What a lovely weekend. HWY 1. Pacific Ocean. Free Bananas in California. Three hour gig at the San Simeon Lodge/Bar & Grill. We warmed up the place for the regular Saturday night entertainment: karaoke hosted by “Elvis” Jim. I got down on some Midnight Special.
Good times and great oldies, on the US-101. A night in Isla Vista. More music tomorrow. I just want to be a pedestrian again. Let’s roll!
Free Bananas homecoming show with Shut Up Baby and Stone Jumpers. December 18, 2009. 8 PM. FREE. All Ages. Wandering Goat. 268 Madison St.
Not so much a rock show. We played all our honkiest tonkiest hits for this bar off Venice Beach, Brennen’s Pub. Relax. Drink a beer. Play more tunes. Besides my guitar pickup having trouble, the show was a very good one. At least, we sounded superb in the mix, played with youthful urgency, and had a bass player–Tien Nguyen. We even got people to sing along and wave their beer glasses in the air.
This California trip is a trip, where cars stand still while driving and anywhere one needs to go is 20-60 minutes away. No more, no less. We took a walk up La Brea Blvd and almost get hit by a car running a red light. Freeways turn into freeways into other freeways, but it all comes back around. It’s hell. But what the hell? Summer in November. That’s a vacation.
If this ain’t nice, what is?
Something like a music tour. Something like a strange trip. Getting tired, getting coffee, taking pit stops for bathrooms and gasoline. Two days from Eugene to Los Angeles stuck in a truck. Through a blizzard, Christmas town, dark misty mountains, gold hills, radios, nothing to see, too much road, 400 miles, 300 miles, 200 miles left to go, nothing to it. Playing music, finally, we entertained–ourselves mostly, and a few interested people. Another cup of coffee, then we had to go. First concert complete. Midnight rambles.
That funny looking kid is our good buddy, Casey Larios.
This might be our biggest, bestest gig on our silly tour. The Mile High Club at Busby’s East in Los Angeles. With Dayplayer, who shares our drummer, Matt.
Are YOU going to be there?
Cold weather is coming, so Free Bananas is heading down south. OK, only for several days, and then it is back up to Oregon for December. But the point is: Free Bananas is going on tour! Why? Because we want to reunite with Mr. Fleming, our drummer, and take a relaxing road trip up and down the I-5. Two L.A. shows are confirmed, hopefully we get more, but it don’t matter. We’re going to end up in a drunken stupor regardless. Do you see what our music does to people?! Take a look:
Please see our MySpace totally wicked awesome cool website for calendar updates: http://www.myspace.com/freebananas
And speaking of California, on that MySpace is a live recording of us playing San Francisco Bay Blues.
Folks, you know, it looks like summer has moved on along, and I ask myself, “Where have I been?”
I do not know. All I know is that my two good music buddies, Matt and Jake, moved out of state, Free Bananas is bewildered, and I cooked up some thick-ass beercheese soup. What a summer!
I made t-shirts:
I built a fabulous bicycle–a refurbished 1980s Schwinn LeTour–named Nematoad, or Neemy, for short.
P.S. Free Bananas is playing a show at the Oak St. Speakeasy with the Whiskey Spots on October 3, 2009. Word to yo motha.
Listen to this fine piece of music, will ya? That right there is the earliest recording that still survives today. It was just revealed and written up in SCIENCE NEWS.
WASHINGTON — Inscribed on soot-blackened paper, the muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago play back like the “wa wa” of an unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.
Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by smoke from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.
Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.
So, it was Scott’s phonautograms that came twenty years before Edison’s phonograph records. Aha! it was the French! How come history can get so twisted sometimes? Like how we think Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type, when, in fact, the Chinese had already been employing presses for seven centuries and movable type for four centuries. So it goes.
In 1878, some two decades after his invention, Léon Scott was devastated when Thomas Edison received accolades from around the world for the invention of the phonograph. “Come Parisians, don’t let them take our prize,” Léon Scott exhorted in a memoir. “I beseech all stout-hearted men and I thank God some still remain to proclaim my name in this matter. For I am getting old, the father of two sons, and all I can leave them is my good name.”
In lieu of posting something worth reading, I am promoting yet another show.
Free Bananas tonight at the Redoux Parlour for the Last Friday Artwalk. 7pm. 780 Blair Blvd. Artwork by Claire Flint.
Speaking of music, please take a listen to the Reverend John DeLore, whom I had the pleasure of hosting while he passed through Eugene on his national tour. Very good singer/songwriter from Brooklyn, NY.