Nice Night at the Monkey

Look at me, writing a post about a show! I played solo last night at Java Monkey -- my musical home away from home -- and in spite of various harbingers of doom, it turned out to be a good night.

The signs things might not go well started with logistics. I had to miss my son's baseball game for the show, and we had some carefully scripted planning go awry when the auto shop called just before 5:00 to say the van wouldn't be available after all. We'd have to get a rental. When I dropped my PA gear off at Java Monkey, the stage temperature was about 85 degrees with 90% humidity. At least I wouldn't be cold! I went to park, keeping my guitar with me, and it dawned on me that I had not brought a microphone stand. Meanwhile, I drove around Decatur three or four times looking for parking, and finally ended up in the lower deck at the library (don't tell anyone). So I walked the three blocks or so back in the 90 degree heat carrying my guitar, and was pretty tired and grumpy by the time I was ready to start setting up.

But things turned around pretty quickly: some friends from college -- whom I haven't seen since college -- were there with their three kids. That was very cool, to say the least! And the always helpful JM staff set me up with a perfectly serviceable microphone stand, so I was able to get my rig set up and sound-checked without any further glitches. While I set up, more people I know filtered in so that, by the time I started playing, there was a nice audience out there on the patio.

Nothing to be done about the heat though. I just stood up there sweating, and I'm still a little dehydrated from it today. I started off with a John Hurt number, and I kicked it off in the wrong key (which I do about half the time). So I stopped and made some random dumb comments in an effort to cover my gaffe. When I started back -- in the right key -- I hoped no one would be the wiser. After the rocky start, seemed like things pinged along pretty well. I didn't really prepare a specific set list for the show. Instead, I recycled the list from when I played the Monkey last month, and I just kind of winged it as the mood struck. I played a couple of songs I haven't played in a long time, and I changed the order up a bit.

As often happens at Java Monkey, it felt more like a conversation than a "show." The room is small enough for me to go "off mic" a lot between songs and talk to folks, and we discussed the merits of murder ballads and the relative tameness of contemporary popular country music and such-like. I was bummed not to have Shelle with me, but it turned out to be a really fun night. I reckon I played for about an hour and a half. If you were there, thanks for coming!

School's Out For the Summer

Today is the last day of school for my kids. I was just thinking about how long it had been since I'd written anything here -- over a month. Wow. Well, I guess it's fair to say I'm in a bit of a Summer hiatus.

My original plan for the Summer was to take advantage of the slower schedule and really focus tightly on music. We had (have?) high hopes to get the record finished in June and try to play a lot of gigs. But two critical, path altering things have happened. One is, a really crucial server at work crashed, and the carefully devised disaster recovery plan seems to have been created by FEMA under the Bush administration. Which is to say, it might have been good at some things, but actually recovering from disaster wasn't one of them. As a result, everything I've done for a very long time was lost, and I'll be working for months just to get back to zero. Call it a really stressful form of job security.

The other thing is pretty fun: our oldest son asked for permission to try out for the all star baseball team for his birthday. We haven't let him in the past because we wanted to take a break from little league over the Summer. But this year we let him, and he made the team. And now we have baseball pretty much constantly. If we're not practicing or playing or driving to far-flung ballparks for tournaments, we're washing practice pants or uniforms or sliding shorts. Red Georgia dirt does really interesting things when layered with infield grass stains on thick, white polyester game pants.

But we do still find time for music. I'm playing a couple of gigs this month, and we played a really fun show in May at a big party. We were the last of a long line-up of bands to play, and darkness fell right as we took the stage, and a chill was settling in, and the sound system was great, and it was sort of a magical little set. It felt a little bit like the end of Spring.

So here's to Summer! To baseball and no school and crazy schedules. I may get into a music groove and write here a lot; I may hit another dry patch that lasts for weeks. Meanwhile, if you're in Atlanta, stop by JavaMonkey Thursday night and say hi!

Untouched by Suicide

We're playing a benefit for the Atlanta chapter of American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tomorrow night. Details here. Since signing on for that gig way back in December, I've been thinking about the subject of suicide and suicide survivors a lot. I wrote this essay some time back as a response to being asked to say something about why I was participating in the event.

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Asked to say how I’ve been touched by suicide, I thought: I have not.

Unless you count Tommy when I went off to college. He sat alone in the cab of a friend’s pick-up back home, with his Remington and several boxes of ammo. While the cops closed in on him, he turned the gun around. It was a horrible death, and although I’d given him up with Tonka trucks, I wrote his mother how Tommy had been my hero once.

And before that there was Mr. Free from our church basketball league. Kevin came up to my house when his father, the pastor, had to go into the woods with Mrs. Free to claim her husband. Kevin guessed hanging, but it was a new shotgun from Service Merchandise and no note. Their oldest boy went running through the neighborhood all night shouting for his daddy, was what we heard.

