Meta and Meta

We Hope We've Failed the Audition

[Treoblogging] The band just finished up a discussion about bizarre musical situations we've been in.

Our bass player "Curly" was once retained by a singer-songwriter (both terms used expansively) for a gig. At the first (and only) rehearsal with the guy, the assembled musicians played the chart down as he sang the first lines:

Have you ever been to God's little river?
Have you ever seen a p***y squirt?

When Curly announced that--ahem--unanticipated scheduling conflicts would preclude his further involvement in the project, the guy pleaded with him, going so far as to offer to pay a few more bucks and even score "a couple of grams of blow."

Here's another elegant lyric, this from the chorus of a punk song run at an audition attended by our drummer "Tom":

C*m stains on the sheets
They don't f**kin' lie!
C*m stains on the sheets
They don't f**kin' lie!

Too, too true.

Finally, when we first met our banjo player "Earl" he was playing guitar in a punk band. And, ah, how well I remember the chorus refrain of one of those tunes, a proceleusmatic little number about Spring Break:

Get laid! Get drunk!
Get f**ked! SPRING BREAK!

And so forth.

That's all for now. But I do wonder what poptimists would make of these works? (Well, no, I don't.)

I Won't Have Any Trouble Getting To Sleep Tonight

Ooooh--just got the long form first draft of our new recording contract. Thirty pages. (I hope I make at least as much under this contract as I would have had I been paid to draft it. [That would make it even more remunerative than our first record deal.])

Ah, well, I've got to start reading it over, which means (alas, Dear Reader) my more ambitious blogging hopes are dashed for tonight...

On the Road Again...

I'll be on tour for the next 12 days, so posting here will be sparse.

Real quick, though, I thought I'd leave you with a pair of "quotes of the tour" from tours past:

We're on the road for shows in [towns and event names deleted]. You catch grub as you can when you are out here, and foreigners like us inevitably have questions. A couple of recent colloquies of this sort ran as follows:

BAND MEMBER: Why is it that every one of the waitresses in here is so pretty?

WAITRESS: Well, Bobby don't hire no ugly girls here.

. . .

BAND MEMBER: What's the difference between collard greens and green beans?

WAITRESS: Difference is, we ain't got no collard greens.

Gotta run, but y'all come back now, y'hear?

My Plea

This business of music is chock full of raving egomaniacs. When will they realize that it's all about me?

Why We Make the "Big" Bucks

[Treoblogging] Ever in hot pursuit of that ever-elusive global stardom, we were coming back over the Rockies to finish up our rag-tag, van & trailer Winter Tour. The weather waxed uncommonly foul, with winds upwards of 40-60 mph, lifting freshly-fallen snow into a virtual curtain of white. The road looked free of ice, but I kept our speed down around 35-40 mph , and trucks and cars continued to pass us.

Despite my seemingly conservative pace, sure enough all of a sudden it was as if the vehicle was aloft on a cushion of air, and we started a mostly uncontrolled drift (counterintuitively) into the wind. I couldn't do much more than let the van slow and avoid overcorrecting.

By and by, the van came to a near rest, its remaining motion being the counterclockwise rotation as the trailer dissipated its momentum jack-knifing around on our right side. We stopped, turned 180 degrees around, facing the traffic oncoming in our lane.

Gingerly, I pulled off the center divider, ueyed, then pulled off onto the right shoulder as quickly as possible (to spare approaching semis the need to make split-second adjustments to there navigational plan).

As it happened, I knew there were no other vehicles in our immediate area, so the incident was in no wise life-threatening. Still, minutes earlier or later and we could've been t-boned by a speeding 18-wheeler, or plummeted down an embankment, or broadsided a rocky outcrop, or... This knowledge of course left us all feeling very alive. And (somehow, suddenly) very skeptical of Winter touring.