Conversation with Speak, Free Music

I had lunch yesterday with an old student, Speak, who makes his music available for free on the web, with no strings attached.  Interestingly, he reminded me that I had told him years ago that music was in a process of decommodification due to mp3 compression.  I gather that that conversation I had with him years ago had something of an effect and he’s certainly done well by it.

So I’m taking my own medicine, and I’ve made all of my recordings available without registration.  As you might imagine, of all of them, I’m most pleased with Adieu, False Heart right now (direct link to mp3 .zip file here), and if I would want anything downloaded, it would be that one.

Enjoy, and be in touch–especially locals so we can get together, have some music, and have fun.

Full Tank of Gas

Bill & Pete, “Full Tank of Gas,”, from La Petite Orange (1992).

The House Carpenters, “Full Tank of Gas,”, from Bill Foreman, The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes (Live Recordings 1991-1997).

The Edsel Brothers + 1, “Full Tank of Gas“, recorded May 16, 2009, in Bill’s living room.

I got a full tank of gas
Got a full tank of gas
Got a body of metal
Got windows of glass
Got my foot on the pedal
It moves so fast
Take you out of my present
Put you into my past
Goodbye to your streetlights,
Cement and your grass
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got a full tank of gas

I got an engine of flame
Got an engine of flame
Call me a misfit
But don’t call me tame
I don’t remember this highway
They all look the same
I don’t remember your face
I forgot your first name
Goodbye to your causes,
Your books, and your games
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got an engine of flame

I got the wind in my face
Got the wind in my face
I can open the sunroof
And stare into space
I can run myself wild
I can go anyplace
I got all my money
I’ve packed my suitcase
Goodbye to your earrings,
Your bells, and your lace
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got the wind in my face

I got my head in the sky
Got my head in the sky
You can ask me what happened
But don’t ask me why
Tell me you’re hurt, girl,
But don’t start to cry
I’ve sprouted my wings
And now I’m going to fly
Goodbye to your movies,
Your dreams, and your lies
I’m leaving you babe,
I got my head in the sky

“Full Tank of Gas” is to me the first really good tune I’d ever written.  I had just finished my freshman year of college and was home in Del Mar, CA, for the summer, so this would have been mid-1988.  I went to the beach one day with my friends Ross and Dave Neglia, using separate cars, and after we’d finished we agreed to meet up for a bite at the Roberto’s taco shack on Carmel Valley Road.  You know the one…

In any event, I remember stopping at the light where Del Mar Heights Road intersected with the 101, and when I paused taking a look at the dashboard of the car.  The tank was full, and I kinda thought, “full tank of gas,” and pondered what a nice feeling it was to have a full tank of gas.  I can’t remember if I started writing the tune that evening or later, but having gotten a 4-track cassette recorder for my birthday that July, I cut a demo of the tune that summer, and it was far and away the best of the lot I had at that point.

The form of the tune is a blues, but it’s worth noting that this is the first time I’d ever done anything original with the blues form.  I was very deep into a fairly stereotypical late-teens-early-twenties white guy blues obsession, compounded by the fact that I could actually play the music and could play slide guitar better than anyone at Pitzer.  That is to say, I was a big tadpole in a small puddle near a little pond.  This to me was a great social advancement, however, and for that reason it meant a lot.

I’d written a couple things in high school that were not bad, and even if none of them were good enough to play publicly, I’d played cassette recordings of them for a few friends, which for me was pretty brave.  Arriving at Pitzer my freshman year, though, I actually formed a band in short order, called The High Plains Drifters, and we played a combination of blues covers, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” in particular, some original blues knockoffs I wrote that are moderately embarassing in hindsight, and some more poppy things, the chorus of one would ultimately become the chorus of “Bad & Good,” which was the second really stellar tune I finished, though that one a couple years later.  It was sort of a mess, actually, the band, largely because I didn’t understand what we were doing, on a social level.  That said, the band was fairly good and it had a harmonica player named Colin Epstein in it which added an authenticity to the proceedings I couldn’t myself provide.

