I remember the waxer and press type and specing type and stats and rubber cement and benzine and the whole paste up process. And I remember doing the artwork for the first New Math single. I posted it all on the Scorgies site.
1 CommentBetween The Buttons
Sometimes, when I want to get to my blog, I type PopWars in Google and then click on the link it finds. There is a skate board company out there with the name but I got there first. Today I noticed a “Britpop” tag next to the return on the Google page. I think it has something to do with the StumbleUpon add on I use in Firefox. There is another Paul Dodd too. He’s England’s number one soccer hooligan. Not sure how I got labeled Britpop but I thought I would go with it.
“All sold out. Well I felt so free. It was just like that. I was put down flat.” I think the Stones may have reached their zenith with “Between The Buttons”. This album still sounds wildy adventurous to me and I am old enough to remember the Stones doing a song off this lp with cleaned up lyrics on the Ed Sullivan show. I love the cover photo and Charlie’s drawings on the sleeve. It’s more pop than blues and I think Brian Jones had a lot to do with it. And I love Charlie’s drawings on the sleeve.
Ruby Tuesday was ok but All Sold Out, My Obsession and She Smiled Sweetly should have all been hits. Can we go back and do it again?
6 CommentsWe All Scream For Ice Cream
We rode our bikes down to Durand Eastman beach this afternoon to catch Joe Tunis as Joe+N at his fifth of six stops on his ninth annual day tour. He is seen here performing with his band Tumul. Cameron (on the left with the Miami Vice t-shirt) has real hair. Joe does too but his is short. The wig came out about a third of the way through their set. That’s Chris Reeg from the Blood and Bone Orchestra on the ground with the camera. The two bikes in this shot are ours. Cameron said he likes hiding behind stuff. The amps are battery operated. Joe from Nod was there. He told us he’s eating at Pasta Villa tonight. Bathers were just behind the bushes and there was a kid yelling for ice cream. His pleas were picked up on and sampled and looped.
1 CommentI Want What She Has
A lot of the companies that we do website work for would die for the kind of traffic Julia Nunes gets. We have been trying to keep up with her by joining her YouTube channel so we get notified when she posts a new video. And then we get the embed source and put it on the front page of her website. But by the time we get to YouTube she has already had 20,000 views. Some of her videos have over a million plays.
Today she asked us to put a jpeg of her new cd on the site with a “Pre-order now and get an autographed copy” head. We did that and some work for another client and and then went down to the pool for a half hour or so. We came back to frantic emails and calls on both lines. We assumed the cd was ten dollars like her previous one but this one is more and they were getting swapped with orders already. How do you get swamped in a half hour?
I just spent most of this evening digging up Paper Faces memories to do an entry on the Scorgies site. I was signed in as Peggi, the administrator, so looks it like she wrote it. She is proofing it now on another machine.
Leave a commentBring Out The Jazz
Pete and Shelley kept us up til two last night or maybe we kept them up. I don’t remember. They left Rochester this morning with their new laptop and my old Kodak digital camera. They should be able to generate enough solar power up there to keep these two electronic devices going in the woods.
Peggi and I met the other members of Margaret Explosion at the Little Theater at noon. We were asked to be a prop for a photo in the cafe that will be used in an upcoming brochure. Were played a few improvisations while they set up the shot and then started talking about the upcoming Scorgies Reunion. We tried acoustic versions of Personal Effects songs, “Zeke’s Baby Girl”, “I Had Everything”, “Baby, Baby”, “Bring Out The Jazz” and one where Bob was playing “Porch” and Peggi was playing “Fascinating Game”. Ken didn’t really know the songs but he sounded great. It was the first time we had done these songs in twenty years or so.
Leave a commentBetter Than The Orange Monkey
Tom Kohn from the Bop Shop asked 4D Advertising to develop a site for Scorgies, the old rock and roll club on Andrews Street. He is planning a reunion for November 21 at the German House and he wanted people to be able to share their memories of the place and the many bands that played there. I wrote this short little piece to to kick off the blog on that site and I’m throwing it up here to encourage people to contribute to the site.
Don Scorgie is obviously the key figure in this whole story but probably not in the way you might think. I don’t think he was much of a music fan at least not like I am or most of you are. When I first met him he was behind the bar at street level on Andrews Street. And that fact that he was on that side of the bar had nothing to do with who was doing the drinking.
