Category: Blog

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

Thoughts about my new single, Am I Not Alien? b​/​w People I May Know

I’m delighted to announce the release of Am I Not Alien? b​/​w People I May Know on Berkeley Cat Records.

A Tale Of Two Songs

Am I Not Alien started a long time ago. I had the idea when playing in HOBO, a band Paul Jackson and Ben Eastwood and I had (with several wonderful drummers) after the initial breakup of the UpTones. We performed an early version of it once or twice but I wasn’t really satisfied with the verses and it just didn’t sound the way I wanted, so we let it go. Flash forward to COVID19 and I’m hanging out with my guitar and the little bass-sliding riff shows up and I recognize it and think, hey, I can finish this now! And put it together myself.

Spent weeks! Recording and rerecording the parts, methodically inching toward the feeling I wanted from each instrument. See, I’m not really a recording engineer, though I guess I am becoming one. And I have nothing but the “gear” in my laptop – amp models, software synths, “VST” effects (I don’t even know what VST stands for!) googles.. Oh! Virtual Studio Technology. Of course! Yes I work in a virtual studio I have been “building” over the years, and in my spare time now I hang out in it and create things. It’s tremendous fun.

So, I had EVERYTHING on “Alien” cookin’ the way I wanted it EXCEPT the DRUMS!! A month ago, I was frustrated because my ham-fisted attempts at drum “programming” were still falling flat and meanwhile, the guitars, bass, synth and organ, (oh and my vocals!) were right there with the musical image I had in my head all along, having followed an aspiration that started (I counted) in 1994. What’s a home recording geek to DO if you can’t get the DRUMS right!?

Call a drummer.

I thought Jay Lane would have the right instincts for this, and in Quarantineville he has his recording outpost running too so he said “Yeah, send me the tracks!” Which I happily did, wrestling first with printing audio “stems” that he could import into his gizmo, and we back-and-forthed about tech issues before finally he too was able to sit down and rock the drum tracks. He sent them back to me, I imported them, and wow, I heard what I had been after with this elusive, delicate, utterly persistent song that wanted me to write and realize it for basically half my life. Thank you, Jay!

Oh! All along I was sending the “ruffs” to Shannon Wheeler. He’s drawn these beautiful covers for me since I started making and releasing solo records in 2015, and usually the method is – I send him the lyrics and a demo or rough mix and he sends me some sketches. This were no different, I loved his take on it, and even before I called Jay, I had the finished cover on my desk. See so I HAD to finish. I could not put the thing off for another year like I had in the past, I had the dang record cover. Motivational. Thank you, Shannon!

It was a saga and I love how it all came together in the end. The song is about being human, obviously, and it speaks to me in ways that feel urgent and current to me. I hope it may for you as well.

b/w People I May Know – yes! b/w meaning “backed with” as they said with vinyl 45RPM singles – an A side and a B side! I’m so pleased with the B side here and it is an ENTIRELY different story! Had the idea one Sunday morning this July – I can tell you the date actually, it was July 12, 2020. Cracked up when I thought of it, saw someone in my “People you may know” feed in Facebook whom I thought I was FB friends with! Being that I consider them an actual friend I was miffed and I thought, FB, that is some fucked up UI design right there! The way I find out I was UNFRIENDED (gasp, horrors..) is by being ‘splained to that they are, a People I May Know! The song wrote itself. To say nothing of the fact that my friend may have deleted their old profile or any number of other reasonable explanations, the gig was on and I was not letting this one get away. Scrawled out the lyrical ideas in pen, pulled up a drum track I’ve been meaning to recycle, played bass, one guitar track, two vocal tracks – inventing the vocal arrangement as I improvised it to tape – mixed it, and done. So where “Alien” took 25 some years, “People” took just a few hours from conception to completion. A tale of two songs! A tail? A tail of two songs. On Berkeley Cat Records. Of course. Every song is different and like cats, they make their own rules.

