Category: Blog

This blog contains music, cats, and things of less importance.

Nerding Forth About Time Signatures, Time Machines, AI, and The Future

A few weeks ago I experimented with a Ska pattern in 7/4 time. It worked spectacularly and I loved the result, so completed and published it as Inside the All Night Ska Disco at Area 51.

Just yesterday I started messing with a ska-adjacent pattern in 6/8 meter, and it got very tropically islandy shangri-lala delighty, so I am eagerly following through with that.

By humorous coincidence, yesterday I came across a ridiculous, probably AI-written, “summary” of Ska music, in the increasingly rotten Inter-mess. In this garbled splutage, it was stated that Ska music is in 4/4 time. Fie, unimaginative robot!  Ska music is usually in 4/4 time, get it right. It IS in 4/4 until someone does otherwise, and I am sure plenty of earlier examples do exist before mine.

“The future is unwritten,” Joe Strummer reminded. Good thing to note, generally, and why especially now, I would think.

So far my attempts at creating a magic sci-fi time machine to put every eligible voter back to Nov. 4 2024 for a make-up exam have failed. We certainly shouted it from the rooftops last year, said loudly and clearly what will happen if that election goes south. It. Is. Now. Exactly. As. Predicted. Whoopsiebears, now they mad. Wiser persons than I may understand it.

I did manage to fashion a 1983 time-capsule, that was fun. Orwell said there might be trouble, and, well.

Good morning!  I’m sipping a nice Peet’s French Roast, brewed in an old-School drip coffee maker from the before time. We’ve probably had this trusty machine since the ’90s, ever faithfully delivering its oh so important yield at the start of each day. Obsolete it is not.

Driving a Chevy Bolt, and GLAD I never got a Tesla. Horrified, that what has been one of the leading EV-makers is now so irrevocably tainted.  It’s not fun times for Tesla owners, as drama ensues, and presumably used models are not fetching “Blue Book” as the brand plummets straight to hell.

What next, we wonder?  I dunno, Joe, the Future is full of Uncertain Tea. But as you say, unwritten.

I’ll keep recording new original songs whenever the inspiration strikes me, and post them here or here per my whim. Whims are good for artistic direction, I find. These tunes are also in the big ol’ streaming world, including now YouTube, so, find ’em anywhere – Pandora, Apple Music, DEEZER, Spotify..  As the pipelines get flooded and polluted by AI-generated content, I’ll be among the artists creating our own material. For what it’s worth, and I don’t know what it’s worth, but it feels right. As long as it feels right, I will do it. One small part of the vast human discussion. The cats seem to enjoy it.

In Defense of In Defense of In Defense of Ska

And oh what fun we had

It’s been a few years since the first edition of Aaron Carnes’ unique and amorous history of Ska music and culture landed in the book-o-sphere. I recently ordered and received a copy of the expanded 2nd edition and yet I haven’t found the time yet to read it, what with work and creative endeavors and the apocalypse and things. SO! Delighted am I to learn that Aaron himself sat down and READ ALOUD the entire thing over several days of recording sessions to create, an audio-book. Now that’s my speed. We can now hear these stories as told by the author directly, and I applaud this fervently.

I recently listened again to the UpTones episode of the In Defense of Ska PodCast in which they interviewed myself and Paul Jackson. Apart from a few crunchy bits (there are always a few crunchy bits), it turns out to be my personal favorite, of the audio interviews we have done. In part because I learned some things, realized some things that I hadn’t really considered before, which become much more plain, in hindsight.

One rather humorous piece – neither Paul nor I, nor any of our bandmates, to my knowledge, were very aware of the up and down trends in ska’s popularity. We just always loved ska, it was never in question. But in 2002 when the UpTones played our first show in over twelve years, it turns out, I learned MUCH later thru Aaron’s work, we couldn’t have picked a less trend-observant moment to re-emerge!

Didn’t care then, don’t care now, in terms of our choice, it’s fitting, really, yet I do find it delightful. Puts some context to things. Why, for example, was this kid in the front row yelling, “YOU’RE SAVING SKA!!” at us? Flattered though I was, I wasn’t aware that ska needed any saving, and besides, what a responsibility! We carried on, played shows all the way through to 2018, with, again, some lineup changes along the way per our normal, finally winding down after the Albany, CA funfest I mentioned in a recent post here.

