries." If you're three people in the last five minutes here at Ridgedale, no you do not.

Well, I guess google bought blogger so now I have a google account. That sucks, but I didn't want to start a new blog somewhere else. Anyway, here's what I was going to say.

I am watching the end of Elvis' "duet" with Celine Dion from American Idol on youtube. It is interesting and I'm glad I watched it. Nothing I have ever seen better exhibits why I love Elvis with all my heart and feel, at best, indifferent to Ms. Dion. Elvis is very obviously pouring everything he has into the song, which played a major role in turning his career around. He seems to be holding nothing back. He has thought about what he is saying and he is saying it as if his life depended on his fans getting it. Whether it is true or not, and I think it is, to watch Elvis during this performance (as I have several times) is to look directly into his soul.

In sharp contrast to the American country boy giving everything he has to a song he believes in and conveys every word of, Ms. Dion is exposed more than ever as a distant, if arguably virtuosic, technician. She reveals nothing of herself, neither feeling nor conveying any meaning beyond her robotic conveyance of the notes. I'm glad I watched it and I need never watch it again. God bless you, Elvis.

Check out this quote (from this article) then check out my thoughts below.

"And I wasn't there, either, when Roger Clemens won his 300th game," Selig said afterward, declining in a small scrum to commit to being there when Bonds passes Aaron. "It's something I'll determine at some point."

Here's a thought. You're the comissioner of baseball. You are (presumably) a baseball fan. You can get great tickets or a skybox to see Barry Bonds break the all time career home run record. At no cost to you. Wouldn't you WANT to be at that game? Some people will pay hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to be at that game. And yet, from this article, it seems Selig is reluctant to commit to going to the game. Selig's done some great things (interleage play, geographic restructuring of divisions, etc.) but sometimes I find him baffling (this article) or even awful (attempted contraction of the Twins).

Response to Chazz Vader's "Tag, You're It".

Chazz Requested I write a journal entry with six facts about myself. Very well.

1. I feel a constant drive to exploit my talent and accomplish something in the musical arena. Yet, whatever I actually accomplish, whatever I do to feed this drive, so far it has never felt like enough, mainly because everything has failed to reach a large enough audience. The process of creating music is its own reward, of course. And creating a great recording is enjoyable for its own sake independent of its audience. Still, I have begun to wonder if it is worth the time and money it takes to do such things.

2. I love being a full time father. In contrast to the pursuit of some sort of audience or money for my music, being a father is incredibly, immediately rewarding every day that I really throw myself into it, which is most days.

3. I have been a great employee only once. Most of my jobs working for other people have been spectacular failures with great stories to match. However, when I was self-employed I was arguably my town's best private guitar teacher. (See also #2.)

4. I just spilled coffee on myself for the second time in as many days. At least none went on the computer.

5. Of the literally hundreds of recordings I've made of my own songs the three that haunt me the most are "An Alien Comes To Earth And Joins A Softball League", "Pop Tab Town", and "Exactly And Rover". I just realized that this is possibly because they describe my actual life, albeit in slightly metaphorical terms.

6. I have my wife to thank for encouraging me to go to Europe and I have incredibly warm feelings about both (very different) trips. In Codaesti, Romania we cared for 0-3 year olds in a (very) rural clinic. In Ibiza, Spain we enjoyed great food, beaches, mini golf on concrete, bowling, and our honeymoon in general. I can't wait to go there with our kids someday.

Absolute: Episode 3: The Greatest Vanity License Plate of All Time

The greatest vanity license plate of all time was recently spoted by me. It is:


HRUDUDU

If you have read Richard Adams' magnificient Watership Down then you already laughed. If you have not read it or if you do not remember reading it well enough to have laughed, it is this book right here.

Of course, you can get it free at your local library.

Just back from a show at the Freighthouse Dunn Bros. It was all to benefit Toys For Tots 2006. We got five items and gave out five of the holiday CD featuring exclusive Christmas performances from five different bands including Great Uncle Helmer and Doc's Kids.