Then there was Sarah, who showed up at Youth Group sometimes. Once I asked her out, and she smiled to say yes, but on second thought she made up some excuse. That was a week before she sat all night in the family station wagon, with the engine running and the garage door closed. Parents found her in the morning. After that they aged considerably, always trailing a sad happy-hour smell.

My friend Greg came home from college with me one weekend, and it turned out our dads had known each other at the same school. Dad was smiling graciously when he greeted us, but there was an edge to his joking, and you could just tell he and Greg’s dad hadn’t really been friends. Your daddy was the advisor on my hall in Winship. A real son-of-a-gun! Wrote me up just for having water in my sink. How is the old rascal?

Greg put on a smile and a bit more accent, just shy of sardonic. Why, I don’t rightly know. My daddy put a pistol in his mouth and shot the back of his head off when I was five.

Breaking an awkward silence, Greg went on. After that, my mom got us a puppy. Sometimes I’d throw it down the stairs, just so I could pick him up and comfort him.

People just hurled into shock and pain in the wake of this violence, and me thinking I’ve dodged that bullet. Well sure, I haven’t been hit hard like that dog thrown down the stairs. But by the simple calculus of the thing, I don’t suppose any of us can claim we’ve been untouched by suicide.

Good Old Days

Have you heard this radio commercial for ice cream? A brand that's supposed to "taste just like the good old days"? The ad consists entirely of a slick country song that starts out, "I remember our old country home. . . ." The song is in line with a lot of what's coming out of Nashville, what I've been hearing on commercial country radio when I listen. There's a great deal of misty nostalgia in these songs, and I gotta tell ya, a hell of a lot of it rings laughably false.

In the ice cream song, the speaker reminisces about "simpler times," and sets the bucolic scene with mama in the kitchen and the kids down by the swimming hole. At the climax of the song my family just laughs out loud: "Mama hollerin' through the screen / 'would you kids like some home made ice cream.'" Now, anyone who knows anything about home made ice cream, or the past, or mamas, should find this image comical in several ways. We've got the kids down in the creek while mama is supposed to be churning ice cream up at the house, presumably in the kitchen, just like she might bake a peach cobbler. And she's going to surprise our apple-cheeked kiddies with that yummy chilly goodness when it's all finished and ready to serve.

For starters, making ice cream is messy. Rock salt is dirty, and when you mix it generously with gobs of ice, you get a messy, corrosive run off. So you churn ice cream in the back yard, preferably on some patch of dirt where theres no grass to kill, or even better, where there are some weeds downhill you been meaning to get rid of anyway. And what's more, in the gauzy past of my youth, ice cream churns were mostly hand-cranked, so I'm sure that in this "simpler time and place" of the song, mama ain't got no fancy electric churn. If you've never taken a turn at hand-cranking an ice-cream churn, let me tell you something: it's bursitis-inducing, back-breaking, mama-pissing-off work. You get as many people over to help as possible and you take turns.

If mama had been busy up at the house making ice cream for the kids, we're talking about cooking up custard, wrestling ice, handling dirty rock salt, turning that ass-whupping crank, and dealing with the messy run off. After all that, she ain't fiddin to sally over to the screen wiping her hands on her apron like Aunt B and sing out a friendly, "you kids want some ice cream?"

On the contrary, mama is stomping out onto the porch, hands red and hair flying, and she's hollering, "If you kids want some of this ice cream I'm a-churnin', you better get your sorry butts up outa that water and come help me! You think I'm doing all this for my health? Tell your daddy to come in from that barn and bring me some more ice or this isn't gonna set up. And somebody's gotta take a turn at this crank! I'm up here sweating like your aunt Edna at a square dance, and y'all just playing in that mud like you don't have a care in the world!

Silly as it is, this song would be right at home alongside some big country hits. Why, I'm surprised there're any farmers left in the fields; to listen to country radio, you'd think they've all pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville. Every time I turn around there's some song about "I'm a farmer like my daddy and his daddy before that / And I love Jesus and the flag, and you can tell it by my hat." I heard this song yesterday that was all about how great it is to be a Southern man because of our traditions of farming and respect for women and family and love of Jesus and all that. And I was thinking, hmm. I'm a Southern man, and all the men in my family are Southern men, and I gotta tell you, I have to look pretty long and hard to find someone like the gentle, faithful character this song describes as the stereotype. Don't get me wrong: I love my family and I'm proud of my heritage, but you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth, folks. It's true that we southerners are not all a bunch of nine-fingered, cross-burning, wife beating hayseeds. It is also true that I have been to a family reunion where a man was wearing a klan t-shirt (not a blood relative), that I have heard shockingly bigoted statements uttered by people I love, that I have seen families torn apart by neglect and ignorance and even violence on the part of men who probably see themselves as good Christians. There's nothing especially southern about the flaws in the people I know, but for some reason Nashville has decided that the South needs it's own special brand of flawlessness.

