I love these ‘literal versions’ of videos.  This one is of the song ‘Harden My Heart’, by the 80’s band Quarterflash.
In other news, Justin and Breanna and I (with my cello) are opening for Quarterflash tomorrow night. Can’t make this stuff up, folks. Life is just chock full of weird surprises.
Ummmm, hi.
Yeah.
I’m alive and well. And busy. Gosh. . .where to start. . .?
I’ve been doing lots of recording, with my friends from my first band ever.
I went on a random little day trip up the Columbia gorge with RockShowGirl, and we hiked to one of the many waterfalls and enjoyed the scenery along the curvy old highway. On the way back, we stopped in Cascade Locks, where we ate the best bacon burgers either of us had eaten in our entire lives. I suppose that means I’ll have to stop calling myself a ‘quasi-vegetarian epicure’ pretty soon, yeah?
I went to see an unbelievably amazing show; a double-headliner bill featuring Butterfly Boucher AND Emilie Simon. Both are supremely talented (not to mention beautiful), and I got the chance to meet both of them afterwards. I told Butterfly that I’d love to play cello with her the next time she’s in town, and she seemed like she was into the idea.
I did something I’ve never done before, and thought that I’d never do; I went to a minor-league basketball game.  [I will now pause for your exclamations of shock and horror.]  Ordinarily, I find most sporting events mind-numbingly boring, so I volunteered to take pictures (with someone else’s digital camera, which is much slower and less responsive than mine) of the game. I took about two hundred, and I would guess that about three actually came out. It was pretty funny.
I went to an amazing restaurant called Trébol with Jeannie-wa. It was stellar, and I can’t wait to go back again.
I went to an amazing restaurant called Indish with BoringFish. It was stellar, and I can’t wait to go back again.
I had a gig with IrishBand, which ended up being IrishDuo that night, because Violinist was in MileHighState. It was the first time we’ve ever done a duo show like that, and it was actually quite fun. I brought the accordion, and someone asked if we knew any Beatles songs. I couldn’t help myself, and blurted out, “Yeah, I know all of them.” This was their cue to throw obscure songs at me, to try and stump me, which didn’t happen. “I Don’t Want To Spoil the Party”, “Let It Be”, “Blue Jay Way”, “Real Love”, all were par for the course. It was super fun, and we may actually incorporate that sort of Beatles sing-along set into some of our future shows. If anybody got pictures of that, I haven’t seen them.
I’ll spare you the technical details, but I bought some equipment for my cello which makes it possible to plug it directly into a PA channel, instead of having to mic it when I’m on stage. It may have been a small step for mankind, but it was a giant leap for my cello career.
I went to a friend’s bachelor party, which lasted until six o’clock in the morning.  At around quarter to five, a neighbor called the cops to complain about the noise in general, but ‘in specific’, I’m sure it had to do with our hilariously horrible drunken guitar playing. The cop couldn’t have been any nicer, actually. He was great, and totally cool about it. It was a super-fun party. I spent the next day in bed, and got up around three-thirty to take a shower and make the hour-long drive up to SeaBird’s family’s home in the middle of a cedar grove on the edge of a hill, to eat incredible food, marvel over the kids, watch the neighbors’ enormous fireworks display, and celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, and the founding of our country. They are my surrogate parents, and I always come away feeling rejuvenated after spending time with them. People like that are very rare and special.
Yesterday, I bought new heads for my drums, installed them, tuned them up, and then recorded drum tracks for three songs in our FirstBand project. I started working on a fourth song, but it was trickier than the other three, and I didn’t get a take that I was satisfied with, so I’m going to give it its due today.
So yeah. Been all busy all the time lately, but I haven’t forgotten about you. It’s nice to finally have spare minutes to let you know what’s been happening. This is just an overview, too. There’s been plenty more, such as going to movies and sushi with LJ and SeaBird, for example.
Today I woke up at nine and edited audio tracks, even before I’d had coffee, in order to get ready for today’s recording session. It promises to be another good, productive day. There’s certainly been a lack of ennui around here lately.
Okay. Deep breath, diving back in now. . .
Saturday morning, after a train wreck of a gig in Renton with my friend BT, and having stayed up until four o’clock in the morning the night before, I got up and nine o’clock and drove up to my brother’s house. I got to see Niece #2 for the first time, and she’s almost five months old. She was very quiet and smiley, and she instantly grabbed both my thumb and pinky finger in her tiny hands, which seemed to surprise everyone. “She never does that with us,” they said.
It was great to see them. The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed. We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved. We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while. They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.
We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while. Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set. I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district. That’s the short version of the story. The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish. I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in. By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax. There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.
Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did. There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .
(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum? I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez. You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it. I’m just saying. The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front. Yeesh. Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already. Moving on.)
. . .and, of course, the gas works itself. This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.  It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.
I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.  The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there. It’s been a few years.
Anyway, the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way. I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.  Here’s the view from the park. If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it. It’d be amazing after dark too.
I don’t know that I’ll actually move there. I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.
Le Sigh. Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.
Friday afternoon, I drove up to Seattle (actually, it was Renton, which is the suburb most famous for being the resting place of Jimi Hendrix) to play a gig with my friend BT.  It was at a venue I was not familiar with, so when I drove into the parking lot, I was surprised to find that it was a small ‘British-style’ pub that was located next to the Department of Licensing in a strip mall. Veeeery rock and roll.
