BeJae Fleming: News

I told my friends, Andy and Chris Shaw, recently that the music club down the street from my house where the Shaw Brothers were due to play had not updated their calendar. I ranted just a little, how was I supposed to know who’s playing at that club if the slackers can’t even manage the simple task of updating their calendar? I mean really, how hard is it to update a calendar? I got the sweetest note from Jackie this morning saying that she’d been on our website and noticed that there are no gigs listed on it and would I mind very much updating it. She was not at all cranky and snappish like I was about the calendar for the club down the street. So, don’t faint, but we do have a few gigs coming up and they’re on the website now … and if you checked before to see where we were playing, but found nothing about gigs listed … Well, sorry about that … You should snap at me the next time you see me, you really should.

We’ll be at the German Village restaurant, Barcelona, this Sunday, January 16 from 7PM – 9PM. This is a background music show, very low volume in the bar area of the restaurant. It’s okay if you just want to come in and have drinks, but the chef at Barcelona is offering a special menu, three courses for $30 a person. The food is extraordinary and I have yet to go to a restaurant in Columbus where the service is as good as it is at Barcelona.

On Friday, January 21, we’ll be at the Rumba Café sharing a show with Chris and Andy Shaw, the Shaw Brothers. Doors open at 6:00. Jackie and I will go on around 6:30 for an hour-long set. The Shaw Brothers will finish out this happy hour show till around 9:00. It is an honor for Jackie and me to play the Rumba Café. This is a real music venue here in Columbus and I’ve had no luck, with my own efforts, getting booked at the Rumba. It is only through the tremendous generosity of the Shaw Brothers that we’ve gotten this opportunity and it means more to me than I can tell you. So, please do me a favor. Go hear the Shaw Brothers and the Andy Shaw Band, when you have the chance. Check them out on myspace, http://www.myspace.com/2shaws and on their website http://www.andyshawband.com/. Buy their records. And, if you have a chance, please find a way to let them know how much Jackie and I appreciate their kindness to us.

Jackie and I share another show with the Shaw Brothers in February on the 19th beginning at 7 PM at the Guitar House Workshop here in Grandview Heights. Thanks so much to owner/luthier, John Bolzenius, for hosting concerts here in our neighborhood. John is very friendly and his shop is cozy. This will be an intimate show where we all get to hang out and enjoy music together. You can pay whatever you want for this show keeping in mind that the Shaw Brothers are fulltime musicians. Music is their only source of income, so please be as generous as you can.

Jackie and I will be in New Orleans in April to play for a conference. Though I’ve been to New Orleans before, I’ve never actually played there, so I’m looking forward to that.

I’d like to come back to Iowa in May, though I haven’t booked anything yet. I should, of course, get on that, but I’ve been busy updating the calendar on my website.

Thanks for listening,

B

In her November 22 blog, Gayla Drake Paul writes: “OK, this is SO strange...I can no longer write songs on paper. Can't do it. My brain has been completely rewired so I now think in keyboard...there used to be something so satisfying about the feel of a pencil moving across paper...but now a pencil on paper just feels like balancing the accounts...the ticka ticka of a keyboard is the opposite of sensual, but somehow it's the only way I can get any words onto anything like paper.

I truly don't mind - it doesn't matter to me how the words get down, just that they do. But it seems so curious. When I write with paper it's CRAP. Total crap. I move to the keyboard and suddenly it's all ok. I guess I am evolving into the new info age whether I like it or not. Well, mostly I like it...”

I think it’s so interesting the way our creative minds adjust and disadjust (which my word processor tells me isn’t even a word, but it should be in my opinion) to the tools we use. We spend so much time on keyboards nowadays doing email, blogs, games and poking around on the Internet. Gayla makes part of her living writing for Premiere Guitar Magazine, so she spends even more time tapping away on a keyboard than she used to.

I like lyric writing on a keyboard. I like the ease with which I can change things and move them around. I often don’t write songs in a linear way. I write in phrases. Sometimes one phrase suggests another which leads to another from the beginning of a song-in-the-making to its end, but usually what I have is a jumble of phrases that catch my ear and my imagination. I don’t know what goes where, what stays, what gets added and what gets axed, until those phrases tell me their story and explain to me what the song is about. I don’t always know to start with. The notion of needing to know what a song is about before beginning keeps a lot of people from writing. For me, it’s sometimes better if I don’t know. I can get in the way of my own creative process if I know too much too soon.

If you had told me when I first got a computer that someday I would write lyrics on a keyboard, you would have stretched your credibility with me. I was very resistant to keyboard lyrics at first.

“No, I’m not doing that! It’s ridiculous to even consider.”

I had a friend years ago whose daughter, we’ll call her Blossom, was an angel child; sweet, cooperative, good natured. Then Blossom turned thirteen. Overnight, it seemed, she became a sulking, complaining, stubborn contrarian. Every time her mother spoke to her, Blossom rolled her eyes with a big, dramatic sigh of exasperation, the universal sign for “you are SO stupid!” My mind has a gatekeeper at the “try something new” door: thirteen-year-old Blossom.

This is what I usually think before I try something new in my process of songwriting: I would NEVER use that, it couldn’t possibly work, it’s distasteful and something only a hack would do and I’m better than that, much, much better and I will never, never, never change my mind about this. Yeah, right.

I’ve changed my mind about writing lyrics on a keyboard. Now it makes perfect sense to me. I’m lazy and unmotivated and I like puzzle games. I play lots of games with keyboard and mouse. Puzzle games intrigue me for hours at a time mostly as a way to avoid chores I don’t like very much. Vacuuming comes to mind. Maybe I’ll play just one more round of Scrabble on the computer before I vacuum the living room. Maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow to vacuum the living room, it’s not like I’m expecting guests or anything and I’m learning all these important new words by playing Scrabble, words like “qat” (an evergreen shrub) and “ilex” (a type of holly), I’d better keep playing. Then several hours pass and it’s time to fix dinner. That’s how it works for me.

I’ve noticed that, for me, songwriting is very much like a puzzle game. My mind comes up with phrases then figures out how to put them together. I like to think that all of those hours spent playing computer puzzle games were training for my creative process rather than a huge waste of time. This is what I tell myself.

I got a tremendously useful songwriting tip from a workshop that Gayla Drake Paul did at the Guitar House in North Liberty, IA a couple of years ago. She said, Don’t sit down to write a song, sit down to write a line. One line. Sit down to write for ten minutes.

Just one line or just ten minutes will often give my mind a puzzle to work. Maybe I’ll write just one more line before I go vacuum the living room. Then several hours pass and it’s time to fix dinner. That’s how it works for me.

I still write lyrics on paper sometimes. It’s an old habit. Occasionally, when I have an idea for a phrase, without thinking much about it I’ll just jot it down on a piece of paper. Those lyrics often lose their way, not because I can’t write with pencil on paper, but because I can’t find what I wrote with pencil on paper. Paper tends to get shuffled and lost among all the other stacks of paper on my desk. I don’t even know what’s in those stacks. I don’t even care. I know it’s mostly stuff I didn’t want to make a decision about. “Do I keep this or throw this away? Oh, I don’t know, I’ll decide later …” Only I don’t decide later. I just let a stack sit there for a year or so then assume I must not need whatever’s in it anymore. I keep all those pieces of paper long enough that throwing them away without looking at them seems like a safe thing to do. I’m better at tidying up when there are no decisions involved. Sometimes I get confused and throw away a new stack instead of an old one, but that hardly ever seems to matter. Nothing really terrible happens when I throw away the wrong stack but, I wish I had those snatches of lyrics back. That’s how I am. I always want what I don’t have, but not enough to keep it. There is a significant responsibility and obligation in both keeping track of things and throwing things away. I don’t do much of either.

