Getting over the mountains in winter is deadly serious business. Traction tires required.
3G service is spotty on the Eastern side of the Cascades, which, as your van skids on black ice and plummets into a snowy crevasse, makes it much harder to Twitter sarcastically about your predicament.
Suspicion confirmed: AMC's Mad Men is the number one rated show among viewers who "don't even OWN a TV."
In the distant future, after the peak oil problem is solved, global warming reversed and we're all wearing silver jumpsuits and driving space-cars on our way to our space-jobs, fart jokes will still be hi-larious so you might as well accept it.
Music critics are full of shit.
Ryan Adams' Rock N Roll is a brilliant, brilliant album. (See #5)
Cartwheels and backflips during our set only encourage us!
Ragged, dirty Chuck Taylors may look "indie" onstage but modest leather boots provide ankle support and project James Hetfield-like confidence.
In the distant future, after the peak oil problem is solved, global warming reversed and we're all wearing silver jumpsuits and driving space-cars on our way to our space-jobs, lots of people will still hate Creed.
It's wise to know at least one recognizable Slayer riff, so when the scary guy in the back yells "SOUTH OF HEAVEN!" you can at least earn his respect. Do not, however, create the impression that you can play the whole song. Ditto any Pantera/Metallica/Sepultura.
Explone recently snagged a gig opening for L.A. indie rock dudes Low vs. Diamond (shown above) when they come through Seattle on October 22nd. They're on Epic Records and have performed on both Letterman and Leno. NO FAIR. I will punish them for their success by sneaking onto their tour bus and trying on all their fancy rock clothes!
Just kidding! The judge warned me to stop doing that.
The town was strangely deserted all weekend. When I lived in CA it seemed like every square inch was packed with people.
The hotel lounge was very nice.
And had cool carpet.
This is Nelson and Bryce, drummer and keyboardist for Kirby Krackle, cooling their heels.
The conference was held at the convention center nearby:
These pictures can't convey just how huge and packed the conference was:
Kyle and Jim, the songwriting brains:
Celebrity guests were a really, really bizarre mix of famous comic artists, D-grade scifi/horror actors, and 80s TV stars. Most wanted money in exchange for snapshots. I managed to ninja-cam a shot of Berke Breathed:
There were also tons of costumed nerds. Check out Sean Doorly's Flickr Set for lots of shots. (Or, just Google for "sexy Deadpool," I dunno.)
We played in a conference room on the second level.
It had ugly, ugly carpet.
Check out the bass amp I was given to use:
It looks like it was pushed down a flight of steps, thrown in a trunk and driven to a cornfield where Joe Pesci beat the crap out of it with a baseball bat. It's not even square anymore. (It worked fine though.)
Surprise, an opening band! The called themselves Bigfoot and played wheedly-wheedly! blues rock.
AKA the Abominable Frontman, Bassquatch, and...Sasquatch? Booo! Dude, you either pick a name or I'm naming you Drumsquatch. Or Skunk Ape. Anyway, thanks for letting me use your battered bass amp, Bassquatch.
Anyway I couldn't take any photos while playing but this guy got a shot of us doing soundcheck:
Maybe more photos will surface, who knows? UPDATE: popculturegeek has some good pics. Thanks to everyone who showed up, including the four dudes in Guy Fawkes masks who creeped out Nelson.
Back to the hotel lounge for drinks and nerd-talk.
Parting shot of the L.A. river on the way back to the airport the next day:
Then it's off to LA to perform with Kirby Krackle at the inaugural Long Beach Comic Con. KK will be debuting a new tune, "Going Home" which was commissioned especially for LBCC and which I've heard but haven't learned yet.
And then the following weekend I'm picking up bass duties for Green Monroe when they open for the Harborrat's CD release party. (Haven't learned those songs yet either!)
So as you might imagine, I've had no time for songwriting other than some melodic mutterings and strummings into my iPhone's shiny but otherwise useless-to-me "voice notes" feature. Also, let me assure you: they suck. I mean, terrible, terrible stuff with ad hoc titles like "EADGBD #1" and "zombie gun woowoowoo!" and "duh dah." No, seriously, I am looking at a song fragment here named DUH DAH. AND IT'S AWFUL.
