First Record At Sixty

The Conch Republic at 4th Street Live!

As I’ve previously mentioned, the producer for my project, Michael T., has a ‘Trop Rock’ band called The Conch Republic, meaning that they play a lot of Jimmy Buffett tunes but also The Beach Boys, Bob Marley and Bob Seeger material, too. They’ve been working on a CD for which Michael asked and received for permission to cut “Madman On the Corner.” They’re finally finished and are scheduled to play in Louisville on June 22 at 4th Street Live!, where they will perform cuts from the CD. Yeah!

Michael asked for a plug in the June issue of Louisville Music News, which I agreed to, though not as extensive a story as he would like. Despite being a music journalist, I try to maintain some degree of integrity. For this blog, though, I can post his story. Here it is:

For fans of Jimmy Buffett (Parrotheads) and fans of great beach music, The Conch Republic invades Fourth Street Live, Friday night June 22nd at 6pm.

Hailing from the Port of Indecision, just South of Insanity, the Conch Republic turns every event into a little bit o’ Margaritaville! But ye be warned, the Conch Republic is not for the timid and faint-of-heart. The Conch Republic is for the young and young-at-heart, wanting to let their inner-Parrothead/Pirate/Landshark, etc… come out to play.

This is just a small preview of the fun and hilarity that is brought on by the Conch Republic, a Lexington based Trop Rock band, described by most as a Jimmy Buffett tribute band, although they play much more than just Buffett. In fact, their repertoire ranges from Buffett to Marley, from the Beach Boys to Seger, and they even boast a few Disney tunes. However, there are two common threads among all of them, they are either topical in feel or great party tunes.

Also, June sees the release of the Conch Republic’s debut CD, Flip Flops and Bottle Tops, which will be available at the performance. The title track, “Flip Flops & Bottle Tops”, is all about the aftermath of a Jimmy Buffett concert. They have done a great job of using little catchy lines from many of Buffett’s songs to give this track a lot of character. Of the other nine songs on the CD (7 originals and 3 covers in all) there were three others that really stood out to me are “Drivin’ Down To The Keys” (a rocking song with some country flare and a lot of attitude), “Palm Tree Paradise” (a soothing ballad with great lyrics) and “Madman On The Corner” written by Louisville’s own Paul Moffett.

Yes, the Conch Republic really knows how to put on a show and they are quickly becoming a favorite among Trop Rock fans from Memphis to Myrtle Beach. They have been asked to play the Jimmy Buffett Concert Pre-Party at Cheeseburger In Paradise in Cincinnati, Ohio. This is an annual tradition at the restaurant chain when Buffett comes to town each year for his concert at Riverbend. Being asked to play this show is a huge honor and compliment to any band in the Trop Rock genre. So keep a weather eye open mates, and hold on tight. Thar be squalls ahead and guilty pleasures for all when ye party with the Conch Republic, Friday night, June 22nd at Fourth Street Live!

To learn more and listen to the Conch Republic and their coming dates, visit online at www.ConchPartyBand.com or MySpace.com/ConchPartyBand.

Jam Sessions, Practice Resume

Louisville and New Orleans have the distinction of having major ‘Civic Holidays,’ quite unlike other towns in the U.S. New Orleans, of course, has Mardi Gras and Louisville has the Kentucky Derby, which expands into two weeks that are collectively referred to as “Derby Week.” The whole thing wraps up on the first Saturday in May, except for a breakfast in Bardstown on Sunday. It then takes most of the next week before everyone gets back into a normal routine, i.e., sobers up. The whole event generally screws up all the live music shows that aren’t downtown, so musicians have to scramble to find work. It’s one of the peculiarities of the Derby that it has a negative impact on the majority of entertainment businesses, particularly bars, during that period. Since the actual Derby is a privately-owned event, as are the various Derby Festival events, it’s clear that the city goes out of its way to help out a couple of private organizations to the detriment of its other businesses. It doesn’t happen like that in New Orleans (or didn’t, anyway), according to a Louisiana native I know.

The bar where I go for a Wednesday jam session is located downtown, so they did alright during Derby week. The week after, it was quiet as [select your metaphor]. Perhaps by this evening, things will have picked up again.