I felt at the time like I was a really fantastic writer, but I also hadn’t actually written anything that was really any good.  It’s almost bizarre in hindsight that I felt I had something to say.  Nonetheless, I plugged away at tunes, writing lyrics that were alternately inane, maudlin, and on to something they hadn’t yet hit.  I was somewhat surprised, then, when I actually wrote this tune, and in the months, and it turned out, years, that followed, I was completely disturbed by it.  I have no idea why I hit this tune as well as I did, when I did it.  I wrote far above my actual technique at the time.  The whole notion of artistic inspiration is not a useful one when trying to produce art or explain its production, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s not at all concrete.  At best, “inspiration” is a way to shut off a discussion of process, and as such it’s a useful tool.  If an artist is in a conversation and the interlocutor is proving annoying or idiotic, one can turn the discussion to inspiration to avoid actually talking about art.  A real discussion of process necessarily focused on technique, which is concrete, though by no means static.

Realistically, “Full Tank of Gas” was me hitting the absolute limits of my technique at the time for, depending on how one wants to slice it, an entire tune or nearly and entire tune.  Most of the time a person doesn’t do one’s absolute best, but the nice thing about writing songs is that they’re not long, and one can finish a piece during a good stretch and have something finished and amazing.  That’s what happened here.  This tune was vastly better than anything I’d written up until that point, and when I played it for people upon my return to school, and more importantly yet when I started playing with Colin as a guitar and harmonica duo under the name “The Edsel Brothers,” I got more good feedback from that tune than literally anything I’d done in my life.  As you can imagine, that’s a big deal for a 19-year-old who veered from absolute self-confidence to despair, often quickly.  I don’t think I’d have given up on music if people didn’t respond, but it made me feel like I had something special, and I wanted to pursue it.

Colin and I played this tune and a few others at some affair at Pitzer’s Grove House, our first gig as the Edsel Brothers.  We introduced–this is silly and obvious in hindsight, and we laughed about this together a month ago when I was at his pad knocking out tunes (the recording of us above is not from our get-together at his place in June, but from a hootenanny at my pad the month before, and the performance above, ragged, was the first time we had played together since 1989 if memory serves, with Matthew Stratton playing some guitar as well)–the tune as an undiscovered gem by a great, unheralded bluesman named “Deaf Banana Washington,” without of course mentioning Blind Lemon Jefferson.  Washington was “the Beethoven of the Blues,” as the unmentioned Professor Longhair was “the Bach of Rock.”  Honestly, I think it was assumed that the joke would be obvious and probably to some people it was, but we were pleasantly surprised when a review of our performance popped up in the Pomona paper (one of a very few live performance reviews I’ve ever gotten, actually…I thought at the time it might be the start of a trend).  The review was positive generally, but absolutely gushing about our cover of “Full Tank of Gas,” which of course was not a cover and didn’t sound anything like an actual old blues tune–especially the lyrics–if you knew any old blues tunes.  Deaf Banana Washington was credited with authorship of the tune absolutely credulously, seamlessly in fact.

I was ecstatic, because it felt like for the first time I had a musical act that got the kind of attention I felt I deserved, and also that I liked myself.  I have never not absolutely loved playing with Colin Epstein, musically or–just as critically–personally.  However, we didn’t have a set of tunes, and having written such a stellar tune I cranked out a number of relatively inferior pieces to fill out a set.  Only one of those tunes I cranked out in the Fall of 1988 at Pitzer was any good at all, “Invisible Man,” the lyrics of which, admittedly less than “Full Tank of Gas” but solid nonetheless, were the only ones I wrote at that point that didn’t steal blues cliches.  “Invisible Man,” in a 4-track recording, was actually included on a Duckweed Records compilation–my brush with a label–and was well-liked a good ten years after its execution.

I became fairly despondent, and remember very clearly a pep talk by David, the drummer from the High Plains Drifters, who was a senior and who was a guy I really liked and looked up to, who very sensibly told me that I wasn’t a spent force and that I should stop freaking out so much.  Of course he was right, but I will go on record and say that I didn’t write another tune worth keeping until my junior year, in December if memory serves.  That tune was “Heart of Steel,” which was good if not great, but which, very unlike “Full Tank of Gas” actually led to me being able to write good tunes much more consistently.  That tune came out on the one Duckweed full release under my own name, which I plan on getting back up and available for download but which for the moment will have to wait as I tend to more recent projects.