Sometimes paper lyrics go through the wash and end up shredded all over a load of clothes, especially lyrics written on cocktail napkins and receipts and such. Lyrics come off of clothes pretty easily, which is more than I can say for lip balm. I swear I try to check all my pockets, but once or twice a year a tube of lip balm gets by me and ruins a whole load of laundry.

I should write all my lyrics with a keyboard (and stop using lip balm). At least I’d have a better chance of being able to find them again. But, sometimes, like when I’m waiting for a flight at an airport or waiting for the band to start in a bar, I might not have a keyboard handy. I have a Blackberry … Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I don’t seem like the Blackberry type. You’re right, I’m not, but Jackie is most definitely the Blackberry type and this is one of her hand-me-downs. So, I have a Blackberry, but I can’t imagine writing lyrics with my thumbs. It just wouldn’t be right and, besides, my thumbs aren’t smart enough yet to write lyrics. Perhaps in time they’ll come around, but right now sometimes it’s paper or nothing … and I can do it, I can still write lyrics the old fashion way. There’s a good chance I’ll never see those lyrics again, but at least I look busy and sometimes that’s enough in an airport or a bar. And every once in a while I run across one of those scraps of lyrics long after I’ve forgotten what I meant by them. They’re often even more useful then. I’m usually better off if I’m not in the throes of whatever I meant.

Now, if only I could come up with riffs using my computer. There are programs that do that, but I would NEVER use one. (That’s what Blossom tells me.)

“Poetic Champions Compose,” by the way, is a late-eighties recording by Van Morrison. The line comes from the song “Queen of the Slipstream,” a song that I learned way back then and preformed a few times. I don’t remember many lines from that song, but I do remember this one: “There’s a dream where the contents are visible, where the poetic champions compose …” It’s hard to tell exactly what Van meant by that. Not many writers could get away with lyrics like that with me, but somehow, I can’t explain how, Van does. You can say anything if you figure out how to say it like you mean it. Van has always known that. Van can make nearly anything sound convincing.

I can imagine Gayla Drake Paul right now sitting at her keyboard, composing like a poetic champion, ticka, ticka, ticka … Try to work in the words “qua” and “ilex,” Gayla. I’ll feel so much better about how I spend my time if you do.

It’s snowing. Eeesh! You know I was raised in the South, right? In the South when it snows even a little everything closes and your mother won’t let you go anywhere close to a car no matter what. So, if you’re female and raised in the South, you don’t learn to drive in snow because you never get to do it as long as you live with your mother. It you’re a musician, you live with your mother for a very long time. You see my predicament. Oddly enough, it’s fine for men and boys to drive in southern snow. I’m not sure they know how to do it either, but they act like they do and at least they get a little bit of practice at it.

So, it’s snowing just a little and Jackie and I have a show tonight in Burlington, IA at Starr’s Cave Nature Center … And I have to go because I booked a hotel through one of those services where you get to pay less money, but you get charged when you make the reservation not when you actually show up. So, I have to go whether the show gets cancelled due to snow or not … which it would if this were the South. But, it won’t because this is Iowa. We drive in the snow here even when there’s more than a little. Even I drive in the snow in Iowa … you pretty much have to … but, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m that person driving fifteen miles an hour, the one you have to pass, the one who makes the road dangerous for everyone else. When you’re behind me, you think you want me to drive faster, but, trust me, you don’t want that. You’d be sorry.

Maybe Jackie will drive to the show tonight. She was exempt from the no snow driving rule because she grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. It snows there. The roads are tiny and winding and aren’t ever safe even in good weather. People who grow up driving on roads that are never safe, if they make it to adulthood, are pretty much fearless. Jackie is not afraid to drive in a little bit of snow or even in a lot of it. Jackie is hardly afraid of anything.

Next Saturday Jackie and I, along with Mary Pat Reasoner on saxophone and Laurie Haag on drums, will be in Minburn, IA. I hope it doesn’t snow. Jackie won’t mind if it does.

Thanks for listening.

I have a guestbook on my website that I almost never look at. I don’t know why I almost never look at it. Probably because I think that no one ever visits my website and so I don’t expect new postings in the guestbook. Jackie looks at my website nearly every day. She checks all the charts that HostBaby provides about traffic on my site so that she can tell me that people do too visit my website, “more this month than last, more this year than this same time last year.” Jackie is like that. I am not. I don’t even balance my checkbook.

I’m not sure why I decided to look at my guestbook the other day … Maybe because, a while back, the immensely talented, young Des Moines blues singer and guitar player, Matt Woods, left a comment in my guestbook. I might have just wanted to read that comment one more time.

So, I looked.

Aside from a long, nonsense computer code message, which Jackie says that spammers leave in order to attract robots and crawlers … She said something like that … See, when Jackie tells me stuff about technology, she sounds like a demented person to me and I immediately snap into my polite face and I nod my head as though I’m taking in what she says when I’m really not, I’m backing up slowly and thinking up excuses for other places I need to be … But, I swear, I think she said something about robots and crawlers … Anyway, aside from that, there was this new message in my guestbook: Gloomy stories.

Okay, okay, you’re gonna love this, you are … When I told Jackie about this message, here’s what she told me …(this is so good) … She told me that sometimes spammers leave random two-word messages that don’t mean anything. Is that great, or what? “Gloomy stories” are just two random words that accidentally wound up together as robot crawler bait. Jackie thought that, since I’m somebody who doesn’t even balance her checkbook, I might possibly fall for this explanation. She said it so that I wouldn’t take the guestbook off my site just so people can’t say things like “gloomy stories” to me. This is my way of dealing with things. Recently, Jackie told me that she didn’t think I played very well at a gig and I told her that the perfect solution for that problem was for me to never play again. Can you believe that Jackie has to live her astonishingly productive, let’s-get-on-with-it life beside someone with such teetering confidence? I’m easily devastated. You just can’t say things like, “You didn’t play very well tonight” or “Gloomy stories” to me, you just can’t.

I got a very nice note recently from Bob Dorr, deejay at KUNI and front-guy for the Blue Band. Referring to our long lives as performing musicians, he said, “Persistence is the hard part, right?”

It is indeed the hard part.

I immediately erased the “gloomy stories” comment from my guestbook (along with the crawler-attracting nonsense code). It’s one of the only ways I manage to persist as a musician. I get rid of the spoilers as quickly and as thoroughly as I can. They’re everywhere, these spoilers, people with egos as fragile as mine, closet self-loathers who make themselves feel better by diminishing and criticizing what others do under the guise of being “helpful” … as though leaving me a message like “gloomy stories” is going to help me write some cheerier ones. I have exorcised people from my life for one comment that I thought was intended to unravel those thin, fragile threads of my persistence at music. I have. And I’d do it again. Some things are more important to me than others.

In all likelihood, my “gloomy stories” spoiler was no spoiler at all, but, instead, some guy from Finland who grew up speaking a different language and meant to leave the message, “dark stories,” which I would have agreed with and taken as a huge compliment.

A journalist recently asked me in an interview if I thought I wrote angry songs.

“I prefer to think of them as dark,” I told him.