I hope you enjoy! Listen, I have been making the songs I share via Bandcamp (we LOVE Bandcamp!) “free or pay what you like.” Reasons for this are simple – I want you to have my records if you want them. Absolutely I love it and appreciate it if you can kick in something to help cover my costs and encourage more of this sort of tomfoolery, but if you don’t have the extra dough right now (WE UNDERSTAND THIS!) please don’t hesitate to put “0” in the download “purchase” amount and save the file. Or, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you can buy it for a million dollars! Thank you, Jeff!

We recommend selecting FLAC because it is lossless, highest resolution (sounds best) but honestly MP3s are fine too and my kittycat ears often can’t tell the difference.

I set the streaming services release date to Caturday, Sept. 26! This gives us a little time to promote the songs and see if we can get them on some popular playlists. That’s about it. You can click through the song title links on:

https://ericdin.bandcamp.com/album/am-i-not-alien-b-w-people-i-may-know

to read the lyrics and credits. Thank you for your time, please stay well and safe, and of course feel free to share this all any ol’ which way you may care to.

Much love

The Long Vacation by Alex Panasenko

I read Alex Panasenko’s memoir, The Long Vacation, this weekend. A delightful romp through the moral simplicities of Europe in the mid 20th century. If you believe that, the Golden Gate Bridge is for sale. Really it’s an entertaining and horrifying and funny and shocking and profound and vulgar and appalling ride to hell and back repeatedly. Then comes the second chapter!

Spoiler-ish alert. The final paragraph is so devastatingly bleak and funny at once, that I couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically or give up on humanity altogether, so I did a bit of both. But overall, the book helped restore my own will that we treat each other well, and ourselves well, regardless of what negative bullshit anyone may ever tell us about ourselves or others.

The author was, years after the events portrayed in the book, my biology teacher at Berkeley High School. The jovial, engaging and brilliant teacher I knew as a teenager, came up from a childhood worlds different from mine. I’m glad he wrote this book, or I would never have known his story. A story which also happens to be relevant to current events in terrible and important ways.

War is crazy. Bigotry is crazy. These things are crazy and ridiculous, yet they persist in being such large pieces of the human experience. After I closed the book, I had an unexpected musing: “The worst things people ever did were done by people.” And quickly reminded myself that the opposite is also true.

My Journey With Bernie

I started supporting Bernie Sanders for president on the day he announced his run in 2015. My friends here may remember I ran a fundraising page thru ActBlue called the Bernie Bus. (I updated the link here, to a current Bernie campaign donation page.)

To my amazement, my small corner of the larger fundraising effort ended up raising over $3500, mostly from donations from my friends on FB! I was disappointed when he didn’t win the nomination, but I got over it quickly and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. (Which she won, absent the awful outdated Electoral College, which we should abolish.)

For the 2020 election, I support Bernie Sanders again, and now, our volunteer organization and small-donor base is huge, unique and unprecedented.

Today, I attended the Bernie rally in Richmond, CA, and it was everything I hoped for and more. Absolutely giant turnout. The line went on forever it seemed, and the beautiful Craneway Pavilion at Richmond Harbor filled to capacity. I got there early so I was not very far from the stage. Photos below. It was great to hear Bernie speak and see him in person, finally. He’s a fantastic orator, something more easily appreciated up close.

The speakers and musicians who preceded him were also marvelous, and after the room could hold no more, the still very long lines of folks were directed to an outdoor area where they could see (maybe!) and hear the speeches. It was downright inspiring. Completely peaceful, empowering, diverse, inclusive, and massive.

My dad and I agreed on Bernie. My father, John Dinwiddie, died in 2015, but I feel he’s with me on this journey, hocus-pocus though that may sound. We’re on the Bernie Bus, more than ever. I feel Sanders is the candidate to win, and, small detail, he’s winning!

