Category: Blog

The last few years have been very productive, creatively, for me. Diggin it, recording at home and at friends’ studios occasionally, writing new tunes or revisiting songs that I’ve had percolating a long time. Part of what motivates me is wanting to create these tracks while I’m alive, as I’ve studied the matter, and I suspect I won’t be very effective at it once I’m dead! Not that I’m ailing or anything, knock on wood, I’m fine, but we have this looming expiration date we can’t know, and for whatever reason, I have a consistent desire to explore songwriting and music production and share a catalog of my various doings. Inherently eclectic, it turns out.. I’m not a resident of any genre. I visit them and play around, pretty much follow my muse wherever it leads these days. So in Sept. I released Bond Meets The Godfather, a ska song, and this month recorded and shared The Cow Song, a campfire acoustic little number. Back in April I released a full album of songs called Street Party – and so strangely, that starts to feel like a long time ago, already! Life is a journey, innit? I’m enjoying walking. Doing some positive, creative things helps mitigate the Overwhelming Angst Of Multiple Converging Apocalypses (OAOMCA) which seems to afflict most of us these days. Lighting candles, rather than cursing the darkness, I am, or trying to. I thiiiiiink this winter break I’m gonna get my second full-length ready to share.. aaaaand, I’m gonna share the cover art for that this weekend! It’s called “CONTENT” in a sort of tribute to how every bit of music and art or videos or blogs or god knows what is generically called “content” in the digital world, and how this amuses, horrifies, and delights me.

I’m enjoying my new habit of Podcatsing. Yes, Berkeley Cat Records has the worlds greatest and purrhaps only PodCATS. I have here an embeddeddedded player which will magically update whenever we add an episode. This is turning out to be a really fun way for me to share some music I’ve made or helped to make or released over the eons (well, decades) that I’ve been slinging a guitar about and caterwauling. With so many amazing cats. I’ve been very fortunate to know and collaborate with such kitties and, as I am no longer a kitten, I know I won’t be here forever and I feel inclined to tell some of my stories. There’s no way to tell my stories without including some of the musical tracks herein, so podCATSing I will go. Ya know, I thought about doing this for a couple of years, and made some false starts, before I found my “radio” voice. I would record something and listen back and it sounded forced and weird to me so I’d try again a few weeks later. Eventually I got comfortable with it and now I’m off and podding. Enjoy with or without catnip.

I’ve submitted this pod-feed to Deezer, Pandora, Spotify, Apple and oh my some others too. I really dig Simplecast’s interface for all this. My thinkin’ is that I’ll promote BCR PodCats and that in turn will promote the records we release. Promoting records directly with a tiny budget in a world where thousands of new records (I still call them records) are uploaded every day can seem (and likely is) futile and if one gets attached to the outcome (as one does) it can be demoralizing. So my thinkin’, thinks me, is a better futility is promoting this “radio” show as an entertainment entity in itself, and thus the records may get exposure through it, and, maybe that leads to streams and sales for the artists and music on our label. And if not, I have fun doing it, and hopefully some peeps enjoy it. So far I’ve received some positive feedback, and oh my but who doesn’t like positive feedback? Meow.

New adventures. I have a few days off to do some exploring and visiting and see a (gasp!) live concert or two (wow!), all the while compiling not one but TWO CD packages. Yes Petunia, hard product. I thought I swore off of it but damn the torpedoes, Russ Ellis Songs From The Garden LP on CD in a nice package with lovely art from Russ and his grandson and music from their whole awesome fam and friends including yours truly, is in the works for actual. And a double CD of my songs, with the title: Eric Din plays the songs of Eric Roy Dinwiddie, because that’s what it is. Shannon Wheeler is working on the artwork. He’s done some incredible drawings for my solo singles over the last 6 years or so. Here, I will share, his latest, which I am so knocked out by. See, what Shannon does when I send him a song, is he interprets it. I seldom offer any art direction, because I want to see what comes out of his wild imagination. It’s been a real honor and a pleasure doing these collaborations, in which I send him a song in progress – usually a rough mix and the lyrics when I first come up with or commit to it – and he makes a sketch and sends it. Generally I go “wow that’s awesome!” and he develops and finishes the drawing as I finish the track, and voila. So the idea with this CD package is to include a booklet more like a comic, with Shannon’s drawings for the songs and my lyric sheets and liner notes and, you know, a package. Here for the first time I share Mr. Wheeler’s take on my song GONE FISH3N. I so love it. And I wish you a fine weekend and will be off for a bit, because I have, figuratively at least, Gone Fishen. <3

