One year ago today: March 26, 2017, on poverty profiling.
Five years ago today: March 26, 2013, they saved Dollywood!
Nine years ago today: March 26, 2009, pronounced “took-took”.
Random years ago today: March 26, 2014, beginning of yesteryear feature.
Well, how did it go? The answer is a bit more involved, but I’d rate it as a qualified success. The place was 90% empty, but of the remainder, most of them were around back in the pavilion by the time we had played only a few tunes. Musically, there were a lot of mistakes, mostly attributable to lack of practice, but nobody cared. The show was fast-moving and lively enough to keep everybody interested. There are no weak numbers on our song list, so momentum was high.
Put another way, I made more in tips tonight that I did in the first year I with the Hippie. Here’s the view from the stage before we got underway.
We even had two people show up from the old club. Now that we got it to the stage, we had the anticipated guitar players coming out of the woodwork, telling us what a wonderful three-piece we’d be. That figures, now that a ton of the hard work has been done, we are being eyed as somebody’s backup band. While we had three sets of seven tunes each, we repeatedly burned through each set in a half-hour instead of the desired forty minutes. This led us to play a few tunes we did not have ready, but with surprising success. We played Haggard’s “Momma Tried” and even got through “Mama’s Broken Heart”.
The bottom line is the crowd loved the acoustic bass combination, taking only a matter of minutes to catch on what was happening. Every song was a winner, including a few we know they’ve never heard before. We made a ton of mistakes but nothing that can’t be remedied by putting in the time. The establishment is total Karaoke for the upcoming Easter weekend, but after that it is likely we could play there any time. For the record, we made as much in tips in less than three hours than the bartender did all afternoon. We finished and were out of there by 7:30OM.
We made mistakes, but recovered from each one. The crowd wanted Lady Nik to sing, which just might succeed where I have been unable to. She mentioned she has a low voice, the first allusion she’s made to her vocals. I hope the incentive gets her up to the microphone as I could really use some help carrying the show. The staff mentioned that for a Sunday, people had hung around longer than usual, a factor I rate as a good measurement of the entertainment. I’d estimate the club sales were up an easy $200 though who knows how much of that would be profit. I have no doubt if we play there again, we’ll get some word-of-mouth people in the door.
There were a few surprises, such as Lady Nik showing up with a microphone which in the end, she did not use. She brought one table of friends, five ladies who were singing along within moments. The Fishman PA proved adequate for the pavilion and the crowd reaction was a league above usual. They were definitely into the music more that you get with the guitar-ballad bands and I will now definitely haul out my wireless Karaoke mics. Even accounting for the novelty effect, I’d say the crowd was more than happy with the material—although we did get requests for new country tunes neither of us had ever heard of. I’ll look into it. I was so busy all night I never had time to get you any pictures.
Notes to myself. The aux in of the Fishman does not appear to be working. Lady Nik has an excellent amplifier, but for the strangest reason, it has only one input jack. And remember the spare splitter I keep in the accessory case halves the volume of whatever you plug into it, even if the second jack is empty. Two tunes gave trouble they should not have. “Mama’s Broken Heart” and “Keep Your Hands to Yourself”. Get them right or drop them. And learn “Long Haired Country Boy” better. Note the guitar is still not getting the instrumentals right.
Alfred M. Butts?
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Here’s the drywall progress for the day. Four hours to get that second sheet of drywall up. That’s really a two-man job. Most of the work was carefully removing the window casings. I haven’t decided if I want to replace them or learn to make new pieces. Much as I’d love to wainscott, I’m too far behind to add anything complicated. There was also a lot of small chunks old drywall that had to be removed one by one. That window air condition has got to go, I just can’t lift it myself. Note the cutout for the smaller room A/C in the upper right corner.
She’s going to talk herself into a jail cell if she doesn’t smarten up. She’s a sunken-eyed tattooed freak going wrinkly and just can’t understand why everybody in this modern feminist era doesn’t automatically take the word of a porn actress. What’s wrong with people? Maybe they are wondering why she waited until he was President to say anything? Let’s watch and see, but there is one solid trait in all these women who finally speak up. They are the ones who got picked over.
I’ve got a new book started. What sparked my interest is it is a South African detective novel and I had earlier been reading some follow on-reports of the situation in Zimbabwe, or as it used to be called, Southern Rhodesia. Another of those “homelands” that was uninhabited when the whites arrived. Well, back in the mid-90s, the politicians kicked out all the white farmers and handed the land over to “natives”. Up till then, the country had been a food exporter. Overnight the agricultural community collapsed as the new occupants didn’t have a clue how to operate a farm. Like American liberals, they thought once they achieved “equality”, the welfare checks would magically keep coming.