OH! And in that post, I was mistaken, there IS a poster for that Albany show, silly me, and I have it on my wall here as well. Another Paul original, and here is a photo of same:

While I abstain from predicting the future, that was the last UpTones show to date, and the obstacles to ever create another one seem insurmountable from here. So it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut would say. In an odd bit of prescience, the East Bay Express article by the same said Aaron Carnes before the above gig, quotes me as saying, “The Uptones have always been an outlet, letting some steam off and turning some suffering into joy and getting moving instead of getting immobilized by the situation,” Din said. “The way I look at it now is any show could be our last one. Or it could be the beginning of another round of shows. I tend to accept whatever it is.”

And accept it I do. Maybe the kid who yelled “you’re saving ska” is leading their own group, now! I rather hope so. Aaron is moving on from this epic project, after two editions and an audiobook, and dozens of podcast interviews with many of the players and characters involved over decades of ska’s unique and powerful history. He has defended ska, and defended it well, and as a fan and participant in this wild story, I tip my hat. Bon voyage on your next literary adventures, Mr. Carnes, and thank you.

Oh one more fun bit – my song Donkeyfish, now track 1 on my Poppin’ the Ska solo-ish album, is directly inspired by memories of all of the above.

All best,

Eric Dinwiddie
Ska fan

Originally posted at https://berkeleycatrecords.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-in-defense-of-in-defense

Musing of Days of Yore

In the Before Time (2018!), the UpTones played what would turn out to be our second-to-last show. ‘Twas at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, a place with a great wooden dance floor, wonderful folks, and infinite memories. I have the show poster on my wall, as I love this unusual one.

UpTones Ashkenaz flier by Paul Albert Jackson

Paul Albert Jackson created the artwork specifically for this Earth Day event, and I love the community vibe of it, and the little mini green UpTones band in the middle.

The group reassembled once more after this, for an outdoor show in Albany, CA, adjacent to Berkeley, and I don’t think there was a poster for that. There was a great crowd and it was one of the few times when the front rows were mostly very (very!) young kids. It was a family affair in the park, hence the youthful youths, dancing and playing or watching in rapt fascination. It reminded me, while we played, of how live music struck me when I was very young. A revelation, then, a great world opening, which I wanted to be in.

Three key events –

Pete Seeger when I must have been 3 years old maybe. Not sure where that was, but it had to be somewhere in the East Bay. Moms’s and pops’s brought their kids’s to see the already legendary folk singer, and I got seated cross-legged on the floor right up in front. Memories loose, but I remember thinking he was unusually tall, gazing up at the dude, with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, leading the audience in a singalong of This Land Is Your Land – now that I remember. This would be about 1968.

The Cadillac Kids when I was in 5th grade, outdoors at the Cragmont School playground of all places. I didn’t attend that school, but someone had the great idea to drive me and a few other students to this concert in the Berkeley Hills, from Longfellow School in West Berkeley.  That was the first time I heard Johnny B. Goode. They played Rock Around The Clock and other ’50s rock n’ roll and I was over the moon. Soon after, I was learning to play those songs on guitar, with help from my first teacher, Lee Waterman.

Finally, in about 1978, at a roadhouse in Elk, California, near Mendocino, right on the coast, this rock band I will never remember the name of, changed my life forever. I was with my dad, visiting some family friends up there, and we went to the only event in that very small town that night. Rock. And. Roll happened. Crowd-pleasing hard rock of the mid-’70s long-hair variety. I don’t remember the songs, so maybe they were originals, I just remember the vibe in that packed room, and the band’s powerful presence onstage. I wanted their gig. In my mind, being in a band went from being a fun little idea to an absolutely compelling ambition.

The following years saw me recruiting friends to form a band, bonding with some now lifelong friends like Tom Pope and others, naming our groups and playing parties when we could, and then when I was 15 I met Charles Stella and Erik Rader aaaand, the rest of the original UpTones including my childhood friend Greg Blanche, and it was, as they say, on.

