A canvas of club membership shows we have a welder on the crew. Agt. M trained in Europe, so next time he’s going to Harbor Freight, we hold a club meeting in the car ride over as to which welding machine to acquire. I prefer the smaller, bench top model, partially because that limits it to club use. I crawled under the scooter and braced up the assembly so none of the weight is on the broken bracket and drove over to Fred’s. The scooter has 8,200 miles on it, twice the expectation.
There’ll be no [repair] delays on my watch. This is the repair at Fred’s this morning. The logic is the Chinese engineers ripped off Harley designs and made them metric, so we cut a Harley frame bolt some new metric threads and added enough washers to make it fit. This flange is going nowhere unless we say so. I am not glossing over these expedients as true repairs. The reality is each repair is more frequent, costs more, and doesn’t last as long.Another day of recording. My own history is dragging me down. I have to choose what I can sing rather than my aim of what the audience likes. It’s still better than force-learning somebody else’s list. Since vocals were formerly some other guy’s job, I’ve got a hundred songs where I can play hell out of the bass runs in a key I can’t sing. For the time being, preferences are out the window. I’ve sunk so low, I’m covering “Midnight Special” and “Act Naturally”. Mind you, there will always be a room in Florida where they relish such leftovers.
Here’s where I add that I do not play any Elvis or the Eagles. Low as I am, I’m still above that. But I’m looking at a couple numbers by Elvis for the effect, so I am doing more than talk about incorporating the audience into the equation. Did you get that, guys? May I never fall into the trap of thinking the crowd loves the tunes I worked hardest at. Today I heard my Florida attempts to organize a band described, I’d say not unfairly, as “an understaffed office”.
One concession I hate to make is drum breaks. When I operate the drum box manually (by foot pedal), I use plenty of stops to emphasize the music is live. I’ve also learned to stop and start when anybody gets off beat, a gift in itself. No more, since the recorded tracks can’t pretend to be anything but recorded. The real casualty is the quality of what I’m going to present—but if you are going to get a bad rep, no better place than right in Florida where you’ll feel at home. By no longer relying on others, I’ve moved up from no quality to low quality. Up, as in upwards.
In time, I’m finishing my deep read of “The Fifty Year Wound”. It is one of the few supportive writings on Reagan where I found him to be the strongest presidents since Kennedy. He bankrupted the Soviet Union by correctly guessing they had over-militarized their economy to the point of inflexibility. And, always a top mark in my books, he didn’t give a damn what people thought. He knew he’d be remembered.
Plus he [Ronald Reagan] and I have a common method of treating irreconcilable enemies. Where so many view life as a pissing contest in which they’ve early learned that causing the other man to walk away in frustration is, in their bastard-rat morality, the equivalent of winning, I’m the type that simply won’t play. Be a total douchebag around me and you’ll soon be doing it in the dark when I cut off the electricity. End of problem.
Take the office over here. Ever since they gave out my personal information after promising me they would not, I speak one word to them each month. I hand them the rent check and say what month. So the word today was, “July”. Good thing I gave them erroneous information, huh? They still deny they did it arguing I can’t prove a thing, but ask yourself: who else thinks my middle name is Seymour?
ADDENDUM
While this is not a total, it is a record I keep of shopping for staples. My average run to the store in the past month has risen from $12.36 to $15.37. That is a drastic 24% increase for the articles that I buy. One of my favorites, chicken thighs, are now $2.49 a pound.
I just got a phone call. From Georgia. I’m not saying anything bad, but I’ve said so many times the market is for country music. And specifically a bass and rhythm guitar duo with non-harmonized vocals doing non-standard hits geared toward audience participation. Is that specific enough? You can clue in on your own, but Billy-Bill was asking about the chances of duo work and I laid it on the line. You guys didn’t learn my music and now I’m 31% finished recording my own tracks.
However, if the idea is Alman to be comping along on drums, then yes, I am willing to work toward some duo guitar/bass to the point where that comping becomes either meaningful or meaningless, see. He follows us, but we rehearse independently so we don’t rely on drumming. I don’t fake it when the other guy is spotlighting and expect others to reciprocate. He’s back in town mid-month. My tracks should be finished by then. Stay tuned, pun intended.
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