It was a weird show. I think there were some people at the place who were annoyed. I also think we played louder and perhaps more obnoxiously to needle them. I enjoyed the show, even though I am totally dad tired and had a long day that began shortly before 6 a.m. when my cats triple teamed me to demand my attention, food, water, and clean litter. One hits the door to the bedroom repeatedly with his front paws. One runs and jumps on me and knocks things off the nightstand if I don't respond. One just cries in a mournful, scratchy voice. By the way, I did mean to type "dad tired". I think it is an extremely accurate phrase.

I did have a lot of fun at the show. Bill Turner opened the show for us, playing Hope Of Deliverance and Biker Like An Icon (which I sang) followed by his new song "Corn Bend", his old song "Total Peace", and finally "Blackbird". I liked doing McCartney songs on a night when people would maybe expect Lennon songs. I meant to take a survey of the people listening as to who their favorite Beatle was. Shoot. Oh well.

Tried out a new segment celebrating freedom of speech called "Say what you want about Billy Joel". We learned that he is talented and that if you switch around the letters of his names it becomes "Jilly Boel" which makes some people feel happy. We also did another couple of "speaking in tongues" parts. These were great and in keeping with what I feel is the spirit of the game.

"Hold Me Only In The Dark" was said to be about worms that live on land and "worms" that live in water, meaning clams. I love that this interpretation ignores the lines about "She did such and such and I did such and such" and any romantic liaison suggested. The song has a lot of imagery of earth, shore, water, etc. I will think about those things as I sing it from now on and I will enjoy it more than I ever have.

"Oh, No!", possibly my favorite GUH song of all time, was said to be about "cleaning out your brain". I like that. In a way, that's how the song was constructed. Karl had a bunch of ideas for songs. They were not necessarily connected to one another. We ended up putting them together to make one Uber-song. (Perhaps I suggested they would fit together? It was more than ten years ago and I don't quite remember.) We worked out the transitions, the form, new words for some verses, and practiced it over and over and over. It is a very tricky song to play. I added the introduction - the a minor-C Major-D Major-G Major riff that also appears in Crayon Pictures and I'm Dead. I first started playing that riff while playing the Rolling Stones' song Wild Horses, which I was playing a lot right around then.

I improvised a song called "I Hate A Parade" about being stuck in traffic while the stupid Holidazzle Parade sponsored by stupid bank TCF went by in front of me. I was late to the show and we got a bit of a late start and I felt kind of stressed out at first. This song was good and I tried to recreate it after I got home. It worked okay but is not quite as good as the original improvisation. I'll keep trying. Sometimes that initial improvisation can never be matched. "Everything Makes Me Sad" and "Cold Feet" are two songs I tried developing from their initial improvised version and they just couldn't be improved upon, or even really effectively replayed ever again. Thankfully, I taped those performances.

We also did a "new song showcase" featuring two songs whose titles have four syllables and rhyme with each other. My "I Came To Play" met Karl's "Air Mandalay". Good stuff. Thanks to our good people who came out to see us and hang out and be cool and donate toys. It really means a lot to us and we're glad you're there. And thanks especially to those who brought toys to donate. We'll see you at Tuesday's show!

Absolute: Episode 2: Album of the Decade

I have decided to expand the thing introduced in yesterday's post. Instead of Five Greatest, it will now be called Absolute. For the next debate, I will name the Album of the Decade for this decade, the two thousand zeroes. It is:

How I Came To Cry These Tears of Cool by Colin Spring

For more information on this album, click here. Debate.

The Five Greatest

Why does everyplace I use on the internet want me to change the way I work with them? "Try yahoo mail beta!" "Try new Blogger Beta!" NO. I want it to stay the same. Oh well.

Anyway, here's my idea. I will occasionally post the five greatest something then invite debate. This is episode 1 of this new feature.

The Five Greatest Male Lead Actors in Television History

5. Bruce Willis, David Addison, Moonlighting
4. Patrick Stewart, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
3. David Duchovny, Agent Fox Mulder, The X-Files
2. David Boreanaz, Angel, Angel
1. William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk, Star Trek

You may suggest corrections to this list as well as suggesting new lists. Thank you. Begin the debate.

