It's a cold spring here in Washington state. That's not to say that we don't have hotsprings, but they are still kind of rare, and I haven't visited one in years. It's supposed to rain tomorrow. Yesterday was a nice day though, and Kristi and I took full advantage. It was overcast, but not cold. This is what you do when you're just introducing yourself to someone. Right? You talk about the weather, and if you're a sports afficionado you talk about the Mariners, or some other team that is having it's season. Hey, don't ask me about sports. I studiously avoid knowing anything about them for pretty much the same reason that I am a faux vegetarian.
It has been a creative weekend in as much as we have been making more "creative" music than usual. Kristi had her "CD release" party on Friday night down the street from where we live at A Rhapsody in Bloom and Caffe Latte coffeehouse. We had a full house, and that made the proprietor, Denise, happy. It was our second time out of the garage with this band, and I thought went OK, especially on the part that was album release. It's a tight space for a four piece band. We were hoping that Paul Anastasio would show up, but alas, he apparently had other things to do that night. He is a fiddler extraordinaire, and I think would work well with Kristi's music. Hell, I know he'd work well with Kristi's music.
I need to get some new cowboy boots. The ones I have really hurt my feet after an hour or so. The up side of that is that my feet really feel great after the pain subsides. Those were cheap boots to begin with, and my feet have apparently spread out as I gain weight, and the years roll along. It would be good to have a pair of cowboy boots that look like I am serious about the cowboy thing, and that feel good on my feet. I think that this goes to my entire cowboy wardrobe. It's a western swing band afterall, and although the west for that music wasn't very far west, the outfit counts. My hat could use some improvement too. I bought that hat in Anchorage, Alaska sometime in the eighties. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when it was my turn to drive, and realizing that I was sleeping on that hat. It isn't the kind of hat that just pops back into shape like my Mississippi gambler's hat does. No. It gets wrecked when you sleep on it. I have managed to force it into some semblance of it's former self, but I have fantasies of getting it blocked into a really nice hat again. Unlike the boots, I paid real money for the hat. For those of you who object to the hammer, and sickle on the red star that resides on the front of my hat . . . get used to it. I'm not a communist, so why should I worry? I could use a new cowboy shirt or three too.
On the other hand, I love my red stratocaster. It was made in China, so I guess in a sense it fits with the red star on my hat. I've insisted for quite some time now that red is the appropriate color for an electric guitar, although I've found myself attracted to certain shades of blue guitars too. I think that the color makes the guitar sound better. I think that thoughts like that are part of the creative process. I've tried to point out to people who listen to my songs that the truth often resides inside of a big fat lie. The ability to sound earnest, indeed, to BE earnest while crafting a tale that is essentially untrue is an ability unto itself. In a world so crafted, the red color of your guitar will make it sound better. Of course, $200 worth of new guitar pickups doesn't hurt either. I have wondered for some time what was wrong with my Roland Cube guitar amplifier. Mike Nelson's guitars sound positively heavenly when amplified with such a beast. I was able to get a good sound out of the amplifier, enough to squeeze out the requisite amount of joy necessary for playing three or four hours at a stretch, but not quite enough to acquire the joy necessary to ward off bouts of depression about how my electric guitar really could sound better. OK. More money thrown at the situation really did do the job, and I have more joy on my hands than I can possibly deal with. I'm talking about my Boss GT 10 multi effects unit. I can't even find all the joy that's hidden there yet. I'm only on the surface joy, and it is almost too much joy for me to handle. You push a button, and the guitar has a nice fender reverb sound. You push another button, and the guitar is wetted down with the sweetest eighties delay sound you can possibly imagine. Push another button, and you're back to the fifties. You don't have to push two buttons either. My Chinese Fender Squire modified red stratocaster guitar is all I ever need, or at least that's what I think at times.
