stoneunhinged

Some time ago, I took part in a project called Banjoaddiction.  This was a project of the alt.banjo newsgroup in which several of the newsgroup participants uploaded a few songs to a website.

About a year ago or so, some New York film producer or editor or something contacted me to request the use of one of the tunes I posted on Banjoaddiction.  (You can hear the tune here:  Used Car).  I said sure, just send me a DVD of the film.

So she did.  The film is called “Arctic Son”, and is a documentary about…well, I suppose you could read about it yourself here:  Arctic Son.   My tune is used as background music while a father and son try to repair their snowmobile.  The great fun is seeing my name in the credits—just a few names away, in fact, from Bela Fleck.  Who would have thought that Bela and I would feature on the same movie soundtrack!  (If you don’t know who Bela is, shame on you!)

About a week ago, I got another email from the producer or editor or something saying that the film will be shown this summer on PBS on 21 August.  So everyone in America, mark your calendars and set your Tivos and VCRs  and tell your pastors and analysts and mistresses, and listen to me play the banjo in the background of a REAL DOCUMENTARY on PBS!

No need to send telegrams or flowers or money.  The 15 minutes of fame is reward enough.

jj

…is here, the link a courtesy of http://stickofsin.blogspot.com/

Be careful: I lost some of my coffee through my nose. Apparently a (decensored) clip from Saturday Night live, it shows they still have some creativity over there in my mother country.

Of course, the whole white boy soul group thing (or whatever they’re called) is just a bit funnier over here, where they sing in German. (German hip hop never ceases to make me laugh—even when it’s not parodied.) For example, in October I saw a documentary about the German National Team’s efforts in last summer’s world cup. A few times they played a “white German soul /rap whatever you call the stuff” hit by a guy named Xavier Naidoo called “Dieser Weg.” Download the song and give it a listen. By itself it is worth laughing at. But in the film there is a segment where they are showing the final celebration in Berlin for the World Cup German national team, and it was all I could do to keep from choking on popcorn. And I wasn’t even eating popcorn. Not only does the song suck, and not only is the “artist”—artistically speaking—culturally confused (German? Tamil? South African American? Of course, I’m culturally confused myself, but I don’t sing like I’m black, either) but the clip in the film shows he can’t sing.

You can watch the clip here. And you should watch it even if you can’t understand German, because it’s funny regardless of the language.

Okay, maybe he was just having a bad day.

jj

Hans and I took a series of pictures for the cover of our new CD.  Here’s one of me without Hans:

I have no idea why I’m posting this.  I just kind of like the picture.

jj

I’ve been listening (once again) to a Tim McGraw song over and over again. That’s how I listen to music. That’s how I play music. It annoys my wife when I play the same song for four days, but I always say, “I’m practicing”. When I’m listening to music, however, rather than playing it, there is no excuse to make. But I think this is totally normal. (I remember when I first moved to Germany, my upstairs neighbor would listen to some Celine Dion song for an hour straight, over and over again. Pure torture for me, but apparently heaven for her.)

The song—which I’m listening to now—is called “Back When.” Good, honky-tonk style country with sentimental lyrics.

Stop.

Let’s back up a bit.

Next week my parents will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. My sisters and myself were requested (read: put under pressure) to write speeches for the celebration which my parents’ church is organizing, and the three of us agonized over the project. All of us wrote nice things, of course. But we also became somewhat contemplative about our childhood. 50 years of marriage, by necessity, includes a hell of a lot of dissonance as well as harmony.

I think what my parents would have liked would have been for us to write our fondest memories of family life, in order to confirm their role as loving parents. I included no memories, though one of my sisters did. I just said nice things.

And would they understand my fondest memories, anyway? What memories I am fond of are not always the nice moments. I absolutely cherish, for example the memory of my mother—who had just cause, for I had just given her some inexcusably nasty adolescent lip—whacking me upside the head with the rag she had been using to dust some furniture. I still fondly remember it as the “Pledge Rag Incident”. It was lemon scented, by the way. She denies all memory of the incident, yet I smile every time I think of it.

Or my father….

When I lived in Michigan, I had obtained some porno mags from my friends. In a totally irrational fit of conscience, I tried to burn them in a gallon-sized coffee can…in the basement. (When you want to feel humble, you think about such things. Holy Lord! Was I an idiot!) Okay, I managed to somehow get by the smoke problem. But a few weeks later my father called me into the living room for a private conversation. He pulled a few pieces of charred porno magazine fragments from his pocket and asked me what had happened. I told him the truth. He said, “Boys will be boys” and advised me that I should be extra careful to keep such stuff from my mother, and that I should have flushed the charred remains. This I remember as “The Coffee Can Incident”.