Tonight's Great Uncle Helmer show at the Freighthouse Dunn Bros. Coffee in Minneapolis was really fun and strange. Among other things, it contained the longest, silliest version of "Kansas City, Nebraska" ever. Karl sneezed right at a break in the verses and everyone cracked up. The song completely stopped. He said he always thought that the unavoidable sneeze was merely a convention of poorly plotted suspense fiction but that now he is a believer.

Then, instead of hacking apart another terrible bass solo over those slippery chords, I tried to tell a joke that required Karl to remember a single line. He did not remember it from the hour and a half before when I had told him it. This forgetting did not in any way detract from the joke.

Finally, the last part of the song was expanded with several good improvised rhymes about the mysterious woman while I insisted over and over that "it's just me". Sounds long and silly, doesn't it. Well believe me it was.

As promised, we also gave the "speaking in tongues" feature its Twin Cities debut and it was a huge success. Karl and I felt very impressed and edified by some of our favorite listeners' interpretations of our songs. Here are the ones I can remember (I just got home):

Zo Bid (click titles for lyrics)
A frequent listener suggested that "Zobid" was the name of a prescription drug and that the person in the song may have run out of their prescription. I love this interpretation, in that it accepts the words of the chorus (and title) as they are rather than shifting them mentally to their near equivalents in the English language, as I realize now I have been needlessly doing.

Rio Grande
Another frequent listener suggested this song was about "differentiating from your family of origin" an interpretation I immediately called "exactly right". I was challenged on this because I had said there were no wrong answers, so I clarified and said there were "right" and "exactly right" answers.

Bass Guitar
A previously total stranger suggested this song was a close cousin of "I'm A Little Teapot". This fascinates me and I will have to listen to it more, or maybe read over the lyrics again. A more frequent listener with the advantage of having heard the song several times suggested it was about a father's love for his child. These are all good readings of the song.

Introducing the Door
This song was said to be about wanting someone to leave and also about spiritual growth. I agree with both. I would add only that it is Karl's greatest "mystery" song and that no interpretation is complete.

There was another song that was said to be about baseball, but I can't remember which one. After that interpretation, we played "Ron Cey", which needs very little interpretation and is indeed one of our more overt songs and is definitively about baseball, marriage, and the passage of time.

I know there were more and if anyone who was there remembers them, please put them in comments on this blog entry and I will publish them. I am sleepy now and having trouble remembering. Thank you and thanks to all who attended this very fun, strange show.

Karl and I had a fun show in New Richmond, Wisconsin tonight.

Our idea was two high energy sets of our fastest, catchiest, most accessible songs. This was modeled after our polished and well received set at the Bryant Lake Bowl last April. Well, the people who come out on a Wednesday night in New Richmond, Wisconsin are maybe not exactly the same folks who come to Bryant Lake Bowl at 11 p.m. on a Thursday in April. We felt like we were a little too loud and high energy by the end of the first set.

We ended up emphasizing slower more "folk" like material. This is fine. I like that material at least as much as the fast material. Also, I guess we were guessing somewhat because we couldn't see the crowd or their reaction for the bright lights shining on us. (Incidentally, I counted the lights (not out loud, just in my head) during the break in "Starguise" "I can't see the moon...3,6,9,12,13, ooh 13!...but my rocket charts should be here pretty soon".)

Basically, we played a good show in a very nice venue, The Old Gem Theater. There were not all that many people there, maybe 15 or 20 at the high point. But we moved four or five CDs and Karl and I played very well together. Actually, from a musical standpoint, I felt like we played very, very well. I would even say we gave definitive readings of the following songs:

(Today I Don't Mind Livin' In A) Small Town
Road Movie to Berlin
Car of Jonas
I in the Sky
Bass Guitar
Introducing the Door
Buffalo Bill's Grave
Dead
Inkwell

Tonight also marked the grand debut of the new GUH innovation, "speaking in tongues". In other words, we acknowledge that some of our songs are confusing, mysterious, and obscure. In tonight's feature, we asked audience members to interpret our bizarre words and tell everyone what they felt a given song meant. Tonight's selection was "Bass Guitar". The audience member who responded said it was about a "bass guitar". So true.

