A Waxing Half Moon, Sunday July 18, 2010

It’s Friday evening, the moon is high and bright, and I’ve got my dobro on my lap trying to make it sing. My fire on the patio is slowly burning down to coals, my wife is asleep on the sofa inside, and my dog is probably keeping her company. I can’t keep him outside with me because he constantly wants to trash talk the neighboring dogs on the other side of our dilapidated fence and at 11 in the PM it ain’t gonna happen. Most annoying. But I understand that he believes his job is to protect us from friend and foe, and he is exceptionally diligent in this duty.

I love fires. They allow me to wander with my mind, imagine the past, forget the present, and create the future. I use fires as my crystal ball, they are where my muse sometimes lay, and the coals provide solace to my worries and the flames, lyrics to my songs. I almost took a fire pan up to Grass Valley this year and regret not doing so. I can imagine a sleepy jam, fed with bourbon, winding down and flaring up with the fire. There’s always next year.

But don’t you know, Grass Valley just gets better and better. This year our extended camp included a whole host of friends. Some were buds from my bands, some buds from past Grass Valleys, and some, well who the hell knows who they were. We had a blast. One of the new activities in camp this year was what I should probably call, competitive cooking. It wasn’t planned though we should have anticipated the competitive side…what do you expect when several cocky musicians agree to cook over different evenings. Curtis just loves his dry-rub tri tip and fine wine, Ron cleaned up with his sausage pasta, Jon and Wendy provided the required Chili fixins and of course I have to be the one that does something different with Curry. And as with any good competition, there was more than enough to share with extended camp members, which was their welcome surprise. Next year I expect the competition to be out of control…..personally I’m thinking mud bugs…aka crawdad boil. I keep flipping back and forth between naming our spot Camp Gastronomique or Camp Carnage. Both names capture our essence.

Grass Valley gets better because I know more and more folks…….sometime during the week I get my hug from Darby, get to hear Rick grouse about something, watch JD poke fun at Rick’s grousing, get my once a year jam with Mark Varner, Bob Schwartz, Topher Gayle and others, sneak into the backstage area to schmooze, watch the next generation yet again smack me in the head with their talent, and have to make the difficult daily decision about “do I go listen to music or do I go play music”. That last one usually requires a beer and some reconnoitering to see who is around.

Unfortunately I have been soooo seduced by the Father’s Day Festival that I am embarrassed to admit not attending other festivals…..an admission that I am sure will bring down on my head public “encouragement” from my various friends and acquaintances. So be it. I’ll do my best to make GOF or Plymouth this year to round out my festival resume and get a second shot at jamming with some of my other friends. Now if I can rope in some of the folks from my Grass Valley camp….hmmmmmm do ya think?

FDF Musings, Sunday June 20, 2010

It is a mixed blessing writing this column, especially during Festival week. Like many of the columnists I wait until the last minute, which doesn’t really work well at the FDF because as most of you know the PRIORITY during FDF is jamming and listening to music……column writing comes in a very distant 123^rd down the list. So I thought I would write a non-column and get other folks to do the work for me. My strategy was to wander around and find some of the usual, and some of the unusual, suspects to gather short quotes on their most memorable FDF. This is not without some bodily risk and I got several suspicious looks from folks I approached, but once they realized my bona fides they usually passed look of annoyed relief. Here’s the memories, quotes, and musings from the folks I was able to corner. My apologies to those I didn’t hit. Due to time and accessibility I trolled for quotes from those that camped near me and from folks I could snag for 5 minutes during the festival. And I have to ask for a bit of latitude in what I transposed here…….the hand writing seemed a lot clearer in the dark. Maybe next year I can get the project started earlier. Enjoy.

“Dudley Connell and the Johnson Mountain Boys in the early or mid-nineties. My daughter and I learned the “Whole World Talk” off their cassette tape we bought at their booth.”        Bruno Brandli

“The first time I played on Stage at the Festival in 1977. It was a real big deal because at the time my only aspiration was to play in a good Bluegrass Band. Playing at Grass Valley was the pinnacle at the time. Still is.”         Mark Hogan

“Oh there’s too many to choose from. One was when Vern’s Band played with Rose Maddox at the FDF. Another was when I was emceeing for a show and told the crowd “you’ve got a killer bass player in the next act” just before I walked over to pick up my bass. My first time emceeing 30 years ago was real special because the stage manager told me to go change and get up on stage….it seems they were short an emcee that evening. So I went and changed from my work duds into my white suit. Been doing it ever since. One of the most special memories was from last year’s (2009) Festival where I was awarded an Lifetime Honorary Membership. Rick Cornish tricked me into going up on stage to make a presentation and when I looked at the plaque it had my name on it…it was a complete, unexpected surprise.”   JD Rhynes

“Mudfest. A transformer had blown up, the power was out, and I found one of the greatest jams I’ve ever played in the women’s shower room at 2 AM in the morning.”