Colin was two years ahead of me, so I lost my musical partner after sophomore year.  Ever the malcontent, I had decided I needed a break from Pitzer and stayed at home for the Fall semester of my junior year, coasted on my AP credit from high school, and took a couple courses at San Diego State University to keep on track, most interestingly one course in electronic music with a fantastic prof named Bob Willey, which basically got me access to a studio with a 4-track reel-to-reel machine.  More importantly, I got a job at Pannikin Coffee and Tea in Del Mar, and there met Peter Giuliano, whose musical interests overlapped but did not exactly coincide with mine, which is actually what makes for a perfect musical collaborator.Peter and I played together until 1997, and it was a truly fruitful collaboration.  We completed three projects together, two as Bill & Pete, La Petite Orange, recorded to my 4-track and released in 1992 and Hey Rhumbahead!, four songs recorded to 16-track reel in 1993, and then one as the House Carpenters, In the Choir of Primates, in 1995.

Playing the accordion, as Peter did, rather than the harmonica took it a bit away from what one expects of blues, which is good of course.  I am particularly pleased with how we end the song, using the flatted fifth of the scale to what to me is great effect.  Pete’s soloing, to which the live recording above will attest, began well in our collaboration and only improved with time.  By the time we’d recorded this I’d written a number of genuinely good tunes and had started to develop a real voice as a writer, and, I’ll note as well, it was only by this point in my life that my singing became a virtue–accepting my limitations–to my music rather than a liability.  I’d learned how to use my instrument.

One of the great problems in music at this point is that most music people actually consume, at least in this county, was never actually played.  Among other things I just finished the new Elijah Wald book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.  If you’re unfamiliar with Wald’s writing, it’s absolutely worth a read.  One point that comes through very clearly in the book is one I’d pondered again and again over the last two decades, namely what is lost when the music we hear was never actually performed, but was rather assembled.  I think I first started thinking about this when I read an interview with Robert Fripp, the last person one would superficially expect to take what some might call a luddite response to the modern recording process.  The second version of King Crimson had broken up a couple years before, and Fripp offered his diagnosis.  Discipline had been the end of a process of performance.  The group had assembled and had worked out its set over a series of live performances before cutting the record.  Indeed, Discipline was the best record that group cut, it’s widely agreed.  Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, Fripp noted, were recorded prior to tours, with diminishing returns.  Fripp, though people talk about his work largely in its technological aspects, has always been about performance and the relationship between the musicians.  For whatever reason he indulges a technological curiosity, but had he chosen to stick with an acoustic guitar I imagine the real import of his work, the attempt to keep the social relationship between players central in musical production, would have remained the same.  Wald mentions an anecdote in which Mitch Miller stresses the importance, in his productions, of actually having musicians together playing his famously idiosyncratic arrangments.  Overdubbing, in critical ways, closes as many doors as it opens.

The version of “Full Tank of Gas” on La Petite Orange was definitely overdubbed, but it was something we’d played together by that time for a couple of years.  It shows.  Overdubbing is not in itself a bad thing, but if it replaces an intimacy between musician and song it’s problematic, at best, and trickery at worst.

More interesting, to me, however, is the live version, taken from the final House Carpenters’ gig, on St. Paddy’s day, no less, 1997.  By that point, the group, which in that format included not only Pete and myself but Danny and Vidal Cesena, bass and drums respectively, as well as Chris Monty on guitar, were absolutely locked into each other.  We would at times count tunes off in performance, but as often as not we simply called them and then someone started.  Arrangements were so solid that we as often as not, especially on a tune like this with its relatively simple structure, discarded all rehearsed details, keeping a sketch, filling in detail off-the-cuff.  I came up with the guitar riff that anchors this performance right as I started playing it–again, the flatted five, but used to a different effect than the 4-track version.  That I cut what is for my money the best guitar solo I’ve ever recorded is to me an added benefit.

San Francisco, CA – 08/02/09

Who	August Hootenanny
When	Sunday, August 2, 2009 1:00pm - All Ages
Where	Bill's Living Room (map) San Francisco, CA, USA 94112 Email billforemanmusic@gmail.com for event information and directions.
Other Info	We're going to get together, play tunes, sing, and drink beer. Local folk: contact billforemanmusic@gmail.com if you'd like to attend.

