Tour End (for me)

Jackson was a very cool place, although it was the last night of the tour for me. The trip didn't end up being worth it for me, so I got off in Memphis under somewhat urgent of conditions. The business was supposed to be alright without me being there for a while -which it wasn't, and the cracked rib that I got in Seattle didn't seem to be healing, I pretty much needed to get back ASAP. Luckily my traveler's insurance is supposedly going to pay for the hospital and the plane ride back. But, as Joe pointed out, Memphis hospitals are not the place to be. It took eight hours before I was seen by the doctor, and there were people with head-wounds who bled for at least that long in the waiting room -some homeboy whose eye had been shot or stabbed out, some girl whose head just didn't seem to want to stop bleeding.

So here are some more photos from the part of the tour I was on. Austin was a good time, it was the first of two nights with the same lineup -Dark Skies, Amplified Heat, and Lions. The second was Jackson.

Jackson Mississippi

I only have a few minutes to type at a little computer station inside a grocery store, so I'll add photos and more details later. I'm going to have to work backwards to some degree here, and fill things in.

That being said, we're in Jackson Mississippi, my first time to this part of the country. It feels more like a different country than Australia felt. In the past several days we've been through Tucson AZ, Albuquerque NM, and Amarillo, Austin and Dallas TX.

Tucson was a pool hall, Albequerque -a tiki lounge, Amarillo -What appeared to be a squatter village. This may sound like a negative interpretation of things, but really we've been having an intensely interesting time and I wouldn't change a thing. We've met kick ass people from all around the world, partied, had hard core temptations, and there's still a month left of this tour.

It has been a crazy time, and there is no way to have any kind of expectations as to what we are going to find when we pull into town.

Last night in Dallas the big scruffy sound guy put his big wet lips on my neck as he said he wanted to spend the night with us -I'm cringing just thinking about. The club gave the band $24 dollars for playing the show, which means we didn't make enough to pay for gas let alone anything else.

We drove through the night; Joe and I sharing tunes to keep each other awake, stopping at motels along the way, only to find "no vacancy" everywhere we went until 8:00 this morning, at just about the worst motel I've ever seen. We didn't dare even turn down the covers of the beds -just threw our sleeping bags down on top of them.

The irony is killing me. Charlie woke up this morning to his 37th birthday in a shitty motel with a sticky floor in Minden Louisiana.

Tonight's club -WC Don's- turns out to be WC Don's Hot Dog House. Charlie's a vegan and it's his birthday, and here we are at a hot dog restaurant that feels like a basement.
One of the guys from Amplified Heat (another band playing tonight) swept the floor of the place himself. The guys working over there had to carry out all kinds of what appeared to be broken down large appliances out of the building.

I'll keep saying it -this is living. As Joe described it this trip has been a series of extremely high moments and extremely low moments. The deep south has maybe seemed somewhat depressing so far, but it's extremely exciting at the same time. this is the world we live in. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, and as we drove into one of the closest neighborhoods down from the capital, it might as well be a third world country. But tonight might end up being the coolest night yet -who knows?

Gotta go -more later...

Tahoe, LA,...

Night before last was Tahoe City, and what a night it was. Charlie's brother and soon to be sister-in-law set us up. They found the club, promoted the show, gave us a place to stay, fed us -everything.
The set list wasn't quite adequate -they actually ran out of tunes to play -that's how much the crowd loved the show. They rocked and rocked, then took a break (after protests from the crowd), then they rocked and rocked some more -and still left the crowd wanting more!
The next day was a blizzard on the way out.
Then on to LA -a very fun night, but being first on a bill of four bands meant it wasn't nearly the show that Tahoe was.
The Husbands were very cool. Also a new band The Makes Nice from Frisco was there, and a rockin' band called The Guilty Hearts.

Joe's good friend Paul Montone offered us his hospitality for the night. It looks like he might be able to fit inside the pizza box.

On the road

On the road.

So I haven't made a post forever. I have to keep the blogging low on my priority list, and I've been hating the computer lately, being as everything I do these days requires a computer. But, I just left a couple of days ago to go on tour with Joe's band Dark Skies. Hopefully I'll get the experience I need helping these guys out on their tour to know what I'm doing when planning my own. The first show was in Seattle with Dead Moon. Here's a picture that Joe drew of the show -he's got a great Woody Guthrie style of sketching...


















We're staying with whoever will let us, so that night we stayed with a guy the band knew they call Sean Shit.



















Last night was Oakland at a place called the Stork Club with a Japanese noise band called DMBQ headlining. It's hard to imagine that a band could have that much insane energy! Their drummer was killed and several members of their entourage injured in an auto accident not too long ago.
Their new drummer was wearing bikini bottoms and a frilly pirate shirt -a genius!
Joe's buddies from school played the show as well -Drunk Horse is their name. They rocked too.

Free Time

Work dried up, so I've had plenty of time to try to get something done the past week. The only show I managed to work was U2 the other day. The crew shirts they gave us were pretty cool...nobody said being a stagehand was glamourous.

I would love to have the opportunity to interview some of the people that I work with, some of them have been in the business for 50 years. As one could imagine, some of them have the most stories -famous Hollywood actors who refuse to enter their dressing rooms unless they're painted orange and stuff like that. Hell, my childhood hero Hulk Hogan dumped my dinner on the floor when I worked a wrestling show about seven or eight years ago.