And yet, somewhat incomplete and non definitive. Perhaps next time we will choose a different song for this feature. But make no mistake, it will become a regular feature of GUH shows. Prepare if you wish, although we are aiming for pentecostal church style inspired interpretations that just hit you like a lightning bolt.

Xanadu was interesting. I sang very, very quietly, letting the microphone do the work, and came a little bit closer to getting the harmony part correct. Only very rarely have I been satisfied with my part on that live. Maybe one or two times. I was not happy with tonight's either, but I came closer to something I think I could really settle in to. Is that weird for a song I've sung for twelve years?

Buffalo Bill's Grave had tremendous dynamic range. On the quiet, slow sections I flat picked individual strings for the first time instead of strumming. This is something I will do from now on as the dynamics of the guitar part then match the variable tempo.

Inkwell felt really great tonight too. It really flowed and I felt like I sang it gently and had a little bit of my young voice back that is audible on the studio version from winter 1995. Karl was really on tonight as well, on this song and on everything else.

Thank you to Kathy and Rick at the Old Gem, the town of New Richmond and the Wednesday night music series, and especially everyone who came out to see us. We hope you enjoy the CDs you bought.

Saturday, September 16: Joy to the World

I headed out to Karl's on Saturday morning knowing that I wanted to record a traditional Christmas song for the Toys for Tots program that Justin is organizing. I knew I wanted to do the one where the men stop singing, the women sing, then the men answer them. I just couldn't remember what song that was. Karl and I were going to go out and try to find an LBW (Lutheran Book of Worship) so I could solve this mystery. When I got to his place, there was one on his bookshelf already.

I looked through the book and found out the song I wanted was "Joy to the World". I had no idea how we would arrange it for Great Uncle Helmer. I thought maybe we could do four vastly different verses, recorded separately then spliced together. The first arrangement we decided to record was sort of a reggae thing. I played bass and Karl played the melody on trombone. We did several live takes working out parts. Finally we played through four verses and were happy with all four. I was still thinking we would only use one of the verses. But then we kind of decided maybe not.

Karl wanted to do another trombone part and I wanted to do a snare drum part. We decided to record these live at the same time. This took a few takes until we got one that I was thrilled with. Although Karl was not very happy with his harmony trombone performance, I really wanted to keep that take and told him, "I said everything I could possibly say on the snare drum with that take! I think your second trombone sounds great." So we kept it.

As we were listening back to it, Karl thought we should sing a little bit of "Angels We Have Heard On High" between a couple of the verses where there was some extra (accidental) time. We did two voices live, then I wanted to do a third part, so Karl also sang and doubled his original vocal up an octave, sliding down at the end to a funky little minor seventh. We had had a pretty fun vibe going already and now we were really cracking up.

The bass had slipped in to a heavy, non diatonic, chromatic quarter note riff during verse four. This was something Andy Honigman and I had started up at various times during Jubilant Dogs and Honigman rehearsals. Karl and I decided to stomp on the floor to go along with this. We tried a couple of different ways of miking it, but pointing the mike directly at our feet, then turning up the bass frequencies and adding a little reverb worked best. Karl also added a little bit of tambourine to verses two and three.

Karl added his banjo ukelele that was a gift from his bride. Initially this instrument was so badly out of tune that I only wanted it on verse two and only very percussively. But we accidentally activated the wrong microphone while recording it. We used the mike that was pointing at the floor where we had stomped. The ukelele sounded very far away and not as noticeably out of tune. It made us laugh and we left it in for three verses.

We wanted to have a sort of wheezing sound like in They Might Be Giants' song "They Might Be Giants". Karl got an ocarina and I got a party noisemaker from his case of weird instruments. We briefly considered a rainbow colored hooter, but it was diatonic and in D flat. We were in D. The ocarina and noisemaker we put only on verse four, which had taken on a parade like quality.