                                                                                                            Dave Gooding

“Our first Bluegrass buddy was Lisa Burns. We showed up at our first Grass Valley and she invited us into her jam and showed up how things went at the festival.”

                                                                                                            Chuck Poling

“Getting run over by the shuttle before our performance at the 2009 FDF.”

                                                                                                            Tom Rosum

“Mudfest. It rained for weeks before the festival. Folks watched shows from motor homes and tents set up in front of the stage.”   John Duncan

“I understand this is a bluegrass festival and you’re painting your truck, but I’m trying to hang this tarp in the tree.”  Anon

“I used to think I did my best jamming between midnight and 4AM but now understand it’s between noon and 4PM.”         Dave Zimmerman

“This isn’t exactly a festival experience but close enough. I was leading a slow jam at music camp and there was this lady that came up to me and said “if you play this song I’ll take a guitar break in the jam”. It turns out that she had been working with a guitar teacher on the break and part of her deal with the teacher was that she had to go try to do the break in a public jam. She was 79. Made my week.”

                                                                                                            Lisa Burns

“The first time my kids were in KOB.”                                           Bob Schwartz

“Six years ago my son was going to come up and visit me at the Festival. His car was pretty unreliable so we lent him our BMW for the drive up. When he arrived it was clearly not running right and I went out to buy some of the obvious things to try and fix the strange tapping noise coming from my engine. I spent a lot of time during the Festival replacing the spark plugs, rotor, etc…but to no avail…turns out hey had blown a valve on the trip to GV.”                                                                                                            George Martin

I don’t know….they’re all kind of merging together.”                Barbara Martin

“ I was practicing my fiddle in camp one year and this little 12 year old girl asked if she could play with me. She played fine and it was her first time playing with someone new.”

                                                                                                            Louisa Knabe

“My friend who became so “disoriented” late one night jamming at GV that he couldn’t find his tent and spent the night sleeping in his bass bag.”      Topher Gayle

“Getting to sing with Roland White and Keith Little with the Instructor Allstars.”

                                                                                                            Ingrid Noyes

“The “controversial” bands on the main stage.”                         Mary Tilden

“Every year at night I look up and there is something phenomenal happening in the sky in between the jams and camps….last night it was the crescent moon and venus.”

                                                                                                            Deb Livermore

“We can’t remember any of them (sleep deprivation takes its toll!).

                                                                                                            Jim & Natasha Burke

27/32, Sunday May 16, 2010

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, we all know from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42. It is amazing that it’s such a simple and transcendental answer, especially since it took a supercomputer known as “Deep Thought” about 7 ½ million years to calculate and check. You’d think that Deep Thought would have come up with an answer that contained a bit more detail, but unfortunately for humankind the “ultimate question” was lost and with it the significance of 42. Bummer.

Now, there are some pretty militant people in the universe that don’t want to know the ultimate question because then we would understand what 42 might mean, and then we would understand everything there is to know. Scary stuff if you ask me. I mean, imagine if you know everything that was, is, and will be then life would be pretty boring. No novelty, no pleasant surprises, no new songs to learn, no new breaks to sweat over, no more adrenaline rushes from playing onstage, no more new recipes from JD. You’d already know it all. From this human’s perspective, omniscience might be highly overrated.

However, I want to announce that I know how and where to find the ultimate question, or at least where to start looking. This revelation came to me during a musically induced trance meditating on the question “what am I going to write my column on this week without any new ideas” while trying to avoid doing some other overdue work on my desk. Pressure from procrastination does have its benefits in focusing the mind. My revelation involves the numbers 27 and 32. Once it became clear to me these numbers have special meaning, I had to meditate further and after consulting my calendar I realized those numbers have a particular significant meaning only once every year, which by chance just happened to occur on this, my column day. Actually I don’t think it is by chance because if my calendar is right, 27 and 32 will be significant numbers every year on my May column day. How eerie is that?

For you to experience the same enlightenment that I had from my revelation, I am going to leave it up to you to meditate on the numbers 27 and 32. The answer should be fairly easy to come by and once you understand that you will also see the path to discovering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. If, after all that, you are still looking for enlightenment, then come address the CBA Welcome Oracles during their collective musical trance induced while communing around a Coleman lantern generated space-time discontinuity. I can guarantee that the Oracles will enlighten you in unexpected ways.