I left my bass in the car and walked inside to check the place out and say hi to BT. He was there, naturally, getting the PA system all set up. The drummer was also there, and it was my first time meeting him, since he was a fill-in guy that night as well. In fact, it was BT’s first time playing a gig with him, which can be very telling about someone’s personality.
Usually during set-up, especially between new people, there’s a lot of conversation and chit-chat about all kinds of things, but this time there was a noticeable lack of conversation, with BT over on one side of the stage, turned away and working on something, and Drummer sort of sitting behind his kit, adjusting his cymbals and whatnot. It was weird. I broke the ice by asking the drummer about his drum kit, which was a beautiful, custom-made kit that was much too large for such a small place. He had about a million different cymbals, too, which were sprawled out everywhere and left precious little room for BT and me.  I moved my monitor and microphone as far forward as I could, in order that I wouldn’t have two cymbals a foot from my head.
Finally it was time to start, and it turned out that the drummer didn’t have a good ‘feel’ at all. I’m a competent enough bass player and musician that I can lock in with anybody, and I could not lock in with this guy. His timing wasn’t solid, and he put in lots of unnecessary flourishes throughout every song. Yeesh.
When we took a break, Drummer went to talk with a couple of his friends, and BT and I went outside to enjoy the cool breeze. He told me that the first thing out of Drummer’s mouth when he arrived was, “You set everything up wrong. It needs to be further over.” He told me that he’d talked with Drummer about how much gear to bring, and Drummer assured him that he’d keep it small. Drummer also brought this weird headphone mixer and effect thingy and tried to plug it in, and got angry with BT for not knowing how to use it. This all went down right before I showed up, which explains the air of tension onstage.
Rule One of being a for-hire musician; never bite the hand that feeds you. You don’t walk in and insult the person who hired you, and you certainly don’t want to be snippy with them if they don’t know how to use your personal equipment. If you do decide to do those things, however, you’d better be a good enough player that your musicianship alone will hopefully redeem your behavior, because if you’re not, you won’t be called again, and worse yet, you will earn yourself a bad reputation around town.
Drummers are particularly prone to this sort of bravado. This guy also grew up in Los Angeles, and he had what I like to call the L.A. Self-Promotion Syndrome. Everyone I’ve ever met from L.A. has a particular way of talking about him- or herself. They always seem to be trying to put themselves ahead of others, or to drop a name in just the right way; you get the idea. It’s very peculiar and specific. So you can imagine what a bravado-prone drummer, who’s also from L.A., is like.  Ugh.
We slogged through about four hours’ worth of songs, and I think three songs sounded good in that whole span of time. We just had to laugh, but after a while, BT’s laugh reminded me of a sheet pulled over broken glass (a very memorable image from a very un-memorable Ayn Rand book). There were three or four times we actually had to stop a song because it sounded so bad. We got through the night, though, and at two-thirty in the morning, we finally got everything packed up and out of there. Drummer gave me his business card and went on his way. BT actually had a gig scheduled with him for the next day. I don’t envy BT. I crashed in his extra bedroom, in my sleeping bag on the floor, for about four hours, and then woke up at nine to meet my brother and his family for breakfast. That’s a story for the next entry.
The thing that made this particular gig bearable, though, was a guy in the audience. He requested songs like “Cocaine” and walked in front of the stage drunkenly appreciating us when we played his requests. Then he started requesting songs by Sublime, which none of us knew. “I’m from Long Beach,” he said, about fourteen times. “I usually listen to gangsta rap, but after I saw Sublime, it made me realize that you guys [meaning musicians in general] can really play.”
“Well thanks, man,” BT said diplomatically. “We’d sure play some Sublime if we knew any. I’ll try and learn some for you by next time.”
“I’m from Long Beach,” the guy repeated, with significance.
“That’s cool,” Drummer said. “I’m from L.A. too.”
“Yeah, man, so you know. Sublime, man. That’s where they’re from too. You guys sure you don’t know any Sublime?”
This conversation happened three different times. And for the record, why is someone who ‘normally listens to gangsta rap’ hanging out in an English-style bar, anyway? Hilarious.
I’m really glad none of our friends were there to see that show. The bar owner guy said, “Hey, guys, sorry there aren’t more people here for you. Usually Friday nights are pretty crazy around here.  I don’t know what’s going on.”
“That’s okay,” I said, laughing and casting a glance over toward BT. “Tonight that’s probably a good thing, at least as far as we’re concerned.”
Every once in a while you have gigs that just don’t work out. It’s totally normal. I look back on that show as being fun, though, if only for reasons other than it was supposed to have. It certainly wasn’t stressful or anything. We just laughed our way through train wreck after train wreck, which has its own special form of appeal.
I just came across an interview in the L.A. Weekly with Jon Brion, who is the biggest influence (aside from the Beatles) on my musical life and career. He’s the one from whom I learned what it means to be a producer and collaborator, and how to try and make your way in a creative life.
I’m posting the link to the article here because I want to be able to revisit it every so often, in the dark times, to renew my inspiration. If you’re interested in music, and movies, and twentieth-century pop culture, I think you’ll appreciate this article.