Finally, I said I wanted to do an Elvis like recitation. I love Elvis' songs where he talks ("Are You Lonesome Tonight", "Are You Sincere", "Hurt", and, most like this project, "America The Beautiful") and I wanted to try to capture that same sincere, heartfelt speech. I was glad Karl went along with it. I really felt the meaning of the words as I was saying them and tried to phrase them in a way that conveyed something important and true.

As I recorded it, the juxtaposition of the heartfelt recitation and the completely goofy background music became increasingly amusing. Karl was laughing so hard he was almost crying. He was trying not to make any sound and I could see his shoulders shaking as he was hunched over with his face in his hands. Finally during the fourth verse, only two lines from the end, I lost it as well. We did a punch in where I spoke only the last couple of lines and we were done. We had our traditional christmas song that was also a completely creative thing that only Karl and I could have done. It's both one hundred percent public domain traditional Christmas song and one hundred percent Great Uncle Helmer.

The Show

We played a show that night at a new place, Goochy Noochy's in St. Croix Falls. It was great. They have a PA there, so all we brought were mikes and instruments. It wasn't as big of a room as the Freighthouse Dunn Bros., but it was a much better arrangement with a real stage, nice tables and chairs, and a real back room where people who don't care about the music can get the hell out of our sight. A few people told me they really liked the part where I strolled around the room and even went out the front door briefly during "Shadowy Figure". I don't sing on that song and the guitars weren't plugged in, so it was a natural thing for me to do.

We went back to Karl's house and had some popcorn and beer and watched Arrested Development until I was falling asleep.

Emmanuel

The next morning we started on another Christmas recording, not for the Toys for Tots thing but maybe for a GUH holiday CD. Karl really wanted to do "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and I have always liked that song as well. He recorded a brilliant one take fingerpicked nylon string guitar backing. Karl's fingerpicking is not like anyone else's I have ever heard and I love it on this tune. (And on "Tall As The Mountains", "It's All Too Clear", etc...)

I had a very low, resonant voice from staying up late the night before and the night before that (reading a very moving and captivating book, Winning With A Bad Hand by Mary Christopherson - I couldn't put it down.) So I recorded all five verses in the LBW, leaving one verse for an instrumental.

Then I recorded a low humming during the instrumental with the idea that we would add three parts above it. It took me about twenty minutes to write the other three parts, using my voice leading rules I memorized and practiced over and over at St. Olaf. There were parts where I heard a lot of movement and parts where I just heard block chords, so that's what I did. Then I recorded the other three parts, doubling only the "soprano" where my voice was a little thin.

I am really happy with where that recording is at right now, and it might only need a violin on the instrumental verse and maybe as an obligato on verse five. We'll see if Karl gets any good ideas about it. It is as normal as our "Joy to the World" is unusual, which was our intention all along. Or maybe it just became our intention after it happened. Yeah, I think that's it.

Questions And Comments From Readers

I here at memphisevans got a surprisingly insistent, almost hostile denial response when I accused myself of a possible lack of professionalism. Read the comments from Chazz Vader on the previous post if you have not already.

Without using inflammatory, loaded, and value judgment types of terms such as "professional", "tight", or "smooth" I will try to explain more concretely some habits that I sometimes feel derail a typical show I might play:

-Long moments where the performers stare at the disordered set list in ten point type on the floor at their feet for 30 seconds or more, killing any momentum.

-Songs utterly destroyed by instruments that are dramatically out of tune with themselves or one another.

These are really the only things I can think of right now that I would completely eliminate. Other things that are questionable, but sometimes acceptable or even enjoyable would include:

-Blown chords and lyrics where other chords or lyrics are substituted on the spur of the moment.

-Playing songs we do not know (see also previous bullet point).

Things I enjoy and have no intention of getting rid of are:

-Leaving room for improvisation, whether it is a)a part of undefined length or melody in the middle of a song, b)playing a different song from the one on the set list, or c)completely making up a song on the spur of the moment.

