Archive for May, 2006
A couple of musings after attending the Kerrville folk festival… This is one of the biggest folk festivals in the country and they tend to book what they feel is Austin’s finest in addition to bringing in artists from around the country. Mt first thought is that there are waaay too many folk singer-songwriters in the world. Geez, did I get bored. The scene really allows for, and perhaps even encourages, mediocrity. Very few of them have anything to say with any lyrical depth and they deliver their glib vocal commentaries with minimal musical sophistication and almost no feeling for composition or arrangement. Granted, there are some fantastic singer songwriters but they’re the minority. There appear to be a few songwriting techniques that push the audience’s buttons and these folks just write some dribble and then do a bit of button pushing and call it a song. Yuk. A notable exception would be Guy Clark. His set knocked me out. He has great insight in his lyrics, delivers them with an expressive voice with great timing. Although he isn’t much of a guitar player himself, he performed in a duo format with a great guitarist/vocalist that nailed harmonies and played excellent lead style acoustic. Together they had worked out arrangements that were very tasteful and never wasted a phrase. All other songwriters and composers should have been sitting in the audience taking notes. I was and I’m not even a singer songwirter.
My other thought (with all due respect to the many excellent Austin musicians) is that there is a strikingly higher caliber of musician in Chicago compared to Austin. I suppose that’s not that surprising seeing that Chicago has a much larger populace. It’s interesting to see the differences between the two city’s music scenes. In Chicago the audience gives the musicians very little respect and even less support. In Austin there seems to be support for even the mediocre. It has to do with an attitude toward supporting local creativity that is strong in Austin and weak in Chicago. Because of this, Chicago musicians have to struggle to get their music out where as Austinite musicians have a ready forum for their new work. This has made Chicago musicians tougher than their Austin couterparts but has created a more fertile creative environment in Austin as compared to Chicago. Who’s to say which way is better. Anyway, don’t hang your heads musicians of Chicago – you are indeed world class even if your local neighbors don’t seem to think so.
May 30th, 2006
I’m hardly the first to notice this, but the hill country is quite beautiful. It also provides some great roads for biking with some righteous hills (I suppose that’s why they call it the hill country, eh?) I’m camped in a very nice campground called the Top of the Hill Campground about 7 miles west of Boerne. Check out the sunset photos below – that’s the view out my picture window. It’s been a pretty good place to spend my “stranded†days. The park has a pool and a fitness center with workout equipment so my fitness jones has been satisfied. Boerne is a nice little town, a bit on the cute side of things but not noxiously so. All the people I met were very friendly which seems to be the case in general in Texas. That’s the interesting thing about people in Texas, the good people are REALLY great and the as@#oles are REALLY big as@#oles. It’s a land of extremes. I’ve also been up to Fredericksburg where I checked out some of the hill country wineries and saw some great bungalow architecture near downtown that my brother clued me into. I’m surprised by the similarities between the hill country and southwestern Wisconsin which has always been one of my favorite places.
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May 27th, 2006
I arrived in San Antonio and decided that I had to get the front jack on my 5th wheel repaired. I had damaged it while hooking up to the pickup truck earlier in the trip (before I figured out that the truck hitch and trailer pin need to be at the same height, more or less, before you try to jam them together) and it seemed to be getting worse. When I was getting my rig ready to go in Houston I had a terrible time getting the jack to go up high enough that it would be safe to drive. I finally got it by using my jack to push it up. I arrived in San Antonio and had the opposite problem when setting up camp and I decided that I needed to get it fixed.
I foolishly waited a couple of days before calling a repair place to make arrangements. I found that they were all booked up for a week or more and told me that it would take another week after the initial analysis for whatever required parts to arrive. I found one place that seemed reputable and didn’t have quite the backlog of work but it would still be several days before they could look at it. I decided that since I’d already been in SA for four or five days, I’d head out to the hill country to pass the time until they could check out the jack problem. The town of Boerne is about 30 miles outside of SA and is definitely in the hill country. That always surprises me because in Chicago 30 miles out puts you in Wheaton with another 20 miles of suburbs to go before you hit the cornfields - and that distance seems to grow every year.