The Derby Eve party at my friend Michael’s house got thoroughly rained out; in the classic Ohio Valley way, it poured buckets in St. Matthews while barely sprinkling in the South End. No use for the sound system and most of the musicians didn’t show up. On the plus side, I got a spontaneous Flamenco lesson from my teacher, who was there with her husband the percussionist.

The last week has been a bit excessive for an old guy. It started out on Monday, when, after the usual jam/practice at Michael P’s house, I decided to go downtown to Stevie Ray’s for an Open Stage. That proved to be serious schmoozefest - you can read my post about it here.

On Wednesday, I headed downtown for the jam session at the Bluegrass Brewing Company on Theatre Square, which proved to be so entertaining that we didn’t knock off until about 12:30 a.m. The very next night was the weekly “Player’s Spot” TV show taping at Gerstle’s, featuring the River City Blues Band, a collection of longtime blues players. After the show, Brian White and I interviewed the guys and followed that with a continuing conversation over beers. I crawled into the bag about 1 a.m. Getting up each of those days was a challenge, as always with vocal encouragement from our two dogs, who insist on their morning half-mile walk at 6:30 a.m.

My justification? I’m getting in ’shape’ for gigging. Either that or I’ve simply taken leave of my senses. Whichever it is, it took its toll on my Flamenco practice, so that come Saturday morning, I wasn’t prepared for the intensified instruction on a tango dance.

The tales of the pickers who first began gathering at Dale Whiteside’s farm outside Anna, Illinois some thirty years ago is likely never to be told all in one place. I made one trip there back in the Seventies with a woman I was interested in; she was going to chase a taxidermist. It was mostly a bluegrass crowd, with a strong representation of old-timey musicians but in any case, it was a big festival spread out over several acres. I didn’t go back there but in time, some of the group began coming to Southern Indiana once or twice a year, including Whiteside. My friend Kyle the banjo player had a connection with a psychologist from Kleburn, Texas who had invited the group first to his farm in Southern Indiana and later to the Wynadotte Woods State Park. After several invites, I made a day trip to the psychologist’s farm and picked some, along with my friend Michael P., who was learning to play the bass.

The group gathered again at Wynadotte Woods over the April 13-15 weekend and Kyle invited all his picking buddies to come up. It was, unfortunately, a cold and rainy weekend, so attendance was down. I went up on Saturday afternoon, played a little with the group before the session broke up for dinner. Afterwards, the players again assembled in the activities building, where one room was suitable for playing and a bit of picking proceeded. As I had to return to Louisville early, I only managed to play five or six tunes before leaving.

Usually, a post of this sort is most reportage and of interest to only those directly involved and that’s still mainly true. However, I found that the notion of the importance of niche in-group/out-group was reinforced by this visit. These folks are mostly in their late forties to early sixties (except for Date, who’s 73) and they generally like old, familiar bluegrass and old-time music. This is entirely common and ordinary; it’s a matter of age and choice of music that also is reflected in commercial radio formatting (The Music of Your Life, All Eighties Hits; Classic Rock, etc). Unfortunately for me, I’m a songwriter, and while my songwriting is mostly also within the acoustic genre, the tunes are new or at least unfamiliar to this particular group. Hence, I was an out-group of one, as far as the music was concerned. While I know a modest number of standard Bluegrass tunes, I’m not terribly fond of performing them; they are the required material to play out in the world. Consequently, I was not unhappy to leave.

Of course, I must say here that all these folks are perfectly nice and good company in the normal course of things. Most of them at one time probably considered themselves ‘radicals’ or at least leaning in that direction, as bright young folks often are and eagerly sought out new music. Age slowly closes the doors to newness; it becomes more pronounced and noticeable after fifty or so (or earlier)

The other reason for paying particular attention to this was that on the previous Thursday, John Whitaker, one of the performers on “The Player’s Spot” TV spot I’m involved with was a 29-year-old fellow who was simply wild about new music, particularly Brazilian and African. After the interview that my co-host Brian White and I do with each artist, we talked about what we were listening to, exchanging artists and websites and going on about why we liked what we were currently into. It was quite so college bull-session-ish, although when I was in college, world music was very hard to come by. It certainly contrasted sharply with my experience two days later.

In any case, I’m quite certain that I wish to continue to hang around with much younger players whenever possible; I’ll also likely decline any additional invitations to Anna.