I support Bernie Sanders because I agree with him. On basically everything. Other candidates, I agree with much, especially Elizabeth Warren, to whom I had signed numerous petitions urging her to run in 2015, before Bernie declared. Warren didn’t run, Bernie did. And in the years since then, the Bernie volunteer organization has grown into something extraordinary.

All of the other candidates have taken some verses from Bernie’s song book. And that’s great. I’m glad to see it. But Bernie has been singing these songs consistently through his entire life and career of public service. Now that he’s winning, there’s an inevitable backlash and hand-wringing from (for lack of a better word) “mainstream” Democrats. Their notion seems to be, “Oh no! Bernie’s winning! That can’t be! He can’t win!” Which seems absurd to me, due in small part, to the fact that, he’s winning.

Rather than try and second-guess other voters, the fabled “swing-voters” for example, I choose to support the candidate I most strongly agree with. And I urge progressives and moderates and liberals and others to do the same, and increase the momentum of Bernie’s campaign, all the way to the nomination and the presidency.

Elections are not a spectator sport. Pundits’ predictions are historically, consistently unreliable and so often wrong. Either by our action, or inaction, we decide the outcome. Let’s be pro-active and vote our conscience, vote inclusively, vote our best interests, and elect Bernie Sanders president, and a Blue majority in the House and Senate, and put our nation on a better course, for all our benefit, and the benefit of our unique and beautiful and only world.

Democracy is not something that happens to us, it is something that we do.
Bernie Sanders for president. Thank you.

Long Live Ska – Aaron Carnes catches up with the UpTones

Somehow I neglected to add this article here when it ran a year or so ago. The author, Aaron Carnes, is currently finishing up a book about how ska music evolved after the Two-Tone era, in the US and Mexico and beyond. Aaron told me a little about the impact of the movie Dance Craze, after I had shared with him what a huge influence it was on the early UpTones. Not surprisingly, it turns out Dance Craze was also a key piece to many of the other bands whom Aaron interviewed, and there’s a whole backstory to how the movie flopped in the UK and almost never saw release in the US. I look forward to reading more about all that! Meanwhile, adding this East Bay Express article to the “Press” section here on my Interbloggy. Time to update the things. All of the things.


Ranty McRantface Loves Football

Today they play the sport where they crash into each other with their heads. You can’t get across town in Berkeley on game days, because so many people enjoy watching young men giving each other concussions. Our higher learning institutions are happy to host the very intelligent running at each other with their heads business. It’s a family affair. We gather in the blazing sun to drink beer and watch young men crash into each other with their heads. I mean, why wouldn’t you, if you could? Dress up in a padded suit with a helmet in 90° heat and charge at each other and crash your heads together repeatedly? I can see no downside to it. The spectacle is made complete by young women in the sidelines dancing and cheering on the young men, as they bash their heads together. Concussions are awesome, and we celebrate, with beer. Colleges wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t smart. Some of the boys, if they are really good at this, and their knees still work, go on to play in the NFL. Where they’re paid lots of money to crash into each other even harder, until their bodies are destroyed and they spend their retirements trying to manage chronic pain, opioid addiction and brain damage. It’s totally awesome. If it wasn’t totally awesome, why would Americans love it? It’s the number one thing. Our single largest entertainment product. It’s nothing new, but today, I see people flocking to the stadium, old and young alike, with their “Bears” gear and I think, how wonderful that we have such a grand tradition. We should expand on it. It should just be the way we greet each other in public. Just straight run at each other and crash into each other with our heads. Then we can be even smarter. Because obviously this is smart. Or we wouldn’t do it. We certainly wouldn’t encourage young men to do it, at our universities, where we do the smart-being. It’s so wonderful, that today, I’m taking a shortcut, because I want to join the fun. I’ve purchased a six-pack of Budweiser and Hank Williams Jr.’s entire catalog to play while beating myself over the head with a mallet. Hey, when I get into something, I tend to go large. I want to be part of this. I’ve avoided this piece of American culture for too long. If only I had a son, I would encourage him to play football and tell him he’ll never be worth anything if he doesn’t win State, like the asshole drunk dad in Friday Night Lights. It’s the life for me now, I don’t know why I missed it. The new game is streamlined, however. To hell with these safety measures they keep talking about, trying to make the game less dangerous. Bunch of pussies. In the new version, the players will all have mallets and clobber themselves mercilessly until they’re passed out or dead. We need to stop coddling these boys. They need to man up and beat themselves to death. I’m excited about the possibilities. We’ll sell a lot of beer. Think of the cheers you could write for that! “RA! RA! SIS BOOM DIE! DIE! DIE!” It can’t miss. Sponsors will firehose money at this. Branded mallets will be the rage. You wont be able to go anywhere without seeing young men diligently beating themselves over the head, perfecting their technique. It’s Football Plus. Football distilled to its essence. Simplified, perfected. Girls can get into the act, too. No more gender bias in New Football, no. Anyone can beat themself over the head with a mallet. We’ll sing the national anthem and then just start right in a’self-clobberin’ and save a lot of hassle and time, not having to mess with helmets and medics and all that snowflakey nonsense. A more advanced player can simply behead himself, as his beloved coach yells, “PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN!” and the drunk dad bellows, “THIS IS IT, SON! YOUR MOMENT OF GLORY! IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER THAN THIS!”

