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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.
Spring is without question here; and we got a ping-pong table! Here are Ellen and Sylvia volleying.
Sylvia and I put it together yesterday afternoon; but we took a break so John and I could do some jamming. A new setup means I'm not sure yet where to set up the camera; and the upshot is that I'm mostly just out of the frame, a disembodied Stroh fiddle. Shades of February! We ran out of tape at what seems to me like a pretty opportune moment.
Mountain Station's practice yesterday was a lot of fun, here are some highlights. Our faces are more visible than in many previous tapes, which may be an asset or a detriment.
Track listing
Odds and ends jam
Blues with a side of bourbon
Queen Jane Barely
Ride the rails jam
Off the rails jam
posted morning of March 31st, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
So I'm hereby formalizing what's been going on for the past couple of weeks -- Every time John and I practice this year I want to tape it and upload some highlights to you tube...
This week's session was a lot of fun, although the placement of the tripod and the lighting arrangement could both have been a little, even a lot, better. A rockin jam -- the best part was when John forgot to bring our gig book -- and I'm getting better at editing the tape.
Prodigal Son (take 2)
tuning
Stop Breakin Down
Arms of Love (Robyn Hitchcock)
Harvest Home
My Bonnie jam in D
Little Ditches (Mike Cross)
The Sailor's Hornpipe
tuning
Simple Pleasures (Kimberley Rew)
posted morning of February 24th, 2013: 2 responses
In later years music historians would speak of the Lonesome Nickel tapes as the birthplace of the Mountain Station sound.
Lonesome Nickel:
Circle be unbroken -- traditional
Green Eyes -- Coldplay
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -- Bob Dylan
conversation
"ten little monkeys" jam
500 Miles -- traditional
God-damn Lonely Love -- Drive-by Truckers
Lonesome Nickel -- Jeremy Osner
Lonesome Nickel 2:
That's Alright, Mama
Clean Break
Lonesome Nickel
posted afternoon of February 10th, 2013: 6 responses
Hm, haven't posted any fiddling in a while. Here is me playing an arrangement of "This land is your land" by Woody Guthrie.
Mountain Station played a song today at the Saturday Afternoon Song Swap in Millburn, and it was a lot of fun. Highlight of the afternoon was (maybe) the song (by a musician whose name I did not catch, rats) based on a Chinese funeral scroll that I need to find out more about.
posted evening of February second, 2013: 1 response ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Today I finished mixing Mountain Station's set for Lazlo's Blow Up Radio (where NJ rock lives) -- very happy with it. We'll make a podcast of this at some point, after it has aired on Lazlo's show. Tracks:
Mountain Station *¡LIVE!* at Lazlo's Den: a Rollo and Crazy Grady production
All Around You (0:00)
NJ Transit (3:29)
Up to Valhalla (6:37)
East Tennessee Blues (trad.) (11:39)
Take Me to the River (Al Greene) (13:35)
Come Down Easy (Howard Eliott Payne) (16:36)
Red Overalls (20:01)
23 ½ minutes! And it seems to hold together pretty well, it is a nice listen.
John came over today and we played a Dylan-heavy set of new-to-us songs...
Gates of Eden (John singing)
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (me singing, a couple of times in a couple of different keys...)
Weary Day (a Delmore Bros. tune, with me singing -- we have played this before but not for a long time...)
Mountain Station's set last night at Desmond's Tavern went off very nicely. The 8:00 set was Grain Thief, whose music was entirely copacetic to ours (and who has just quit his job to pursue music full time -- best of luck to you, Patrick!) -- when we arrived around 8:15 he was playing a tune from our songbook, "Angel From Montgomery". We had about 7 people show up to hear our set, plus Patrick and several of his friends stuck around to hear us; felt like a nice crowd.
Our gear took only about 5 minutes to set up and we launched right into our set, and played for a good 45 minutes or so. The list was a good mix of songs we've been playing for a long time with new songs:
Drowsy Maggie/ Dancing Barefoot
Meet Me in the Morning
Swallowtail Jig/ Galway Girl
Red Overalls
Cole Durhew
The L&N don't stop here anymore
Highway 61
NJ Transit
Praying Mantis
Get up high, come down easy
A great advantage to the size and acoustic nature of our band -- after we broke our gear down and listened for a while to the 10:00 act (Queen Orlenes, whose lead singer is the spitting image of a young Grace Slick and has the voice to match), we headed out and were able to take a walk -- no amps to lug around! -- in the technicolor glory of New York at night. We went down to Madison Square Park and chilled out over a burger and fries at the Shake Shack, before we headed back out to Jersey.
