The New PA Thing

Full disclosure: since the Eyewitness Blues Band sort of happened by accident, we never really had a proper set of gear. We've begged, borrowed and stolen PA gear for our gigs from Day One.

Thank goodness my brother Craig has quite a stable of audio gear (and has been willing to let us use it). But patience has its limits.

Back in January, Doug and I popped for a pair of JBL monitor speakers and stands, just before we played back-to-back gigs. The speakers performed spectacularly. The same can not be said for the PA amps we hauled with us to the second gig.

It was a near-disaster, saved at the last second when we pressed a drastically-underpowered backup amp (also borrowed) into service and worked without the stage monitors that backup amp was supposed to power. Not a very pleasant way to perform, worried that the jury-rigged setup would crater at any moment.

So now, we've taken the next step. We just bought a Yamaha powered mixer which should take care of us in small-to-medium sized gigs (anything bigger is guaranteed to have a house sound system we can use). It's a slightly-modernized version of the unit Craig had been loaning us, so we already sort of know our way around it.

Got a great deal, too, through an eBay seller in San Jose. But you have to wonder about karma: the reason the guy was selling the amp was because he'd bought if for his band, which broke up before they ever used it.

Whew!

Well, the show lasted almost as long as Woodstock, but at the end of the day (and I do mean the end of the day; it was almost midnight when we cleared out), I think a good time was had by all. At least the ones still awake.

I mentioned in my last post that I was nervous about performing without the safe, snug security blanket of the real musicians in the Eyewitness Blues Band. It was just Mike Sugerman and me, plus harmonica whiz Steve Rubenstein of the Chronicle (in photo with me) and a "house band" led by Alameda piano legend Kelly Park.

Turned out fine. In fact, better than fine. Sug turned into our front man and absolutely killed. Rubenstein knocked it out of the park. And Kelly and his crew really made it work. They took our songs and added a little here and there--I felt lucky to be in their capable hands.

We raised some badly-needed cash for the effort to keep elementary school music education alive in Alameda. We got to hang with some great musicians. And I think the audience enjoyed it.

Check out Ed Jay's photos here. And if you can, help out the cause here.

Headliners!

So it's come to this. Somehow, Mike Sugerman and I have become a headline act. I don't mean the whole band, just Mike and me.

Careful listeners will have noticed that Sug and I are the least-talented members of the Eyewitness Blues Band. But everyone else is working or traveling, so, somehow, Mike and I are going to try to perform.

It's a good cause: we're trying to help raise money to keep elementary school music programs alive in Alameda. I managed to finagle San Francisco Chronicle whiz Steve Rubenstein into joining us to play harmonica. But that leaves us a drummer, a bassist, and a lead guitarist shy of a real band.

Not to worry, said the organizers. We'll provide you guys with our house band!

Great, except that means I have to explain our songs to real musicians. When it comes to speaking "music", I'm about on the level of a guy scanning his Japanese phrasebook while trying to communicate in Tokyo.

We will meet the "house band" for the first time a few hours before the show begins. We'll see if we can communicate musically well enough to make it work. I have this scary feeling that they'll look at us and say, "You posers! Put down those instruments right now!"

One good thing: we're playing our two songs very early in the show. If it goes badly, everyone will have forgotten by the time the curtain falls.

Gettin' The Junk Out

I believe the phrase is "one man's meat is another man's poison"--what's good for you may not be such hot stuff for me.

I've found myself thinking about this as my wife and I empty our house. We're getting ready for a major remodeling project and using it as an opportunity to purge our lives of a lot of stuff.

Some of it is just plain trash. But most of it falls in that in-between place: we don't want or need it anymore, but maybe someone else can use it.

We're not the garage-sale type. We've already hauled loads to the e-waste place, the toxic-waste place, and the Goodwill place. But much remains, mostly furniture that's too worn or too out-of-style to make the cut in the "new" house we're building.

We've been wrestling with this. The last thing we want to do is send any more trash to the dump than we must (and trust me, we're pretty low-impact: our average weekly trash output is less than one kitchen-sized bag). Yet we have a few items that are just too big or too funky to donate.