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Cheap Liquor

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

“Cheap Liquor (demo),” from Adieu, False Heart Demos.

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
I got a bad song coming and I’ll sing it from the witness tree
And they’re saying this time I took it too far
I got a set of bloody knuckes and a dented car
You got a lotta nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down
When you were robbing me blind and you took off out of town
And when I hear any telephone calling
I’m bawling and shouting your name at the walls
You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down

You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me
When you call up the constable, threatening lock and key
But you can serve up your subpoena papers
I’ll still be be escaping to the street below
You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me

You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your letters behind
I can hear the clock ticking and I’m gone out of a healthy mind
I could torch this one-room apartment then watch
The whole block steal away in smoke
You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your locket behind

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
Tell me who does it serve when we’re dishing up misery
Yes if you’re thinking of drinking two-fisted
You’re sinking down in the same hole I’m in
You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

Yes, this tune was available on the last post.  That was, however, a note that “Adieu, False Heart” was available.  This is the commentary.

The demo above, which is available for listening but not to download, was recorded about two hours after I’d started writing the tune, the quickest thing I’ve written, conception to execution, probably since I was in college, and this of a much better quality (the other one was a tune called “Potato Truck Headlights,” which I wrote to prove to Colin Epstein I could write a tune in one hour, and the carelessness showed in the piece).

At that point–this is sort of how I felt about myself, and I’m curious if anyone else felt this about where I was at that time–I was a bit stuck in my musical production.  Not as bad as I’d been in 2004 or 2005, when I’d just finished Chevy w/Balding Tires, a record of which I was enormously proud and which seemed to me impossible to follow–and of course anything like that is impossible to follow if one attempts to replicate it.  Chevy was a dense piece of work, and up until that point, possibly in an attempt to compensate for a lack of record sales, my work had become increasingly literary, for lack of a better word, and probably for that reason increasingly exclusive, in a literal sense, as in keeping out.  My music I felt then and feel now was completely successful, but successful on terms which, very simply, kept people out.

All kinds of people harbor grandiose ambitions, and this kind of thing is normal and healthy.  Mine at the time was to write the best songs of anyone working remotely in my medium in my generation.  Very particularly I wanted to outclass everyone else my age lyrically while at the same time having better melodies, bearing in mind a more-or-less folk-derived base of source material, than all comers.

These kinds of ambitions are juvenile, but useful.  For starters, I made a lot of good music.  A person needs a measure of ambition, even small ambition, to do anything, and looking back between 1988, when I wrote “Full Tank of Gas,” my first decent song (commentary coming relatively soon) and 2003, when I’d completed Chevy, I wrote 60 or 70 keeper tunes, with probably that many that I put aside but which were nonetheless finished products.  More importantly to me, I put out a number of albums, all homemade affairs but very real nonetheless, and these gave and give me a sense of some accomplishment.

I don’t think I started writing tunes trying to write “literate,” let alone “literary” lyrics: I wanted at all times to write excellent lyrics to tunes, largely because I was and continue to be very easily embarrassed by bad lyrics.  I always wanted my words to actually make some sort of a point, which meant that it was never acceptable to me to be obtuse or incomprehensible.  At the same time, the ideas I tried to express became over time more complex and specific.  Details became more numerous, and the relationships between them more complex.

I have no idea how I compare to other writers my age, but I am sure that if one takes my best tunes and puts them next to others striving for a similar type and level of quality, mine at the very least hold their own with anyone else’s best.  I really felt I nailed this level of quality on Chevy‘s best tunes, above all, to me, “When My Wife Takes Me By My Hand,” which was my favorite among them–commentary on that one forthcoming as well.  You could argue with me about which tune was or is the best on that record, but that one really stuck with me.

I had two problems once I’d finished Chevy.   One, of course, was that once I’d finished the work and was proud of it, it had really tapped, at least temporarily, my imagination of what I was capable of doing.  I wrote some good tunes in 2003, but very literally only a couple, and I did not write a single song in 2004.  You can imagine how demoralizing that was for me.  I have never been particularly prolific, but I’ve usually knocked out at least two tunes a year, and often more.  It’s almost a cliche to suggest that artists often spook themselves after they finish a great work, but I suppose I really did.