One might think from reading this that I'm a materialist. I was born in the USA afterall. I SHOULD be a materialist. There certainly isn't much soul here. Is there? You might think that I don't even like the bonehead music that I play. I do, I do. I think we're gonna have some fun here. You know, don't you, that country music has widened up the scope of it's sound. I am not a purist of any kind. I don't have the patience for that. Of course, I'm not the bandleader either, although there are times when I forget that. There are times when I jump completely off of the sideman role that I'm supposed to be playing and leap headlong into how I want things to be. That's only because nobody else seems to want to make that leap, and that leap is what I'm all about. I guess it's about my inadequacies, and how glaring they are going to be if we leap in the wrong direction. If we leap away from bonehead music, and primitive sound into the world of jazz chords, and scales too numerous to mention, and sounding just like so and so, and . . . do you get the picture? If we leap in that direction, or the band leaps, and I am simply in my place but the momentum of their leap catches me in it's gravity, and I am swept away into a world, and a place that I didn't intend to be it may be, at the easiest, difficult.
This materialism thing has been a conflict. It takes tools to accomplish almost anything, including getting out of bed in the morning, and that means that there is going to be some materialism involved in one's world. That means materialism no matter what you think. You may think that you can live on a higher plane, but if it's totally without an acknowledgement of the value of materialism, it may well be a lower plane. It may be a much lower plane. Even living in a cardboard box takes some materialism. I may be underestimating the value, and joys of life in a cardboard box. As a child, they certainly were considerable, but, as I recall, my parents had provided a larger roof over my head, so the cardboard box was only pretend. In that context, a cardboard box was a ship out on a neverending sea, and I was the captain, a spaceship drifting in the timelessness of space, and I the only occupant, an automobile hurtling down an endless highway searching for the answers to who knows what questions, and at that time in my life, actually finding them. So, yes, let's not underestimate the value of living in a cardboard box, as the minimalization of materialism can yield an entire world that is not accessible in a world of real houses, mortgages, automobiles, and red guitars.
Maybe in some respects I still reside in that cardboard box where I didn't really live when I was a child. Sometimes when I am playing my red stratocaster there are moments where I am in the moment, and it is such a joy that I can't possibly describe it to you, mere mortals without red stratocasters. There are moments when the sound transports me, and the time that I'm playing in is part of me, and I am whole for those mere seconds of time. I'm sure this isn't real. On the other hand, maybe at those moments my entire being is vibrating at the same frequency as the guitar strings, and I am transported into a different dimension that you mortals cannot occupy. Perhaps if I could get myself to vibrate at that frequency for long enough, I would permanently reside in a different world where people never go hungry, children are imbued with a sense of happiness that cannot be denied, and everyone has a good roof over their head, and a healthcare system that takes pride in providing a service to all of the humanity that it can, and, and and . . .maybe.
You know by now that I'm talking about an entire weekend, and not just the vibration of the strings on my red Stratocaster. It is only Sunday now, and the beginning of a new week. I don't like April. I'm sorry to say that, as one should enjoy April all the way from April the first to April the thirtieth. It is a time of renewal, and hope . . . hypothetically. Hypothesis be damned, it's tax time. I guess the government philosophy is to get it all out of the way in one month. I'm back to materialism, and the unhappiness that it generates. Yes, I love my Stratocaster, but the money that had to be spent to manufacture it probably wasn't enough money for the people who provided me with this artificial joy to find real happiness of their own. It may have gotten them out of their cardboard box in their little town in China. I wonder if they ever laugh to themselves about the fools such as I who acquire the fruits of their labor? Nonetheless, it is also property tax time here in Washington state, and Kristi, and I have more property than we had ever wished for. I studiously avoided the possession of real estate for the better part of fifty years. My avoidance was part of a plan to keep myself unfettered from the real world, and to a large extent, we managed that.
Saturday: After the CD release party Saturday became my obsession. I say obsession because I am probably that kind of guy, obsessive. Did I mention that we sell books on Amazon.com used books for a little extra cash? Should I say that? You see, materialism again. If I could only adjust to the "living in a cardboard box" paradigm of life on earth, perhaps I'd find myself on a "higher" plane. Someone threw out that illusion. I don't know who. I have to mention the books because we had time to go to a sale on Saturday morning before we set out for our ultimate destination for the day, which was Seattle. We did find books at one location. It was apparently an estate sale, and that's interesting in the respect that this guy had had a lot of books. They were going for a good price, and we bought a bunch. He was into commercial seamanship, and true stories of the sea, true stories of adventure, travel, and there was a healthy dose of social justice thrown into the mix. I think I would have liked to have met this guy. Of course, I'm assuming it was a guy. Well, there were also a bunch of books about . . . well I think I should quit while I'm at least not too far behind.