-Responding to questions, requests, and general crowd mood

And speaking of questions, let's reply to some of the specific questions raised by Chazz:

CV: Isn't the point to be entertaining?

ME: Yes. But there are so many different ways to be entertaining. I certainly do not want to play things the same way a brazillian times or try to sound just like a given recording. But I want people who have never heard me before to be drawn in by something they can possibly begin to understand and feel they are a part of.

CV: What if, during Cowtown, you break a string. Does the list change? Does that event decrease your percieved "professionalism"?

ME: Yes, the list would change. What I think would be utterly, totally "professional" would be to have a backup guitar handed to me by a roadie during the song so that it would hardly be noticeable that I had broken a string. This is an area where economics has an impact on a band. I am not willing to purchase and bring an extra guitar to shows. I am not willing to pay a roadie or guitar tech. As it is, in a GUH show, Karl would do a tune or two by himself and I would go to a different room and change my string.

CV: Some of my favorite shows have been due to some strange, unexpected event that happens during the show. I don't consider this less "professional".

ME: This is very true. I like unique and strange events and value their ability to help create a unique and strange show, never to be repeated. That is always special. Honigman's "Nuclear War" at The Hall in Milltown WI occurs to me in this regard.

Lilpudn writes: Looked at the playlist for Saturday and was amazed at how many songs you do in a 2 hour show. It doesn't seem like that many.

ME: Actually, that may be a little over ambitious on my part. We will probably not get through that many songs. But we will have a possible roadmap we can either jump off from if we feel like it or completely rely on and stick to if we want to.

Thanks for the thoughtful, passionate comments on shows. I appreciate your interest and look forward to tonight's show. I have added a special "relentless melancholy" set pending Karl's approval. We'll see what we do when we do it.

Another Fun Show with Justin

Had a fun show at Grand Ave. Dunn Bros. with Justin last night. Inspired by a misspelling on the set list, I went by the new name of Blue Bassa during the show.

It was about what I expected - more polished because we rehearsed but at the same time some of the immediate thrill of reconnecting with old songs I haven't played in years is wearing off. "Heart Shaped Things" and "Bittersweet Love Song" bored me a little, but not so much that I wouldn't want to play them. And I'm also realizing that several of those old songs, most notably "Hourglass" last night, are very high quality even without any nostalgia factor.

Plus there were, as always, a lot of really fun spontaneous musical moments playing with Justin, who's the best other technical guitarist I have ever played with on a regular basis.

Politics a Hit!

The blog on Pawlenty's speech got the most comments of any of the 37 blog entries thus far. I can see why bloggers write about politics. Such attention! Nevertheless, I think most of my writing about it would be boring and pedantic and so will leave it to those who don't care that they are boring and pedantic.

Preview the Saturday GUH Show

I have decided to release the set list for Saturday, July 1st's 7:30 p.m. Great Uncle Helmer show at the Freighthouse Dunn Bros. three days ahead of time. Check it out here.

My goal is to have the show go a little more smoothly and professionally than our Anodyne show last week. Not that it wasn't good and fun, but I would like to see if we can run a two hour show that is as tight and engaging as our 45 minute Bryant Lake Bowl set last April.

Thanks for reading.

I had a really good time playing a show at Anodyne Coffee House with Karl last night. (reconstructed set list) It was a strange show. We made a lot of jokes. Karl made a joke about someone walking by, not hearing the Eagles, and walking right past, so I played Desperado. Karl and I used to play that song years ago and I was stunned to hear myself recall all the words perfectly. I sang it in a somewhat "jokey" but not unpleasant and strangely powerful feeling voice. It is the voice I would use if I were in musical theater without microphones.

I was not very surprised to find myself blowing the words disastrously on Foreign Movie and California. Foreign Movie is always a gamble, since I don't rehearse it, it's never been a regular part of our set, and C) it's a very different texture than most of our songs. There is no supportive strumming. It's just a lead guitar riff I sing words to. Karl plays some nice harmonica blues to fill it out. We should emphasize it more in our sets as I really like it. It also worked well as an intro to California, which I am a little sick of and should maybe retire for a while unless it is requested.