So I'm basically taking the rest of 2009 off to play other people's music for awhile longer. I've scrubbed all my lofty plans for EP releases and covers albums. Maybe between now and next January I'll produce some new material that isn't the aural equivalent of MC Hammer pants.
Hey, here's a grainy video of me playing bass with Kirby Krackle last Saturday at the Showbox:
Huh, I'm not jumping around nearly as much as I remember. That's probably because 1) this was the last song, 2) I had just lugged my rig through high-80s degree heat, and 3) that bass weighs ten pounds more than most. Anyhoo, we had a really great turnout, which is a testament to Kyle's prowess as über-promoter and growing popularity with the geekcore crowd.
Here's a photo from behind the mike, during soundcheck:
And here's a forest of bass rigs all backlined up (there were two other acts that night):
As a musician, I'm of course very interested in the role of "free." Music can be had for free, I give away music for free, much of the software I use is free, etc. In the ten years since Napster, has anything changed?
Nope! Bertrand and Moore are still destroying everything, yay!
The talk was pretty fascinating and Anderson is an entertaining speaker. The key takeaway for me as an artist is that once price hits zero, it's pretty much all psychology from there. As if selling music wasn't a giant head-fake already. Also, the secondary argument of whether music -- or anything digital, really -- should be free is totally moot these days, and belongs in angry comment threads where musicians who spend $20K on their recordings shout at the musicians giving away basement-recorded MP3s.
Other than that, I don't have much to offer in the way of analysis. If anything, Anderson's talk confirmed my opinion that the best thing any up-and-coming artist could do with their music is give it away.
This Friday I'll be filling on bass for geekcore band Kirby Krackle. Clever, uptempo songs about comic books and video games. And yikes, our gig is at the Showbox at the Market.
KK is a joint venture between songwriter (and former Explone bassist!) Kyle Stevens and Seattle comic shop mogul Jim Demonakos, who also organizes the Emerald City ComicCon. Jim co-writes, Kyle records and performs, and fans delight to songs about Mario Kart and Benjamin Grimm. There's a HUGE writeup of the guys in this month's Seattle Sound magazine, which I can't link to because of course they use some lame Java thing.
Anyway, we've had two weeks of rehearsal cramming to get these songs in shape and it's been a lot of fun playing these tunes. Between KK and Explone I have to say I really dig being a sideman these days.
So I finally broke down and upgraded my recording rig. Actually, my original sound card broke down first, so the decision had already been made for me!
I figured if I was gonna upgrade the card, I might was well do the whole system, which seriously bummed me out because I hate dealing with hardware and I'd rather run a piece of equipment until smoke billows out of it before spending cash to replace it.
But I got really, really lucky. I wandered into Re-PC, which basically a giant warehouse filled with recycled computer parts and stuff, and hidden against the back wall I found a like-new 3.2GHz Pentium 4 machine, with 2 GB of RAM and WinXP Pro. I figure it's someone's former gaming or media box as it also came with a crazy 7.1 sound card and DVD burner. I'm amused to think this is someone's old, slow machine chucked to the curb, but what do I know. One man's trash, etc.
Anyway, a few days later I got an M-Audio FastTrack Pro. Not a top-of-the-line model by any definition, but it has decent preamps and phantom power, and it's USB powered so there's no ugly AC adapter. It's got two inputs so I can finally (finally!) record in stereo to separate tracks like a grownup.
By the way, all the complaints about the FastTrack preamp knobs are true: positions 1 - 8 are too quiet, 9 is just right, 10 is WAY TOO MUCH. Something about how the knobs don't compensate for the logarithmic blah-blah? Anyway, trust your meters, not your headphones, I guess. Also, I had to go online to download the latest drivers; apparently "it's ASIO or nothing."
Between the new PC and the FastTrack, recording is suddenly fun again, hooray! Everything just works and sounds better. I spent the weekend installing FL Studio and Reason, hooking up MIDI stuff, and playing around with REAPER, which I'm pretty sure is going to replace Cakewalk SONAR as my multi-tracker of choice, given that the former costs way less and does everything the latter does.
Now I just need to sit back and wait for all this new gear to write a song for me to record!
Anyway, a few days later I got an