Monday, September 19, 2011

I don't worry about what people can't do I work with what people can do.

I had to bark down that bone wisdom at a band rehearsal the other day... it was more of a casual fun music session in a living room.. that's the way to roll. You see SR JONES got into CITR Shindig (Tuesday September 20 @ the Railway), one of the first shows i ever played in Vancouver, and the first at the Railway club... It was the only way to play the Railway club in those years if you were me.

It Looks like I'll be splitting this town in the New Year for an extended absence... another fork in the road that looks like it will land me in Portland Oregon.

8 years ago if you told me i would have spent the last 3 plus years as a stay home father to 3 young girls, i would have called "loony bin" on your ass. Now it looks like another turn of the fortune wheel of life ( king lear). I'm set for it... as they say on the bench "fuckin' rights" I could use a new adventure. I never had the young adventures... or at least the travel and such as i set to work very young to make money to salt away for some reason... that was the house... Not that i didn't have adventure, I just made it locally. "I may as well put this Fatman suit on and go out and do some interviews if nobody else will" i would think. My poor cousin, who flew out from London Ontario, just a sweet innocent girl, picked up at the airport by Carl Fatman and then rushed to a Motorcycle Man show at the Cottage Bistro... The family back in Ontario was concerned for me for quite some time after that one... It really wasn't until i had kids that they considered me normal, cause that's what normal people do right?

I guess the next segment is:

Never rule out what somebody might be able to do.

Not that we are trying to make any sense of coherency in this little exercise... that's what paid writers do. Although glancing through the National Post the other day... i might have to wonder.

OK it was the band thing i meant to talk about... some people weren't there.. why worry about them? (I knew they couldn't make it as they were out of town... why should that stop progress) The classic mistake of the rookie band. When i was in a band called Knockin' Dog we had a member who came an hour late every rehearsal and then proceeded to spend 20 minutes complaining about something... in time, the band that we were in the first hour of rehearsal was 10 x the band we were in the latter part of the rehearsal. Of course the self centered son of a gun, who had a deflection for every reality, refused to quit the band so you are tied to this sense of earlier commitment which is stalling every bodies good times. We had a studio session booked a few months in advance and he just stopped showing up at all, so naturally we just prepared for the session... He was playing another game but we were interested in music. On that day we went to the studio to record i had a visit from the said absent band mate. Knowing that other members believed "no fucking way he is playing if he doesn't show for rehearsal" i just lay ed low... for sure he damn well knew we had the studio booked and was there to lure me into some insane argument over my apparent betrayal... i was in no need to be annoyed so i just offered tea and snacks and weathered the moment... If it was just us, i probably would have been fool enough to try to go into the studio as an act of non betrayal... which is total horse shit, but that's the way we rolled... and in the end it would have been a nightmare. But because i had a commitment to other people who had worked hard i had to hold strong... that's the thing about me... I will always throw myself under the bus but i won't throw somebody else under the bus... ( However it is fair to note that sometimes the bus goes off roading and mauls innocent bystanders)... so i need to put somebody on the team that has the same reasons to thrive as myself so i can defend their ground and by default stand up for myself. it hasn't always been that way of course, and I'm sure reading this could prove to be a great source of ironic comedy for many.

That day, the only day i left a studio way early, our band stomped down a album (Roadbed-Represented), that i think is fair to say has stood the test of time. There was so much focus on "would we actually even be able to come together and lay down this music we know, love and are hot on"... and so little focus on "we have to do this, to achieve this, to then advance this", and only one person is smart enough to think for everybody. I remember being in Red Robin eating dinner with the band and the sun had not gone down yet... and we were done.

do what you can do... Let the chickens worry.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

I guess this blogaroo fits under the guise of "SR Chronicles"

Was in the dressing room after another hockey game loss and one of my teammates said he was reading my blog and getting a good kick out of it... i had to spoil the moment by asking "which one"... I, without thinking, was generally curious but then shifted the focus back on my man who was smiling remembering a story he thought was hilarious, but then he had to answer the name of the blog and became confused like it was a test of sorts. I realized what i had done smiled and said i was glad he enjoyed it... that's why you do "art" right... it's a personal thing where maybe you can brighten some body's day with something you did. That's the way i see it... the hard slough of the music industry is a soul killer, and it's bull shit too, just like the world economy is bull shit, and the idea that we can't afford to not turn our freshwater lake systems into trailing pond toxic zones for short term economic gain is bullshit. You either get it or you don't, or you don't care to get it for some reason or another.

