We had Dr. West and his Medicine Show, but somehow we missed another famous Doctor and his motley crew of medicine men.
I think there is another paradoxer hidden therein?
Friday, May 30, 2008
Will the real Doctor please stand up?
We had Dr. West and his Medicine Show, but somehow we missed another famous Doctor and his motley crew of medicine men.
I think there is another paradoxer hidden therein?
Monday, May 26, 2008
And on a sadder note.....
Last week, the nation and world lost one of its greatest patriots and citizens, Utah Phillips.
For those in Bob and Helen's neck of the woods, the tentative date for the funeral is Thursday May 29 with a memorial service on the following Sunday.
For those in Bob and Helen's neck of the woods, the tentative date for the funeral is Thursday May 29 with a memorial service on the following Sunday.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Greetings from Austin, Minnesota....
... home of the world-famous SPAM museum....
....but where the big news in town is that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will be playing on July 17 (missing "SPAM Days" by just a week or two).
My family will be there, remembering the time that Ralph, Jimmie, and maybe Jeff and/or Bruce were all sleeping on our living room floor in Tustin, and Tiger Jim would visit with his tiger.
And I'm sure my Aunt, who was also staying there at the time, will want to remind Jimmie of the time he warned everyone to "watch their socks" because there was a crazy woman (my grandmother) who would steal them in the morning to throw them in the wash. As I recall, we had quite the house full that summer.
Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
This just in from Helen:
As Helen writes:
"You all remember Daisy from the reunion last Labor Day, the one that helped out on many of the songs being preformed. She and Brian, year old kitty, sleep all cuddled up.
If this can happen, why can't the world get along?"
Monday, May 19, 2008
Been to Winslow, AZ lately?
Norma and I took one of our ruin-crawls through the Four Corners area on our vacation last October. We're deeply into the ancestral Pueblan culture and have made a number of trips through Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep and a bunch of the outliers. It's another one of those academic areas where most of what we know we learned in the last 25 years.
It's lovely country, but getting there and back eats up two days either way, Nevada is in the way, and there's no route we haven't taken a few times too many. And you've seen our little red roller skate. Not much of a highway cruiser.
It's usually my responsibility to find decent food on the road, which is a skill I picked up touring, and I'm the one who's usually saying, "I wonder where that road goes", or "I've never been to X. Let's have a look." Which is exactly what I said when we were tearing up I-40 headed towards Winslow, AZ.
When we got to the "Historic Downtown" area, it was apparent that Winslow used to be a lot bigger and a lot more prosperous. I mean, they were doing their best, but as with most of the other towns of the area, the interstate bypassed it, killing off the hotel and restaurant trade. "Downtown Winslow" is two blocks with a couple of gift shops, a couple of hotels and the civic buildings. So I mialed off some postcards and made friends with one of the postal clerks wo tipped me to a great Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks from there, we enjoyed a little bit of heaven topped with chile verde. And it meant walking through the two blocks of town.
The whole point of this post is that, right in the middle of town, there's a statue of a hitchhiker right on the corner, with a mural behind him of a blonde in a flatbed Ford, and across both streets, on each corner, is a gift shop selling souvenirs, with PA speakers outside playing the Eagles version of "Take it Easy" (over and over). Both shops obviously share the same playback system.
It's the "Standing on a corner" corner, and they have a Standing on the Corner Festival every year, with bands, rides, a parade, and everything. This is what it's come to in Winslow. I wonder if Jack knows.
Lest you think I'm kidding....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standin%27_on_the_Corner_Park
It's lovely country, but getting there and back eats up two days either way, Nevada is in the way, and there's no route we haven't taken a few times too many. And you've seen our little red roller skate. Not much of a highway cruiser.
It's usually my responsibility to find decent food on the road, which is a skill I picked up touring, and I'm the one who's usually saying, "I wonder where that road goes", or "I've never been to X. Let's have a look." Which is exactly what I said when we were tearing up I-40 headed towards Winslow, AZ.
When we got to the "Historic Downtown" area, it was apparent that Winslow used to be a lot bigger and a lot more prosperous. I mean, they were doing their best, but as with most of the other towns of the area, the interstate bypassed it, killing off the hotel and restaurant trade. "Downtown Winslow" is two blocks with a couple of gift shops, a couple of hotels and the civic buildings. So I mialed off some postcards and made friends with one of the postal clerks wo tipped me to a great Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks from there, we enjoyed a little bit of heaven topped with chile verde. And it meant walking through the two blocks of town.
The whole point of this post is that, right in the middle of town, there's a statue of a hitchhiker right on the corner, with a mural behind him of a blonde in a flatbed Ford, and across both streets, on each corner, is a gift shop selling souvenirs, with PA speakers outside playing the Eagles version of "Take it Easy" (over and over). Both shops obviously share the same playback system.