I’m all about dark stories.

I’m probably way too quick to erase my critics. There are probably ways in which their criticism would make me better at what I do. I’m just terrified that their criticism, instead of making me better, will make me quit. And one thing I know: You don’t get better at something by not doing it. And I know that it would not make me happy to give up music and dark stories.

And then there’s the other side of it. There is Jackie who has allowed me to set up my life so that it can be all about music. Hardly anybody I know gets that kind of support for their life as a musician and songwriter. If Jackie hadn’t done that for me, my fragile persistence would have broken long ago. If I had what many musicians have, a fulltime job outside of music, children and the plethora of activities that go along with having them, and other interests and talents besides music, I never would have made it this long. I don’t see how Jackie does it. She has always given enormous time and dedication to her academic work. She has an astonishing number of interests and talents outside of her job and outside of music. She puts in far more hours, even on sabbatical, than I put in on one of my occasional productive weeks. And, yet, she still manages to play shows. And she doesn’t just play them. She plays them with great skill and intensity, and she gives herself over as a musician to my songs. Jackie is remarkable. I am not. I would have folded long ago as a musician without everything that Jackie does for me.

My friend, Gayla Drake Paul, who is a wonderful singer-songwriter and a world-class and world-recognized guitar player, came to hear me play a while back. Gayla and I shared a number of shows years ago when I first moved to Iowa and, through her playing, I learned a guitar tuning, DADGAD, that has become the foundation of a lot of my playing.

I said to Gayla after the show, “Can you believe that, after all these years, I’ve finally figured out that I can play in other keys besides D when I’m tuned in DADGAD? It’s only taken me about twelve years to figure this out. We can’t all be prodigies like you.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” she said to me. “I learn something from you every time I see you play live.”

These are the things that get me through my own gloomy stories when the pull of persistence is weak and waning.

I was all ready to take my guestbook offline to protect myself from those “helpful” critics who leave me messages that are code for, “Why don’t you just go ahead and give this up, you were never that good at it, why not save yourself a lot of misery and just stop.”

Then I saw Matt Woods’ entry: “BeJae Fleming is the queen of the world.”

I decided to leave my guestbook as it is for now.

Yesterday was Bruce Springsteen’s birthday. And the birthday of the slightly-less-than-famous-but-great guitar player, Roy Buchanan. And John Coltrane and Ray Charles and Ani Difranco. September 23 is a very auspicious birthday for musicians.

Jackie and I played in a trio for three years with Al Clarke on electric guitar. It was an amazing and expansive experience for me. You’ve heard me talk about some of my guitar player influences: Bo Ramsey, who can give a song a deep, mesmerizing groove like nobody else; Dave Moore who, besides being a great songwriter and harmonica player, can make an acoustic guitar sound as powerful as an electric; and Gayla Drake Paul, whose sophisticated playing can make an impossibly difficult riff sound easy. These players, among others, I’ve been lucky enough to know and share music with.

But, when it comes to driving, melodic lead guitar, I’ve learned nearly everything I know from Al Clarke.

The first time I ever heard Al play was in my living room. I hardly knew him. I’d met him only a few times and liked his dark sense of humor. I liked it that he was a writer, though I hadn’t read any of his work. He came to hear Jackie and me play a few times and seemed to like what we did well enough.

I’d heard from a mutual acquaintance that Al Clarke was a guitar player. I’d spent months avoiding the subject with him. I immediately get nervous and skittish and wary when someone tells me about their friend who plays guitar, but who has been “between bands” for a while. Sometimes, without warning, these “between bands” players wind up in your band. You never know quite how it happened or when or how you’ll get them out again. But, it’s a problem. A big problem.

It happened to Ray Wylie Hubbard (Texas singer-songwriter) years ago. Ray is a nice guy who doesn’t like to say no and he let a saw player sit in with him once … Well, Ray thought it was going to be once … But, the guy started showing up at every gig with his gear: a saw … you know, a regular hand saw with a handle on one end and a flexible blade, the kind of saw you’d use to cut a board or a tree branch if you’re scared of the kind of saw that plugs in or the kind that runs on gasoline … with a Barcus Berry contact pickup up on the blade and a violin bow and a Marshall amp. You change the pitch by bending the saw blade. The more you bend it the higher the pitch. But, the pitch is never exact. It’s always off. And it always wavers in the way that tones waver in old, atmospheric sci-fi movies, in that ahhhh-ouiiiiiii-wowowowowo kind of a way. So here’s Ray in his progressive country-rock band playing his original songs like Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother with what sounds like a weird, sci-fi, off-pitch, alien whistling tea kettle smeared all over them. It was … interesting. It was … awful. And it went on for months and months.

I don’t know how they ever got rid of the saw player. I always assumed that maybe Hubbard took Saw Guy on tour and managed to drive off without him from a rest area in Texarkana where Saw Guy still lives and plays saw in some other band that can’t bear to fire someone they never hired in the first place.

This was all I could think about when a mutual acquaintance told me that Al Clarke was a guitar player.

But, there he was in my living room. We had dinner and a few drinks, and there were guitars on stands just sitting around next to amps and somebody in the assembled group said, Why don’t you three play something … It seemed inevitable, preordained. “Let’s just go ahead and get this over with,” I thought to myself.

Jackie and I played the intro to Hound Dog and I began to sing. Al played so quietly and sparingly that I could hardly hear him. When we got to the part of the song that cried out for a guitar solo, I nodded at Al and he began to play a solo that was so dark and dirty and beautiful that it made me shiver. Al suggested we play Cutaway and he played riffs that made me like that song better than I’d ever liked it before. I asked him on the spot if he’d like to gig with us. And that’s what we did for the next three years. We played everything from the Farmers’ Market for vegetables to the M-Shop for standing ovations.

I cried for days when Al quit the band. Then I was mad for months. Then I started thinking about the way Al played, the tone of it, the feel of it, the way he used the melody of the songs to shape the solos. And I began to try to use what I’d heard Al do for three years to shape my own guitar playing into something that was a distant echo of his.

Any of Al’s fans reading this will be very quick to tell you that I’m no Al Clarke as a guitar player and that I can never hope to be. Believe me, nobody knows that better than I do. But, even though I’m not nearly the player he is, Al Clarke is a huge part of everything I play. You may not be able to hear it, but it’s there just the same. And it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me as a player.

The breakup of that band was hard and it was ugly. It was nearly like a divorce. We were pretty much estranged for a while, but, thankfully, what Jackie and I share with Al goes way beyond our band configuration. Al and I are good friends. I think Al and I will always be good friends.

Yesterday, September 23, was Al Clarke’s birthday. I think that Bruce Springsteen, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Roy Buchanan and Ani Difranco should feel honored and grateful to share a birthday with a musician as extraordinary as Al Clarke. Though they are lucky enough to share a birthday with him, they were never as lucky as I was. I shared something even better than a birthday with Al Clarke. For three years, I shared a stage with him.

I share a birthday with Chuck Norris … which means that, if you think I’m not nearly the guitar player that Al Clarke is, you’d be very smart not to tell me to my face.

Jackie and I will be at Stomping Grounds on Friday, and at Prairie Moon Winery with the band on Sunday, the 28th. September 28 was my mother’s birthday and was my wedding anniversary for thirteen years. It’s a big day for me and I can’t imagine anything better to do on a big day than play music with my band. This is the last public performance the Jimmy, Jackie, Pete and B configuration has for a while, so if you like this configuration this is the right time to show up.

