The year I got rediscovered by the press. |
... and did all sorts of crazy dangerous stuff I'd never done before. Some of it was stuff I sincerely wish I had not done, but all in all it has been an interesting and unforgettable year.
It all began on New Year's Eve at the UpStage, dancing with Eszter, while playing my Dinosaur song with Alice Stuart's band for backup.
Next day we went tele-skiing on about 2 hour's sleep, and I caught a doozey of a cold. This lead to all sorts of stuff that will show up in a great new song pretty soon, and it also lead to me rediscovering the dancer that had once been a major part of me and who I had walked away from over 30 years ago, in much the same way I had walked away from the musician I had once been, ten years later.
And so I started to dance. | 
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Susan started it, really.
She dragged me onto the floor at a Vigilance party on Fat Tuesday and we started doing push-hands and it was almost like we had gotten crazy-glue on our fingertips and people said that it looked like we had found our soul-mates. I said "I don't think so, but I think I just found my dance partner." And so I joined a dance group, Soul Motion, and then a Contact Improv group and then, on the way to that dance group one evening, I crashed my bicycle by hitting gravel in a fast corner, and landed hard - breaking my femur right at the hip. This was a major setback in my path back into dance, as one might imagine |
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The links below will get you music in some form of MP3.
I have stolen the interface from MP3 dot com as an experiment in "copyright karma" and it may or may not be in use on this page.
 The MP3 files are surprisingly clear on my system at rates as low as 32 kbps, but I could certainly put them up in other bitrates.
MP3 at 32 Kbps stereo streams to Windows Media Player or other MP3 decoders over dial-up connnections and it sounds significantly better to my ears than Real Audio, and the files are smaller. Let me know what you think.
Except where otherwise , this site is
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REASONABLY NEW STUFF - Recorded as recently as 12-21-2001!!!
Duets with Strangers dubbed off the minidisc in 32 kbit/sec MP3.
For a while this year I was in a wonderful situation. Gavin Patchuli had opened a very wonderful nightclub in Port Townsend. I loved the idea and loaned him gear - mics, ADAT recorder, mixers, amps, the big JBL 3-way studio monitors, and suddenly there was a place to play, all set up and ready to go. No bar no kitchen, nothing but a dance floor and a stage, with 2 cameras and a production studio upstairs and a streaming connection to get the stuff up on the web. Unfortunately, Gavin (the Cabaret upstairs) and Mark (the dinner-theater downstairs - the UpStage) could not figure out how to get along, and they shared a common ceiling/floor amd a commmon landlord, and Gavin lost. So we lost the club, and I had to move my sound system to the Oracle Arts Center in uptown.
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 Cabaret De La Lune - opening night The club opened with me singing a nearly new and still unfinished song about what relationships turn into, when the inevitable resentment displaces the initial excitement. |  |
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My Matchless Matchless. Attempting to guide some kids who were not even born when this picture was taken, into playing reasonable facsimile of late '60's acidmusic. The "kids" are Gavin on textural guitar, an 18 year old drummer from Boise and Kurt on Bass. The authentic late '60's guitar sound is my 1965 Mosrite (that I got at Sherman-Clay in '68 after I traded the blonde ES-335 for the Martin D-28) driving my hand-built Matchless (one knob - volume - and a unique parallel high-current front end stage) pushing an old chrome-basket Electrovoice SP-12b.
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O.K. here is how picture relates to the sound-file. The picture is from the summer of 1967 when I was playing lead guitar for Clockwork Orange - the loudest & most "psychedelic" acid-rock band in the Pacific Northwest. This picture is from a ""be-in" in Volunteer Park, in Seattle. And my job in that band was to play 20 minute-long wandering guitar solos that sounded a great deal like the stuff in the Matchless file. Only a whole lot louder. That rig was 8 6L6 tubes and 6 JBL D120's. At 10.
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Frederick Tuso and I set up a camp at WOMAD in 2000
Frederick used to be a hotshot record producer in LA. He had a string of chart-topping hits with Tommy James and the Shondells. We had so much fun (collectively and alone) at WOMAD 1999, that we had no choice. It was a great camp, with a huge awning set between his van and my SAAB, a circle of folding chairs, several of my great guitars, a charcoal grill and several 5-gallon buckets of live oysters. And of course a pretty nice pair of microphones.
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 The stalker in you ...
The stalker in you ... |  |
The idea was to set a trap and get people to come make real music. It worked, and we learned a lot.
The combination of beautiful guitars and beautiful women attracted some odd animals, and I caught several of the them on the minidisc. Here is one, trapped in a duet/duel. |
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Another adventure with Tal Raboy the master stage-pirate. |
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I told Tal that I would gig with her at festivals last summer, if she got some gigs, and so I ended up playing with her as the opening act at last year's Garlic Festival in Arlington.I am totally in love with her voice, and would follow her almost anywhere to play music with her. But she only wants to play with me in front of big audiences, so we never play together quite enough to get good at it.
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Africanization
in Real Audio
Africanization
in 32 Kbps MP-3 |
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I maintain that it makes far more sense in the long run to consistently provide "headliner" quality entertainment on the sidewalk than to waste the audience's time with sidewalk quality music on mainstage, but Tal is obsessed with controlling stages, and I can remember whan I was, too.
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We were the first act, the sound-people's guinea pigs, and we got up on stage to discover that the stage manager was FURIOUS with us - or at least with the flute player for how he had parked and how he had behaved after he was asked to move his rig. So there we were, totally unprepared and under-rehearsed, as usual, AND we had the people in charge of the sound system mad at us, which is NOT the best way to start the set, or the show, but some of the performance was very good, and I think this track is pretty representative of the stuff we do.
It was recorded on stage, near the drum kit, so what you hear is live drums and what we were hearing in the stage monitors. The tune is interesting: I'd never played it before, but there were dancers out front, so I was determined to "Africanize" what had been one of her Hebrew campfire sing-along songs into dance music, and she went along with it pretty gracefully.
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My venerable Sony D-7 DAT recorder died in February of last year, so I switched over to minidisc and highly recommend that you do too.Sharp is the brand to buy, and even their bottom-end machines work better for live recording than the Sony's that cost more than twice as much. I would love to have status lights, and I would recommend that you buy one with at least some visible-in-the-dark indication that it is in "record-pause" Sharp's coolest machine has all the recording controls and the VU level meter on a back-lit 2 color LCD screen, on the remote, for under $300.
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