Trapping Innocent Animals, Sunday April 18, 2010

I recently received the following email, which somehow made it through all my spam and junk-email filters:

“Geoff,

The trap, I’m sure you’ve now come to realize, is that any time you do something for the CBA, the CBA is immediately back at you.  And our Welcome columnist jam is no exception.  Would you be willing to organize that again?

R”

My immediate reply, in part, was:

“R,

Ahhh yes, the old CBA-trap ploy.

I already anticipated my incipient demise and have a plan in mind. However, I was waiting for the FDF schedule to post so I can coordinate the Welcome jam with a dobro jam I am thinking about organizing.

My plan, like last year, would be to do the Welcome columnist jam after the last set of the evening....the only variable is which evening? I don't recall which evening we did last year but my inclination is to do it on a weekend evening...that way we might capture some of the weekend warrior Welcomers.

G”

I have concealed my email correspondent’s name simply by referring to him as R to preserve his confidentiality and allow an anonymous, discrete presence while commandeering his golf cart around the fest.

This email was actually a refreshing change from the typical Nigerian-based CBA emails that I receive claiming to have “$1,000,000 in a secured Grass Valley bank account” and explaining I am the only individual who can help move the money to an anonymous offshore account in the Caymen Islands.

Usually the sender of those emails offers to split the money with me if I would provide my bank account number to transship the currency. I have been skeptical about the accuracy of the email, suspecting it might be for a far larger denomination than indicated and concerned that it is ultimately an attempt to ensnare me in an ongoing money-laundering scheme. So I have resisted responding.

Which brings me to my next point; what to do about the Welcome columnist jam. We now have a plan….somewhat different as indicated in my email correspondence, but that’s the way it goes. The plan is to do the Welcome Jam on the FDF Thursday evening after the final stage-set. And this year I will (gulp) host the Welcomers at my humble camp, which is located across the ditch from the showers; that is, if I can score my campsite again this year, which is actually a pretty good location, near various loos and at the edge of tent city, strategically located for post-jam patrols deep into the interior of jamville.

I thought I would conduct a social experiment by announcing the Welcome jam via my Sunday column. Actually it serves several purposes. Last year we (gasp, oh no, heaven’s to Betsy, great googly mooglies) left a few of our highest profile correspondents off the email list (sorry Mark and Darby) and then there are a few rogue correspondents that contribute an occasional column or two that aren’t on the usual email list, and I believe there are a couple of Breakdown correspondents that do a Welcome column here and there. So I am trying to put out the word using the local bluegrass bush-telegraph to alert all those unrecognized Welcome columnists about the Welcome columnist jam at FDF this year. Shoot me an email if you are one of the rogue Welcome columnists that would like to be on the list.

“But”, you say, “won’t announcing the jam on your column also alert all the paparazzi and Welcome columnist stalkers that we constantly worry about interfering with our private lives?” True, but I have a hypothesis on that, which you may ask about at the fest, and in a way the Welcome columnists are my unsuspecting guinea pigs in the experiment. Besides, maybe I can get JD to pack some heat and provide security in between songs.

In any case, I will also follow up with the Welcome columnists via email for further details, RSVPs, and about where to park your armor plated Humvees and manage your security details and entourage.

Postscript to last month’s “Fly Me to the Moon” column: my truck underwent major surgery last week for an organ transplant, which has successfully prolonged its life with a new transmission. My mechanic tells me the new tranny could last another 168,000 miles and the engine should be good for another 140,000 miles or so. The question now becomes whether I should drive to the moon…or drive to the moon and back?

What is it with transmissions, bluegrass, and the CBA? I just don’t get it. Something eerie is going on here!

Drive Me to the Moon, Sunday March 21, 2010

Boy those evil hackers must have done a real number on the website because half the links were dead dead dead as of Friday night. At least the front page is now loading without the google skull and crossbones beware all who enter will become zombified-bots warning.

As of today it’s officially not winter anymore and I have a pretty lackadaisical attitude towards writing this month’s column; an uncertain malaise has befallen me. I don’t know exactly why…. the sun is shining, our pear tree is snowing white petals, the vegetable garden has been planted, the backyard isn’t a jungle of 3 foot high weeds, and all I want to do is lay around the picnic table and play my dobro.

Let’s see, what are my other symptoms….no gigs this month, the spring campout is still weeks away, the Father’s Day Festival is even further away, haven’t been to McGrath’s but twice this year…..must be a touch of the spring fever. What I need is a good stiff bluegrass tonic to pull me out of my funk and it just happens that the Infamous String Dusters are playing the Freight tonight. Strong medicine, but unfortunately it will only relieve my symptoms for a few weeks, at least until the spring campout, and hopefully I will be able to attend to get inoculated with a real, full strength dose of some Jammicillin.

