http://bejaefleming.com/news.html BeJae Fleming: News Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:02:04 -0700 http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#28
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#28 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#27
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#27 Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#26
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#26 Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#24
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#24 Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#23
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#23 Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#22
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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#22 Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#21 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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#21 Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#20 http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#20 Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#19 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.]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#19 Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0700 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#18 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]]> http://bejaefleming.com/news.html#18 Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0800 With Jackie Blount on bass - BeJae Fleming - News