I've been working on a few new mixes with some tools that I have acquired recently. This one I call "ride" because it ended up having a western thing going. I'm including a bit of the improvised jam that I decided to create the mix from. I suppose I should use a click track for this type of thing, but what are you gonna do?

jam 11-22


ride

noise

With a bit more free time on my hands the last couple of weeks I've had some time to do some experimentation with sounds. Playing with new pedals and new software, I'm finding the recording process to be much more fun this time around.

-I think I've rediscovered my love for noise.

Before, the goal had always been to eliminate the noise, to the extent that on more than one occasion I spent hours covering the doors and windows of my living room with blankets and mattresses in order to muffle the sounds of traffic. Of course the results were never worth the effort.

The other night I was talking to Joe Mac at the Doug Fir before he played his set (which rocked). We both agreed that music exists in a space. It doesn't come out of a vacuum. -I ride my bike past a warehouse with sounds of industrial machines and when I get home I pick up my guitar and possibly I'm still in that space, and its mood and rhythm comes through in what I create. Why not take a microphone and capture the sound of that space? That was the thought behind the audio of my experimental short "i." But, now, with a few more tools, I am much more free to create my own spaces.

Although I studied music theory and ear training and all that, the intellectual side of music has never been that attractive to me. While I hope to have something meaningful to say in my art, music is more a physical and emotional experience to me. For example in this piece which I'm calling "noise" I came up with several chord changes to take the harmony somewhere and make it more interesting, but it just didn't work. I couldn't add to the harmonic structure without losing the original mood. When I put the headphones on I can practically melt into the furniture.


"noise"


Someday I hope to be in the position to record all of my acoustic tunes in a form that I can be satisfied with, which will require an actual studio.

Kris's tune

The tune on this post was recorded in an hour or so when my friend Kris James from Phoenix visited last year. He had the lyrics and had a melody for them and I came up with guitar and harmonica parts to accompany him and his drum. Here's the mix I came up with.
"Alone and Desperate"

He's been playing in a band down there for going on 10 years (Danville Trains), which is very cool, but I've been trying to convince him to move and start a band with me all that time.

I'll sleep when I'm dead

Does this man look homeless? How about someone who has worked ten to twelve hours a day without a day off for going on three weeks? Yesterday I was looking for the club I was going to be working at, and I turned toward this hipster guy who was crossing the street to ask if he knew.
“Hey…” I said, as I walked up to him.
“I don’t have any change man.”
“No, can you tell me how to find the Barracuda.” (Obviously I don’t get out much there were over 2,000 people there that night.)
“Uh, yeah I’m working there myself.”

So after the Coors “titties and beer” gig yesterday I have a little time off. The 1st of the month was the Rolling Stones but most of the month I worked for Acme Scenic out at the Nike headquarters for their fall sales meetings. I have mixed feelings about working for big heartless corporations but they’re paying union scale and I’ve gotta pay the bills, so what am I gonna do? Plus the people are really great to work with.

The rest of the crew and I brought our instruments and had a great jam session while we were on fire-watch. The six of us Pete, Andrew, Joe, Brandon, Steve and myself are all musicians of one sort or another (along with 99 percent of stagehands in general). Half of us being headbangers the other half of us more on the hippie side, we called it Heavy Metal Bongo Sacrifice. Even Hunter and Tony from Acme were in on the jam.

CHECK IT OUT

Smooth Landing

I've finally settled down (for a bit anyway), maybe I'll be able to start getting some work done again. I'm still pissed off at that psycho roommate of ours for the setback, but it's good to be out of a bad situation. Speaking of work -Creature's on the Loose will be playing at the Hollywood Theater on Saturday the 22nd, the Portland International Short Short festival -I hope it looks good on the big screen after the organizers' (www.zonkerfilms.com) digital transfer. It's also going into the first issue of the Oregon Literary Review (www.oregonliteraryreview.org). Pretty exciting.

Creature's on the Loose
Watch now


Well, the web archive for my files weren't working properly, so my audio files were loading but not my video. Samantha fixed it by putting it on our site... Nothing ever seems to work right the first time.

I worked a load out at one of the local network studios the other day, some deal called Gimme the Mike (creative, I know). One of these goofy deals where they get their force fed celebrity news anchor or weatherman or whatever, try to make ten people look like half the country, and give away an SUV to make it exciting. This time Joanne won! So they had the thing driven into the studio and put in front of their blue screen wall so they can make it look like it's flying through space or whatever.
I act as if these people are a bunch of morons and they don't help the situation by putting a bunch of signs on the windshield saying "Gimme me the Mike!" and "Joanne your #1!"

Time

It's not been easy to get much playing in lately...in between homes, everything I own in boxes, working every day, interruptions, catching colds...

I finally got a chance to do some playing in the backyard of my friends house in between the load-in and load-out of Audioslave (who put on a good show).

It took a while to warm up considering I was just getting over a cold, but I believe I'm getting closer to my goal of improvised songwriting. If I don't have the time or money to develop tunes right now at least I can record what I'm doing in the moment so I can come back to it later on.

Improv 9-27-05
Listen Now

With only a couple of hours to play in a couple of weeks the almost constant interruptions were obviously irritating.

Blues Interrupted
Listen Now

One interruption was finding out that one of our good friends had been attacked. We haven't heard from her since getting her somewhat ambiguous email, I hope she's okay...