I made the trip to Lexington on Saurday, April 7 for the recording of mandolin and bano tracks on the bluegrass tunes. As I noted earlier, I arranged for Murrell Thixton on banjo and Danny Jones on mandolin for this sessions. They laid down tracks for five bluegrass tunes and one mandolin track for “White Horses” in about three hours. That’s one of the best parts about having two very professional pickers do the work: most of the songs were single takes, with a bit of extra punch-in on “White Horses.”

Producer Michael T also said that his Buffett cover band was proceeding quickly to wrap up recording for their CD, which includes “Madman on the Corner,” for which I’ll get some actual royalties. Wheee. I can hardly wait.

The restarted Wednesday Jam session at the Bluegrass Brewing Company on Theatre Square have been going along pretty well. The layout of the structure, though fundamentally unchanged, has been altered by the addition of large booths in the front area where we had been jamming before, so that it’s now necessary that we move to a similar space in the rear, near the kitchen. That space is roughly twice as large as the front room, with the result that the acoustics are not nearly as good. We beat the guitars pretty hard and have to sing so loudly that we risk voice strain, particularly when a group of diners is seated nearby. Ah, well, it’s better than practicing at home along.

Just a quick post here - finally, finally, we got a schedule set for the session with Danny Jones and Murrell Thixton to put mandolin and banjo tracks on the five bluegrass tunes on the project: April 7. Better get my taxes down early.

Well, I don’t have any “Niagra Falls”-type trigger words, but I do know that managing projects can be, at best, a step-by-step affair, and sometimes more a “two steps forward, one back” sort of situation. It doesn’t help when ‘assumption traps’ hang you up.

“Assumption Trap” is a personal phrase for a problem which has plagued me for years and years: having a background assumption about something or somebody that is, simply, wrong. When that happens, the results of some effort or plan or campaign fall short and you don’t understand why, and so you try again and fail and still, no light dawns.

This error is a constant danger in the geek programmer world; an early error of any kind in a piece of code will come back to bite you on the butt, usually when you least expect it. In the musician’s world, it’s the same: some assumption or set of assumptions slowly degrade a career or block a gig or, more often, simply result in a lot of things not getting done.

For instance, what’s your assumption about why a club or restaurant hires you or your band? Are you there to entertain their guests or are you there to draw in customers? Making the wrong assumption here means you don’t maximize your results for that gig and then don’t get hired again.

Well, I write all that because I allowed myself to put a foot in the trap; I assumed that because the studio where I’m recording is run by an Audio Engineering school, which doesn’t have students on the weekends, that the studio was likewise not available on the weekends, unlike most studios. This made for some real difficulties with scheduling a couple of sidemen mentioned in the a previous post. I was thinking about how I could, perhaps, record the tracks in Louisville at a studio with Pro Tools and zip ‘em down to Lexington. Not the best possible solution and certainly a detour, but hey! I wanted these guys to play on the job.

Anyway, the owner of the school called up a few days ago about another matter but asked why the project wasn’t moving forward. I explained my dilemma: Saturday recording needed. Oh, hell, he said, (producer) Michael T. comes and goes when he needs to and often comes in on Saturday. I should schedule a Saturday and he would see to it that the producer was there. Problem solved.

So now, all I have to do is arrange the schedules with the players, which is a set of problems all by itself, but now I have a direction to go. Pick up one foot, set it down; pick up the other.

P. S. - For any readers not old to enough to have seen Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the “Niagra Falls” joke was a running routine through several of their movies.

The holidays certainly take their toll on my time; yours as well, I would guess. The recording process got bogged down, too, in part because the studio was tied up over the holidays, then my choice of banjo players got sick on the first of January and was still ill around the last week in January. Additionally, he kept complaining that a.) he didn’t want to go all the way to Lexington from Louisville and b.) he couldn’t take off work because he had employees.

This is not a problem specific to my project; generally, weekend players or even working musicians can be problematic about scheduling time to record, as my previous experience working on other projects as proven. Then, of course, once they’ve committed to a schedule, it is often difficult to ensure that they will playing at the level you will want. Session players and musicians who have been session players understand the rules and will be ready to play when the time comes.