I could have hardly recounted these memories for a church audience.

But I do have innocent memories which I just hadn’t thought of, at least until listening to Tim McGraw:

Don’t you remember
The fizz in a pepper
Peanuts in a bottle
At ten, two and four
A fried bologna sandwich
With mayo and tomato
Sittin’ round the table
Don’t happen much anymore

Peanuts in a bottle?

My mother used to put peanuts in her cola bottle. I have no idea why. She would take a first swig, then empty one of those small foil packages of salted peanuts into the cola. I don’t know what she drank back then: Diet Rite? Diet Dr. Pepper? RC? Pepsi? All I remember—and my goodness, is this a fond memory—is going to gas stations, where they had these soft drink machines with a glass window through which you saw the caps of the glass bottles lying one above the other in different compartments as if on different floors of a skyscraper. She would buy a bottle and dump peanuts into it.

Why?

Is this what Tim McGraw is singing about?

Some fond memories have no rational explanation.

jj

I was writing elsewhere and said something like, "why don't we just move to California?" I think about California a lot. I was born there but have very little memory of it. Generally, I find California to be a kind of idea: both returning to where I came from and going to a place made primarily of dreams; though California is the place of Raymond Chandler and O.J. Simpson, a place where dreams sometimes go terribly bad.

Anyway, I found myself humming a tune by some pop group about California. I had seen the video three or four times last summer while on vacation, and the line "California, California…" stuck in my head.

So I was humming this tune, and I thought I should find it and listen to it. I googled around and found it quickly enough. It's called "California", and it's by a group called "Phantom Planet."

What a sucky song! The melody of the verses is a direct rip-off of Oasis's "Wonderwall" (if you're not a musician, you may not hear it; if you are, you can't miss it. "Wonderwall", by the way, was an absolutely superb pop song.) The chorus is pure ear-candy, and once you hear it you are practically forced to sing along. But that doesn't make it good. Also, the chorus was obviously written by some kid playing an E chord on the guitar and sliding the fingering up to the third fret and then the sixth, all the while singing "Califooorniaaaaaa…Califoooorniaaaaaa!" I wrote songs like that when I was thirteen. No kidding.

But they can be forgiven for a musically weak song. This is the 2000's, after all, not the sixties. But the lyrics are absolutely unforgivable. Lines like,

"We've been on the run/driving in the sun/looking out for number one"

or

"Pedal to the floor/thinking of the roar/gotta get us to the show"

Hell, that last line doesn't even rhyme!

And of course the chorus:

"California, here we come!"

I was very disappointed. If this was a hit, perhaps I should sell some of the songs I wrote when I was thirteen and make a few million.

Talentless, silly boys.

BUT: as I wrote this I was listening to Chris Thile's Stealing Second. So today's music doesn't really suck: just the stuff that passes for mainstream popular music.

If you want to listen to music played by an immensely talented young man who didn't go the pop route, go buy a Chris Thile CD. You shouldn't be sorry. If you are, you have no taste anyway, so you might as well go buy the next Phantom Planet CD. For that matter, you might as well just forget about buying music and just listen to the radio. And you can also leave a comment telling me that all these things are subjective anyway. GRRRRRRR!

jj

I never got around to blogging about last month’s gig in eastern Germany.

We were here: Zum Pappenheimer, in Saalfeld, a town in Thuringen. This is in what used to be the German Democratic Republic. For all you kiddies out there, that was the official name of East Germany, back when there was a wall running through Berlin and they would shoot you if you tried to cross over into the west without getting permission first.

The bar has a super bar atmosphere. To play there, however, is not to play in perfect conditions. There is no stage—they just clear away a few tables in the corner—so you never really get the feeling you have an audience, which I find important. A few people at a few tables act like they are there for the music; the rest just occasionally look over and applaud at the end of songs.

We played well, I think.

But the evening was terrific. The people there at Zum Pappenheimer are world-class in hospitality. We got to use one of the guestrooms for free (you can look at it on the web site, actually. Click “unsere Zimmer” and then “west”. You can also see that the room normally cost 50 euros a night. For small time acts like ourselves, this is luxurious.) For dinner before we performed they handed us a menu and let us pick anything we wanted. I had steak and home-fried potatoes with salad and beer. Breakfast the next day was so large it seemed like a buffet.