Audio Journal Of A Music Curator

In 2017 I started working as a contractor for Pandora Radio in Oakland. Pandora was working on creating their on-demand streaming service, integrating it with their classic radio service, and I joined a team optimizing music metadata for this launch. I took to it right away, loved the work and the people there, continued on, and they eventually hired me full-time.

After a year or so, I started adding little by little to what is now a 230 song playlist. Most of it is songs I’ve come across while doing my work as a music metadata specialist and catalog curator.  Sometimes a track really stands out to me in some way, and I add it to this personal playlist,
Din’s Pandora Picks.

In the last few days, I’ve been listening back to it anew, and frankly I’m blown away by the quality of so much of it. It’s extremely eclectic, genre- and era-agnostic, with the only common thread being that this is all stuff that rocks me in some way.

It happened that The Specials, on my shortest short list of favorite bands, released their ENCORE album around that time.  The song that inspired me to start this playlist journal, was track 2 on that album, B.L.M. It was a brilliant return, and I found it so right on.

By contrast, No One Sleeps When I’m Awake by Canada’s The Sounds is a stunning rocker with a unique mood, great vocals and guitar work, and brilliant production. As a songwriter I wonder with great fascination about the possible story behind the song, and wish I had written it.

The set runs roughly chronologically from there.  Songs I found recently are at the end, with my earlier discoveries nearer the beginning. A great majority of the selections are in the proverbial “long tail.” Some started there and then got much more popular, and a few are old favorites I arbitrarily added along the way cos they rock me.

At this point, I’m pleased about the whole playlist and quite delighted to share it publicly. Tooooo many favorites to call out, but that’s why it’s a PLAYlist! And you may play it.

Hop on in, tune in, turn up, rock out. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on, whenever the inspiration strikes. 

 

Self Care, Care Self, Caturday Musings Selfie

A friend of mine posted on Bluesky yesterday, “my self-care skills aren’t up to this.” This summarized concisely and eloquently what I think many of us are wrestling with presently.

I seem to renew my commitment to taking good care of myself often, with varying results. Today it means waking up early and reading and writing a bit as the cats do their pre-dawn romp, and preparing to learn to play Pickleball. Indeed Pickleball. A fast-growing social sport easier to learn than tennis, and, social.

Reading and writing and listening a bit. The amazing wealth of good material at our fingertips, should we care to curate the experience actively, that Internet of yore, still exists to a degree. In the late 1990s I was thrilled by the possibility that somehow there wouldn’t be a “mainstream” anymore, in terms of culture and music, or just about anything.

I was a huge fan of Google, when they first popped up. For me, their original simple site was ideal, and really it was the first Search Engine (remember those fancy words?) that actually worked for me. Their web-crawling text searching gizmo delivered desired results consistently, and they pretty much blew the competition in that space away, pretty quickly.  I remember finding websites and then later blogs, while these were new emerging forms of communication and creativity, and immensely enjoying the sort of decentralization of it all.

As a musician and band guy, the whole world changed when I was introduced to the MP3 file, I think in ’97. Boom, level playing field for access and distribution, you can send a song to a friend or share it out as widely as you please, and I was all-in, let’s go.  The UpTones had in 1995 released a live CD from a 1989 performance, and around 1999 we made MP3s of a couple of the tracks,  started uptones.com and shared ’em up.

At the time I was part of a startup company called MP3 4U, with Matthew Kaufman and some fellow travelers who believed great things were afoot, a renaissance brewing for both music fans and music creators. And during that time, I watched the stats closely, from our website activities – who was listening, where and for how long, which songs etc. – with these reports I generated from downloaded server logs. It was a great nerdy time, and I loved seeing this view of things.

One UpTones live track, Get Outta My Way, not surprisingly a sort of signature song for the band, started getting an absurd amount of downloads, starting in the Bay Area and then far beyond. I remember the rush I got seeing downloads from Tokyo one morning, it was exciting, we were there, without being there, our music was distributed and available, and we did it ourselves. It was free, of course, we made a loud point of that, buy the CD if you want to, but have an MP3, on us, thanks for listening, right? So eventually that MP3 had a million downloads, and we toasted the occasion at Brennan’s, the storied hofbrau in West Berkeley near our office at the time.