Have I told you that the guys in the band now have band names? I haven’t told them yet, but they do. After not hearing from Pete and Jimmy for a while, I asked Jackie, “Gee, what are the names of those other two people in the band?”

Without a pause and without looking up from her work, Jackie said, “Pinky and Hinky Dink.”

The part of Jackie’s brain that generates names is called the Linkdoodle. This is too much information, isn’t it?

So, we don’t have any public gigs booked for the Jackie, Hinky Dink, Pinky and B configuration past September 28 mostly because we operate on the agricultural calendar as a band. During the growing season, there are outdoor gigs. They’re very civilized gigs, most of them over by dark. They’re cultured and refined. Or family-oriented. People drink wine or eat hotdogs/tofupups (never both) at them. They’re sane gigs. They’re safe.

The gigs available to a four-piece band in Iowa during the indoor months are less cultured, they’re not over before midnight and the audience tends to be drunk, moody and a little cranky about the weather and the fact that they’re not allowed to smoke in public anymore. They have to go outside thirty feet from the building. During blizzards, they have to tie ropes to themselves to find their way back to the bar. It’s called a blizzard rope. (I first learned about blizzard ropes in a poem by Debra Marquart.)

It takes some rehearsal time to learn the bobbing-weaving-feigning-and-faking-while-playing techniques that keep a player safe at gigs in most places in Iowa in the winter. (Not at gigs in Fort Dodge, not according to our former guitar guy, Al Clarke. You gotta go ahead and carry weapons to Fort Dodge gigs according to Al. I’ve never played in Fort Dodge. I’m too lazy to fill out the paperwork and too scared of the background check.)

Pinky doesn’t rehearse. He’ll stay up just as late as you want him to … Later … Drive home … Learn the songs on his own and make notes so that he can play em better than you can … But, he won’t rehearse. Hinky Dink will rehearse, but he won’t stay up past ten PM. So our season is just about over.

Jackie and I have been looking for winter subs for Pinky and Hinky Dink, twenty-year-olds who are eager to bob, weave, stay up late and not make much money for playing. We’ve noticed that all classic rock bands in Iowa have an old-guy bass player with a twenty-year-old nephew who plays drums. It’s an interesting phenomenon. I went to a lot of shows at Moose Lodges and VFW Halls last winter trying to steal a twenty-year-old nephew drummer, but it turns out that, though the nephew drummers will gladly stay up late, rehearse and make too little money, they won’t play for non-familial, counter-culture, classic-rock-aged women who play original songs (which some musician with a smirk is at this very moment calling “derivative”) on electric guitar. I don’t know if it’s the family thing or the genre thing, but like everything else in the music business, I can’t seem to get this quite right.

It’s a tough business.

I’m off to El Bait Shop in Des Moines tonight, corner of 2nd and Market, Court Avenue area on the deliciously wrong side of the tracks, to hear one of my favorite bands of all time, Brother Trucker. Frontman, Andy Fleming, is one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in all my years of touring, playing and listening. I was lucky enough to get to sit in with Brother Trucker this past Saturday evening at g-palooza, Big G’s fabulous birthday bash on the shore of Lake Red Rock, close to Pella. We had a great time and there’s rumor of another g-palooza next year … and you’re all invited … seriously, Big G said so.

Brother Trucker is oh, so lucky to include our good friend and great musician, Jimmy Stevens, on drums at El Bait tonight. You can hear Jimmy again along with Jackie Blount, Pete Manesis and me at Stomping Grounds in Ames this Friday.

Jackie and I will be at the Mill in Iowa City on Saturday night for the release of Sandy Dyas’ book, Down to the River: Portraits of Iowa Musicians. Lots of fabulous acts are on for that show, many of them Trailer labelmates of mine, Bo, Pieta, Greg, Dave, Kelly and the list goes on. I heard that, in Sandy’s interview on Live from Prairie Lights, she revealed that she had me close my eyes during our shoot for the portrait of me in Down to the River, because I was so uncomfortable having my picture taken. It’s true. I’m camera-shy.

Next week, you can catch Pete Manesis, Jackie Blount and me at Cottage on Broad in Story City. This is our first show at Cottage on Broad. We’re looking forward to it.

Hope to see you soon. Thanks for everything.

I wrote this as a response to a blog my buddy, Big G, worte on MySpace about hearing Dave Zollo in Perry, IA recently. You can read the original post at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=78168856&blogID=278091054&MyToken=fe5b6812-3263-4177-8166-2b38497b3803.

I heard Dave Zollo for the first time in a while a couple of weeks ago at AK O'Connor's. He was playing solo, the room was noisy, the audience attention was bouncing all over the place ... it was not an easy playing situation. And yet Dave Zollo was astoundingly good. I think that Dave is at the peak of what he does in that same way that Bo Ramsey is at the peak of what he does. Nobody does Bo better than Bo, and nobody does Dave better than Dave. You could go to New York or to LA or to Nashville and you could go to a show where somebody was doing the kind of music Dave does and they would not be better at it than Dave is. You could pay a hundred dollars for a ticket to hear somebody famous do the style of music Dave does and you would not hear a better act. Dave has so many shows under his belt ... He understands what he's doing at a level most of us never reach. And there's Dave playing in Beaverdale with people talking loud and people choosing to sit outside instead of inside where Dave is playing ... and regardless of the noise and the apathy, you've got David Zollo in there playing a free show that ought to cost more than I could afford. Life is so amazing. I'm not from Iowa. I could have missed this. I could have missed it. But, I didn't. I'm right here in the middle of this Iowa roots music scene that is so rich and inspiring and includes acts like Brother Trucker fronted by one of the best songwriters who has ever lived, Joe and Vickie Price who are as nice as they are authentically compelling, Dave Moore who has somehow gotten even better the last couple of times I've heard him when I thought he was already as good as anybody could ever get ... and the list goes on and on. It turns out I have all the luck. My musical life is better than I ever imagined it could be ... And you know, right, that I've been around ... I was part of the Austin/Dallas/Houston music scene in the seventies and toured the entire eastern half of the country in the eighties ... I've heard some stuff. This is better.

Jackie and I were in Fairbanks, Alaska last week. Jackie's Women's History Month keynote address on the life of Ella Flagg Young was wonderfully inspiring. We had a great time playing at the Pub on the UAF campus. We'd like to thank everyone at UAF for being so kind to us, especially our friends, Sine Anahita and Kayt Sunwood. And thanks to the aurora for finally showing up on our last night in Fairbanks.

Jackie and I are pleased to have the opportunity to play a few songs with Rob Lumbard at his Octagon show this Saturday. Rob is an astonishingly good finger-style guitar player. I feel so lucky that I get to hear Rob in the lovely art gallery on the third floor of the Octagon Center for the Arts in Ames. The room has great acoustics. It’s a wonderful place to hear music. The Octagon has scheduled an impressive series of concerts over the next few months. See the list at http://www.octagonarts.org/en/events/. Jackie, Rob and I will play a few of my songs at the beginning of the show. Trust me, you don’t want to miss Rob. http://www.roblumbard.com/
Next week, Jackie and I are off to Fairbanks, Alaska for a lecture on Jackie’s current research, “Famous to Forgotten: The Legacy of Ella Flagg Young,” and a show on my current research, “Ink and Needles: Wonder if I Could Get the Band to Get a Tattoo,” in a series of events celebrating Women’s History Month. Jackie and I are grateful to our friends, Kayt Sunwood and Sine Anahita, for turning the wheels of this very exciting invitation. The temperature has been forty below zero for enough days in a row in Fairbanks that most of the plumbing there is all frozen up and inoperable. Wahoo!!! There’s a moose living in Sine and Kayt’s yard that sometimes gets cranky and won’t let anybody come out of the house. You know, they just can’t replicate adventures like this at resorts and at Disney World, they just can’t. I can’t believe we’re getting paid to do this. The Northern Lights are very active in Fairbanks at this time of year, especially at around three in the morning. I could call you and describe what I’m seeing. Shall I? Oh, wait, our cell phones won’t work up there. Darn.