Out of the Outback, with The UpTones and Berkeley Cat Records

What did I do this summer? Oh, I started a record label! Here’s the true story. In 2015 I start recording some songs of my own, and releasing them online in Bandcamp and to the streaming services thru Distrokid. Now, when you put stuff out through Distrokid, they assign a unique number which becomes your default label name. Mine was “676723 Records DK” and that was fine for a few releases, but at a certain point I wasn’t having it and wanted to name my label. So I upgraded my Distrokiddie and set out to come up with a good name. I asked on FB and crowd-sourced for fun, and some really cool and creative names came in! But I didn’t feel any of them enough and I was flummoxed and stopped thinking about it for a while.

Berkeley Cat Records popped into my head one day and I knew instantly that was it. I immediately called Shannon Wheeler and asked can he draw me a cat, sleeping in a circle as they do, on a record player? Done, couple days later he sends me the logo and voila, a label is born.

What does a record label do in 2019 and beyond? Well for me, we upload stuff. I don’t want to print CDs or vinyl because it’s a hassle and we cats must have our naps. Besides, “hard product” is very hard to sell if you’re not on tour, and I’m not on tour, and touring costs a lot and because naps. The basements and mom’s attics of the world are filled with boxes of CDs and LPs from artists who pressed ’em up with high hopes. I don’t have storage space for that.

Do I miss physical media? Am I nostalgic for it? Well, yes. But the wonderful thing about digital product is that it doesn’t exist. I mean it does but it doesn’t. It is created on-demand only when someone wants it. And there’s no shrink-wrapped chunks of plastic to eventually choke some poor dolphins.

The song that made me want to make my own label is “I Can See It Now.” Not sure why, but that was it. And I’ll release whatever of my own stuff thru Berkeley Cat that I feel inspired to, and I don’t know exactly what all that’ll be! Which I find entertaining and exciting.

More recently, my UpTones mates and I were talking about re-releasing some of our early stuff, which has never been on iTunes or even on CD. Just vinyl and cassette. So this record, OUTBACK, a six-song puppy from 1986, we re-mastered and got ready and now it’s coming out. Rescued from the oblivions of time.

Paul Jackson took his original cassette artwork – which was a photo of a painting of his – and recombobulated it into the new cover image. Paul also joined me at Coast Mastering for the transfer from analog and mastering job, which, was a bit suspenseful at first! Will this work, we wondered? Worked beautifully by the sure hand of Michael Romanowski, record mastering master.