Most notable is the big-ass entertainment center. Oak. 5 feet wide by 6 feet high. A relic of an era where a TV set would fit inside the entertainment center. And way too big to fit in our car (not that it would matter, anyway--I couldn't find anyplace that would accept it as a donation). I wasn't really up for dealing with the whole Craigslist thing (lots of swapped messages, waiting around for someone who may or may not show, then may or may not want the thing, etc.)

We were almost resolved to the sad fact that we might have to smash it to pieces and send it off with the construction debris when I read about Freecycle. Simple, sort-of-hippie idea: keep stuff in use. Post stuff you want to unload (or stuff you want). Neighbor-to-neighbor.

Turns out we have an active Freecycle community in Alameda. So I posted a brief description of the entertainment center, and by the next morning, three people expressed interest.

It's not gone yet, but I'm feeling good things for the old entertainment center. I think it's going to live on, stay out of the dump, and be of use to somebody else. Way cool.

One Coat Blues

So I've been busy (too busy to blog, apparently) the last few weeks, working my way through a paint job.

And you know what I've finally confirmed? The phrase "covers with one coat" is a lie 100% of the time.

I have two different gallons of "one coat coverage" paint for this project ("Ceiling White" for the, well, ceiling and "Peaceful Peach" for the walls), and neither comes close to covering the old paint with a single coat.

I know this will be the case each and every time I paint a room (on average, about every 4 years). And yet, like Charlie Brown kicking the football, I charge forward, only to have Lucy yank the ball away. Every time.

Wonder if I can wear one of those Charlie Brown sweaters with the zig-zag stripe while I roll on that paint?

Chicago '68 Redux?

OK, this is not a blog strictly about politics. Plenty of those out there already.

But you just can't ignore the drama of a Presidential campaign, and this is one for the ages. Both parties are choosing new candidates (no incumbents or obvious heirs-apparent, although you could argue the point when it comes to Hillary), and all sorts of interesting plot lines.

Including the possible return of the proverbial smoke-filled room. It is increasingly possible that the Democrats will head for Denver without a candidate haveing sewn up the nomination. That's when the 20% of party delegates who were not elected come into play.

These "super-delegates" are party regulars: pols, ex-officeholders, bigshots. They're not bound to anyone, although they certainly have allegiances. While it's tricky to determine, CBS News estimates Clinton has racked up more of their support than has Obama (look carefully at the full CBS News scorecard). And you don't have to have a PhD in poli sci to guess that an "establishment" candidate (Clinton) is likely to find more favor with this group than a "change" candidate (Obama).

Of course, I've piled up enough assumptions there to get a good argument going. So while I'm at it, I'll go a step farther: imagine this unelected crowd of super-delegates winds up deciding the nomination. What does that say to the throngs of energized voters who've responded to calls for change (whether those calls came from Hillary or Barack)? To them, the outcome could seem like "more of the same".

We already have way more cynical young people than we need. Let's hope the Democrats don't give them more reason to believe that their votes don't matter.

Whew!

Let me say this right up front: I have no idea how young rock bands manage to go on tour.

We just finished playing two Eyewitness Blues Band gigs in two nights in two cities. And I can barely stand up.

Load in. Set up. Fix. Sound check. Play. Take a break. Play another set. Tear down. Load out. Stagger to bed. Rest (briefly). Repeat. Hard damn work, and not made any easier by the fact that we don't exactly have world-class gear (our second gig was a full-on McGyver scene, with fill-in audio guy/troubleshooter Mike Davich reaching deep into his bag of tricks to clobber stuff together). Of course, it went a little easier the night before when my brother Craig ran the audio--he just takes care of stuff, and there are no surprises.

But both shows came off well. Maybe better than that. We had people smiling and dancing and yelling for more (at least that's what I think they were yelling). We even had a guy propose to his girlfriend during our Saturday night gig at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company (which we absolutely loved--great good, great little bar, great people). That's them in the photo, right after she said "yes". We serenaded them with Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Pride and Joy". Who says we're not romantic?

