The Next Stuff Coming Up

Well we made it back from the frozen North. That would be Central New York for those of ya’ll who haven’t been paying attention.

The trip was great and I want to thank everyone for showing The Lovely Pamela such a good time on her first ever trip to the Finger Lakes region.

Recording

The recording is finally winding down with just a few dubs left to complete our project.

We’ve left the final dubs in the very capable hands of Chad Crumm, and Eric Aceto at the Music Tank studio in T-Burg.

New Guitars

Here’s a picture of the new guitar that Eric is building for me. Pretty cool huh?

Road dogs and gas stations.

Well after spending the last 18 months thinking about it, I finally had to get off the fence and decide whether or not it would be prudent for me to consider going back on the road for a real tour as opposed to the limited kind of roadwork I’ve been doing in the Northeast. After much deliberation and multiple consultations with Jim’s Magic 8 Ball, we’ve decided to go ahead and book a tour for this Spring. The first pass will be through the Southeast. I’ll be posting the dates as they get confirmed. This will be the first actual tour I’ve done in 13 years. I hope my enthusiasm holds up.

Jollyville Hayride

Starting in March we’ll be jumping back in to our once monthly show at BB Rovers.

We took a break for the Winter, but March really isn’t Winter so for those of ya’ll here in Austin the first show of the new season will be Tuesday March 4. More details can be found at the website.

One final thing: Kenneth Welch, if you read this….Call me.

On the Way Back to Austin

With the show done we hung around saying goodbye to everybody, and I just have to pass this on. The Pourhouse only sells wine and beer, but Liz (she’s the owner) told me she had heard that I like bourbon, and that she had a bottle of Knob Creek for her own personal consumption, and would I like a snort. I told her that yes I would very much like a snort, but since it was Knob Creek, and it’s pretty hot, would she please splash a little bit of branch on the top of it. She said she would be more than happy to do that. She left and was gone for 5 or 6 minutes then came back and said she needed a translation….what exactly did I mean by branch…..I forgot that I wasn’t in the South, and in Central New York they apparently don’t refer to water as branch. Still it was pretty entertaining at the time. Sorry if this lost something in the re-telling.

With everything packed, and the Pourhouse getting ready to broom us out anyway (see entry titled "NY in the Winter"), we headed for Hall Rd.

The next morning we got loaded and said goodbye to Jon & Terry, and started the long drive back.

Only one thing on the way back could be considered interesting. We stopped the first night just south of Cincy right across the Kentucky state line. We got a room and being pretty wiped out from driving we ordered a pizza from take out, ate it and went to sleep. When we woke up the next day, some weird phenomenon had made Pamela’s hair kind of expand. My theory was that in the South almost all the women have “Big Hair” and now that we were back in Dixie the Cosmos was trying to help.

NY in the Winter

January 30, 2008

Howdy Ya’ll

Well we got back to Texas Monday, and after spending yesterday unpacking and generally getting back to normal I thought I’d sit down and relate the events of our trip while I can still mostly remember them.

The Lovely Pamela and I departed Austin for Central New York on Monday January 21.

The drive was mostly uneventful until we got close to Erie PA where the Lake Effect was making it dump snow all over us. Both Pamela and myself have had some experience driving in snow, but this was more like trying to drive inside a snow globe.

Anyway we did make it into T-Burg, although we were about 12 hours later than we thought we would be.

I had a recording session the first afternoon we were there with Chad Crumm at The Music Tank. Me, Chad, and Eric Aceto went over the tracks that we recorded at Pedernales and 5^th Street Studio and took a lot of notes, and nodded our heads a lot. Then I turned the whole thing over to Chad and Eric to get the remaining tracks recorded and Pamela and myself took off for Jon & Terry's place.

Eric had a show that night with his gypsy swing band Djug Django at the Lost Dog Café, and since it was an early show Jon and Terry were able to go with us. As I’ve mentioned in these pages before, I always have a great time at the Djug Django shows because it’s a real departure from most of the live music I usually get to see. Tonight was even better being as it was Django's birthday; the band was wearing white tuxedos in his honor. The place was full and the swing dancers were going full tilt boogie. We saw our friend Julie Jordan, and I got to introduce Pamela to Harry Aceto and Chad Lieberman. We had dinner and some beer and then it was time to head back to Hall Rd.

Thus ended our first day in T-Burg.

I had another session the next afternoon, but since it didn’t start till 2:00 I decided to ride into Ithaca with Pamela and sit in on her meeting with a local Autism group.

Pamela's meeting went pretty well I guess, I’m not sure how such things are judged, it went well from my end as all I had to do was drink coffee and eat a couple of donuts. With the meeting done and my session still a few hours away we went by Ithaca Guitar Works so I could lay in some extra guitar strings (for those of ya’ll that pay attention to such things, ya’ll know I break lots and lots of strings.) I was looking forward to seeing my friend Chris Broadwell, and Pamela was looking forward to seeing the Moose Wood Restaurant, having already bought a copy of their cookbook.

Chris was in the store so I got to BS with him a while, and listen to his son Ash test drive some acoustic guitars. Ash was once in a band called The String Busters. I can only assume I wasn’t invited to join because that was before I ever went to New York for the first time, but I can easily claim the title “String Buster”

I bought my strings and a chart showing how to make mandolin chords. (Jon, having given up on making his right hand work in the necessary way to strum a mandolin, had offered me his mandolin if I would promise to remove it from his house forever.)

I got to my session, and since we hadn’t lined up any of the musicians I had come up there to play with, and Eric was fighting off a cold, me and Chad decided to work on a few tracks that we had recorded back in October when Phil Achee was up there with me.

We tracked some vocals and some guitar parts, drank a few beers, watched it snow for a little while, then called it a day and went home.

We didn’t have any plans for the evening but it was really cold, so we decided to just hang out with Jon & Terry. Anyway, I had to get up the next day and run down where we were supposed to rehearse for the show at The Pourhouse.

On Friday morning we got up and slowly started moving. I had to be at Eric's place at 3:00 for a rehearsal, but nothing much was happening besides that.

At 3:00 we went to Eric's and Doug was already there. Eric was still fighting off a cold and to be honest he looked a little rough. We ran a couple of sets and called it, on account of not wanting Eric to get any sicker before show time.

We went back to Hall Rd. where we were meeting Jon & Terry, and then we were off to dinner with our friends Mike & Diane. There was this huge group of old people from the senior center. Tammy, that was the lady's name who waited on us, said they were about 40 of them and they did this once a month or so. It was pretty cool watching the seniors get out and have dinner, it was however a bit slow as they tend to not be the speediest demographic. Anyway, I couldn’t stay for dinner as I had to get to my sound check, so I left Pamela with Jon & Terry and bailed.

This was the first time I had played at the Pourhouse, but I had drank in there lots of times so I was fairly familiar with the place. The roughest part of the gig was unloading the PA in the cold . . . man I hate cold.

Ok. So we got set up and then fired up the set about 8:00. Eric was still fighting off his cold so I tried to take it easy on him. We just kind of eased into our set, and that worked pretty well anyway because the place isn’t real big.

Our drummer for the evening was Mike Wellin. I had played a show with him last year, and was looking forward to playing with him again. We plowed through the first set, then stopped for a while, then played a second set.

Chris "Tex" Broadwell had brought some guitars with him so he sat in and played some really cool cowboy songs. We had beer and played a few more and wrapped it up early because Eric and Doug had an early afternoon show the next day in Southern Pennsylvania, and thus had to be on the road really early the next morning.