This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Mountain Station
My and John's band: covers, originals, freak folk.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Hm, looks like me and John should start coming up with a set list... On my 42nd birthday, Friday the 18th, we'll be featured artists at Michael's Songwriter's Circle, at Tapastry in Montclair. Today's practice session had a couple of great new and old tunes in it...
Get up high, and come down easy
The Sailor's Hornpipe
Suicide is painless ("Here's the tune M*A*S*H stole from Johnny Mandel, we're stealing it back!" shouts the guitarist)
The Swallowtail Jig
The Galway Girl
Danko/Manuel
Coulter Hue
Long Black Veil
Commuter Rail
Bonaparte's Retreat
(an abortive) See Emily Play
East Tennessee Blues
The L&N don't stop here anymore
Carrie Brown
Let's listen to the Drive-By Truckers singing "Danko/Manuel".
Tapes of some of our rehearsal tunes will be forthcoming... Some of these came out really nicely!
What happens when Mountain Station tries playing an old Irish drinking song? Liam Clancy says of this song that it's like St. Patrick's Day in the way it starts out beautifully melodic and rapidly deteriorates.
Well I think we have a bit of a head start on the deterioration aspect of it... With a little practice I think this is going to become a core bit of the Mountain Station catalog.
Practice with John this afternoon was composed exclusively of almost-new and brand-new songs.
"Chinese Bones" -- we've abortively tried playing this a couple of times before, today was the first time it really came together, through the magical-seeming addition of a short capo on the second fret.
"Old Joe Clark" -- we've played this once or twice, how could we not have, but not for a long time. Sounded really nice.
"See Emily Play" -- this one will take some work, I'm excited about doing that work.
"Jug of Punch" -- we tried playing this (in honor of the Saint's day) a couple of times, it was sounding ok, suddenly John got the idea to speed it way up and completely alter the melody of it; and all of a sudden it was a Mountain Station song! Really fantastic. I will post a video later on.
"I've Just Seen a Face" -- what fun. We haven't done any Beatles covers but this one might be a keeper.
(Update as of Saturday): We played the set through tonight and it took just about one hour. If we do everything the same speed on Thursday and without any screw-ups (there were a couple tonight which stretched the set out slightly), we will probably have space to play one more song, which will probably be NJ Transit.
Mountain Station's show on Wednesday was a lot of fun -- we got a couple of people to come out and listen to us, we got a chance to play with amplification, played our whole set plus a couple of spur-of-the-moment songs, got a chance to play with Kari sitting in on vocals...
Ellen got a tape of us playing "Dancing Barefoot" on her phone -- the audio quality is a little strange but I think our sound comes across nicely.
Mountain Station will be playing a gig in 2½ weeks, at the Crossroads in Garwood, a one hour set. Exciting! This week we are starting to figure out our set list. Here is an initial idea --
