Wicasta's Blogs

Much to my surprise, I recently ran afoul of Pink Floyd. Well, I ran afoul of Pink Floyd Management, actually. I consider that a semantic difference. An important one, maybe, but semantics all the same. Long story short, I decided to sell my Alembic F-2B preamp on eBay to try to save my eBay store (my fees were past due) and put a little money in our pockets. I’d researched the preamp fairly thoroughly, and discovered some time ago that it’s the very same preamp that David Gilmour has used since the mid-1970′s. His has been modified slightly, but it’s still an Alembic F-2B. You can find all sorts of information scattered around the Internet about his use of the preamp. So… I thought I’d mentioned this in my auction, and did so, with links provided to web pages that detailed how Gilmour used a modified version of the preamp. I also provided links to product pages at Alembic. All of this was intended to help potential buyers learn as much as possible about the Alembic F-2B.

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Victoria’s at work. It’s her second day on the job. I got up and straightened up the house, and am about to get back to writing. I’ve been transcribing some handwritten chapters of Blood & Chartreuse lately, so I want to finish one up so she can read it tonight. But mostly this morning I’ve been thinking of ways to improve our lot, and maybe get her out of that regular job in the process.

Obviously, our ideal solution would be to make a living playing music. That’s a bit of a hard sell these days, though. Most everybody steals music online. We discovered rather quickly that while there are plenty of places to perform in the Tampa Bay area, most of these venues expect you to do it for free, or close to it. So… what I’ve been pondering is ways to make money even if we’re not going to get traditional compensation from the venue. Obviously, that means we’ll need something to sell at the gigs. T-shirts, CDs, and the like. Victoria has a lot of interesting t-shirt designs in her Floozees Doozees store, not to mention the very cool candle rings and tote bags. Maybe we can find some Windhaven appropriate stuff to take with us. Who knows?

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I helped Doug load up his equipment this afternoon. He’s essentially left Windhaven. He wasn’t happy with some of the things that Victoria and I want to do, and decided that he was going to try to get something going with a Rock band where he’ll feel more at home. He never really found his groove in Windhaven and left feeling rather under-used. I don’t blame him. At the end of the day we each have to live our own lives according to what feels right to us. We’re each put here for different reasons, and we have to go our own way. Our paths cross those of others on occasion, but we each have to stay true to our own path and reason for being.

Doug and I will no doubt work together again at some point. Maybe we’ll get those trio gigs rolling with Windhaven. Or maybe Doug will help me with some of my original music, such as Crewe. Or maybe I’ll bump into a band that needs a bass player and a drummer.  Whether we ever work together again, I was pleased that today was cordial and friendly. I think we were all a little saddened by this transition, but there seemed to be no ill will. That’s a refreshing change from the last time someone moved on from a project. It bodes well for working together again. Anyway, I wish Doug well. I hope he’s happy in his new projects. And I hope we have a chance to play together again soon.

For me, this changes the focus of Windhaven dramatically. It closes some doors, but it opens others. I have theories about how to create a percussive texture using my new stomp box and whatever percussion Victoria is using when she’s not playing bass. It’s going to be a challenge to pull off what we’re going for, but I love a challenge. Over, under, or through. B’god!

We just put up videos for “Hallelujah” and “White Rabbit”, and will probably do one for “Freedom”. After that, we’re going to start working on our album of originals, which will include some videos. In the meantimes we have to keep trying to get those gigs scheduled and get Windhaven out there and making money. We’ll miss Doug, but we have to keep going.

Windhaven took our dog & pony show to Market On 7th again last night. It was a dead night in Ybor City, with only a few people out and about. We skipped rehearsals on Tuesday night, so wound up running through our Covington Park sets again. We had planned to run through some new tunes in our third set, but found ourselves at end of the second set fighting to be heard over the loud electric Blues band across the street at Gaspar’s Grotto. There was no one around anyway, so we decided to call it a night.

The two sets we did were solid, but I was really looking forward to working out the new stuff. We’d planned to do a blend of J.J. Cale’s and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s versions of “Call Me The Breeze”, Sarah McLachlan’s “Ice Cream”, and “Red, Red Wine” by Bob Marley (with a whole lot of UB40). What we had to make do with as a highlight of the evening was when a street performer wandered in and asked us if we’d like a little violin. He sat in with us on “Rocky Mountain Way”, which was an odd fit. But I really loved what he did. The textures he was adding gave the song an odd, haunting feel. But I loved it. I wish I had written down his name and contact info. There are definitely some of my more bizarre ideas that could use a violinist. And I admired the kid for the chutzpah it takes to put himself out there like that.

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At rehearsal with Windhaven last night I had an epiphany. Victoria suggested that we try my song “This Old Dawg”, so we gave it a go. I didn’t really know what to play, so I started playing the song’s bass riff on my 12-string acoustic. Doug jumped in on the congas, and Victoria joined in with maracas and a shaker, and joined me with vocal harmonies during the chorus. All I can say about it is “wow”. “This Old Dawg” came to life for Windhaven in a way it never did on my original recordings. I could hear this song on contemporary radio right alongside Jack Johnson and John Mayer. Holy crap. This sounded so good that it’s made me reappraise what might be possible with Windhaven.

We are not an acoustic band, I don’t think. It says a lot that when I was talking to the event organizer for this weekend’s Covington Park gig and mentioned that, while our old band was kaput, we have an acoustic trio, it was met with immediate resistance. He heard the word “acoustic” and thought Folk music and hippie consciousness. But he went to our web site while we were talking and discovered that we’re very different, indeed. That got me to thinking that maybe Windhaven should drop the word “acoustic” altogether.