Sipping said beers, the question arose, why not an UpTones show? We hadn’t played one in twelve years by then, and we’re getting emails from kids who have the live CD or MP3s saying do a show already. So we did. Put together a crew with as many original members as poss (6, I think it was!), auditioned some horn players and in walks Jeanne Geiger fresh from her Hayward State music degree and a new chapter of UpTones began. We played at iMusicast. That was a great all-ages venue, silly name and all, and we did maybe five gigs there in the early to mid 2000s. It was a case of one thing leading to another, and I don’t think any of that would have happened if Beserkley hadn’t released that one live album, and the subsequent MP3 adventures.

Things have funneled in the strangest way, now. It seems social media sites with all their promise have really rotted, most acutely Twitter, of course, my god, how hideous that pile. Its dumb new name, its Nazi twit, ugly, ugly ugly. FB which was my jam since 2007, started with a lot of fun and joy and sharing music posts and political fundraisers and random thoughts, oh and kitty pictures. Tons of ’em. But, as things went, the joy eroded from my experience there, slowly over time, to the point where it had become just a habit. Even the pages I maintained there, for Berkeley Cat Records and for the UpTones, lost relevance as FB required payment for “boosting” posts just to have them visible in the feeds of people who had actively chosen to follow said pages. Bait and switch, standard procedure, I guess, but I’m out.

So what do I do now? Well, I blog here, and maintain these little outposts on the Interwebs, sort of like the olden days. I make every effort not to purchase anything via Amazon (100% successful of late). I am having a little bit of engagement on the aforementioned Bluesky, hoping it continues to grow in healthy ways. Healthy. Health. Self-care. Really just saying aloud I need to triple down on that, focus, remind myself, not let this encroaching dark age in but rather simply be aware of it as I live my own renaissance.  Aware of it enough to know I don’t have my head in the sand, but not following the “dailies” – to use a moviemaking analogy. I know them, I voted to prevent this and I know what it is.

“Corruption is just Tuesday, now” I said, in this bit of wordplay, and look, the head in the sand thing!

That was a one-off, and looking at the date.. Wow, January 29, 2024. One year ago. How much has happened in that packed year.

To quote my departed great friend Luke,

All love, soon forward,

Caturmonday Musings

Drove to Gilman yesterday, picked up my music stand, which I had loaned to a fellow artist last week after my caterwauling. On the way to and from said venue, I listened to some of my own records and my, I like them! People make records for many reasons I am sure, and me? I seem to make records that I want to play, for entertainment, for me. Self-centered? Why yes, by definition. Success is enjoying them, and yesterday, I enjoyed them very much.

I wouldn’t be happy being toooooo predictable, to myself or to anyone observing, when it comes to my artistic output. I s’pose if being marketable were a priority I’d have stuffed myself into a category long ago and tried to be understandable as a public entity. That just seems boring, to me, best left to others who may enjoy that kind of thing.

I’m leaving behind a little legacy of songs, recordings, posts, podcats’s’s and mewsletters, as part of the human record, my small voice in a giant field. Why? Because I choose to, because it feels right to do, because I want to. Free will, what a thing.

There’s a song by XTC on their Oranges & Lemons album which used to haunt me a bit, in particular this repeated line:

He’s always saying what he’s gonna do

The song is One of the Millions by Colin Moulding. The whole album is great, heck everything by XTC is great.

In my youth I was often a frustrated artist, a frustrated boyfriend, a frustrated bandmate a frustrated bandleader, a frustrated person. I had plans but not the means nor skills to implement many of them, yet I strived constantly, continued through my frustration and indeed, said what I was gonna do. I heard myself saying what I was gonna do. And like Colin Moulding, observed this with a certain wariness and dread.

In my youth, if I wanted to record a song and make it into a record, there were a number of hoops to jump through. Gatekeepers to pass. The traditional route for many, back then, was something like this: Record a demo of a song, then teach it to a band, record it properly, then the feloniously dull “shop it around.” To record labels or managers or whomever, OTHER people, gatekeepers, people who are not me.

To be an artist is to be your own gatekeeper. Choose your own path. Make your paintings and hang them on the wall if you like, maybe to find relevance to other people, maybe not. To be an artist is to not be concerned with how a piece is received. To be an entertainer, sure, you need to care about that, and that’s fine, I’ve done a bit of that too, but approaching the end of my sixth decade, I’ve learned I very much prefer the agenda of the artist. Which for me means to make it up as I go and do whatever I want.