I was playing drums with New Math at the time and we rehearsed around the corner in the Cox Building on Saint Paul. Geoff Wilson from the Bowery Boys was the elevator operator in this building in later years but it was pretty much deserted when we moved in. We got in the habit of stopping in Don’s place after practice for beer. I never drank too many because I had to ride my bike back home.
Don was sort of an old salt like Popeye the Sailor man. Being next to the river he had nautical theme going with rope railings and a fish net hanging from the ceiling that was just beginning to collect the Spanish moss style dust clusters that became such a fixture here. The guy who rented him the juke box when he opened this place was probably the one who picked out the 45s. It was just generic mid seventies crap. I think Kevin Patrick, who was working as record promo guy at the time, talked Don into stocking the juke box with the good stuff. In later years, it seems Danny Deutsch, who now runs Abilene, was in charge of the tunes and at some point it seemed like every time you walked into that place you heard Bobby Darin’s “Mack The Knife”. But it wasn’t Don calling the musical shots.
One night after rehearsal Don took us down to the basement at Scorgies where he had just installed the first section of green indoor outdoor carpeting on the step up section next to the bar. It was the first time we had set foot in what people think of as Scorgies. He had a few picnic benches down there and he told us he was planning on setting up an indoor putting green. This was going to get people down in the basement of a century old building? We laughed at the idea.
I remember us, and it was probably Kevin doing most of the talking, trying to convince Don that what he had here, an empty room with no chairs or tables, was the perfect rock and roll club. All he needed was a stage and a sound system. So Don built the plywood stage and he eventually rented a sound system from Mark Theobald. Mark mixed the bands if they didn’t have their own guy. New Math was the first band to play here but I had already left the band at that point and was playing with the Hi-Techs.
This is just the way I remember it. That doesn’t mean this is really the way it went down.
2 CommentsWrestling With All The Little Pieces
There’s a Press Tones show tonight at Abilene. I don’t think we will make it but you never know. We are headed over to Bill and Geri’s to see the progress they have made on their tiled house. I see a lot of people cover their original wood siding with aluminum but not Bill and Geri. They have been slowly applying all shapes and sizes of colorful tile to the side of their house.
We worked on the Scorgie’s site for Tom Kohn today. Tom is planning a Scorgies Reunion show at the German House in November with some of the bands that used to play there. New Math, Personal Effects, Absolute Grey and The Press Tones are on the bill. We have been setting up a site for Tom that will hopefully run itself. People should be able to post stories, pictures, posters, mp3 files and videos to the site without 4D Advertising wrestling with all the little pieces.
Today we spent a good bit of the day getting this slideshow script to automatically size and post thumbnails without distorting them and also size and post larger files that can viewed in a Lightbox slide show. The Press Tones sent in a poster from one of their gigs that was actually a poster that I made for our band, The Hi-Techs. We played this date with them opening. I hadn’t seen ithe poster in a while.
2 CommentsWe’re All Deaf In Here
It has been total Julia immersion for us working on Julia Nunes’s web site. She’s had thousands of hits while we set the thing. People were signing her guest book as we were installing it. We worked until six or so and then we headed down to the pool. It was beautiful there and relaxing. We watched for John Gilmore to drive by and when he did we went home to meet him for dinner. We ate on the deck and headed off to see Julia at Alilene. She was great. She did this song about breaking up with her boyfriend that had the line, “I’m going out to get my mind off you”. It was like an Irish drinking song.
I couldn’t hear her talking between songs (and that’s my favorite part) so I said, “louder”. I was standing next to Dick Storms and he seconded my suggestion, “This is an older crowd. We’re all deaf in here.”
I went up to Julia on her break and waited for an opening to say hi. She was surrounded by admirers. I said, “Hi Julia. I just thought I would say hi. I’m Paul” and she looked at me and smiled sarcastically sweet and went on talking to her friends. I had to interrupt her again to say, “Paul from the website.” And she asked if Debbie was around but she meant Peggi. So we met. We love Julia.
Leave a commentGood Night Irene
The Phil Marshall Trio may not really be a real band. The official name may now be “The Horse Lovers” but the players are the same and Phil’s songs are are just as sweet. Even the new songs feel like old friends and the players are old friends so their performance on WXXI’s “On Stage” last nigt was especially enjoyable. Ken plays a different kind o bass in Margaret Explosion and all three of these guys played with Colorblind James. My favorite part was when Jimmy Mac did the chain drop on his snare drum for the big beat during their minor key, revamped version of “America The Beautiful”. Phil’s song, “Walking To The Opera”, written for his late brother is a flat out beautiful. There is an acoustic version of it on Phil’s MySpace page. While you’re there check out Annie Wells singing, “Guide Your Sweetest Dreams”. Watch out though. There’s a few Phil Marshalls in the MySpace world.