Anyway, I’ve had my eyes opened by the power of “This Old Dawg” and our noodlings on April Smith’s “Terrible Things”, and my assumptions changed by having an organizer stumble over the word “acoustic”. Windhaven is many things, and represents many possibilities that cannot be defined by the terminology we’ve been using. We are not what people think of when they think of the word “acoustic”.

We tried a few different phrases, from “Gypsy Folk” to “Folk Fusion”, but wound up feeling kind of allergic to the word “folk”. What I finally stumble across was “Indie Acoustic Fusion”. Yeah, it still has the word “acoustic” in it, but “indie” and “fusion” actually describes the sounds of Windhaven. Leaving in the “acoustic” keeps us from sounding like a collection of twenty-somethings. “Indie Acoustic Fusion” kind of describes the sound of Windhaven.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this road leads us with Windhaven. From all indications, we’re not going to wind up remotely where we thought we would. We’re going to be in a much more interesting place.

Links

• Windhaven – Official Site

I think anyone who has read my Blog for any length of time knows that I’ve sort of been casting about in the wilderness. None of the usual stuff I’ve talked about for years will fly anymore. I’ve have too many loved ones and relatives waiting around to be offended by the things I say about myself. So… why is this blog even still here?

Well, I’m nothing if not stubborn. There have been times in my life when having this blog as an outlet or a release valve has saved my sanity, if not my life. But, I have to admit that I’d developed a dystopian view of my own life. It couldn’t have been very much fun to read anything that I posted here.

So… I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to do certain things differently on my web sites, and I’ve decided that I need to approach this Blog in a new way. There are a lot of things going on in my life that I just don’t write much about. Hell, I performed on a weekly basis in Ybor City for almost a year and wrote not one blog post about that experience. Instead, I bitched about some of the things I wasn’t happy about in the band. I whined about my frustration and lack of direction. That pretty much serves as a metaphor for everything else. Enough of that, already. Let’s move on.

I’m prohibited by familial relations from writing about some of the things that are going on in my life (financial issues come to mind), so instead I’m going to try to write more about the positive things. Windhaven will be heading to Ybor City next Wednesday to take up the mantle that was left behind by my old bands, Systematic Chaos and Catdaddy Pirates. This is a good things. I think I’m going to try to write more about the good things. Maybe if you’re an old reader of this blog and you’ve stuck around thus far, you’ll soon recognize a few bits and pieces of the old Wicasta that so many of you told me made for an enjoyable read.

If nothing else, adventures lie ahead. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to chronicle some of this stuff.

I’ve submitted my song, “This Old Dawg” (recently updated and featuring new vocals, new drums by Doug “Wolf” Schwartz, and new mixing and mastering), to MySpace’s Rock The Space 2 contest. Long story short, whoever wins the contest will be awarded a recording contract with MySpace Records, as well as $10,000 in Fender gear. I’d appreciate it if you could keep an eye on this, and maybe vote for me when the time comes.

I’m about to start working on songs for tonight’s rehearsal with Windhaven. I’ve just spent the last half hour or so changing some info for some of the shows Windhaven and myself are attached to. I had to correct the dates, but I was mostly removing Bad Hat Harry from the bills. I got up this morning hoping to have received an overdue confirmation from the guitar player that we’ve been trying to get involved in BHH (a friend from one of my other bands), but there was no response to the two e-mails I sent him yesterday about playing tonight in Ybor City. For me it pretty much sounded the death knell for Bad Hat Harry. Not that it’s a big loss. We never came close to getting it off the ground.

You know, looking back, guitar players have always been the bane of my existence. With the exception of my asshole cousin (who was a singer), nearly every problem in every band I’ve played with can be traced back to the guitar player. Either they’re ego-maniacal prima donas, they’re unreliable drug addicts and alcoholics, or they’re layabouts who show up with a smile on their faces and an inability to play the material (whether through a lack of preparation or skill). Most of the people who know me are aware that while I’ve always considered myself a bass player, I’ve played guitar as well almost from Day One. What most people don’t realize is that the reason I picked up guitar in the first place was that I got tired of depending upon unreliable guitar players to help me put together my songs. It was easier to do it myself than deal with the chronic bullshit of guitar players.

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I’m sitting here in the den with Victoria, taking a few moments to write something by hand before we start going over music. This is part of a new approach for me. Something that I hope will force me to focus upon the things that need to be done rather than be distracted by pointless diversions like Facebook and MySpace.

I didn’t plan this. As much as I’d like to claim a revelation and a certain resolve, the reality is that I had no choice. Last week the main hard drive on my recording computer (which I also used for e-mail and Internet) bit the dust. I scrambled for a few days to get things worked out, switching over to another drive and re-installing all of the important programs. Which is sort of the point. This forced me to re-evaluate what needed to be on that computer, versus what I could live without. I decided to strip it back down to a recording computer, with no Internet capabilities whatsoever, with no need for the drain of anti-virus and firewall programs.

This has left me scratching my head about how to get my e-mail and do my Internet stuff. I put an e-mail client on our laptop and figure on using my Yahoo! account so I can get at least one of my e-mail accounts from any computer. However I may be making it sound, this is a good thing. I’ve spent far too much of my time checking e-mail and Facebook. It’s so easy to set aside fifteen minutes to catch up on a few things and then not surface for two or three hours. That needed to stop. Now it has.

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