We’ll be back in Ames in time to open a show with Red Stoltenberg on guitar at the M-Shop for our friends, Joe and Vickie Price, on March 29. Joe is in the Iowa Blues Hall of Fame, a veteran and a legend in Iowa blues. Joe and Vickie travel all over the country with their combination of Joe’s deep, traditional blues style and Vickie’s beautifully voiced swing blues. The M-Shop is, of course, one of our favorite venues, so please join us for this show. http://www.joepriceblues.com/
Jackie and I will be in Chicago for a show on April 13. Joining us on guitar will be our dear friend, Victor Sanders. Victor produced and did the lead guitar work on our first two CDs. We’re very pleased to have the chance to do this show with Victor in the intimate setting of an artist’s studio. I’ll have more details about this soon.

Check for more shows in the calendar section of this site.

I’m very happy to tell you that the Iowa chart of the Roots Music Report shows Destination Unimportant at number seven again this month. Our deep thanks to all the DJs spinning our disc.

Thanks so much for all you do to support us indie musicians. We’d be glum and alone in our living rooms without you.

Hello,
This is the first chart for Iowa artists available on The Roots Music Report. I am proud to say that 8 of the top 10 are played regularly on Midwest Revue and the two blues artists are also heard on The Big Blues Broadcast.
Thanks to all artists who help keep my shows fresh!
Billy Rose



IOWA: ROOTS ARTIST RADIO AIRPLAY CHART
Jan: 2007 Chart
Ranking: Artist: CD Title: Label: Genre:
1 STEPHEN SHEPHERD IN THE SHADE WHP True Country
2 BLUEGRASS ADDICTION BLUE IN MY BLUEGRASS SELF Bluegrass
3 GREG BROWN THE EVENING CALL RED HOUSE Folk
4 BO RAMSEY STRANGER BLUES BO RAMSEY RECORDS Blues
5 PIETA BROWN IN THE COOL VALLEY ENTERTAINMENT Roots Rock
6 THE NADAS LISTEN THROUGH THE STATIC AUTHENTIC/C & P APPOLONI Roots Rock
7 BEJAE FLEMING DESTINATION UNIMPORTANT TRAILER Blues
8 LITTLE MOJO AWAKE & DREAMING MUTINY 2K MUSIC Roots Rock
9 SAM SALOMONE VOODOO BOP HOT FUDGE Jazz
10 TOWNCRIER WITHOUT A TRACE AUTHENTIC Unknown

Kris Konrady, writing for the Des Moines entertainment magazine, Juice, named Destination Unimportant as a "Top Five" Iowa album along with albums by Bo Ramsey, The Bone People, Mike and Amy Finders and Stuart Davis. Thanks, Kris. This means so much. Read Kris's review at http://www.dmjuice.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061227/JUICE05/612270327/1115/juice

By Sandy Clarke

Having kicked around Iowa for all but a few of my 41 years, you’d think I would have made it to the famous Surf Ballroom at least once before. But I hadn’t, until lately. What makes this even more of a mystery is that I love to see live music in smaller venues, and I’m married to a Buddy Holly enthusiast.

So when I saw that Susan Tedeschi was on the bill for August 18 at the Surf, I was determined to knit up this hole in my Iowa musical experience. My intrepid friend Ann, who is always up for a road trip, joined me on the pilgrimage. Al, who is not always up for a road trip, declined.

It’s a good thing I was so determined because forces out of my control, namely the Highway Patrol, were against me. I got pulled over on Interstate 35 a few miles south of Clear Lake because I did not (could not) change lanes when driving past a patrol car stopped to ticket another driver.

So, while sitting in this very patrol car seconds later, the officer said “you're supposed to slow down when you can’t switch lanes so that you can come to a dead stop in case an officer has to walk into the lane.” I’m thinking, yeah, right--in a perfect world maybe. In fact, as I sat there in his squad car trying to act much cooler than I felt, several people whizzed by us in the near lane, causing the officer to remark, “See those idiots? (Not that you're an idiot, ma’am.) I could spend all day just ticketing for this.” So I said, "Yeah, I guess I'm the lucky one." That's a lot of lip from someone sitting in a squad car, so I flinched a little when he gave me “the look.” But he said I was lucky after all and he was just going to give me a warning.

After this delightful delay, we got to Clear Lake and headed down toward the lakeside for a quick meal. When we got to the Surf half an hour before the start of the show there was already a long line out front beneath the marquee. If you are an aficionado of 50s psuedo-Deco architecture, this is your place. I don't think they've changed one thing since 1959. The decor is turquoise blue and white, with little maritime flourishes to remind you that a lake is nearby and it’s time to relax. When you walk in, the rarified air hits you like a painted brick wall. A large newspaper clipping featuring the Buddy Holly crash story is prominently displayed, as are other rock and roll artifacts.

The seating protocol at the Surf is big trouble. Some patrons pay an extra $10 for a reserved booth (maybe even more for a reserved table on the floor), and these booths aren't always clearly marked, which leaves the other general admissions people (us) just floating around in never-never land. After we got kicked out of an unmarked booth, Ann asked about the seating policy. She was told that we could sit anywhere after the show started, even in reserved spots, because after that it reverts to first-come basis. Try telling that to a woman in a leopard-skin dress with bouffant hair who calls you honey. And the t-shirted security folks are not interested in settling these land-grab disputes. You are on your own.

After two unsuccessful attempts to defend squatters’ rights, and after trying a couple booths strategically located behind thick concrete pillars, we eventually settled on standing stage right and got to see a lot of the band and the guitar tech. We danced the night away. I noticed that when the band looks out from that famous stage, their perspective is dominated by huge images of Buddy Holly, done in the style of Andy Warhol. The stage is like the old ballroom stages that used to be prevalent in Iowa, fairly high off the ground with thick velvet curtains in the background. The sound system is huge. I bet the dressing rooms backstage are fantastic relics. The bathrooms are cavernous mirrored and tiled rooms with antechambers.

We had a blast at the Surf, even considering our driving and seating tribulations. Susan and her band seemed to enjoy the ambiance, and she pounded out some great gritty numbers and soulful ballads. When she belts out “You can make it if you try,” you almost believe it. I imagine the Surf is quite a memorable stop for touring musicians, and those billboard-sized images of Buddy Holly grinning encouragement must stick with them for a long while down the road.

Kayt Sunwood and Sine Anahita left messages in our Guestbook.