Hans and I try to keep alcohol intake to a bare minimum while performing. Then, after the show, we pack up all the equipment, sit and the bar, and order a shot of some kind of spirit. Han always orders something called “Williams”, a pear-flavored liquor of some sort. I always order a bourbon. Usually I’m not choosy, except to avoid Jack Daniel’s. But this place is special. This place—these unbelievably good hosts—held up a bottle of Maker’s Mark and Woodford’s Reserve and gave me a choice of the two. I went for the Woodford. An excellent choice. Excellent whiskey. Excellent.

Anyway, we’ve played this bar twice, and my experience there and other experiences I’ve had in the ex-GDR have given me the same impression: the people there are just extra nice. They may have had to endure over a half a century of dictatorial government, but they seem folksier and friendlier than their more “sophisticated” western kinsmen.

I hope we play there again next year. I think I’ll have the lamb instead of beefsteak. But I’m sticking to the Woodford’s Reserve.

jj

An article at Yahoo news: Lennon. This may be the highlight of my year. This is being done by people who have done something similar—they tried, on pay-per-view television, to contact Princess Diana—so they know there’s a market for it.

But: why Diana? why John Lennon? Have Buddha and Socrates been dead too long? Is Elvis somehow less an icon than Lennon? Is Diana more sanctified than Mother Teresa?

Yeah, yeah, I answered my own questions even before asking them: because there’s a market for it.

Still, the article has some stuff to spit coffee over. Consider this line:

“Sharratt said he chose Lennon because the former Beatle, like Diana, is an icon and was also a deeply spiritual person.”

Indeed.

How about this:

“‘The Spirit of John Lennon’” is being done without the knowledge or consent of John Lennon’s estate.”

I could write reams over this sentence, but I won’t. I’ll let clever readers think for themselves.

There’s this, too:

“Sharratt said, ‘We are writing to Yoko and contacting friends this week to see if any people associated with Lennon would take part.”‘

What does “contacting friends” mean? Maybe they’re planning a non-pay-per-view seance with George the week before to seek his participation.

Which gives rise to another thought: these people are being impatient. If they wait until Paul and Ringo die, then can do a “Beatle’s Reunion Seance”.

Even I would pay for that.

But here’s the kicker of the article:

“Sharratt said the Indian sequence will feature a spirit reader at an ashram who believes he can contact Lennon to receive musical notes and lyrics from the other side.

Any notations will be flown to Los Angeles, where a composer will arrange the notes, add vocals and backgrounds to produce a new song.”

Again, this raises questions. First is, if we’re going to get music from the beyond, why aren’t we contacting Bach or Mozart or Beethoven? They aren’t “spiritual” enough, like Lennon? But second, read the line again: a composer will “arrange the notes”. Perhaps the article was written by a journalist totally ignorant of music, but if a “composer” “arranges the notes” and then adds “vocals and backgrounds”, what may I ask, are they actually using from John Lennon?

Perhaps a faint, ghostly whisper saying, “Leave me the f**k alone!”

jj

…and while I’m on the banjo theme this morning, I noticed yesterday that Danny Barnes’s website has been refurbished.  Danny Barnes is one of my favorite musicians, and appears to be just an all around cool guy in almost every way.

He’s one of my 72 heroes.

The current incarnation of his website has a few mp3s you can listen to for FREE, and FREE is never bad.  Unfortunately, the most interesting part of his website—where he used to give reports of his musical travels, complete with the food he ate and what he carried in his luggage—is history.  Too bad.

Nevertheless, the website is not the most important thing.  The music is.  So check out his website and buy all of his CDs.

Almost forgot:  it’s www.dannybarns.com.  Duh!

jj

Here’s a link with some videos of Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt: earl. Be forewarned: even with DSL each video took at least ten minutes to load. Be alswo forewarned: the Beverly Hillbillies is NOT a show which, in my opinion, holds up over time. I recommend skipping those clips. But if you must, be prepared to rethink how culturally significant the 60s really were.

At least the music was good.

jj

I briefly mentioned a few days ago that the website for my partner Hans and myself was just about finished. Well, I guess it’s finished enough to send out an invitation.

Consider yourselves invited!

The only things missing are pictures of my banjo—which you’ll get here, anyway, just as soon as I have some—and a biography of myself. Anyone want to write one for me?

Here’s the link: www.cowboysongs.de. You can also click the link for “High Noon” over on the right of this blog.

jj