May 20th, 2006
The rv park here in Houston is actually quite nice for being right in the city. It’s got a strange (but not too ugly) artificial pond in the middle and all the campsites are situated around it so that you have a “lakefront view”. It’s very close to downtown - maybe 5 minutes by car. I’m still a little frustrated by driving around with this 12000 pound monster behind my truck going from one campground to another. Trying to read a map and drive can be challenging as can having to stop quickly when going 65 mph on a downhill. I also had the experience of pulling into a gas station and discovering that the exit was too small for my rig to fit. There was a display of wire sculpture blocking most of the exit pathway. I love art but not on that day at that particular minute! That one was a real pain to maneuver out of.
Our first show was at a church in the town of Rosenberg to the west of Houston. I figured it would be a concert using the church as a venue and I think that was Ricardo’s understanding as well. It turned out to be an honest to goodness church service of a particularly fundamentalist group of folks. There was a church band that played a few tunes to start off (they were actually quite good) and then we went up and played a short “set”. After our set a travellin’ preacher named “Bubba” (I’m not kidding) came up to breath some fire and brimstone upon us. It all turned out just fine in the end - the people received our music very well during the service and afterwards were very nice to us. Like a dummy I forgot to bring my cds along to sell and 5 people asked to buy one. When will I learn?
Our second show was at a wine bar named Cafe Rabelais in the Rice Village area near Rice University, which is a very cool neighborhood. We played with a third guitarist named Kelly Lancaster who is an absolutely burning gypsy jazz style guitarist. The show was a great success and I sold enough cds (yeah, I remembered them this time) to pay for my gas and camping fees. Ricardo was a great host and I’m looking forward to playing again in Houston. We recorded some really nice stuff while I was there and once I get it mixed I’ll put it on this blog so you can hear it.
Look Uncle Jed, it’s a big old cement pond!
The mobile studio ready for action…
May 18th, 2006
I’ve moved on down to Austin this week. I got to hang out with my old friend Frank Chodacki the sax player. We even went and did an open mic at “Carlos and Charlies” which was a little strange since they’re used to Waylon ‘n Willie but they were nice to us and accepted the music just fine. That seems to be a theme in Austin - that folks are gonna play their own music and it’s all OK. The rest of the country could stand to adopt a bit more of that attitude. Went out and had some good barbeque the last night with Frank and his wife Chris.
I was in Austin in 1990 and just loved it. There was a very bohemian hood right near the UT campus and 6th street had live music in every other restaurant or bar. I thought the place was fantastic. I returned 3 years ago and was disappointed… 6th street had become a caricature of itself almost like Bourbon Street in New Orleans and the bohemian hood had been overthrown by corporate America with a KFC or Subway in place of every funky joint that used to be there. On this trip I figured out what happened. Everything moved south. The real estate close to the school became so valuable that only the corporates could afford it so the other folks moved to the neighborhood just south of downtown on Congress Street. It had gotten a little run down so real estate was more affordable and so everyone migrated. The place is now the “hip zip” as they call it and it has that vibe that I was missing 3 years ago as well as plenty of success business-wise.I also found some awesome country roads to ride out into the hill country area northwest of the city. Gotta love those Texas wildflowers. I always say I love to ride hills but some of these down here are a bitch! That’s ok… I still like riding hills. Next I’m off to Houston to do a couple of shows with a guitarist friend that I met in Zihuatanejo named Ricardo Sweatt Rodriguez.
May 13th, 2006
I spent the week hanging out with my brother and his family at their home about a half hour west of Fort Worth. We fished a lot (they have a stocked fishing pond in their back yard… nice, eh?) and I attended a half-dozen little league baseball games, which was fun and relaxing. I found some nice country roads nearby to ride on and one day I traveled to a nearby trail that’s part of Texas’ “Rails to Trails” program where they are converting old railroad beds into bike trails.However, the fun project of the week was a recording that I did with my niece and nephews. I wrote a piece with parts for each of them - my niece Stephanie (15) plays flute and my two nephews Doug (12) and Dana (10) play drums and guitar respectively. Once I had the skeleton of the piece written and loaded into Pro Tools, I had each of them sneak out to the rv without their folks knowledge and record their parts. It turned out really well I think. You can listen to here.
May 8th, 2006