Which brings me to another topic….I’ve included my dog in my columns on occasion as one of my important bluegrass buddies. Well ok maybe he’s a reluctant bluegrass buddy that I have to bribe with serious Frisbee time. In any case, one of my other really crucial bluegrass buds is my faithful steed….my truck. I believe that these unsung heros of bluegrass…our trucks and trailers, that carry us, and our gear, down long hot dusty roads to the festivals, deserve better recognition. We have among our CBA members some extraordinary highly visible vehicles that might be even more recognized than their owners, though the only one that comes to mind is a green VW camper whose owners are far from inconspicuous.

My truck isn’t any ordinary truck. Noooo, apart from being a most excellent, reliable bluegrass truck that has carried me to Grass Valley 3 years running, I think it is capable of driving to the moon. Seriously…it is on average about 233,818 miles from the earth’s surface to the moon’s surface and I have about 168,000 miles on my clock…so only 65,818 miles left to make it to the moon….or more accurately to traverse the same distance. My truck is a ’92 Nissan and at my current average of 9,333 miles per year it will only take another 7 or so years. Google tells me it is 151 miles from my house to the Nevada County fairgrounds so if I drive my truck only to the festival, 9,333 miles would be approximately 62 more Father’s Day festivals…..a number that, for mortal reasons, I am not likely to make. But if I include spring and fall campouts, then that number probably comes close to around 20 years…that I could do. Throw in jams, band practices, and gigs, and 7 or so years could be realistic. Now what was that noise I heard coming from my transmission yesterday.

My Computer is Infected with an SFBOT, February 21, 2010

You’ve probably heard of botnets, networks of personal computers enslaved by malicious software viruses to do their evil bidding. Well my personal organic-computerhead, the one that sits on top of my shoulders and controls my every movement (even the words being typed right now), recently became infected by an extraordinary virus that created the infamous SFBOT net. There is no cure for this virus and the only way to leave the BOT net requires shutting down the organic-computerhead and doing a complete system rebuild, which unfortunately has a high morbidity and results in typically unsuccessful reboots. So be forewarned that reading this column might also infect your organic-computerhead and enslave you to the SFBOT net.

This BOT (Bluegrass Old Time) net is peculiar in that the compromised computerheads are often compelled to passively monitor output from groups of other SFBOT infected computerheads. More amazing is that small groups of SFBOT infected computerheads sometimes auto-organize and by a process involving artificial pseudo-intelligence learn how to collectively control the actions of other infected computerheads. If you understand what I just wrote then please let me know so I can figure it out too. Writing gibberish like this is just one symptom of SFBOT infection….the other symptoms are obsessing on themes involving jaded lovers, murdered lovers, lost lovers, footprints in the snow, cold empty cabins, and illegal distilleries.

You might have correctly guessed that I was at an SFBOT show Friday evening and while listening to the music my mind was churning around in the background wondering what I was going to write for today’s welcome. This was more than a little distracting but at the same time changed, perhaps for the better, my awareness of the show and the folks attending. To make things more interesting two of my band mates, Scott and TJ, went with me, actually it was their idea and kind of a boy’s night out to take in some music. Fortunately Scott and TJ have been SF-loBOTomized for a long time, even longer than me, so we fit right in with the other BOTs and their presence always makes for interesting conversation about the show, which usually reflects our musical preferences.

We went to the show at the Noe Valley Ministry….a nice, small venue, my first time there, for a show that promised a bit of old time and a bit of bluegrass. I was looking forward to seeing Crooked Jades, in part because Lisa Berman was playing, an excellent local dobro and claw hammer banjo player that I assisted last summer teaching at the CBA music camp. The show was kicked by the Black Crown String Band and closed by a group of hot pickers from Portland called Jackstraw. Woohooo what a show. The music took us up a hill and down again, there were dancers, even the dancing guy was there. In between sets, folks spent time greeting each other, talking to strangers and even engaging the musicians in conversation. In fact the crowd looked and acted a lot like crowds at events organized by other BOTnets, including the CBABOT virus….a particularly persistent virus that supports the  IBMABOTnet.

Since Scott, TJ, and I are bandmates, we tend to study how other bands perform which provides the proverbial “bottomless pit” of topics for conversation. One thing that made a big impression and created conversation after the show was how the Jackstraw mandolin player broke strings twice on stage over about 30 minutes. This guy is obviously an aggressive mando picker….but you know that you  are in the presence of other pickers when the real thing we were impressed with was how quickly he changed out his broken strings. He broke a string while singing lead and chopping, and while still singing, without missing a beat, he stripped the string off his mando and continued playing. Very cool.