Kristi had found a notice on the Tacoma Arts Listserve looking for musicians to play for a Bradley Manning event at Westlake Park. The lady who was putting on the event had warned her that she would only have two microphones. We brought our own microphones, and were prepared, pretty much. We parked in the Westlake Mall parking lot, which is $7 for the day, which meant that we had to stay in Seattle until we felt we had gotten our money's worth, or at least that was Kristi's logic. We had a small audience for most of our performance. One could almost say that the public was avoiding looking us in the eye, but the folks who were there to listen listened very closely. I think I was in a pretty good mood, and not likely to be put off by very much, and that's rare, and was a good thing as I think back on it. We played a nice set, and at the exact juncture where Kristi would play a bass solo, her amplifier crapped out on her. It ran out of batteries. On the way to running out of batteries it made her bass guitar sound terrible. It wasn't my guitar, and it wasn't red, so I didn't care that much. It sounded like punk folk to me. The largest problem was that we didn't know what the problem was. Eventually, when the amp really conked out on us, I figured out by plugging her guitar directly into the PA system what the deal was. The blue guitar worked fine.
All through the second half of our performance there was a woman out in front of us. You can see what we were (in general) looking at while we played above. She was completely engaged, and afterwards bought a CD from us. She explained that she ran a house concert down in Berkeley, CA and that was nice that she told me that, as well as buying the CD. I guess that means that it is a possibility that she might book us if we tour down there. We'll see if we ever hear from her again. Just in case . . . Hello Andrea, and thanks for stopping. We'd love to come to Berkeley again.
There is a little shop in the Pike Place Market called the Souk. It has been there for over thirty years, and every time we go to the Pike Place Market we expect it to be gone like the rest of Seattle that we were so familiar with back in the 70s and 80s. I don't say that as a bad thing, as I love the new skyline in Seattle, and the colorful glass buildings. The market has changed, not being as casual a place as it was when Kristi sold handmade leather goods back in the 80s. Pike Place Market is a testament to the desire to escape from the ratrace for one, and another is that people who can find no other place in society are welcomed with open arms with their crafts, their vegetables, and flowers. When I visit a place like this I wonder how much of it is artifice, tourism, and the desire for wealth that drives it. I hope that it is a place for people to find respite from the winds of materialism, and the rat race.
As we rounded this corner, there is a door near this window where you can step out on a staircase and look down on Elliot Bay, and the waterfront in Seattle. As we looked out at the city Kristi reminded me that we had visited this place in 1973, coming from Olympia, and how important it was to her at that time. Maybe there was something about the Pike Place Market that in the end created a bond between us that is sustained this very day. I know that Kristi had been looking forward to this day in Seattle, and I thought we would spend a fortune on dinner before we came back to Tacoma, but no. That wasn't what happened. We ate at a fish bar for tourists at the "Crab Pot" Restaurant. It was inexpensive, and unremarkable. While we ate a tour boat came in. You could see the pyramids of napkins on tables through the window of the tour boat. I wondered where it was coming from, as there were no tourists on board, only a few staff members. I found it remarkable how much of Seattle I have missed in my comings and goings from that city over the last few years. I simply haven't bothered to notice, although even a casual observer who has a timeline experience with Seattle can't help but notice the change in the skyline, and the much slicked up downtown area. I think that some of it I had seen before, but never noticed like yesterday. Maybe it was a lingering effect of the red Stratocaster.
I think that I should include one more picture of the Red Stratocaster. It is a modest picture. I suppose that it's a little risque. The guitar is naked. The strings are just hanging on it, like the one at the front, but this is a full frontal picture. OK. Here it is.
I guess it's like a picture from the doctor's office. Steve N.
