Here’s some recent scooter and bike parking. This was up in West Palm last Sunday. Still, you see a lot more two-wheelers on the road than ever before. Naturally, my scooter has the brightest and bet paint job as you can see. But the muffler and chromed parts didn’t last six months in this climate. Just the shiny plastic. (By 2017, it was kind of a dull pink color.)
So far, I imagine today went like it would if I’d been born rich. Up at dawn, but rested and leisurely. A healthy bike ride to the bakery, an hour’s morning coffee with the paper and crossword. Check commodity prices, then back home to code one web page (for Howard, then paste it three times and charge for three, standard practice. Which brings it up to 11:00 AM and no need to work the rest of the day. Must be nice.The good word is Mike’s backing tracks from y’day came out astonishingly well. I’ve bragged and complained how my bass playing has been making guitarists sound great for years. Should I put it to the test with my own act? My bass playing could be described as piano-like rhythm dance sounds without the standard (and ho-hum) bass runs from the academy. I borrow heavily from other instruments, often bombshelling an audience who hears something they expected to be omitted—like saxophone and short lead riffs.
This is the tracking idea to use on stage as discussed a few weeks back over Trent’s recording mixer. It’s an expensive route, but now we can guaranty the idea works. It would mean hundreds of hours of work for what will be a second-rate product, but I’ve lately seen plenty of acts that don’t even rate that. The mixer/recorder has to posses certain features missing on Mike’s unit, such as individual channel knobs. I exhausted several hours today specifically on this whole musical idea.
I would no longer be playing my favorite bass, but Mike’s tracks leave no doubt my bass lines are novel enough to carry the entire tune. Can I turn this into a paying proposition? Not until I get $500 together for a recording unit. But I can pick up the Ibanez again. That reminds me, I’ve often told guitarists not to follow me on stage because of the way I play. Well, I wasn’t kidding, because I throw myself off the chord patterns trying it myself. (I use a lot of mediants, diatonic mediants, which are easy to mistake for passing notes.)
Never will I be an A-room act, and even to do a restaurant, I’d have to dig deep into my oldest material. We’re talking Johnny Horton. Not one of Mike’s tunes is suitable for my voice or demeanor. I’m not into singing the blues, though I can fake a country yodel note or two and get them all teary-eyed. I could just manage 32 tunes if I throw in “Save The Last Dance For Me” and such. I can’t say I’ll be doing any upscale joints but then, there aren’t all that many such places in Broward.
To say I went out, I drove up to Karaoke. To learn that Eddie has finally moved out of town, like he’s been saying for so long. I heard Illinois and California, but he’s now living in (guess where) West Palm Beach. Many other Karaoke regulars are gone, meaning I was up three times as often. Whoa, I’m out of practice. Thank goodness so many other people’s problem was not practice at all. I brought down the rafters with the rocking tune of the show, Yearwood’s “That’s What I Like About You”.
[Author's note 2017: this same tune, "That's What I Like About You", went on to become my second top Karaoke number and the first "lead solo" I played on the bass. Listen to the solo next time and you'll probably agree that is a pretty impressive thing to hear a bassist pull off. Normally, however, I only sing this song at Karaoke.]
Anything new? No. But since I’ve absent [from Karaoke] a long while, a few have signed up to do my tunes [it is customary not to copycat]. At least that shows I'm chosing popular material. I’m still side-effecting so I left early. I craved pizza but instead had apple slices. A low carb diet leaves you hungry all the time.
ADDENDUM
These are amazing times, I saw a youTube video today of a place I first saw when I was five years old and not since. Inuvik,Canada. It was easy to spot the old house, actually, the end unit of two-story government-built fourplexes, the only places to live back then. I picked out by memory many landmarks and buildings in the same locations, albeit under new management. I see the weather hasn’t changed since then.
Look closer, do you see the purple and red end units of the fourplex, with the third yellow unit just beginning to appear? The fourth, not shown, unit was bluish-green, and this is the only building on the street still painted in the original colors—only somebody who’s been there would know that. And that’s where I lived. My parents were last-chancers who came out of Inuvik with less money than they started, don’t even start with me on that. See the nice lawns? That’s what moose pasture looks like when the tundra is scraped away. I saw many differences. Paved roads. Sidewalks. Lamp posts. Traffic lights. Suburbs. Chinese tourists. The road shown is now called the “Top of the World Highway”, despite being nowhere near such a place. This photo is taken high summer, looking east toward Alaska. Missing are the utilidors, the above ground pipelines for water, power, sewer, and whatever else cannot be buried in the permafrost. I suspect they are overgrown. The pylons that raise the buildings up off the ground are now skirted.
Here is another view looking west on what is now Main Street. I knew the store with the blue sign as “Pfeiffer’s” and the igloo church at center was a pile of construction materials when I last saw it. To the right is the new and painted front of “MacKenzies”, then a general store and eatery. I had my first milk shake there, the only one my father ever bought me. They cleared a spot in the storeroom, set 2x8 planks on crates, and showed black and white movies. The Eskimo kids particularly liked Tarzan.Um, make no mistake about it. Inuvik is a god-forsaken icebox eleven months per year, every tourist who has ever visited the place takes pictures of the day they get the hell out. The economy is contrived as a Canadian territorial claim, few people in their right minds live there permanently. Even the Eskimo school children were flown in (and many committed suicide or ran away and no doubt starved, not realizing how far they’d been transported). No, I don't need to quote any sources on this. I was there and saw this personally, so as a first-hand witness, I am the source.
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