We were traveling with Rick Simpson in John Gilmore’s car last night so the night was still young when the XXI show ended. We walked into Adeline as the Tar Box Ramblers were startig their second set. We got talking to Rita Coulter at the bar and then got sidetracked at the pool table where John Gilmore was playing the night watchman from the Little Theater. When we finally got out back the bass player had set aside his stand up bass to join in on drums. The woman doing the door told us that the band reminded her of Phil Marshall. She was right. They did a nice versio of “Good Night Irene”.
I started thinking about Marky Ramone and how I liked his angular playing in the Voidoids but didn’t think he could match Tommy’s succinct playing with the Ramones. That was pretty much a non-sequitur. Here’s another one. Did you know Ken Frank is a mean chess player and an enigma.
1 CommentBeautiful Iraq
We are supposed to be over at WXXI today at 2:00 to get set up and sound check for the taping of Margaret Explosion’s segment of the OnStage Series. We gave WXXI a guest with ninety names on it and they told us we were at the limit. It might have had something to do with the free drinks and appetizers before the show. Los Lobos is playing for free tonight in the park downtown and some of our friends found it hard to tell us that they were opting for Los Lobos. I wish I was one of them.
Pete LaBonne came into town last night and will be joining us tonight on the five foot grand. We had a rehearsal where all went well except for when Pete and I headed off into a lounge section in “Beautiful Iraq”. It will be really interesting to see how we get from one song to the other tonight because we are used to talking amongst ourselves between songs. We’ve been doing this for years, sort of clearing the air before we start the next song. Another thing we’re used to is people talking while we play. We shape our songs around the din. I don’t think anyone will be talking tonight.
As far as I know, we are the only instrumental band on this list. The songs are sort of abstract and the host, Julia Figueras, will try to get concrete answers to her questions between songs. I see an interesting collision coming. I hope it plays well on tv.
Leave a commentIt Has Something To Do With Truth
We had a good time listening to an ABBA cover band a few years ago. It was interesting and a hoot at the same time. The Leonard Cohen movie, “I’m Your Man”, only had one song performed by him in it. They should have just made an MTV video. Cover bands are usually sort of sad.
Everybody was saying how much they enjoyed Billy’s Band at the Jazz Fest but I kept thinking about how much better Tom Waits would have been in person. Even when the band is the same but the main dude is missing, it just doesn’t work. Van Halen without David Lee Roth? After Sun Ra died, Marshall Allen took the Arkestra on the road but Sun Ra without Sun Ra?
And we broke one of John Gilmore’s concert going rules this evening by listening to a recording of Chuck Cuminale playing solo at Rising Place in Rochester in 1976. John says, “Never listen to a bands’ cd on the day of the show”. I missed Chuck Cuminale tonight at WXXI and maybe that was the idea. He had a perfect sense of rhythm and timing in his guitar playing and vocal delivery. This is all laid bare on this solo performance. And then of course, he was a poet.
Musical director, Ken Frank organized other former CBJ members (Rita Coulter, Phil Marshall, Charles Jaffe, Jim McAvaney, Bernie Heveron, Rush Tattered) and Chuck’s son Mark for this performance and their stellar performance almost made Jaffe’s wood inlay Chuck portrait (propped up behind the band) come to life. Julia Figueras asked Mark what he thought his father’s legacy was and he said “it has something to do with truth”.
4 CommentsVideo Responses to Video Respones
YouTube ukulele sensation, Jake Shimabukuro, was just here performing to packed crowds at Rochester’s Jazz Fest and little did we know that we had our own homegrown YouTube ukulele sensation in Julia Nunes. We’re talking MILLIONS of hits. She’s Paul Nunes’ daughter. Paul is the Chesterfield Kings’ studio keyboardist and lawyer. He is also Vincent, a wildly successful childrens’ entertainer.
Julia soaked it all up and now knocks ’em dead on her own. She’s very cute, her covers are very well chosen, her bedroom video production is amazing but what really gets me is her video responses to video responses to her videos. Click on the photo above to see/hear her latest.
Julia plays this Saturday at the the Knitting Factory in NYC.