So in 2015, Zimbabwe started begging the white farmers to come back. Once I quit laughing and got back in my chair, I began looking to see how well that worked for them as of today. But I could not find a single mention of any such happening, that damn liberal press again. All I could surmise is that the country is still a met food importer. That would about say it all. Back to the book, I would have bypassed it because it starts off with the death of a “base jumper”. These are those idiots who dive off tall buildings. What caught my attention was the dead girl had been working with a charity that supported small farm groups.
However, by the second chapter, that style changes to better purpose, to move the plot along a murder investigation. That’s where it picks up and holds your interest. It takes place in Jo-berg, a city built by the richest square mile on Earth. And consequently inhabited by some of the worst crooks and con artists the continent has to offer. Actually, I’ve heard they operate on such a grand scale that it makes being an ordinary citizen safer since they don’t possess enough to become worthy victims.
[Author’s note: one of the main characters is a futures trader. This is similar to the career I was about to embark on when I was felled at the onset of my prime earning years. I can only imagine where I’d be today if twelve years ago I had been making $80,000 a month and working only four days a week. That fast-paced computerized job environment was made for me. Remember, my 99.5% mark in Financial Management 351 remains to this day (thirty years later), the highest mark that ever came out of the tough school I attended. That was one grueling 16 week course.
And I have another record over there, a 100% mark in advanced statistics--and the only perfect test score ever at that institution. In the end, except for my own few investments and my own retirement planning, I never got to use any of that. At least not in a job setting.
Yet that is the same school I failed a tax law course and withdrew from a Lisp programming course, the only two academic failures of my adult life. The law course was about what to think and not how to think. And I rejected Lisp as some concoction from the ivory towers that would never find a place in real life. Besides, I could see how Lisp was really just a variation on underlying regular computer code, so why not use that?]
I also read, or tried to read this month’s edition of the now next-to-useless Popular Science. They’ve finally figured out there is something to AI (artificial intelligence), so what do they do? They print a massive article stating that intelligence and IQ are not the same thing. You see, every last single white person who ever scored high on an IQ test was somehow cheating, advantaged, in better health, or has taken specialized training on how to answer questions. In the media mindset, that simply has to be the explanation. And every test ever devised that showed any white person as high-scoring necessarily had to be biased or faulty.
Of course, once these unfair conditions were removed, said the study, all people on Earth would score the same. What a comfy thought that must be for the planet’s cadres of underachievers. And last, there is all the squawking still going on in the government ban on “the sex trade”. It was dumb for the government to do that but it is all about extending federal control. The law makes no distinction between sex workers who consent and those who do not. These laws do little more than create a new category of citizen-criminal who will henceforth bear a permanent grudge against the system—and those who support it including support by complacency. Why, the police wouldn’t arrest anybody unless they were doing something wrong at least. A fine way to avoid taking sides. Until it is your turn.
ADDENDUM
What is the next move for the band? First, the song list needs to be expanded and polished up. The pavilion may be the much desired spot for paid practice, but it turns out the bartender guy is also running the Karaoke, so don’t step on any toes. Encouragingly, the audience spotted the versatility in what we were playing and before long was requesting music just to see if we could play it. From my standpoint, that is a good sign. I did a couple of requests as bass solos, and not surprisingly that went over great, though the surprise element can make up a large part of that. The next move is therefore to double the length of the song list.
The guitar players in the crowd, two of them (very vocal) knew precisely what was happening with the arrangements and were super easy on Lady Nik, which was nice. Just after we began, a carload of her relatives showed up. They were a generation or two younger than the music, so although they didn’t stick around for the entire event, it was plain they were totally happy with Lady Nik getting out and about. Good. Nothing beats being on stage to meet somebody and I hope that happens for everyone concerned. Especially me.
And I have to do something about memorizing more lyrics. Even with the book handy, you have to know which words you are forgetting and find them promptly while distracted by playing. It would be fair to say if I could focus on playing instead of conducting I would have fewer lapses. Another aspect that went well was how the duo could include musical elements that would otherwise get left out. So we had a great time playing fills and riffs that in a guitar duo would be next to impossible to get right. That’s good, because quite a lot of the time the audience seemed to know the songs note-for-note, which casually surprised me since close enough is often good enough in such a situation. It means they knew we were doing it right.
Last, for now, there were a few passages that worked well at rehearsal but came across weak on stage. I may add that chorus pedal for some of my bass breaks, much as I deplore relying on gadgets. Some tunes that are standards across the Mississippi seem to be unknown out here, or have less appeal. I’ve got them checked on the list. And one thing we have not practiced that would have gone over incredibly well was medleys. Alas, these are difficult arrangements and we have too much ground to cover immediately, but keep those in mind.
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