A second problem was that I had absolutely no sense of what to do with my music once I’d finished it.  A lot of people heard Chevy, but it never grew legs, commercially.  I have always been from somewhat naive to exceptionally so when it comes to music appreciation.  I’ve never been able to fathom that most people do not have the same relationship to music that I do, though I have come to understand that there’s no reason that people, in this big world, ought to.  I wanted Chevy to be the best hometaper/lo-fi album of all time, and to some extent I feel like I succeeded.  However, I finished it about 5 of 6 years after lo-fi had ceased to be cool, and it had never, with a couple of exceptions, been lucrative.

I suppose I started to ask myself, in 2004, when I didn’t write a single tune, what the point was, and given the assumptions I made about how my trajectory ought to work, I couldn’t give myself an answer.  I sort of assumed that if I kept making good music, things would snowball, and increasing numbers of people would come to appreciate it. It doesn’t actually work that way for anybody, even Paul McCartney.

A few things saved, me, however.  In 2004, I changed an intellectual interest in Buddhist thought into an active meditation practice when my girlfriend (now wife) and I found a fantastic meditation group in Riverside, CA, with a top-notch Dharma teacher, Gilbert Gutierrez.  The Buddhist emphasis on practice had implications for my music, and if initial results were slow to come–I wrote only two tunes in 2005, “Open Door” and “El Chorrillo,” both collected on Begging Bowl–what I did do was decide that music was something that one does.  My wife was a huge help, too.  Above all, she likes my music, to her relief.  I had told her when we started dating I made music and when I burned a CD for her of the works-in-progress from Chevy she was apprehensive lest it not be any good.  Thank God she liked it.  Having someone believe in me, but believe in me not-uncritically is hugely important.

My wife also got me out of the United States for the first time in almost 20 years.  Staying in Dakar for eight months in our first year of marriage was great for us as a couple and for me as a human being, but as a musician it really put me in a position where I felt that, contrary to my negative feelings the year before (this was 2005 when we moved there, in October), I had new and fantastic experiences awaiting me, which inevitably would lead to new musical experiences.  I finished more songs that year in Dakar than I had for some time.  A feeling of forward momentum is essential to me as a musician.

All this put me in a position where I was ready to have breakfast with Matt Nathanson in the Spring of 2007, who as I write this has finally after so many years “broken through” to a huge extent.  Matt and I played in a band together years ago, and he’s always been one of my very best supporters, on a personal as well as a musical level.  In any event, over breakfast, he said to me that he could not accept that someone as literate as me would have trouble writing.  He suggested that I just get the hell out of the way and write.  Very concretely, knowing how I wrote, he suggested that I refrain from editing a tune until I’d completed a draft.  I had evolved an effective but horribly labor intensive writing process by that time with which I would consider a complete line a good day’s work.  Deal with the editing, he said, at the end.  I said, “OK,” that I’d give it a shot because I didn’t really have anything else working for me that well.  Indeed, I said I’d have something by that evening, to which he replied that I didn’t need to feel that much of a rush, but he wished me luck nonetheless.

I drove home from Noe Valley to Crocker-Amazon, and on the way, I started whistling a bit and got the line, “You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me.”  I understand that this might sound made up, but it really did happen like this.  I got home, got my guitar, and figured out the chords to the melody I’d been humming.  I got pen and paper, and started tossing out a number of lines.  I aimed for completion rather than perfection, and allowed myself to repeat lines, in this case to begin and end each verse with the same line.  This was incredibly liberating to me, as small as it sounds, and I felt–I remember this very clearly–a palpable sense of writing quickly when I got to the end of the fourth line of the first verse and then finished it off with the first line of the verse, already written.  Writing felt easy for the first time in years.

I ended up finishing the tune in a couple hours, as I noted above.  I focused less on an overarching coherence than on a series of lines that each were vivid and, I’d hoped, humorous in a sharp, absurd way.  This is to me a very natural way of working.  I like to say absurd things in normal conversation as people who know me will tell you.  Writing a tune this way suited my temperament.  I won’t say I didn’t edit as I wrote, but the editing was limited to cutting out or adding words to make it possible to sing, given the meter.  Some lines jam in more syllables than others, and I let this be.

