Damn Austin to Ithaca Is A Long Drive

Well my trip to Buffalo is over. I landed back in Austin Sunday night around 9:30
This may have been the best trip I’ve had since I started these excellent New York adventures.
The first 2 days aren’t much to hear about. I left Austin and drove to Montgomery, Alabama, where I picked up Phil Achee. Me and Phil have been playing music together in one band or another for almost 20 years, so I was looking forward to taking him with me.

I got into Montgomery about 10:00PM and we decided to go ahead and take off , figuring that we’d probably spend the next few hours catching up, so we might as well do that while we were driving. Other than to say that the scenery was beautiful there’s nothing much to mention about the drive from Atlanta to T-Burg. We reached our general destination Tuesday morning.

Our first stop on Tuesday was out to see Eric Aceto, and let him know we had made it. Eric and his brother Harry were working the show in Buffalo with me on Thursday, so I figured it was common courtesy to let him know that I had actually showed up, and would in fact be playing the show.

Now, for any of ya’ll that have read my previous writings, ya’ll know that Eric is an exceptionally talented luthier. (For all you readers, who like myself don’t know a whole lot of big words, a luthier builds stringed instruments. In Eric's case, guitars and fiddles mostly. Actually I guess he makes violins, 'cause a fiddle maker builds fiddles, a luthier builds violins.) Anyway, Eric is building a guitar for me, and I figured since I was there, I could get him to tell me how that whole process works. It turns out it’s pretty complex. So much so in fact, that I’ve already forgotten most of what he told me. I did, however, get to look at some different kinds of wood that the guitar could be made out of. With Eric's help we chose a real pretty chocolate looking wood whose name I can’t pronounce, but Eric tells me it’s a form of African Walnut.

With the wood for the new guitar picked out, and a rehearsal scheduled for the next afternoon, we were at loose ends for anything to do, so we trucked on out to Hall Road to wait for Jon to get home. The rest of the day we mostly just stood around till it was late enough to justify going to bed.

Wednesday

So we got up Wednesday morning and started moving around a little bit. We went into T-Burg and drove up and down. I stopped in to see Kari and she cut my hair (the haircut was great, except she was wearing flats instead of pumps). We went on over to meet Eric and knock the rehearsal out of the way. We wanged around the set list for a couple of hours, and it was like most rehearsals . . . really boring. Eric and Harry were playing their regular Wednesday night gig at The Lost Dog Café, with their gypsy swing jazz band Djug Django. Not having anywhere else we had to be, me and Phil decided to go check out the Djug Django gig. This worked out pretty well, because I got to introduce Phil to Doug Robinson and Chad Lieberman. Doug will be here in Austin later this week to play bass on my new record, and since Phil will be beating the drum on the sessions, well I just figured it would be good to go ahead and introduce them sooner as opposed to later.

I had seen Djug Django perform on my previous trip to Ithaca, and I like watching all the swing dancers (not being a dancer of any kind myself, for me it’s a bit like watching a magician, it’s cool to watch, but I have no idea how they manage to pull it off). For some reason the swing dancers weren’t there that night, but I did get to meet Karen Kucharski. Karen is an artist, and a Tango instructor. Now I’ve only ever seen anybody dance the Tango on television, but it looks like it’s more of an Olympic event than a dance. I can’t imagine being able to do it myself, let alone teaching anybody else how to do it. Still Karen was really nice, and seemed a lot more “not crazy” than I would have guessed anyone teaching amateur dancers how to Tango would be. She said that she often came for the swing music. The closest you’ll ever get to swing at one of my shows, if is somebody swings from the rafters, but I went ahead and invited her out to a “Drive By Concert” we were planning for Friday night. More on that in a minute. Anyway I had a couple of beers and hung out with Djug Django, and then we went with Eric to a little bar that has a giant neon rooster on the sign out front, where we had another beer, until it was time to go back to Hall Road.

When we booked the gig in Buffalo we intended to put a few more shows around it, so as to avoid driving from Austin to Buffalo for one Thursday night gig. However due to our scheduling indecision, we wound up with one verified show that we couldn’t really re-schedule. I wanted to book the Rongo, but we had waited too late, and Mike Barry already had his calendar full for the month. As it turned out, we managed to squeak another show in anyway. Eric recently opened a gallery with his friend Mike Stiles, who is an extraordinary painter, and they were planning on having an open house that Friday. Since we were there anyway, I was able to talk Eric into letting us play a couple of acoustic sets. Earlier that day I talked to Chad Crumm about the possibility of recording a couple of songs I had that had never been demo’d. Chad is the owner operator of The Music Tank recording studio; he’s also a monster fiddle player, ya’ll should check out his group The Chicken Chokers. Chad had a few free hours on Friday, so now we had two gigs and a recording session (that made the whole trip a little bit more respectable).


