musings

had a couple of great gigs over the weekend, which the ol’ soul really needed. luch desoto band on saturday night, then blues pirates on sunday. I was on bass duties with the lds band,  hadn’t played bass in years but used to with her original band back in the 80’s. was mucho good indeed. great crowd, someone had the bright idea to kick on afterwards, and I had the dim idea to say yeah.

we ended up at the empire. it used to be a great rock pub, I played a regular sunday with chris turner & the boys back in the 80’s, then it was home to the sydney blues club for years. but, as with most things pub-like in this country, a management company bought it and renovated the joint to within an inch of its bricks n mortar. add that to a very loud band o’ rawk pretenders, and… why did we go there again?

sunday, I shook off the inevitable hangover to re-set the stage for the pirates. amazingly, many of saturday’s crowd returned, including jim finn who joined us on drums. sore heads soon gave way to happy faces as a bluesy groundhog’s weekend wound up.

got a nice lunchtime gig later in the week, plus a rehearsal for this upcoming neil young tribute show, more about that later.

oh, and I have two years’ of taxes and books to do this week…

friends around me are losing gigs, we’re all struggling to get thru each week, my rent is about to be hit with a serious increase - third in a year, work is tenuous at best. I’ve got a bad case of the blues, and not the good kind.

any good news stories out there? I’d love to hear some.

happy b-day to lani, and to lynie. much love to you both.

my rant about the debacle that was the good food show is on my food blog, if anyone’s interested. and we didn’t hear gordon ramsay drop the ‘f’ word once.

had a play with the new compressor today. I’m stoked. the guitars now actually sounds like real acoustic guitars. it means I’ll now need to re-record everything, but that’s cool. spoke to my talented photographer pal about cover ideas. I’d had a working title for a while now, and I’m going to make a concerted effort to get this finished before year’s end.

got a couple gigs coming up over the weekend, more on that soon.

which is also the title of one of my fave richard clapton tunes.

okay, after wallowing around the house for a few days, it seems clear that the mountains move is now off until year’s end, at least. so, I’ve gone back to look at my catalog and the new tracks. I’ve ordered a new valve mic compressor and cleaned off the whiteboard in the studio. expect more on this soon.

played a private corporate gig this week, it was held at a nice bar on the quay. the folks were great (in that they simply left us alone to play, instead of hassling for unreasonable requests such as abba), the food and drinks were ample, the staff treated us with respect (an increasing rarity - few things more heartening than to be told by a 19 year old with several nose and lip piercings that “we don’t give free drinks if you’re just the band”), and killer views of the harbour and opera house. best things was, it was a post-work bash, and I was home by 9.30pm.

oh, and we’re off today to the good food & wine show, where amongst other things foodie, we’ll catch gordon ramsay’s demo session. I haven’t seen the gypsy gal this stoked since it was announced that george clooney was single again.

we’ve decided to pass on the cafe in the mountains that we were considering. too many ifs, mebbes and more than a little deja vu re our last place finally told us to take that off the burner.

so I’m again in a holding pattern. with work commitments all over the shop, kids coming and going and a general lack of household direction, I’m not sure where we’re headed. I’d pick up a guitar, but I can’t hear myself think.

natalie merchant’s cover of the john lennon classic is quietly filling the room from my well-battered sony speakers. I’m on my third coffee, it’s just gone 9am. I’ve been trying to force myself into a routine of getting to bed before midnight and getting up by 7am. now that I’m not out gigging as much (or pubbing, for that matter), it’s an easier routine to make er, routine.

we’ve resumed talks about the cafe site, so I suppose I’m mentally preparing myself for the morning hours that will ensue if we can strike a deal. the house that we both loved had a few strings attached to it, mainly that the owners were still attached to it themselves and couldn’t decide if they really wanted to let it go for more than a short term lease. after nearly three decades of virtually living out of a suitcase, I’d really like to stay put for a time. I’ve been here in this flat for two and half years, which must be a record for me.

it’s a real dilemma, whether to go back into food or not. on one hand, it’s a dicey industry at the best of times, and we’re looking at a mainly tourist-fed market, heading into a global recession and astronomical petrol prices. on the other foot, the overheads are pretty cheap, and we’d be able to keep our ‘day jobs’ by only opening on the weekends initially. so the financial risks are minimal.

for me, the real dilemma is, if I get totally absorbed in food again, I’ll have to let go much of the time, energy and muse for music. I turn fifty next year, and looking ahead at the rest of my working years, that’s a big choice. if I’d managed to establish a more solid career that folks like say, pete case or kevin welch have, then I could persevere. but the reality is, I don’t have enough of a fanbase. judging by recent sales, downloads and shows, not enough people are interested. I think I’ve spent too much time on the fringe, in the shadows. there hasn’t even been enough interest in the long-talked about compilation album to justify releasing it.

neil young said, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” I’m not sure he’s right. but then, if I were in neil’s shoes, life would look a whole lot different.