This journal style of songwriting, self-producing and self-releasing my own product, CONTENT being the hilarious catch-all term, god, it is so liberating. Demo, nothing, I just make. In fact, some of the songs I have produced in recent years, started as demos lonnnngggg ago when I tried to go the old traditional route. On Top Of The World, for example, man, I demo’d that on a Tascam 4-Track cassette recorder in like, 1991 or so. Couldn’t quite get it to sound the way I wanted to, lyrics not quite complete, couldn’t quite find the right collaborator to help finish the words, band and producer at the time didn’t quite know what to do with it, and it.. died. Well did it? Ah, but no, the idea was still appealing to me, and I remembered it and one morning felt inspired to go for it AND! Now I know how, and have the tools at my fingertips, and, I made the thing, finished lyrics and all, and, I like it. Success.

Lunacy abounds. The world will do its thing. I read yesterday’s email newsletter from Bernie Sanders and bless his great heart, he nails it right on, yet again. Mr. Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson and some other brilliant voices I choose to listen to, and I choose actively.  Much of the Internet and social media today seems focused on feeding content to users, analyzing our habits as dispassionately as if we were laboratory animals, and feeding us what statistically they determine is likely to keep us engaged.

To actively and intentionally curate our own menus of information and experience has always been an essential skill, and I think this has become somehow more complicated of late. Quoting myself,

The feedlot backlit and I am split

from People I May Know. I’m fond of that line, and feed lot can be stylized either as one word or two, it’s a clear double-meaning. I love the image of grazing on the content that is fed to us, in our feed, and the lot – the lot is also a double-meaning, as in “you lot,” or, the space in which we feed.

Quoting myself again,

Tomorrow is a day
Yesterday was one also
There have been some before
Presumably there will be more

I love that! Thought it was a throwaway, really, when I came up with it – an afterthought, nothing remarkable, and intentionally not remarkable due to its place it a rather absurd song, but then, when I hear or read it now, it has considerable meaning, and it makes me smile. Makes me smile.. isn’t that one good aspect, one possible good result, of a piece of art?

They’ve been going in and out of style,
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile

– The Beatles, of course. And what a gorgeous sentiment, what a lovely invention, their imaginary band, led by a Sgt. Pepper, of all things. A pure work of the imagination. Perhaps a bit weary of all things Beatles by then, they invented and inhabited this whole other world, and gave it to us.

But getting back to my previous quote, that chorus is from a song called Derogatory Matrons, and this title, and the main verse, I came up with when I was about 14 and had only just learned of the existence of punk rock and new wave music like, minutes before. Enthralled I was, and in fact, the words “derogatory” and “matrons” had only just entered my vocabulary, and I in fact was not entirely clear what either one meant. But! I liked the way they sounded together, whilst pogoing.  AGES later, odd thing happened, my friend Roger Clark (AKA Little Roger!) asked me to contribute a song to a project he was working on, and I made this track, which didn’t exactly fit the bill for his thing, sooooo, it was mine to mess with aaaand, it reminded me of Derogatory Matrons – the idea and vibe still living in its little song-place in my brain cells that held it for however many decades. So I made the track. It found a happy home on my Sensible Comments album. All very sensible indeed.

So, what IS in a name?

Liking my name, this morning, in a peculiar way. Names, rather. Funny thing about “Eric” – I’ve never disliked the name, nor given it much thought, it’s my given name and I kept it. Had this odd moment this morning of actively liking the name. I like the sound of it, the two-syllabled simplicity. So, right, finishing my sixth decade of life and suddenly realize I like my name. Thanks, mom and dad, for the cool names! Names? Well yes, Roy being my middle name. Named after a buddy of my dad’s. Very rock n’ roll, that name, innit? Not only because Roy Orbison but also the sound of it. You can sort of rock the “Roy,” with a certain twang, or drawl. Dinwiddie, now we’re in the deep water. I love this name, now, but had to retire it for a time in my youth for a few distinct reasons. 1. Misspellings! Of every imaginable sort, routinely, comically. 2. Spelling it out loud for people over the phone, spending precious minutes of my life ‘splaining “No, there’s no L, that’s an I at the end, I am not Din Widdle! I mean I could be, but I am not. 3. I had this nickname, Din, which really started as my initials on guitar repair tickets when I worked at Subway Guitars in the late ’80s. There was another guy there with the initials E.D., so I just wrote Din to disambiguate myself. This took with my workmates and friends, and so Din and Eric Din I became. Only many years later, after my father passed, did I start to regret that a little bit. I don’t know if it bothered him or not, probably not, but losing him was quite a thing, and the surname, as something we share, gained some unexpected meaning for me. Surnames, surnames, I think if I were to do it again I’d be Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, do the hyphen thing including my mom’s family name. Eric Roy Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, now that would be fun to spell for people over the phone, wouldn’t it?