I was immediately a bit dumbfounded with the results, because I hadn’t written anything so quickly in years and almost couldn’t believe that after a good three or four years of horribly labored writing I’d tossed off something in a couple hours that was objectively a better piece of work than things I’d put upwards of six months–or more–into in only the recent past.  Within a day I knew that, indeed, the tune was basically finished and good.  The only word I changed between demo and the final version on Adieu, False Heart was “locket” to “letters.”

“Cheap Liquor” had practical implications.  I was, I had thought, about half-way through my follow-up to Chevy, with a good four or five tunes plus a couple instrumentals finished, aiming for ten to call it an album.  I thought, however, that regardless of whether or not “Cheap Liquor” was better than the tunes I had, that it was different, and that I didn’t want to cram it into a group of which it wasn’t really a part, and that I didn’t want to try to force myself to write things to match the other tunes I had–that, of course, being the definition of filler, which I’ve never liked.  So rather than half-way through my next record, I had one song.  I ended up, after having written a few more tunes, taking the first three weeks of the 2007 Summer vacation to record those tunes I’d written between 2005 and late 2006 and release them as Begging Bowl, calling the group of seven tunes a “mini-album” for lack of a better word.  It felt bigger than an EP: I didn’t know what else to call it.

Comparing the demo to the final product is probably not without some interest to some people.  Both have the same instrumentation: solo acoustic guitar and vocal.  The process of production–and this was sort of my point on Adieu, False Heart–was not about making instrumentation more complex or developed, but about deepening the performance.  Both were played live, without overdubbing.  I think we tend to underestimate, given modern production capabilities, how critical it is for a singer to form a relationship with a song, and I can say for myself that in the nearly two years between writing this and cutting the final recording, I’d become very close to the tune.  The listening bears this out.

Adieu, False Heart available

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

Quickly:

My newest album, Adieu, False Heart, is now available at General Ludd Music. Download is free.  One song, “Cheap Liquor,” is publicly available without registration.  It is included in this post, though I will write about it later as well at greater length.

Years ago I blogged a bit about my music, posting music files with commentary, and in hindsight it was good for me personally as well as for a number of other people who in year since have told me they enjoyed what I wrote.  I’ll re-start that process here.

I’ve made music for well over 20 years and good music (as far as I’m concerned) since at least my Junior year in college, and I haven’t done anything better than this, though I’ve done plenty of things that are wonderful and different.  It’s just me and a guitar, cut in a studio, with an emphasis on concision and clarity.  It sounds exactly like I sound when I sit with a guitar and play well.  I haven’t made a record like this before, in that sense.  As far as the tunes are concerned, they are certainly the most directly accessible tunes I’ve written in years–like since 1993 or 1994–but they reflect all the development in my work up through Begging Bowl a couple of years ago.

Enjoy the tunes, and be in touch.

News, website, gigging.

“Planxty Steve Gonzalez,” from Begging Bowl (2007).

I just turned 40, and I suppose it’s a milestone of sorts.  I feel good about it: with whatever crap I have to deal with in life (and there’s plenty, of course) a few things are in place that I’m pleased with.  Above all, nice wife.  She really helps.  I cannot overstate it.  Second: I can still make great music.  With all the idiosyncrasies of how I present my music to people, near-constant changings of mind, I’ve never had any doubts about its quality.  Profitability, marketability, doubts.  What to do about music?  Nothing but doubt.  Quality of music, no doubt at all.

The record I’ve finished this year, Adieu, False Heart, is in many ways my best, but wherever one might place it in a hierarchy it is certainly something new for me and absolutely worthy of stuff I’ve done before.  I went through all kinds of changes about how to present it to the public.  Long story short: whatever I intended a year or so ago with these tunes, I came up with a Bill Foreman record, and a good one.  I have wavered about how to put it out: do I print up 1000 copies of a CD, which is still the main way people consume music in 2009, despite the changes in patterns of consumption brought on by digital distribution?  Do I save that money and go for a commodity-oriented model of consumption on iTunes and the like?