From Kayt:
I'm not sure that Fairbanks has an unjumpable claim (Alaska humor, from the gold mining days) on hosting the Farthest North BeJae Fleming Fan Club. I know of tiny villages on islands in the Chukchi Sea WAY above the Arctic Circle, as well as a Yukon River village with radio reach into Canada are rocking to CDs from BeJae and the Band. Are there any fan clubs from Point Hope, Barrow, Prudhoe Bay, or Kaktovik? Speak up so you can claim the Farthest North honors. Even though in miles we are far, far, far from the Heartland, your music reverberates throughout the "Last Frontier." I find Rhonda’s message from "Rudy's" particularly poignant in villages throughout Alaska. Even though most Alaska villages aren't connected to a road system, have few to no cars, no parking lots, nor diners --- similar to the fate of Rudy’s Diner --- in Alaska in the last 30 years much of what made up villages and village culture has been “swept … clean away.” Throughout Alaska we seem to be wrestling with Rhonda’s message, “some things you can’t hold back even if you try.” BeJae, and band, you are phenomenal. Couldn’t make it way up here in Alaska without the connections your music provides.


From Sine:
From the Farthest North BeJae Fleming Fan Club: Though she has never performed in Alaska, BeJae has a growing throng of fans. I use her songs in my sociology courses at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, most recently in my Love, Sex, and Heartbreak class. The students enjoy "Your Love is a Car", although they are confused by the metaphor. Which is actually prrr-fect, as I use this song to teach about Symbolic Interactionism, which confuses even seasoned sociologists. I have also used "Don't Criticize My Love" to teach Marxist theories about sexuality. Jesse Helms never had so much press so far North. "Cutaway" works well when I need my students to analyze the sociology of personally ruinous, even illicit romantic liaisons. There is a big market here for that. I'm still trying to find a sociological hook for "Rudy's" and "When It Comes to You", my two current favorite songs. "We All Got Wings" seems dangerous to play for college students; they are uncontrollable enough as it is without giving them any liberating ideas. Thanks for the music.

********************************************************

Jackie and I met Sine Anahita around 1990, when she booked me to play a show at her beautiful Bold Moon Farm, just outside of Greensboro, NC where we lived at the time. This was before Jackie played bass with me. In fact, this was before Jackie played bass at all. There was one Bold Moon New Year’s Eve show, though, when Jackie played a few songs with me on guitar. We also played a set at an Ashville, NC festival, Bel Chere, with Jackie on guitar. There’s no end to her musical abilities. She has all sorts of musical secrets, like the fact that she can play tunes by buzzing her lips. Flight of the Bumblebee is one of my favorites.

Sine had owned Bold Moon for a few years when we met her. Her notion was to create a safe and interesting place for women. She scheduled everything from day-long music festivals, to workshops on, among other things, massage, how to build straw bale houses (efficient and relatively inexpensive housing available to landowning women of modest means and varying levels of building skills), and how to create intentional communities. She cleared space on her land for camping, renovated an old school bus as a guest cottage and built outbuildings on her farm where she kept goats and chickens. She took in every stray cat dumped in the area, baked bread, edited a newsletter for women on the land, and hosted rituals to celebrate the change of the seasons. Sine was a one-woman cultural renaissance at the end of a long gravel road.

Jackie and I took to Sine from the moment we met her and she to us. We became fast friends over those last three years that Jackie and I lived in North Carolina. Sine was one of the people who helped us get ready to move to Iowa in 1993 and cried over us when we left. She wrote us letters once we got to Iowa, sent us shells from the river behind her house and drawings of her goats. She helped us through those early days in Ames, IA when we didn’t know a soul here except each other.

Sine came to visit us in March of 1995. Sine and I have birthdays just one day apart in March. Jackie and I put together a small birthday celebration at out house. I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted Sine to meet our new friend, Kayt Sunwood. Kayt was working on her PhD in Instructional Technology after years as an activist in Duluth, MN. Kayt had built her own cabin north of Duluth on a piece of land barely accessible by car. She had lived without electricity or running water. She spent a winter in a teepee where she raised all her own food, lived in a women’s collective for several years, and could fix about anything that didn’t work right. I thought that Kayt and Sine would have a lot in common and enjoy talking to one another. I had planned to tell Kayt and Sine a little bit about each other, all these amazing and wonderful things that I thought they’d enjoy talking about, but, as guests started arriving, I got busy with taking coats and serving drinks, and missed the chance to give Kayt and Sine anything but the briefest introduction. Once there was a break in my host duties, I looked around for Kayt and Sine. There they were sitting together focused intently on each other as though they were the only ones in the room. By the end of the evening, they knew as much about each other’s extraordinary lives as I did.

Sine and Kayt kept in close touch after Sine returned to North Carolina. In November, Sine moved to Iowa to be with Kayt and to continue her studies in sociology.

After several years, Kayt and Sine both finished their PhDs. Kayt had been working at the University of Wisconsin in Superior, while Sine finished her dissertation and worked at Iowa State. Finally, they went on the academic job market and found jobs together. That was the good news. The bad news, for Jackie and me, at least, was that the jobs were in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was our turn to help them pack and cry over their leaving.

Jackie and I visited Kayt and Sine in Fairbanks last summer and got a firsthand view on the extraordinary lives that these amazing women are living in a remarkably beautiful place.

Sine and Kayt have made sure that our CDs get airplay on Alaskan community radio stations. Because of them, our music is sitting on top of the world.

[Hear samples: http://cdbaby.com/cd/boramsey2]

The first time I ever heard Bo Ramsey play live I had booked him myself into a community concert series in Ames, Iowa, where I live. I was fairly new to Iowa at the time, and new to Iowa music. I didn’t really know who I was booking. I’d barely heard part of a cut or two from Bo Ramsey and the Backsliders’ Live CD (Trailer Records) on KUNI radio, while I was driving to gigs. Without paying much attention, I pigeon-holed Bo in my mind as “one’a those electric blues guys.” I booked him because I knew there was a lot of talk about him in Iowa, and I needed someone with a draw. Since we were on the same label, I thought maybe I could get him, and I thought maybe he could prove to some of the people who didn’t believe it at the time that, yes, people in Ames would pay ten dollars for a sit-down concert that didn’t involve alcohol or a full band.

Bo played that show with bass player Marty Christiansen, just the two of them in a very intimate setting. I introduced Bo, and he came on stage humbly, almost shyly, sat down on a tall stool, and got down to the all-git-and-groove business of playing the most engaging live show I’ve ever heard. They played all sorts of Americana, roots music on Bo’s usual array of guitars, all of it with mesmerizing depth and masterful control. When Bo announced that they would take a break, then come back for a second set, I thought to myself, Well, they can’t take a break now, it’s too soon, they’ve only done a few songs. I looked at my watch. They’d been playing for an hour. I had completely lost track of time. For that hour, there had been nothing for me but that music. I’d never had an experience like that before. I turned to Jackie Blount, who sat next to me. With a stunned look she asked me, What just happened? I don’t know, I told her. I don’t know. Jackie and I have spent our time as musicians since then trying to figure it out. That show changed the way I listen to music. It changed the way I think about music, and it changed the way I play.

In 1999 when I was in the process of recording my 2000 release, Navigating Limbo, I was talking to friend and music critic, Jim Musser.

“If you could have anybody in the world play on this record, who would it be?” he asked me, though he already knew who I’d say.

“Bo Ramsey,” I told him.

“Ask him.”

“I can’t,” I told Jim Musser.

“Why not?”

“I admire him too much. I don’t have the nerve to ask him to play on my record, Jim.”

“Want me to ask him for you?” Jim knew from the beginning, I suspect, that this was his match to make.

“Yes,” I told Jim. “Yes.” “Yes.”