Amusements continue. I can’t get back into my FB account because the good gatekeepers of same say they can’t confirm my identity. Isn’t that so 2025? I’ve been on that platform since 2007 you see, as Eric Din, and when I sent my ID to confirm my me, they correctly observed that the name on my ID does not match. I don’t know how much time I care to spend trying to fix that, we’ll see, but I haven’t felt greatly motivated yet. Perhaps in part due to the many horrible aspects of FB and corporate electronic social networks generally, and what they have done to society. I left Twitter the day whatshisname took over, and I wished everyone else would. Now being in FB exile, I guess, my feelings about it are a little complex. I miss some folks there and indeed, some I will likely never again interact with in this life, absent that venue, just because it’s the only place where we were connected. So that’s real, and I don’t love that part. But at the same time, I’m sort of savoring this abscence. Odd as it sounds, FB had become something of a chore. I mean, as a recording artist and for my record label I want to have reach there, right? Well that’s harder than it used to be. Many of my music posts in recent years would fall flat, no response or very little, leaving me to wonder, is this just that people aren’t into my work, OR does it mean FB is not showing my music posts to my friends in their FB feeds? And being an emotional person, I have emotions around all that, and they are not entirely pleasant emotions, and I think, am I getting paid for this unpleasantness? No, they are. The UpTones’ page on FB still had some reach, but in the last few years we played live, we had to buy a “boost” for our gig announcements, whereas earlier everyone who had followed us there would see our posts organically. Waaaay into the weeds on this I am, so I’ll step out. It’s a weedy thing, this dystopian hot mess. And somewhat shocking to me is how much the social networking fracas has influenced my songwriting. Quite a many of my songs over the last ten years or so are directly informed by these conflicts and contradictions.

Michael Valladares really nailed it some years ago, when he said regarding an early social network (Friendster, was it?), “Let me tell you about my me.” As sort of a catch-all for what a social profile is, for a person. My Me. I found this delightfully funny, and it stayed with me even though I don’t remember the exact context of our conversation. Let me tell you about my me.  Well social networks go kablooey eventually it seems, and here I am, back in my faithful WordPress site, saying let me tell you about my me.

Here’s some photos, of me, at Gilman this last Saturday, caterwauling at Peter Montgomery’s b-day bash. It was rad, the whole event.

As for my names, I’m keeping all of them.

Photo creds: Larry Lynch

Liner Notes for Poppin’ the Ska

Greetings, campers, here are the song-by-song notes for my solo skampilation, Poppin’ the Ska, copied over from my Bandcamp pages, now here in blog form. Cos why not?

Donkeyfish

A ska song about ska? Why yes, Petunia. Conjured up at home in late 2024 and quickly released as a single, this song gave me the notion to compile my more Ska solo efforts into an album, and, here that album is. Put on yr dancing shoes and dive in!

Bennie Got A Boat

A true story, in parts. Features the good Captain Bennie himself, on Bass, and two UpTones horn cats! I’ve had this recording sitting about for a long while, recorded in the early 2000s while the UpTones were having a third (or so) resurrection. As for the Captain, he’s indeed a sailor, always was, since youth, so this part, in the very least, is true!

I Quit (Gone Fishen)

A theme develops! UpTones drummer John Mader helped me bring this puppy home, remote from our studio-caves during the Covidopalypse. A fun and bouncy rejection of all that might vex us in our quest for not being vexed. I’m especially fond of the bass guitar descending octave run a’la funky ’70s, a technique brought forward in ska music by Horace Panter. The huge reverb snare-thingy was quite a project, I pored over this track for a while before calling it soup yet. Listening back now as I compile this album I can say, wow, it actually works quite well! So I’m goin’ fishen.