It just seems like we are all focused on the wrong things... remember distraction is a human strong suit. It looks as though i threw a hissey fit on "facebook" the other day when i mentioned that only one person who i had given a "download card" for my new record to actually downloaded it. That's the problem with soundbites... My point being that over the years i have released 13 CD's and numerous tapes and there is always this idea of getting the music out there, wherever the hell "out there" is. i always remember seeing sealed copies of my CD's in used CD shops.. there was even a report of the Knocking Dog "simplex" album in a CD store in Drumheller in the free bin on the sidewalk still with the wrap on the plastic holding the plastic... Kind of a victory given the song "the Drumheller Boogie" was on that CD.

This is fine, nobody is asking for shit so you dump it on them, and that's what happens... i myself have plenty of CD's people gave me that i never got around to listening to. I think that was the cool thing about tapes... you would hand make like 30 of them and it would take you a long time and then you would give them to people who you know would listen to tapes... You know the Mule would listen to a "roadbed" tape, or an "8 minute MAN" tape, or a "Restore/ 21 Tandem Repeats" split tape... and there would only be a few of them. You made some music and you shared it with your peers, and later a tape would come back your way... perhaps somebody would put out 2 tapes in a row and you would feel shamed and get back to work.

I think with CD and digital... well the limit was originally 1000 and then 500 copies of CD's... so you had way more shit than you could ever deal with, so rather than learning to deal with it, you figure i should just get the music out there and give it away... which is the biggest mistake you can ever make... if you are giving something away then it is worthless. Like the classic coffee story... some dude started charging more for coffee and people paid more gladly thinking that they were getting something gourmet, something special. the other mistake fools make giving away their music is they give it away to other fools trying to "make it" in the business, and those people only care about themselves... which is not a knock on them... that's what they are supposed to do... community is a mirage when the shit hits the fan.

So anyhoo, i have a stack of download cards now for my latest album, and the neat thing about that is you get a report on any activity... if somebody redeems one of them is shows up in your accounting. I mean the basic idea of getting a CD out (now) is to get that CD into the MP3 player of the person, because that's how most people listen to music... for good or ill... so if you give your CD away it is just another piece of plastic that becomes somebodies garbage which is bad for all, and in the end you don't even know if it was ever heard, which was the basic point in the first place. With the download card you can shoot at about 2% and know it, and for sure it is good to know how you are doing. And that's all i ever really wanted to know.

I remember i met a guy one time years after i gave him a copy of "Roadbed-Represented" and he loved the album, and he said "it's so rare that somebody gives you a CD and it's any good at all". That was good advise... i didn't see it as advise at the time, it was just a statement, but the point is you don't want to be that person giving away your "product" (loath to use that word), because you are just showing that your product has no value. It might almost be the worst way to get people to listen to your music.. quite seriously. I know that after somebody heard a song of mine on the radio they took a different approach to the idea that the music i made was any good... I think there is some thing where by people need to hear of it from another source but yourself. otherwise you are just shilling, and that's always bad, and shilling is what has driven some of the most of the talented people i know out of music.

For me physics was always my strong suit... light mathematics but it was how to apply the equation, or when to apply it for that matter. From where i stand, any equation that has an artist do all the fuckery that is necessary to achieve success, is bull shit... never mind some of the loathsome pap that is turned out but focus more on the psychological damage done to young people trying to achieve a dream that was never really their original dream in the first place, but rather a status. But i guess status is the new world order... your status is important and people can comment on it and share it and even like it. Sure there are things i would like to be that I'm not, but that's what happens in life... and in the end it's all just memories... right Mule?