Bo Ramsey drove from Iowa City to Chicago on a sweltering day through snarly traffic for very little money to lay down stunning guitar parts on three cuts for Navigating Limbo. The signature, seductive slide guitar on Make the Boys Like Me, Bo cut in one take. He did multiple texture and solo tracks for I Am a Diamond (my co-write with Trailer Records founder, David Zollo). At the end of the last take, Bo said through the studio microphone into the control room to engineer/producer, Victor Sanders, That’s the one, throw away the others. Victor opened the control room mic and said to Bo, Okay, then turned the mic off, turned to me and said, We’re gonna use every one of those tracks.

During a break in recording, Bo and I went outside for some fresh air. How’d you get so good, I asked Bo. He told me this story: When Bo was around ten years old, during the summer when school was out, he’d go to the community center in the small town where he grew up. There was a big linoleum floor and a record player. Teenagers would bring their forty-fives and spin them all day long. Bo hung out by himself off to the side, younger than everyone else, caring about little besides the music on those records, until a group of fourteen-year-old Black girls took pity on that skinny White kid, opened their maternal rhythm and blues wings and taught Bo Ramsey to dance.

“I never forget that,” Bo told me, “when I play.”

At the time, I thought that was a strange answer to the question, How’d you get so good. But, in Stranger Blues, I can hear them. I can hear those young girls dance.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love Bo Ramsey’s newest release, Stranger Blues. I love all of Bo Ramsey’s recordings … Well, all of them I’ve heard. Bo swears to me that he released some recordings early in his career that I wouldn’t love … but, I don’t believe it, and he won’t prove it, so we’re at a standoff. And, just in case you think that I’m too much of a devoted Bo Ramsey fan to have a valid opinion about Stranger Blues, Kyle Munson, music critic for the Des Moines Register, gave this new CD four and a half stars, more than he gives nearly any new release. (He also called Bo the Yoda of Iowa City roots music. That Kyle … he’s a corker.) Even though I always expect amazing records from Bo, he has still managed to surprise me.

Bo Ramsey is a great songwriter. Most of Bo’s work as a guitar slinger and as a producer is with songwriters who are the best in the business, among them Pieta Brown, Greg Brown, and Lucinda Williams. There are no original songs on Stranger Blues. It’s a collection of very authentic blues, gospel, and folk songs that have inspired Bo through his life as a musician and, for those of us trying to become Bo, it’s a revealing, informative, insightful, and important glimpse into what makes Bo Bo. These songs are not as lyrically sophisticated as Bo’s own songs. Instead of relying on lyrics to get the point across, Bo uses the most convincing vocals of his recording career, along with his legendary hypnotic guitar playing, to move us to that place in ourselves of very basic, and mostly inelegant phrases made of coarsely beautiful sounds; that place very nearly beyond words.

Bo, along with co-producer Pieta Brown, applies those experience-honed techniques on Stranger Blues that have made him a sought-after producer. Foundation is everything to Bo. The rest is secondary to the deep, lock-groove of drums and bass, an approach nothing short of amazing for a lead guitar player. Everything else rests on top of that foundation in an utterly intentional way. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is useless. No filler, and no aimless showing off. It’s a minimalist setting in which every note is essential, and where a simple slide, in exactly the right place, played with exquisite precision, and a fabulously dirty tone, will take your breath away.

These are only a few of my personal favorites on this spectacular release.

Freight Train
This is an instrumental version of Elizabeth Cotton’s familiar folk/blues song. Bo weaves multiple melodic lines together to form a sonic landscape of poignant, surprising, and moving chord inversions. Joining Bo in this rich guitar texturing is son, Benson Ramsey. This piece reminds me of some of the instrumentals on Ben Ramsey and David Huckfelt’s release, The Pines (Trailer Records), another of my favorite discs. Ben, heir to his father’s no-nonsense, swampy guitar style, is clearly the right person to carry the Ramsey tradition into the future. (I just heard that The Pines have signed with Red House Records, one of the most successful small labels in Americana music … Yeah!)

Jump, Baby, Jump
This tune by Mississippi blues woman, Jessie Mae Hemphill, could easily wind up sounding artless in less capable hands. But, you give drummer Steve Hayes a jump beat like this to play, and he’s gonna make you ache to move. Wrap Bo’s slithery vocal around that beat, and you end up with me dancing around my house, singing way too loud, Do it, baby, do it/Do it, baby, do it/Do it, baby, do it/Do it, baby, do it. You’ll see windows of the house next door to mine being lowered and locked. You’ll see Jackie Blount with a knitted brow, and a puzzled look. Apparently, this song isn’t as cool when I do it as it is when Bo does it … But, I suppose any of us could say that about any song.

No Place to Go
This haunting piece by Chester Burnett (never heard of him? … Howlin’ Wolf) may hold at least part of the secret to that in-the-moment timelessness of Bo’s live performance described at the beginning of this blog. This song is built around a steely guitar riff that repeats throughout the whole song without change or embellishments. Just the right tempo, and the deepest of grooves, produce a trance-like effect here. There’s plenty enough well-placed spooky guitar, ambient keyboard, and nearly scary vocal to keep things interesting, but it’s that riff and groove that pull you in.

Sitting on Top of the World
I’ve often heard this done as a bouncy, happy-go-lucky sounding, bluegrassy song, which I’ve always thought was weird. This has never seemed like a happy song to me, even though the title makes it sound like it’s going to be one. You’ll never hear a more appropriately dark version than this one.

Where the Sun Never Goes Down
This gospel song closes Stranger Blues with an absolutely chilling vocal, full of the regret and doubt of a sinner with one last good intention to keep his promises.

Bo Ramsey and Pieta Brown have reached a new level of artistry working together. Since its release last fall, their last duo project, Pieta Brown’s In the Cool (Valley Entertainment), has seen more action on my player than any other disc. Bo tells me that they have another Pieta release just about ready to go. I can’t wait. In the meantime, I can’t get enough of these Stranger Blues.

Hear samples of Stranger Blues at http://cdbaby.com/cd/boramsey2 Read more about Bo at www.boramsey.com and at http://www.trailer-records.com/artists/ramsey.shtml.

Read Christopher Weishaar's Ames Tribune article on BeJae Fleming and Crimson-Mahler at http://www.midiowanews.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=16912065&BRD=2700&PAG=461&dept_id=554340&rfi=6

The G7th Performance Capo: A Product Review

I don’t like capos. They pull the strings out of tune and cause more problems than they solve; that’s what I’ve said for more years than I care to admit. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble in my life as a musician to learn to play without them. There are good reasons to use a capo. Some riffs work best with particular chord forms. If a riff-friendly chord isn’t a moveable form and also happens to be in the wrong key for your vocal, you need a capo. I dislike capos so much that I’ve learned to avoid those unmovable, riff-friendly chords in the wrong key when I’m writing songs. That limits me in some ways. And it was a lot of work to learn to play out of enough keys and chord forms to avoid using a capo. If you knew how lazy I am you’d understand that hardly anything would make me do that much work. Capos did.

When I got Nick Campling’s email asking me to try his G7th capo, which retails for around forty dollars (FORTY DOLLARS!!!!), for free, my first thought was; I’d pay forty dollars not to try it. I dislike capos that much. Just out of curiosity and something-for-nothing greed, I Googled Nick Campling to see if he was on the level. When I read online that Nick Campling was indeed the inventor of the G7th Performance Capo and that, among other notables, Eric Clapton uses one, I fell into such a swoon of self-importance (this guy’s got Eric Clapton, but he still wants me) that I wrote to Nick Campling and took him up on his offer. Yep, me and Eric, we’re trying out Nick’s capo. Why not?