It's the "Standing on a corner" corner, and they have a Standing on the Corner Festival every year, with bands, rides, a parade, and everything. This is what it's come to in Winslow. I wonder if Jack knows.
Lest you think I'm kidding....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standin%27_on_the_Corner_Park
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Just thought I'd check in and see what folks have been up to. It's been a blur here in SF.
My countryesque band, Gayle Lynn and the Hired Hands, just got a two gig tour of San Francisco, including sneaking my electric guitar into what was supposed to be an all-acoustic show at the Bazaar Cafe, in Seacliff, and a nice little set at the El Rio in the Mission District, which was a benefit for the Avon walk for breast cancer. I got away with the stealth electric thing because Les, the owner, a man of taste and sensitivity, was impressed by the minisculitiy (is that a word, Diane?) of my little 5-watt tube amp.
My jazzesque operation, Annie Z and the Best She Could Do, played the same club last week in a completely acoustic fashion, with our bassist playing his new Tacoma bass guitar unamplified. It went surprisingly well, although the recording didn't come out quite like we'd hoped. Bad balance. TOO acoustic. I figure that we need 7 inputs to the board. to make it work. Two vocals, all three instruments, and a stereo pair in the house for ambience. We need to hire our own geek.
Both of these are what I call Bowling Night Bands. We don't do it for the money. We do it because not doing it leaves a hole in our lives. Annie is a schoolteacher and mother of two, Scott, the bassist, works for Ideo, a design firm, and I supply culture-hungry Marinites with fine musical instruments.
The other regular musical outlet in my life is a monthly get-together in Berkeley, called the Singthing, where about 20 or 30 of us have a potluck and sing everything we can remember. It usually takes about 5 hours. There's a core group of 3 guitars - David Gans, who hosts "Dead to the World" on PRI, and a Grateful Dead channel on Sirius, Eric Rawlins, an Appalachian music fan and singer/songwriter, and me. Eric is the meat and potatoes, David adds the spicing, and I'm... well, I guess I'm sort of a vegetable. And then there's a rotating pool of fiddles mandolins, banjos and other guitarists. A lot of pros and semi-pros show up, like Mike Stadler, Henry Kaiser, Tom Rozzum and Laurie Lewis. We've been doing this for over ten years and it's the social center of a lot of our lives. Some beautiful stuff happens at these things.
Life isn't entirely sunny. I came home from a rehearsal the other night, moved one load of equipment upstairs, and got a phone call. After dealing with the call, I went senior and forgot that I hadn't finished bringing in all my stuff. The next morning, I found that someone had broken into my car and run with my beautiful old '73 Gibson RB250 banjo. You know how these things go. It's in another state by now, and I'm going to need to buy a banjo, since I use it to teach. But I'll never be able to afford a sweetie like the one that got away. I'm being pretty buddhist about it, but I can't help feeling stupid.
Just so as not to end on a downer, here's a peppy little earworm that was sent to me by my friend Ed Ward, in Berlin. There's a kid's show on TV over there, called "Schnappi, das Kleine Krokodil", and the theme to the show was one of those out of nowhere hits that went straight to the top of the charts and drove people nuts for a month or two. It was HUGE over there. If you listen to the production, it's ludicrously low-budget, and may even have been a bedroom deal. Coupla synth tracks and a kid's voice. Don't blame me if you find yourself singing in German when you're out walking. Well, go ahead. Blame me. I'm still trying to figure out how to get even with Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3FG4EOgyU
Can't get the damned thing out of your head, can you?
My countryesque band, Gayle Lynn and the Hired Hands, just got a two gig tour of San Francisco, including sneaking my electric guitar into what was supposed to be an all-acoustic show at the Bazaar Cafe, in Seacliff, and a nice little set at the El Rio in the Mission District, which was a benefit for the Avon walk for breast cancer. I got away with the stealth electric thing because Les, the owner, a man of taste and sensitivity, was impressed by the minisculitiy (is that a word, Diane?) of my little 5-watt tube amp.
My jazzesque operation, Annie Z and the Best She Could Do, played the same club last week in a completely acoustic fashion, with our bassist playing his new Tacoma bass guitar unamplified. It went surprisingly well, although the recording didn't come out quite like we'd hoped. Bad balance. TOO acoustic. I figure that we need 7 inputs to the board. to make it work. Two vocals, all three instruments, and a stereo pair in the house for ambience. We need to hire our own geek.
Both of these are what I call Bowling Night Bands. We don't do it for the money. We do it because not doing it leaves a hole in our lives. Annie is a schoolteacher and mother of two, Scott, the bassist, works for Ideo, a design firm, and I supply culture-hungry Marinites with fine musical instruments.