Thursday Shuffling Off To Buffalo

Thursday afternoon we drove over to Buffalo. This was the first time I’d ever been to Buffalo, and the only thing I knew about it was that Buffalo wings were invented there, and it snows a lot. We were booked into a place called the Sportsmen's Tavern, and it turned out to be a cool place to play. I’m only sorry that I didn’t draw more for them, but I can’t say I was surprised at the light crowd since I had never played there before.

The owner, Dwane, also has a really nice state of the art recording studio, along with a sound stage and video facilities. Dwane's real love however seems to be Honky Tonk music, with a honkin twangin Tele. We obliged that, honkin and twangin thru a couple of sets, and even tho the crowd was light, we rocked all 8 of em. We finished up a bit before midnight and me and Phil headed back to Hall Road. Eric and Harry were staying over in Rochester, and were meeting us at the Music Tank the next afternoon.

Friday Part 1

On Friday I got up and drove into Ithaca. I had to get some guitar strings for the sessions and the gallery gig. I dropped in at the Ithaca Guitar Works, it’s a really cool music store on account of they gave me a free t-shirt. Ithaca Guitar Works is owned by my good friend Chris “Tex” Broadwell. His friends call him Tex because even tho he was raised and still lives in Ithaca, he was born at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Tx. When Chris was a kid and his parents told him he was born at a fort in Texas, well he naturally assumed he was born at the Alamo. Hence the nickname Tex. I met Chris on my first ever trip to Ithaca, and since then we’ve struck up a friendship. When he was in Austin for the NAMM show a few months ago, he sat in with us at our regular BB Rovers gig.

Since the gallery thing was pretty casual I talked him into coming out and playing some songs with us. Besides the music store, Chris is a pretty monster guitar player. I would probly have hung around Ithaca for the rest of the day, but I had a session that I was already late for. So I bailed out for T-Burg.

I got to the session almost right on time. Harry Aceto was playing bass, and Eric was playing fiddle, and I figured at the very least we could get the bass and drum parts for 2 songs, and with any kind of luck it would have the added bonus value of giving us 2 new songs for the show later.
The sessions went better than I expected. We got basic trax for 3 tunes, and the fiddle was a real plus. I haven’t used a fiddle in any of my stuff since the very first record I ever made. We could maybe have added some overdubs, but Chad had somewhere he had to be, so we settled on basics, and wrapped it up.

Friday Part 2

I was pretty stoked about Friday's show at the Aceto/Stiles Gallery. It was more like a party since the audience was mostly made up of friends of ours, but still it was the first art gallery gig I had ever done, and those always look good in your bio.

We got the band fired up about 8:00, and except for the fact that the lead guitar parts were acoustic, it was basically the same set we had played the night before in Buffalo.
Chris Broadwell was there and he played some tunes with Eric playing fiddle. We played a couple of sets to a wildly enthusiastic room, and then retired next door to the Pour House for some post gig beers. I wish I could have stayed till the lights all came on, but me and Phil had to be on the road pretty early the next day, so instead of drinking a bunch, we drank a few, said adios to all our friends till next time and bolted for Hall Road.

Saturday

The drive back to Montgomery was everything you’d think a 17 hour non stop drive would be. We got to Montgomery just before 2:00 in the morning. Phil said there was a bass player there that he wanted me to meet, as I’m looking for one for my road band. I figured why not since I was already there. The bass player's name is Kent Cooper, and at the moment he’s working in a band that plays 5 sets every Fri.&Sat. in an all night dive in Montgomery. Phil drove us to the club where Kent's band was playing, and we hung around till he got his break. Kent’s a good bass player and I managed to strike a deal with him for this spring's road work. The downside was that by the time I got out of there it was 5:00 AM . . . I drove about an hour south toward Mobile down the Hank Williams Memorial Lost Highway, finally stopping for the night just after 6:00 AM in Greenville Alabama. The next day I finished the last leg and got to Austin about 9:30 PM.

That was yesterday. I have a rehearsal for the Dell Diamond Walk for Autism gig in about an hour. For anybody reading this, if I misspelled your name, I apologize. If the events are not like you remember them, then next time you can write the Road Blog.

For anybody that I forgot to mention, I’ll try to get ya worked in at the first opportunity, and for all the rest of my friends not in the Central New York Area, I’ll see ya’ll real soon.

Until next time,
Adios