Leave a commentScreamin’ You Head
Someone asked if we had seen Kevin Patrick’s “So Many Records, So Little Time” entry on the Hi-Techs. We hadn’t. That’s because Kevin is still experimenting with two sites (Blogspot and Tumbir) so if you want to stay up to date on all he has posted you will have to check two links for the time being. I like his Tumbir layout better because the play button for the songs is right next to the copy so you can play it while you read the entry. I’m sure he will figure this all out. I put links to both of his locations in the right hand column for the time being.
I really love this site and have been checking it out everyday but was only going to one link so I missed his entry on Screamin’ You Head. We hadn’t got around to digitizing this single ourselves so it was good to see and hear it in its digital shoes.
Those are Peggi’s eyes on the cover and she sang and played Farfisa organ, Ned Hoskin played guitar, Martin Edic played bass and I played drums. Dwight Glodell produced this.
2 CommentsPill Popping
Although a dying downtown does have it’s advantages, like easy parking and relatively cheap loft space, it is still sort of sad. One bright spot is the new Frederick Douglas Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge. I heard Frank DeBlase call it the “Freddy Sue” which illustrates how crazy the real name is.
We checked out Gato Barbieri yesterday at Paetec Park. There are so many tenor sax players in the world and yet no one else sounds like Gato? He’s still got it. Peggi came home and put on a few of his digital files. I guess he is almost blind so he probably didn’t even notice how few people were there. We hung around by the fence near the admissions gate instead of paying to get in. We did that once at the old baseball stadium when the Dead were playing. They had a huge crowd hanging around for them. There was only one other couple outside listening to Gato yesterday. I talked to Brad Fox on the phone yesterday and he reminded me that we named one of our cats after Gato. I didn’t tell him that Gato is cat in Spanish.
We ran into Laurie Barnum who works for the city. She said she brought an ibuprofen to Mark Iacona, one of the concert promoters, when he was back stage with Gato. She opened her pill container and Gato grabbed one of the pils, popped it and then asked what it was. She told him and he said, “Good, I could use one of those.”
1 CommentRejuvenation
Water temperature in our neighborhood pool reached 68 degrees today. If it was warmer out I’d be in there. I read Thursday’s and Friday’s New York Time this morning, brewed a cup Yogi Rejuvenation tea and headed down to the basement to paint. I got one that I like a lot. Again, I had plans for it but I didn’t get there.
I have to look around for an alternative to Yogi Tea. They changed the graphics on the boxes. It’s now glued shut like a small fortress and the tea bags are sealed in a type of paper that is almost impossible to tear open. I started to do the yoga stretch that is pictured on the box and I read, “Before doing this exercise or participating in any exercise program, consult your physician”. My doctor would live that.
We rode downtown with our neighbors last night to hear a band of Eastman students outdoors at the Village Gate. We sat down in front of Bodhis Cafe and Monica and I both ordered hummus and cucumber sandwiches. Peggi ordered chicken and I think Rick had something called “Big Bertha”. After dinner we rode over to Abilene where a Cajun band was playing on the deck. Danny has a pretty comfortable spot here. And the juke box is a sight to behold with Colorblind James Experience and Personal Effects first two record. We were checking it out with Mrs. Colorblind. There is a pretty cool podcast of the CBJ’s Dylan night from 1992 at that Colorblind link. Brian Horton does a version of “Dark Eyes” shortly before his heroin od.
4 CommentsFeeding The Beast
I’m still “feeding the beast”, that is, ripping all the cds we have in the house in iTunes and building a library on an external drive. This has been a casual, ongoing, background activity for about a month now. I’ve got boxes of cds on the way out the door. Still not sure where to go with those.
I am really surprised that I haven’t burned out the cd drive in our old laptop yet. That thing has been a work horse. I did bring it to its knees a few times with homemade cds with paper stick-on labels. I put the first of Duane‘s Crucial Roots cds in there and it sounded like a helicopter taking off. I had to use a paper clip to bring it down. I asked Duane if he had a digital version of his essential, twenty cd set of Reggae/Ska/RockSteady/Dub and he set aside some time on Memorial Day weekend to make one. It fit nicely on a dvd and it’s now in our library competing with Pete LaBonne’s twenty six cd set, “Gigunda” in the “Party Shuffle” mode.