Rabbitus Maximus

Conceived and recorded on January 1, 2024 and promptly released as a single, appearing here again as part of my Poppin’ the Ska album, Rabbitus Maximus is one of my personal favorites.

Coventry

So much backstory here but when I start to write it, it feels better to let the song speak for itself, and someday I shall write a book. This song came to me so fast, I hardly remember creating it. It took about one day from idea to final mix (quite unlike some of the other tracks in the skallection!)

Bond Meets The Godfather

High-concept? Low-brow?! I dunno, but I like it. Silliest idea but I just had to pursue it, and it was so fun. Can you spot the melodic Easter eggs? We quote the Godfather theme, Gangsters by the Specials, and of course Bond themes! But just a taste, you know, so they don’t send their goons. Mind the ejector seat.

Jupiter Girls

The Poppermost of my Ska-Poppin’, Jupiter Girls was on my first solo album and released as a single. The long-distance production with Steven Bernstein and Jay Lane was ambitious, and I didn’t know if it’d work, but the ska-pop gods smiled upon it! This was another created during my Covidopalypse Renaissance in isolation. The original lyrical idea, I had scribbled on a napkin tipsy on the 51 bus after a night at Jupiter and indeed, there were dancing babies, and the beers were not spilled.

Radiation Boy (solo acoustic live version)

Recorded live at Down Home Music on August 12, 2023, this is one of the first songs I wrote for the UpTones, way back in ’82. I was surprised to find out it works well as a solo acoustic number, enough to include it here.

1983

No accident this comes right after RadBoy on this comp. And wow, what a production this turned out to be. Went big on it, real studio, real drums. Even called in my UpTones bro Paul Jackson to sing BGs on it, and it was all a blast. Rest in peace, Juliet, who made her exit this year, a star to all who knew her. “Scooter rides on the Quake” is a nod to a Robert Seidler (AKA Cole Panther) hit on KQAK and KUSF at the same time those now-legendary stations were spinning the early UpTones. Our original lineup (or, most of it) played our final show on New Years Eve going into 1984, opening for Oingo Boingo at the Warfield in San Francisco. Bill Graham himself brought us a bottle of champagne at midnight, as Boingo sang “Wake up, it’s 1984.”

Talkin’ To The Wall

This is one of the wilder productions I’ve made. I had a recording of myself and Moose Lethridge playing acoustic guitars at my cottage in Rockridge, singing this song which I had just written. The UpTones were semi-retired (again!) and I didn’t see an immediate opportunity to try the song with the band, so I forgot about it for a while. Enter, Covidopalypse! Listening to old tapes (hard drives, rather) I found this and thought, hmm, can I add bass and drums and flesh this out a bit? Sure enough, Thomas White, UpTones founding drummer knocks it out of the park, I add bass, and Adam Beach, UpTones sax man extraordinaire, does his extraordinary thing. All remotely, from their own studio-caves, as such. I love Adam’s phrasing on this. He has a way of dragging a melody into last week and still somehow connecting with the beat in a coherent way. It’s uncanny. Unskanny, if you will. So this track in a funny way, once I Frankensteined it all together, turned out to be a mini-UpTones.

People I May Know (D. Backle remix)

The last and greatest remix of one of my personal faves. Ironic timing, too, since I am in fact (for the first time) in FB exile! Perhaps permanently? We’ll see. Send me kittycats!

Bennie Got A Boat (reprise)

Composed to-order for this collection, Bennie Got A Boat (reprise) is a clear and blatant nod to Enjoy Yourself (reprise) by The Specials. I whipped it up as Shannon finished the cover art, which is also a clear nod! Can you name the R. Crumb album art it’s based on? If you’re around my age, your parents had a copy! One guitar track, some vocals and reverb and very large waves. Hey, is it a true story? As the Clash would say, some of it is, Gabriella! <3 Bon voyage

What IF?…

Creativity is the act of not stopping yourself from creating

..was my thought as I woke up this morning. I haven’t been stopping myself lately, no siree. Random funbits –

I just added the lyrics to Bennie Got A Boat on the Bandcamp page. I had to type them out, because my original copy is long gone – perhaps eaten by seals or dolphins. In any case, there they are! Where lies the land to which the ship will go? We don’t know, Petunia.