A rare Paul and Din sighting, clearly up to no good

After this appointment, Mr. Jackson and I repaired to the Missouri Lounge for pints. It’s right by Fantasy Studios, where Michael now has the room which was the legendary Studio C. Studio C was also one of the first rooms the UpTones recorded in 1983, and by gosh I have some tapes from those sessions which I hope/plan to release by and by. It’s a bit more of an endeavor because they need to be mixed.

Sitting in the lounge there as countless other musicians have done pre- and post- sessions in the Fantasy building, we reminisced a bit and howling laughter ensued. And, we agreed that after getting OUTBACK out into the wilds, we’d revisit some other material we’ve made, within and without the UpTones, and release that too. Why not?

There are also a few records in the brewing that I didn’t make, that friends of mine made, or are making, which also will likely come out on Berkeley Cat! I have to remain mysterious about these for now, but dang, I am thrilled about it.

Buy the OUTBACK! Share the OUTBACK. Pick up a Berkeley Cat Records two-tone coffee mug. Follow us in the Facebonk. It’s all on our site:

https://www.berkeleycatrecords.com/

Thank you! And Happy Caturday.

Caturday Music Musings

Saw a few wonderful concerts recently. One was at the Piedmont Cemetery, a rather magical event they do once a year on Solstice, that Sarah Cahill describes here. It’s a wander-about, with performers in the various nooks and corners of the vast and ornate Julia Morgan indoor/outdoor maze that is the Chapel of the Chimes. A highlight for me was hearing Paul Dresher‘s group and meeting him briefly afterward. I took a guitar lesson from Mr. Dresher at Cazadero when I was 12 or so, and my dad flipped out when he learned this way back then, as he had mad respect for Paul as a composer. And now, I do too! Full circle. Also heard the aforementioned Cahill and she was magnificent. And numerous other great musicians whose names I didn’t note, during the wandering about.

Another was just this week – a house concert in the Berkeley hills with Jonathan Segel of Camper Van Beethoven fame. I love his songs. And I so admire anyone who can step up to the mic with just a guitar and perform solo, which he did brilliantly. It’s sooooo different from performing with a band. No net. I keep saying I’ll try it but then I don’t. Maybe now I will, inspired by Mr. Segel. Damn you, sir. Ah, but he was joined by the magnificent Kelly Atkins, who sang harmony on some tunes, so he didn’t have to carry the whole set alone! Their voices blended like angels.

What else? Charlie Hunter and vocalist Lucy Woodward, at the Ivy Room a coupla weeks ago. Oh. My. Word. Charlie’s a lifelong friend and one of my favorite guitarists, and I really love this episode in his ever-changing musical adventures. Lucy’s voice and stage presence with Charlie and drummer Doug Belote was a winning combo. Check ’em on out.

Also last weekend, rock in peace blowout concert for Keystone Freddie. Freddie Hererra was a huge friend to music fans, the music scene, and musicians. As a Berkeley kid I used to walk by the Keystone and look at the band names on the marquee, thinking, “someday!” Someday came and it was our “home” club if you will, from when the UpTones got started until they closed. Of course the talent lineup at his memorial show was absolutely stellar, and it was great to see some friends from, wow, twenty and thirty years ago. There’s a nice write-up about the event and Freddie here.

Did I forget anything? Of course I did! Happy Caturday.

Always For A Moment

Haven’t posted here in a while! Been busy. Here’s my latest song, hot off the presses. Hope you enjoy! It’s a free download or you can buy it if you like. Please feel free to share this any ol’ which-way ya care to. This is me on guitar and vocals and bass, Michael Urbano on drums. Michael Rosen recorded and mixed it at his studio. Myles Boisen mastered it up. Shannon Wheeler drew the cover. These gents all did such beautiful work, and I’m so very grateful to them. Happens to be ready on this holiday, so, I’m glad to share this today! <3