Happy Birthday to Us

Shelle and I are turning 40 over the next couple of months. We're celebrating with box seats for REM. We just bought them with the help of a friend who (through some mysterious means) had access to advanced purchasing. The last time we saw REM they were touring Monster, and the acoustically dubious Atlanta Omni still existed as a rock venue. We waited in line before daylight at a Publix store out in the sticks with a bunch of friends to get a low lottery number, and still our seats sucked.

Of course, we'll have to sell the kids for scientific experiments to pay for them, but sacrifices must be made. Well, that will help with the babysitting, which will put the cost right over the top. Actually, our oldest will be jealous when he learns he's not going: he loves REM. Especially Document and Life's Rich Pageant. And the middle child loves their cover of "Superman." But alas, they will have to remain at home.

Speaking of concert costs and of the Omni, I remember paying $17 to see Van Halen when I was maybe 15 or 16, and we lamented then the rising cost of live music. Ha. These tix were >$80 each before all the usury fees. Well, we haven't had a big splurge show since Shelle bought Paul Simon tickets for me at double face value for the Surprise tour, which turned out to be worth every penny, so here's hoping!

Famous in China

OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:

xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [17/Mar/2008:12:51:13 -0400] "GET /player/dep_noauto.xml 
HTTP/1.1" 200 1336 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; 
rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12"

Using my mad h4x0r skillz, I can write little scripts to parse these and look for things like "how many visitors downloaded an mp3 in the month of March"; or "what's the most commonly downloaded song on my site."

While doing just such an analysis recently, I noticed that one song was rather more popular than any other. And I don't mean five percent more popular; I'm talking about five times more popular. Hmm, that's strange. I mean, I like that song just fine, but it's not like "Stairway to Freebird" or something. This would require some investigation.

I scanned the logs manually, looking for any pattern that might provide a clue. I didn't need Velma and a box of Scooby Snacks to discover the regular repetition of a single URL where the referring server should be: http://music.soso.com.

I typed the URL into a browser and it brought up a Chinese site that seems to be some kind of music clearing house. I saw what looked like a search box (I couldn't be sure since all the text was Chinese) so I typed in my name and hit enter. Sure enough, there was a link to my song Shudder, along with the helpful (if totally inexplicable) title "Anniversary."

Of course, if my song were an actual Chinese hit, it would generate as many downloads in a few minutes as I'm seeing in a month. But it's still pretty interesting to see what a little bit of bootlegging can do for your stats. So here's what my friends in Kunming are raving about:

Download Shudder

Love to Hate Rhapsody

I've been a paying "Unlimited" subscriber to the Rhapsody music service for a couple of years now. And dammit, I hate Rhapsody. But I just can't give up the streaming access to all those hundreds of thousands of records.

Here's why I'm griping right now: I'm in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones. Now, the Rhapsody music client is really, really slow on the old computer I run it on, so you've got one good shot at finding what you want before you get annoyed and give up. So I go to the search box (after slowly, painfully logging in for the fourteenth time; 'nother story). And I type "exile on main street" and select "Album" for the type of search. Then I hit "go" and walk away. I walk away because if I stand there I will get really mad and pull my hair out waiting for the search to come back. And I don't have the hair to spare. After doing some other things (work, like), I come back to find the message, "sorry, we couldn't find an album matching the search "exile on main street." Long story short, they had it cataloged under "st." rather than "street." That kind of thing drives me up the wall -- they can't implement abbreviation expansion in their search algorithm? Hell, they could just use proximity to come up with the right album.

So here are some other things that piss me off about Rhapsody, in no particular order:

1. When they have an outage and you contact customer service, they NEVER admit they've had an outage. They always refer you to a trouble shooting FAQ.

2. If you use the web client, you can stay logged in forever. It doesn't work very well and crashes your browser, but by golly those cookies persist like herpes! The real client? Forget it. Stop playing music for a few minutes and you're back into 30 second sample hell until you log in again.

3. Login from the desktop client is a pain in the ass and takes forever.

4. Playing a CD on your own damn machine contacts Rhapsody, logs you in (see number 3), and subjects you to occasional network stutters and other annoyances.

5. Sometimes the client just gets stuck between songs and keeps playing the last few seconds of a track. Man, I hate that. It even does it when you're listening to a CD. And each upgrade to a new version of the software preserves the old problems.

So why don't I cancel my account? Well, at the end of the day, $12 a month, or whatever it is, is a pretty fair price to pay for access to a gigantic catalog of music. And when it's working, it's pretty great. Like right now (I finally got what I want), I am listening to Exile, and after that I may dial up Bob Dylan's Live 1966, aka the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg. A couple years ago, we put all our old stereo gear in storage and replaced with a laptop hooked up to a nice powered speaker/sub-woofer system and a high speed Internet connection. And for parties, I hook it up to a PA system out in the back yard. And Rhapsody employs some "editors" whose ears I've grown to trust and who put together rockin' play lists or "radio" stations.

So the library kicks, but the software . . . feh. I wish they'd just start over.