A week or so went by and a manila envelope arrived from Musical Distributors Group. It’s that capo, I thought; I gotta try out that capo. Maybe tomorrow. The envelope lay on my desk unopened for over a week. I gotta try out that capo. I don’t like capos. Maybe tomorrow. I’m way too busy playing guitar right now to try out a capo. Love to play guitar. Hate capos. You get the idea.

When I made my set list for a gig at a nearby winery (Iowa wine … better than it sounds), I put two songs from my old capo-using days on the list. I figured I’d better learn to use that capo before trying it out on stage. I couldn’t tell from the picture I’d seen online quite how it worked. When I opened the packaging the first thing I noticed about the G7th was the sleek, smooth feel and the weight of it. It felt far more substantial than any capo I’d ever held before. But, this was a forty-dollar capo, after all; it oughta be well-made from good materials. I read the instructions. Place snuggly behind the fret and squeeze. I did that. It didn’t feel like I’d done anything to make the capo stay on the neck of the guitar. The mechanism was so flawlessly smooth and the “squeeze” so subtle, so quick, so utterly effortless that it was hard to imagine I’d done it right. And yet it did stay on the neck. Then I played my vintage Gibson archtop and couldn’t believe my ears. It was perfectly in tune. With a capo. I still have a hard time believing it. This capo is to other capos what an electronic tuner is to a tuning fork. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against tuning forks (really I do, but I have friends who still use them and I feel I need to act as though I think it’s a sensible choice, even though I don’t) and I can still use a tuning fork if I have to. But, trust me, you don’t want that. It’s going to be a struggle that neither of us will end up happy about. Same with all those other capos I’ve ever used. You’re gonna have to sit around while I yank strings and retune the guitar and curse … and the guitar still won’t be quite in tune. Let me say again, my guitar is as perfectly in tune with the G7th capo on it as it is when there’s no capo on it. And I don’t have to do anything to make that happen, no yanking strings, retuning or setting the capo multiple times in hopes of finding that mysterious, just-right fit that leaves the guitar at least almost in tune. None of that. Not only is this by far the best capo I’ve ever used, it’s also the easiest and the fastest.

I don’t like capos, at least not all those others. This one? I’d pay forty dollars for it. Gladly. It’s that good.

Find out more about the G7th Performance Capo at http://www.g7th.com.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to hear the Bone People at an outdoor series called Tune into Main. It’s held in a small grassy area between buildings just off Main Street in Ames. It’s right next to a double set of railroad tracks and a crossing. Every few songs, a train rumbled through with its horn blaring. To make matters worse, there was a forty-mile-per-hour wind and a bad electrical ground. It was a difficult gig. And yet, the Bone People made it look so easy. If I’d closed my eyes, I could have imagined I was listening to music on a windy, freight-trainy day in Chicago or in New York or in Paris. The Bone People are that sophisticated. The Bone People are that good. They’re so good that I’ve come to take it for granted that they’re going to be exceptional, so exceptional that they couldn’t possibly get any better. But, I swear, they have.

Deb Marquart’s three-octaves-all-of-em-good voice has matured into the consummate jazz voice, smooth, cool, hypnotic and unpushed, with the timbre ranging all the way from an airy soprano to a raspy trumpet sound, artfully used and masterfully controlled. Add that voice to skillfully written and carefully chosen songs, an appealing stage presence and Deb’s mysteriously beautiful good looks and you begin to get the picture of the Bone People.

Pete Manesis, who plays primarily acoustic guitar in the band with occasional rides on bass and bouzouki, did his time in rock bands before venturing into the complex voicings of jazz chords and the super difficult acoustic guitar techniques unapproachable to all but the virtuosic. The result is a style that defies pigeon holes and boundaries. Pete is the primary songwriter in this band, but has spent the past couple of years composing absolutely stunning instrumental pieces that were judiciously sprinkled through the show.

Tony Stevens, percussionist for the Bone People, known for his wild and wonderful expertise on an array of hand drums, couldn’t make this gig and was replaced by traps player, Collin Dettmann. I’d only heard Collin play once before in a fabulously funky, but short-lived band called Big Medicine. As far as I know, this is the only time that Collin has played with the Bone People. His approach was perfect for the material and his musical ideas were stellar.

With all this talent and all this skill, wouldn’t you just think that the Bone People would be stuck up?

When I was new in town in the fall of ’93, I met Debra Marquart, Pete Manesis and Tony Stevens of the Bone People at a show they did at Ames’ legendary Dugan’s, a treasure of a bar known for the diversity of its clientele and its live music. I’d already heard from nearly everyone I’d met in Ames how great this band, The Bone People, was. They were all right. It was a memorable night of funky, jazzy originals and cleverly augmented takes on Zeppelin, Hendrix, Joni and Rickie Lee among others.

Soon after I met them, Pete and Deb called with an invitation to dinner, to get to know Jackie and me better and to welcome me into the Ames music community. They told me about venues in Ames and Des Moines that were likely to hire solo acts (which I was at the time) and offered to share some of their gigs with me to help get me established as an Iowa musician.

In 1995, when I was working on my first CD, Red Cross Woman, producer/engineer, Victor Sanders, wanted vocal harmony on my song Iowa. The plan was that I’d record those harmonies. I’d been in a duo for years and had done a lot of harmony singing. But, for some reason, I just couldn’t hear a harmony part for that particular song, just couldn’t get it. The Bone People were working on a CD with Victor during that same time period and I suggested that we get Deb to give that harmony part on Iowa a try. Victor made a rough mix of the song for Deb, who said she thought she could come up with something. When the Bone People were in Chicago for their next batch of sessions, Deb laid down a gorgeous harmony for Iowa that she had carefully prepared. “Could you do a second harmony part?” Victor asked her. She put down a second harmony part that was just as beautiful, with no preparation at all, on the spot, quick, precise and perfect.

In 1998, Jackie decided to take up the bass, something I’d been bugging her about for years. Jackie, remember, has an undergraduate degree in music from a very demanding music program. She’s classically trained as a player (French horn was her instrument), utterly steeped in music theory and experienced as a music educator. Jackie taught herself a lot about playing the bass, but decided a few lessons would move her along more quickly. She took those lessons from Pete Manesis, who is an excellent bass player as well as a phenomenal guitar player. Jackie says that in all her years of music training, she’s never met a music teacher more gifted than Pete. She says that Pete gave her a semester’s worth of music training in a few lessons and deepened her understanding of bass playing immeasurably.

A few years ago, The Bone People began performing The Storm, a song off of my first CD. Just recently, Deb asked me if it was all right with me if the Bone People covered You Were On My Mind, a song from my most recent CD, Destination Unimportant. The Bone People do stunningly beautiful versions of both these songs, very different from my own versions. They have given The Storm and You Were On My Mind a much bigger life than I could have given them on my own. In all my years as a songwriter, I am most proud that I could write songs good enough to catch the attention of these exceptional musicians.

The Bone People have been unfailingly kind to me in the often harsh and competitive arena of the music business. This is one more item on the long list of ways in which they are remarkable.

Hear the Bone People live this Friday in Ames; June 30; Bandshell Park; 11:30am—1:30pm.