Leave a commentJuke Box in the Sky
Today is Steve Hoy’s birthday. It is a big one for him. There is a six involved. We called him this morning but he didn’t answer. He was at the Indianapolis 500 yesterday and and may not be able to hear his phone ringing today. In the late sixties he proposed that we just kill ourselves when we turned thirty. I was uncertain but Steve felt like that was just too old and everyone he knew that was that old was a creep. It is old. Sixty is older.
I worked so hard on our landscaping job on Friday that I couldn’t paint Saturday morning. I stood in front of my easel like a zombie and then decided to just go out and work in the yard some more. Painting is hard work, harder than landscaping. I need to be physically ready or I make a mess of it. We turned in early and I was in good shape today. I finished a really strong painting before Peggi got back with her mom. We cooked chicken in the back yard.
I called our nephew in NYC to see if he could handle manual labor when he gets up here. He’s taking the train up tomorrow. I plan on borrowing my neighbor’s truck and picking up a load of 3/4 inch gravel to put in the French drain out back. It’s $5 a load at the quarry in Penfield. Our nephew is up for it.
Kevin Patrick is building a site that dedicated to 45s. He has just started but it promises to be brilliant. He tried blogspot yesterday and Tumblr today. He’s looking for an easy way to embed music in the blog software. It’s called So Many Records, So Little Time and it reunites packaging with digital music files. It promises to a juke box in the sky or record store showroom where you can’t buy anything but you can browse as long as you like. There’ll be plenty of personal anecdotes as well.
5 CommentsPerfect World
I am nearing the end of of the big rip, that is taking every cd in the house and shoving it into our old laptop. I still have a stack of Sun Ra cds to rip and I’m sort of surprised the cd drive still hanging in there for this operation. A few cds with heavy ink coverage have sounded like a helicopter while giving up the goods. I have iTunes set to automatically retrieve track tags from CDDB and then eject with a chime when it finishes converting the tracks to mp3s or Apple Lossless files. Buy.com had a one day deal where you could buy a 500 gig harddrive for $100 and then there was a $20 rebate. So the library is sitting there and the cds are all in boxes ready to . . . I don’t know what I’m going to with them.
No more looking all over the house for a particular cd or just trying to find a cd in a pile. When I do that I usually forget what I’m looking for and go right by it. Now we’re diggin’ the Party Shuffle. You shuffle the deck with a click, call up 50 tunes at random, and restack those 50 if we don’t like the order. Or we live dangerously and just the let the thing go. All sorts of stuff comes up that I would never think of putting on. I keep thinking, “This guy is the best dj in the world”. And iwhen something nasty comes up, I hit the delete button and iTunes moves the file to the trash. This is a perfect world.
1 CommentScrewing Things Up
Bill Jones bought a plug-in for Cart Weaver (a shopping cart add on for Dreamweaver) that allows you to sell digital files and collect through PayPal. We are collaborating to set up a functioning store for Pete LaBonne’s entire oeuvre to date, entitled Gigunda. Today I scanned the covers of twenty six Pete cds. When we get the bugs worked out we hope to off this service to our website customers. Here is a sample from “Gigunda”. This track is from Pete’s “Ask Mr. Breakfast” cd.
I brought the Marlene Dumas book that Monica checked out of the UofR library to painting class last night. I had hoped to show it to Lorraine but she wasn’t in class. She has been really tearing it up lately. She brings in two or three paintings a week that just knock me out. My painting teacher really liked Dumas’s work too and he has borrowed the book for a while.
I saw that Lucian Freud’s fat lady painting sold yesterday for more money than any other painting by a living artist. Beautiful tribute/obit to/for Robert Rauschenberg in yesterday’s NYT’s. I particularly like this passage.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”
1 CommentDreamland Faces
Andy McCormick and Karen Majewicz (Dreamland Faces) performed in the dark last night in front of twelve short silent films that had been recently restored by the George Eastman House. Their music was so perfect for these old films that I kept forgetting it was being performed live and that it was not part of the soundtrack. And we were sitting right next to them in the front row. It was a magical night.
Andy plays musical saw, accordion, piano and keyboards and Karen sings like Edith Piaf while playing accordion or piano. They movies included “Mushroom Growing”1915, “How The Cowboy Makes His Lariat” 1917, two sensational “Felix The Cat” movies circa 1925 and “Love, Snow and Ice” 1915, featuring festivities at the famous Ice Palace built in 1898 in Saranac Lake. The complete lineup and a very cool picture of the band is here.
Also in the very cool category would be the John Cassavetes film festival this month at the Dryden.
1 Comment