The other regular musical outlet in my life is a monthly get-together in Berkeley, called the Singthing, where about 20 or 30 of us have a potluck and sing everything we can remember. It usually takes about 5 hours. There's a core group of 3 guitars - David Gans, who hosts "Dead to the World" on PRI, and a Grateful Dead channel on Sirius, Eric Rawlins, an Appalachian music fan and singer/songwriter, and me. Eric is the meat and potatoes, David adds the spicing, and I'm... well, I guess I'm sort of a vegetable. And then there's a rotating pool of fiddles mandolins, banjos and other guitarists. A lot of pros and semi-pros show up, like Mike Stadler, Henry Kaiser, Tom Rozzum and Laurie Lewis. We've been doing this for over ten years and it's the social center of a lot of our lives. Some beautiful stuff happens at these things.
Life isn't entirely sunny. I came home from a rehearsal the other night, moved one load of equipment upstairs, and got a phone call. After dealing with the call, I went senior and forgot that I hadn't finished bringing in all my stuff. The next morning, I found that someone had broken into my car and run with my beautiful old '73 Gibson RB250 banjo. You know how these things go. It's in another state by now, and I'm going to need to buy a banjo, since I use it to teach. But I'll never be able to afford a sweetie like the one that got away. I'm being pretty buddhist about it, but I can't help feeling stupid.
Just so as not to end on a downer, here's a peppy little earworm that was sent to me by my friend Ed Ward, in Berlin. There's a kid's show on TV over there, called "Schnappi, das Kleine Krokodil", and the theme to the show was one of those out of nowhere hits that went straight to the top of the charts and drove people nuts for a month or two. It was HUGE over there. If you listen to the production, it's ludicrously low-budget, and may even have been a bedroom deal. Coupla synth tracks and a kid's voice. Don't blame me if you find yourself singing in German when you're out walking. Well, go ahead. Blame me. I'm still trying to figure out how to get even with Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3FG4EOgyU
Can't get the damned thing out of your head, can you?
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
back to our world
B&H just got back from visiting with Ed and Bette. Bob who has picked and grinned Ed almost all of his life, went to visit our good friend Dory and her now husband Ted in Green Valley, AZ. Going down hwy 10 is nuts! Towns and lakes in the desert all the way. Also meeting us were Hank and Connie, great fun!
Swinging by the OC on the way home we had a super great pickin', pizza party with Steve Noonan, Ralph Barr, Jan Hampson and her guy Randy, and of course Gary, who organized it, last Thursday.
Saturday, May 3, Bob's 6 dozen Birthday, we went to the Claremont Folk Festival. What a birthday he had! The same group that came on Thursday, plus Pam and Henry, Susan, Eugenia and Pete. It was wonderful! Like stepping back into the 60's.
J.B. is so young and healthy and talented of course. We had a nice little "howdy" with him.
On the program with J.B. (this was an all day event), were great bands all day, which I won't mention, but should because they were all great. Not just bands, but dancing, and cultural groups....great!
Headlining along with J.B. was Ben Harper, too cool, and the very great and still going strong Taj Mahal, that guy Rocks! The first time we ever saw him was the Topaga Cannyon Banjo and Fiddle contest, sitting on a log pickin'. Few years ago, try 43 or so.
So glad to be away from traffic, population freeways etc. Daisy (hound dog) was waiting for us on the driveway, on the pond, a family of just hatched baby ducks, 10 of them. "ain't no place like home."
Swinging by the OC on the way home we had a super great pickin', pizza party with Steve Noonan, Ralph Barr, Jan Hampson and her guy Randy, and of course Gary, who organized it, last Thursday.
Saturday, May 3, Bob's 6 dozen Birthday, we went to the Claremont Folk Festival. What a birthday he had! The same group that came on Thursday, plus Pam and Henry, Susan, Eugenia and Pete. It was wonderful! Like stepping back into the 60's.
J.B. is so young and healthy and talented of course. We had a nice little "howdy" with him.
On the program with J.B. (this was an all day event), were great bands all day, which I won't mention, but should because they were all great. Not just bands, but dancing, and cultural groups....great!
Headlining along with J.B. was Ben Harper, too cool, and the very great and still going strong Taj Mahal, that guy Rocks! The first time we ever saw him was the Topaga Cannyon Banjo and Fiddle contest, sitting on a log pickin'. Few years ago, try 43 or so.
So glad to be away from traffic, population freeways etc. Daisy (hound dog) was waiting for us on the driveway, on the pond, a family of just hatched baby ducks, 10 of them. "ain't no place like home."
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Bob and Helen and Pam and Henry.....
.... attended the Folk Fest and found one of our missing Paradoxers.
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