I mentioned above that sometimes SFBOT infected computerheads auto-organize…….my bandmates and I are not immune from that and in fact have been completely overwhelmed by this pathology of the SFBOT virus which has some interesting consequences. For example, our bass player, Fred Cone, commuted from the CBA music camp in Petaluma to Concord to attend band practices for our gig last night at the Swedish American Hall…that is either dedication or obsession…..and probably a little of each.

I could go on and on about BOT nets, give more case studies, investigate the phenomenon ad nauseam but one thing is rapidly becoming apparent. These BOT nets are getting out of control. It is often said that the BOT nets proliferate most frequently in the summer months at BOT net festivals, but it seems obvious to me that the BOT nets are expanding outside their classical seasonal boundaries and will soon infiltrate every level of civilized society. The consequences are serious and will forever disrupt any hope of intelligent discourse between infected individuals. I predict that in the future, BOT infected individuals will form BORGs (Bluegrass and Oldtime Reproductive Groups) and life in the universe, as we know it, will be forever changed. Resistance is futile.

First Generation Dobro, Sunday January 17, 2010

I’ve been thinking about doing a short column on Cliff Carlisle, a prolific country and bluegrass musician, and blue yodler. Maybe some of you already know of Cliff Carlisle but I just recently discovered his music and was surprised to find that he wrote several songs now considered standards in Bluegrass and other related genres. I was even more surprised and excited to find that he was a first generation dobro player. Cliff was born Taylorsville, KY, on May 6, 1904 which makes him about 24 years older than Josh Graves, the reigning patron saint of dobro players.

I have to admit that my introduction to Cliff came via a song I heard performed by Jorma Kaukonen called “Tom Cat Blues” also know as “Ring Tailed Tom”. It is amazing to me that this song has not been covered all that much in any genre, though The New City Lost Ramblers and The Rooftop Singers covered Tom Cat Blues in the late 50s early 60s. Tom Cat Blues is one of those humorous clever bawdy songs that describes human male “courting” antics in the guise of a Tom Cat. It seems that Cliff Carlisle specialized in writing bawdy songs with his favorite themes covering farmyard bawdy and domestic strife. Some of these songs explored the antics of Shanghai roosters, ringtailed Tom Cats and used other metaphors for sex…one of the more unusual metaphors, involving phonographs, is in a song he wrote called That Nasty Swing. Occasionally, Cliff’s racier songs were recorded under pseudonyms, one of which is Ash Can Blues. Apart from the bawdy songs, Cliff actually was a very prolific song writer and claims to have written over 300 songs during his career. And he is credited with writing the bluegrass standard Footprints in the Snow and Just Because (the original title was You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone).

Cliff Carlisle had two other distinctions: his yodeling and dobro accompaniment. As contemporaries of Jimmie Rogers, Cliff and his brother Bill helped to pioneer blue yodeling and recorded with Jimmie Rogers in the early 1930s. Cliff is absolutely a yodeling maniac, which can be found in almost every song he recorded. Cliff also made the unusual choice to accompany himself exclusively on a dobro, usually a custom-built National. There are few modern dobro players, professional or amateur, that do this, which makes it even more unusual for the times. Cliff credited his early interest in dobro from listening the early Hawaiian slack key musicians Sol Hoopi and Frank Ferera and unlike many contemporary musicians he presented himself as either 'Hawaiian' or 'Hillbilly' (or 'Cowboy'), depending on where, and to what sort of audience, he was performing.

Given his prolific and successful song writing I would have expected Cliff to be enshrined as a member of the Grand Old Oprey or Country Hall of Fame, but those honors belong to his more successful brother Bill Carlisle. Bill performed on the Grand Old Opry from 1953 until 2002 where he made his last performance in a wheelchair! Bill was inducted into the Country Music Hall-Of-Fame in 2002. Cliff Carlisle died April 2, 1983, at the age of 79 in Lexington, Kentucky.

More in depth information about Cliff Carlisle and his brother Bill are in the web sites below:

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/ 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Carlisle

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:fxfoxqq5ldse~T1

http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/bill-carlisle-biography.aspx

http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/1111111111111111111111111new-page.aspx

The adolescent in me, or maybe I should turn that on it’s head because I usually have to reach out to the adult in me, always enjoys a clever bawdy song and now I have a whole library of Cliff Carlisle songs to try and convince my bands to play.