I settled on the model I used in 2005-6 when I was in Dakar for almost a year and had no pretenses of being able to promote my music for financial gain.  I returned in late June, 2006 to the States, but my ability to promote did not change.  As a result, after much see-sawing, the music is available under a Creative Commons license, to be had by those who want it.  Donations are of course accepted, but they are not needed.  I’ve set up the General Ludd Music website (which I’d decommissioned for a while in the past year, thinking I’d make a break with the past before I realized that, in fact, GLM is my life’s work like the Mercury Theater was Welles’) as a social network, using a script called Elgg.  Basically, in order to access the music, you need to register for the site.  At this point, I am very happy that anyone enjoys my music and listens to it, but I do like the idea of being about to have a social relationship to people as part of that.

I made a realization that helped me make this decision.  A couple friends said things to me that really made me rethink my approach to things.  1) Steve Gonzalez, of “Planxty Steve Gonzalez” fame (registration required to download) and I have seen a lot of each other in the past couple months, and we took a drive up from Riverside to Napa together.  If I remember correctly, in our conversation at a hamburger joint in Napa, having a couple beers, Steve told me that of all the stuff I’ve put out over the years, his favorite was Building St. Petersburg.  This surprised me, partially because BSP is to me my sleeper album.  It’s the most different from other things I’ve done, and I recorded it in less-than-ideal circumstances, in my Riverside apartment in 1998 and 1999, which limited the amount of drums I played on the record.  But in our conversation it was really clear to me that the music meant a lot to Steve, that he’d sit with it many times over the years, and that it had made an impact on him.  I hadn’t really ever thought of Steve as anything other than a friend.  Friends and fans in my mind were different groups of people.  Obviously, this is nuts.

Confirming this realization, I got 2) a very good email exchange with Alex Kimmel of twodoggarage, whom I’ve known for years and with whom I played a few gigs as part of The Little Band in 1993.  I shared rough mixes of Adieu, False Heart, and he loved it, and very clearly sat with it, like Steve with Building St. Petersburg, and he made a point of saying that my music meant a lot to him over the years.  Perhaps more importantly, he suggested a) that we do some recording at some point–this will certainly happen–and b) he suggested we set up a house concert at his pad in (or rather near, I think) Los Angeles.  We’ve picked July 25 as a date but haven’t finalized all the details, so email me if you’d be interested in attending.

A lot of people might misunderstand this, but there’s no other way for me to say it honestly.  I’ve always felt that the type of gigging I needed to do to follow what is at this point the “normal” music career trajectory–do the open mics…play everything and pressure everyone you know to go to the gig…do the hard sell…push the product–I’ve always felt it was beneath me.  As a result, I’ve basically had no musical career.  I’ve certainly made a ton of music, but not really as a career.  This would be pure arrogance if it weren’t also both true and sensible.  Above all, if the only way to be a musician were to play for years in cafes where nobody listens and where you are treated as an unwelcome interloper because you only brought 10 people to your gig rather than 20–even though all of your people actually bought coffee–then I’d probably do it.  But it’s not, and I won’t.

A third thing that had a real impact was finally, after I don’t even want to think how many years, I got together a group of sympathetic musicians over to my pad in mid-May for a hootenanny.  The four of us ran through country tunes, folk tunes, a little rockabilly, and a bunch of my things that were suited to the occasion.  Steve and my wife were in attendance.  I’d say it was the best gig I’d done in years.  I can do a really great performance in a more formal setting, playing solo or with a band, but me just playing good tunes, among other musicians, is a beautiful thing.  Chris Freeberg at Pitzer organized a number of hootenannies a few years ago (probably still does) and I attended a couple of them.  Certainly, this is the way music should be made.

So I have an agenda with General Ludd Music at this point.  We need to get together and make tunes.  The social network, so-called, exists to facilitate that.  If you are a music fan, host a house concert.  It will be a great gig: I don’t recall ever playing a straight-up bad one, and you can ask anyone who’s seen me play to confirm that.  If you prefer more of a party, have a hootenanny.  I can’t say at which point which of the two I prefer, so I’d like both.  Do be in touch about this, please.

San Francisco, CA – 07/11/09