We also played "Synthesis" which was fun but very silly, as always. I did a new Metallica-like guitar riff for it instead of trying to play anything like the parts on the 1993 tape. That was good. I wonder if Karl ever wishes I would play the same, reliable thing every time on a given song. Probably not. (Speaking of which, last night I even diverged from the preset solo on "Rio Grande" when it was noted I had not used my whammy bar on my electric guitar. I then did extreme whammy overkill.)

We also improvised a song called "It's All Your Fault". All I can remember is that it was in Bb, capoed fret 3 for Karl, on bass for me, and the chords were Bb, F, cm, Bb, then a descending bassline thing. I hope Karl can remember the rest of it, as he sang the words and melody. It was pretty good.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Karl and I meticulously mapped out and rehearsed a flowing, smooth, professional two hour set of our best songs and cut out the jokes, requests, and mistakes. We sort of did that at a 45 minute set at Bryant Lake Bowl a few months ago. It was a real stage, theater, and good PA with a sound engineer. It was a world of difference from our usual shows.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy it tremendously either way and I think we are good at playing an appropriate show for a given room, crowd, etc. We've planned out long shows before and it's not that much more effective for the coffeehouse scene than just having a list of songs up there with us. I don't think. Maybe it is. Which leads me to another thing I would like to be able to do, which is to experience a GUH show as an audience member experiences it. Any thoughts on this, regular GUH show attendees? Comment below if you wish.

We ended with "Inkwell" which I really like. That song was the reason I felt like I needed to make a really good recording of our repertoire. That became the old man will travel CD. Karl sort of "ba-ba"'d some horn parts during some of the final lines of verses last night and I thought, "Yeah! That would be cool!" I am almost never satisfied with any recordings I've made and now I wish that "Inkwell" had those cool mellow horn parts during some of the verses. They would make the connection to '70s mellow rock so tremendously overt. Maybe a little Hal Blaine or Karen Carpenter drum part. Yeah. The horn part would resemble the horn part on my solo recording "Milestone Motel (The Weird Thing Was The Rain)". Maybe when we sell out of the first printing of omwt (about 50 left from the original 471 from January 1997) we'll remix some of the tunes for the second printing.

The other thing about Inkwell is what a totally joint composition it is. I tried improvising with a lot of different people in 1992-1994 (my last couple years of college) and coming up with stuff where it was "I say something, you react, I react, you react, etc." and "Inkwell" is by far the most fully and perfectly realized result of that ideal.

Don't forget to comment on the GUH performance issues raised above if you wish. Thanks for reading.

So I understand blogs are supposed to have a political component. Here is a quote from our governor taken from his speech accepting his party's endorsement.

"Now I know I may not be in some of your wildest dreams but I can tell you what your worst nightmare is," Pawlenty told delegates at his party's state convention. "It's one of the big spendin', tax raisin', abortion promotin', gay marriage embracin', more-welfare-without-accountability lovin', school-reform resistin', illegal-immigration supportin' Democrats for governor who think Hillary Clinton should be president of the United States."

To me this sounds like (very) thinly veiled hatred. At the very least it suggests and exploits resentment and bigotry towards gays, immigrants, and the poor. Am I wrong? How is that statement supposed to be interpreted?

Now yes, I hate paying taxes. I give plenty of money to charities that reflect my values, partly in an effort to reduce the amount of my money going to the government, since they generally waste it on foolish endeavors. (Iraq anyone?) But I don't think putting the hurt on hard working Mexicans, needy families, and gays who just want to have legal love is the answer. I don't see why that's even a priority.

While I would never have voted for the governor, I had heard him speak on the radio and thought he was a reasonable person. I did not think he was one of these hateful, pandering idiots. It appears I was wrong.

There. Now my blog has a political component. Enjoy. What do YOU think?