Dears!  I am locked out of Facebook. It’s amusing because I have tried to quit FB a number of times, and always returned to the well before very long because, well, a bunch of my friends and fam and fans and colleagues and cats and doggies are there, so.. Well I am glad I posted about my latest album there before being summarily banished by the F-Brainz. Oddly they didn’t say I did anything wrong, just that they can’t confirm my identity. So I’m going through their hoops to retrieve my profile there, and yet, at the same time, I don’t miss the “place” and life seems less hectic without it. Paradoxes pile on, these days, don’t they?

Hopefully more of my pals will subscribe to the Berkeley Cat Records mewsletter and podcats (sic and sic) and engage with me that way, oh, and Bluesky, I’m there too – seems there are some “signs of life” there, as my dad would say.

Trivia question!  For my single It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer, I made a loop from part of the drum tracks on one of my ska songs! Which song was it? A hint: I sped the track up a bit. Another hint: The original tracks were recorded by Thomas White, founding drummer in The UpTones. One more hint: The original source track is on Poppin’ the Ska.  “Now Safe To..” was a fun experiment, and I wasn’t at all sure how it would go, but I am pleased with the result. Unusual for me, it’s just drums and vocals – nothing else on the track. Spoken/rapped as such, yet when I sing a melody near the end, on these lines –

The lunatics have taken over Main Street
And we’re hiding in the asylum
Listen to the bells fall down from the tower
Corruption is just Tuesday now
As it ever was

– the implied chord changes seem very apparent to me, just from the single vocal and drum tones. It was tempting for a minute to add those chords on guitar or keyboard, but I rejected the notion. I really like the sound just raw like that. It matches the feeling of the text. So I mixed it as-is, it was a quickie! Gosh, one of the things I’ve learned in this journey of producing my own records is that knowing when to stop working on a thing, is crucial. Perfectionism can be a creativity-killer, and yet, one strives for excellence by one’s own standards, right? So one breathes in and out and tries to follow as a thing unfolds, and be aware of the moment. I’ve gotten better, at this, I’m happy to say. Taking chances, going for it, trying things I’m not sure of, to find out.. What if..? ..is part of the joy of life for me. Always was, but, safe to say I sometimes let things stop me more easily, in the past. My own doubts, or others’ opinions, or my perceptions or worries about what people might think.. These all can derail the creativity train. Mine’s been roaring along, lately, and it’s fun.

Wow, it’s December the 31st.  I recorded Rabbitus Maximus on January the first of this year, and that was a packed 364 days and bears oh my, was it not? The amazing human story plays out, we’re in it, and we get to choose, to a large extent, our attitudes and behaviors. I say these obvious points out loud, to remind myself.

Chuckle. I’m going to quote a song from RUSH now, chilluns, take cover.

You won’t get wise
With the sleep still in your eyes

Neil Peart at his finest, IMO. Full context here.

That song had a big impact on me when I was 13 or 14, discovering prog rock and metal. I dove headlong into RUSH, YES, and pretty much anything with dragons and odd time signatures that I could find. Those roads led to the Dixie Dregs, for me, and my all-time greatest guitar hero, Steve Morse. I gained a lot of creative courage from them. They just did whatever they wanted to, for most of their run. They experimented. And what is Experimental Music?  One experiments! And what happens when one experiments? Well, we don’t know. Until an experiment is run, you may predict the outcome, but you can’t be sure of it. And indeed, the Dregs had an album, called What if

Looking back as we enter the last year of the first quarter of the first century of the millenium, I’m glad I tried some things. Went on creative limbs to see which would carry my weight or bend or break, to find out, what if. I’m humbly grateful that my muse, for lack of a better term, perked up and responded with marvelous surprises, over and over, each time so differently. I expect I will ask her some more questions as the days proceed.

Wishing a huge HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL! And a great big huge THANK YOU for your pre-orders for Poppin’ the Ska! It really makes my day and I appreciate it.

Try some things. Enjoy the discoveries. Ignore the voice that says you can’t.