I’ve been playing with some video editing software in prep for a client job next week, so to experiment a bit, I did a short film about my guitar collection, past & present. it’s here on youtube and in my myspace videos, if you’re interested.

seven years ago this very day, I began what has evolved into this blog. I can’t really recall why I started it, reading back some of the earlier entries I didn’t really have a lot to say. but I’d just returned to australia after a couple of years in nashville, was facing a divorce, a new career and a new life overall and needed an outlet of some sort, I suppose.

the blogosphere was a very different place then, in fact it probably didn’t exist as such. open diary, livejournal and blogger were about the only self-authoring platforms avalable. just using the word ‘blog’ in conversation would bring looks of puzzlement and incomprehension. 9/11 created a whole new level of political blogging, and salam pax’s diary from the streets of pre-war iraq demonstrated again that the pen (or keyboard) could be mightier than the sword.

according to my stats, 34,671 people have read this page in the past 12 months. that’s 95 unique visitors a day. I find that astounding. I don’t feel that I’m writing anything particularly interesting to anyone but family and a few friends scattered around the globe. but you’re all out there, somewhere. and thanks for reading.

the gypsy gal’s gone to adelaide for the weekend, her father’s not well at all. it’ll be good for her to catch up with folks there. so it’s meself and miss angsty teen for the weekend. actually, to be fair, she’s not angsty today, having earned some money which promptly propelled her out of bed first thing in the afternoon and headed to the city’s clothing sales. while she’s in a good mood, I might drag her along to the saturday irish music session at the welcome.

and it might be one my last visits for a while. we’ve found a fabulous house in the mountains and have submitted papers. we may well be moving before the end of the month, and I’m looking forward to the change. we’ll see if the deal goes thru during the week.

one of my pet peeves, along with millions others, are bad drivers. coming back from the mountains today, I find myself lucky to have arrived home in one piece. long weekend holidays seem to attract the lunatic fringe out behind their wheels.

one of my other big pet peeves are grocery stores. not the stores themselves, but rather, the customers. I don’t particularly like food shopping, other than being able to hand-pick what I want in my pantry, for several reasons. I really hate coming home and having to unload, unpack and sort out everything. trivial, perhaps, but it’s an annoyance.

but not nearly as much as dodging customer traffic in the store itself. I have a theory that one can gauge a good idea about what kind of a driver someone is by the way that they steer their shopping trolley. I’m forever faced with a trolley skewed across the aisle, one hand holding it for support, physical and emotional, no doubt, by some hapless shopping tragic staring blankly at a shelf full of baked beans tins, completely oblivious to anything else in the universe - like other shoppers wanting to get past their meditative shrine to the gods of heinz.

or, in my local, hordes of little italian ladies who like to shop in pairs (or even threes), stalking each aisle side by side, providing a stronger line than the new england patriots’ defence, nattering amongst themselves, and not only oblivious to other shoppers, fully prepared to glare harshly at them in the event that one might actually wish to peruse the same aisle.

trolley rage. it’s real. it’s here. someone will make a reality t.v. show about it before the end of the decade.

then there’s the checkout staff. twenty year old ravers, suffering thru the “day gig” with that dead blank emo look that got them an early discharge from school. recently arrived immigrants, usually from the subcontinent or africa, and probably armed with three degrees in medicine and physics, but forced to work at the local woollies because the local government won’t recognise their credentials. the corps of middle aged - almost always women - who clearly have been doing that same job since col. harland sanders invented the chicken.

buying groceries online has been a big deal in the states for years. it’s a pity that it never took off here.

but then again, who’d teach those old italian ladies how to use their grandkids’ computers?

due to a fire in my server’s main data centers, all of my and my clients’ websites and mail have been offline.

they report that some six or seven thousand customers were affected, but by “customer”, they mean reseller of webhosting. so the real figure could be upwards of 100,000 individual websites.

if you’ve tried to send something and found it returned, just resend please. these things happen.

especially in houston.