As a result of this delay, I gave up on my friend and connected up with two bluegrass musicians that I knew to be longtime working players at all levels, Murrell Thixton and Danny Jones. Thixton, a banjo player, was last with Storefront Congregation, a most excellent bluegrass band from Louisville. The players in Storefront included several musicians who had been in a bluegrass group, New Horizon, that was named Upcoming Artist of the Year way back in 1980, at the height of the bluegrass craze in Louisville. Mandolinist Danny Jones has been in the bluegrass scene for many years, including a stint with Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys and as the founder of Bluegrass Alliance, a band that ultimately spawned Newgrass Alliance.

Anyway, they both asked for a CD of the tunes I was interested in having them play on, which I sent to them. I also sent an email down to my producer in Lexington and asked for a selection of dates. At this writing, that’s where things stand for recording.

On other fronts, the television program “The Player’s Spot” is continuing right along. We have recorded ten shows and broadcast seven of them. Clips from the artists on the show have been posted on youtube.com.

The downside to this project has been that I haven’t been playing nearly enough. This lack of picking time has been commented on by other folks who were playing at the Wednesday night jam session, so for some time, we have been searching for another friendly place to jam, with no success, until the management of the Bluegrass Brewing Company in St. Matthews, which had licensed the use of their name to the Theatre Square bar, took over (bought?) the Theatre Square facility, which has now reopened after being dark for over two months. Steve R. and his wife Debbie promptly went down and arranged for the return of the Wednesday night jam, which will kick off on Wednesday, February 7. I am eager to return to playing for two or three hours at a stretch.

Part of the process of getting ready to go out and gig (in support of the CD) is playing with other folks, with a particular emphasis on finding possible bandmates. This is especially true for those of us who are past the big six-oh: it’s hard to play three-set gigs solo. I have been jamming with several folks for a while on Wednesdays (see the June 2 post) and, to make the story short, we have wound up with a television show featuring live music.

Of course, this is not something that’s readily available to everyone, although in most cities, it is more attainable than you might think, particularly if your city’s agreement with the cable system there includes a ‘public access’ channel. I produced a public access show for some three years or so but finally gave it up because it was simply too much work without any particularly obvious payback. (I wasn’t playing out at that point.) The experience was useful because I learned quite a bit about the process of making television, which is not nearly as difficult as it might seem.

Some subsequent opportunities also came my way courtesy of a friend with thirty-plus years in commercial television. This friend also has a longtime interest in putting Louisville music on TV. He started and continues to produce a country music video show; we also did a line dancing show for a year, shooting a dance instruction show at Coyote’s Dance Hall in Louisville. It was quite a production: seven video feeds, involving two mobile cameras, one on sticks, one on the floor, another over the bar, a mini-cam in the DJ’s booth and a feed of the videos the dancers were following. My friend built a remote setup in the back of his van, including a switcher, time base corrector and a pair of Sony 3/4 inch U-matics video recorders. Every week, we’d unload all the cameras and gear, run the cables, set up the cameras and Clear Comm headsets for the camera operators and, after the show, pack it all back up.

That was something of a chore but I really learned about TV.

It was this friend who dropped by our jam session who suggested that we could do a TV show with acoustic players and, using just one pro 3-chip camera, do a pretty good job. He also had a line on a local low-power station where we could buy airtime for a dirt-cheap rate. The other players were interested; I had other friends who had some TV experience, with the upshot that we moved to jam to a different club and began putting together the show. A friend who had done camera work on the linedance show also had a pro camera (Sony 3000) and a new Mac Powerbook with a next-to-the-last current version of Final Cut Pro, which he subsequently upgraded. Another friend - also a musician - volunteered to sell some of the advertising (also dirt cheap) and we were on the way.

The show was titled “The Player’s Spot” and we invited various singer/songwriters as guests, two per program. The folks who had been regulars at the jam became the house band, under the title of Tingo. We established the rule that only original music would be played, just to sidestep any copyright issues and began to record, getting three shows in the can before airing the first one.

TV taping is the same as any other recording; sloppiness is embarrassing. Immediately, various folks began to insist on rehearsal, which caused scheduling issues all around. We still have not quite worked that out, even though some of us get together on Mondays to play. We are still hashing through the details, with particular problems finding a rehearsal space, which is no different a problem than it is for any band of any age.

So that’s where it stands at the moment. We recorded a show last night; the first program aired last Tuesdays. We have a thirteen-week commitment at a minimum and life has gotten busy. I just hope that I can continue to perform and not get bogged down producing TV, a monthly newspaper and managing a constantly updated website. Plus write two blogs.