Like a Rolling Stone

48 hours from now, I will either:

1. Be so in love with the idea of being in a rock band that I'll quit my day job, or,
2. Be feeling every one of my 51 years of age and ready to quit the band.

See, your Eyewitness Blues Band is about to embark on its most ambitious effort thus far. We're playing two gigs in two nights at two different venues. And while we're accustomed to playing a single set of 30 to 45 minutes, these are pro-length gigs. That means two sets the first night and three sets the second night.

Add in all the loading-in and loading-out, the setting-up, tuning-up and other assorted stress-inducing activities, and I have a feeling we'll know why the reality of being in a professional band is decidedly less glamorous than the image.

This is not new news to Doug and Patrick, both of whom tried to earn a living with music and retreated to the relative sanity of the broadcast news business. That should tell you something: if the broadcast news business looks sane to you, then whatever else you're doing must really be crazy.

I have a feeling that by the end of the second night, I'll be too tired to even trash the hotel room.

Bike Porn

If this photo doesn't get your blood pumping...well, to each his own.

For the uninitiated, it's a Cervelo SLC-SL road bike. Same bike used by Team CSC (which employs one of my favorite riders, Jens Voigt). Really light. Really fast. Really expensive.

I just spent a weekend riding one, courtesy of my friend Don, who collects drool-inducing bikes the way some folks collect fast cars. Don's not a collector, though. He's a rider. Big difference.

For Don, it's not about the thing itself, but about its utility. And this thing does its job. It really does its job.

The Cervelo is amazingly light (you can easily lift the whole bike, even with loaded water bottles, with your index finger), but also very stiff. I had the sensation you get in a powerful car--hit the gas, and it just jumps.

Not that the Cervelo turned me into Jens Voigt, but I definitely felt like a better rider while we tackled the hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the flats along Santa Monica Bay. What I didn't expect is the bike's comfort level--despite its race breeding, it's an easy bike to ride. You're connected to the road, but you don't feel every wrinkle in the pavement.

Of course, this could all be my imagination. When I told my wife about the bike, she (no doubt thinking about the $6,000+ price tag) immediately challenged me: how do you really know it's a better bike? Is it possible that you're swayed by the knowledge that it's a superbike? Would a blind test reveal the same results?

She may be right. But thankfully, you can't blind-taste a bike the way you can coffee or wine. Could I tell the difference between that Cervelo and say, a Scott Addict (another superbike)? Maybe not. But I could sure tell the difference between my trusty old Trek 2100 and that Cervelo.

Even a blind rider could see that.

TiVo Crisis Averted

It's a long story, but I think we own the TiVo machine that Alexander Graham TiVo cranked out on his first day of business. While people now talk about their DVR capacity in terms of hundreds of hours, we sometimes have trouble recording an entire football game on our aging warhorse.

This leads, not surprisingly, to turf wars. It's me vs. my wife vs. our son, each wanting a slice of scarce capacity (she records "CSI", he records all kinds of Discovery Channel stuff, and I get left out).

So I finally broke down and bought an upgrade kit from WeaKnees. These guys will ship you a new, higher-capacity hard drive, already formatted with the TiVo software. All you have to do is wrestle open the TiVo case, pull the old drive, stick in the new one, and put the machine through its startup procedure.

It's every bit as easy as they say. They're not kidding when they say the case is hard to open (it just requires some serious effort, and a well-aimed screwdriver helps). But once you're in, we're talking 10 minutes.

Of course, I added a few minutes so I could clean up the disgusting pile of dust I found inside. Yuk. It makes me wonder if some of the occasional weirdness we got from the TiVo was actually caused by filthy living conditions on that circuit board.

But I digress. After a fast pass with the vacuum cleaner, I sealed things up (closing the case is a reverse wrestling match), and after letting the system phone home to retrieve its TV program guide, we're in Fat City. We now have 90 hours of storage, ready and waiting.

Which just means the arguments over who's hogging the hard drive will be slightly delayed.