I finally had some free time to read Aaron Carnes’ wonderful book,
In Defense of Ska. Naturally I was interested in this since The Uptones are in the story and I am quoted in it, but now, as I had hoped, I’ve learned so much more about some bands who were our contemporaries, and many who emerged later. I admit I was a little puzzled by the title when Aaron first mentioned it. I wondered: “Does ska need defending?” All of the anti-ska stuff of the post-90s world kind of whizzed by me, back then. I just wasn’t looking too closely at that time and I honestly didn’t care. If someone didn’t like ska, I figured that was their loss, and to each their own. But the story Carnes (Carney, if you will) weaves is far more interesting and profound than whatever I had imagined, and I found it a great read as a ska fan, as a musician, and just as a human being. I think it would be of interest to anyone who loves good stories. I know it’s a stand-up-and-cheer read for any ska fan. I mean, I actually applauded at the end, like you would at the end of a great concert. I’m honored and delighted to have had a little role in spreading ska in the US of A, and it’s an unexpected delight to see the story told from so many angles – the east coast, midwest, SoCal, our Berkeley thing, Portland, elsewhere.. seems our experiences being the “lone” ska band for a minute were shared by many other bands in their various scenes. The music industry “relationship” – if you can call it that – with ska music and ska bands, is.. troubled at best, and it turns out we also shared that with other bands. Tragedies and triumphs and lots of comedies all make for a fabulous read. Thank you Aaron, for writing this so thoughtfully, with humor and passion. It’s obviously a story I care very much about. And it’s not a story that is over, either. I bet somewhere some kids are reading this book right now and planning their own ska bands. The sound they will hear from here is – APPLAUSE!!

You can order Aaron Carnes – In Defense of Ska from Clash Books

So I’m not a Berniecrat (don’t like the term, not sure why), I am definitely not a “Bernie Bro” and “Bernie Sanders Democrat” sounds tedious so in short, because Bernie and Cats, Berniecat. Obviously, really. Of course I’m a Berniecat. Berniecats unite. Berniecats are go. Bernie Sanders supporters have been right all along and the current presidency is onboard with the very damned obvious things we and Bernie have been saying all along. And this is good. It’s a Berniecat new era. I approve.

Photoshoppe cred missing ^, alas, tho it is part of the Great Bernie Meme Flood of January 2021 of course.

Other newts. I’m quoted in Rolling Stone, that’s a fun thing that doesn’t happen every day. It’s an excerpt from Aaron Carnes’ new book, which includes a chapter about the Uptones and, this one about Operation Ivy and their Energy album. A fun read. Funny – the part where Op Ivy re-did their album – I remember running into them when they were making that decision. I saw them on Solano Ave and we got lunch together, they had it on a walkman, and they seemed unhappy with it, deliberating about cutting the whole thing again from scratch. I had no opinion, other than, like, “do it if you want to, guys!” We are glad they did.

The Berkeley Cat Record Podcats is all the way up to EPISODE TWO!!! It’s incredible. A vast, almost entire hour of…. CONTENT! Content is what everything is called now. I like my Content. I’m contented with the content. I contend that my content is a contender. Constantly, Constanza. We love you, bye.

Updates! Updates. Wow, updates.

The latest episode of the Dark Ages behind us, enjoying some moments of sanity.

Wrestle, I do, with what format to release recordings in. At this point I can’t care about it, it’s just wrong no matter what. Humorous, really! My friends who really do listen to vinyl encourage vinyl releases and they are the ten people who would buy the thing that costs thousands to make. The rest get stored in a sad dust-collecting pile, adding to the preposterous mass of Crap That Humans Made, drowning the earth. CDs, similar dealie, different numbers. Virtual releases are my favorite these days because if someone wants to, they can download and burn their own. Heck if they really want to, they can make vinyl! Get the means of production, have at it. DIY on the consumer end. Why not? Put it on an Edison cylinder.

Some crazy amount of new music is released every day, mostly online. Tens of thousands of tracks. Each and every day. Cos we have these little recording studios in our laptops and thingy-pads and even in our “phones.” You know, I love, truly love that people can do that. I love that I can do it. I’m amazed when there’s an audience for a new artist or a new record by a lifer like myself. It’s a connection of sorts, a human one, when we’re all so far apart generally. I’m one of the so so many persons makin stuff alone these days. Well sort of alone. I seem to have these wonderful little collaborations with some of my great old musical buddies brewing lately. Damon Wood, Jay Lane, Al Marshall, the whole Ellis family, Steven Bernstein, and my Uptones bandmates Tommy and Ben and Paul and Moose and Charles and John and others.. so many cats, wow, all in the past year. At a desk, with headphones. It’s a kind of magic, that they can record a track and send it to me and I can load it into ProTools (still my main DAW, I guess that’s “old school” now!) and do my tracks with them and mix it up and release it, all from here. Nuts. It’s perfectly nuts. And I love it. These parts.

My Bandcamp page (have I said how much I love Bandcamp? I love Bandcamp) now has 4-up and 4-down, visually, and I am strangely pleased with the symmetry. Most of the tracks are done, a few of them I will remix. It’s been a sort of a public “work in progress” there. Most of the artwork is from Shannon Wheeler, whom I spoke with just yesterday. We’re gonna have a little chat on my podcats soon, I think. Which reminds me – Updates! Right!

The Berkeley Cat Records PODCATS is up! Others have podcasts. We have a podcats. Check it out. Subscribe. Share. It’s free. We have no sponsor and there are no advertisements. Though I might make some satirical fake ones.

There’s more, always more, so much more, but that’s it for now, I’m out for a walk in the woods.