Room Full Of Mirrors

It’s kind of a strange Monday night.

This is a video I made about myself.

I love my Egg Roll.

Open Mic #48

I realized a while back that I kept starting my Open Mic blogs with “Tonight I was at Mulligan’s Open Mic”.
When in fact it’s 1:14am, so it’s not really tonight anymore it’s tomorrow morning.

Linear time kind of confuses me.

So yeah, I guess yesterday I was at Mulligan’s Open Mic in Eugene Oregon.

I got to see the Whiskey Chasers play a very entertaining and engaging set.

The Whiskey Chasers always put on a fun set.

I saw Bruce Henry play “North Country Girl” in both Johnny Cash style and Bob Dylan style.

Most of the night I just sat at the bar and didn’t talk to anyone, I took a few pictures while listening to the music and I tried to learn all I could from all the other musicians.

At one point I chatted with my buddy Scott Austin about his upcoming CD release party among other things.

When it was my turn I played “MJ” which is a song about Micheal Jackson, I played a rendition of “Room Full Of Mirrors” by Jimi Hendrix, I played “Ice Cream” and “After All” and I ended with “One More Cup Of Coffee” by Bob Dylan.

It’s hard sometimes to get out of the house around this time of year but I’m really glad I did tonight.

It is now 2:14am and I am still confused by linear time.

Thanks for listening.

Please help! Even though life is good I’m still very poor.
I really don’t like to ask people for things but I’m having a hard time paying my bills and I could use your help.
Any funds that you could donate through paypal would be greatly appreciated.
This has been a difficult month for me and I could use all the help I can get.
Even just a few dollars to go back into server costs would be helpful.
Please feel free to give as much as you can spare, my blog is not subsidized by advertising it depends on you for support.

Thank you.

A Musical Hero And A Sleepy Monday

I kind of feel sorry for my dentist.

Last night I traveled north to Portland Oregon, a few friends and I ventured up to Mississippi Studios in our little 1989 Toyota Camry to see the band Woven Hand.
Woven Hand is fronted by David Eugene Edwards who was also the the front man of 16 Horsepower.
He has been a major inspiration to me over the years not only in music but all aspects of my creativity.

Before the show we all went to a little place called Muddy’s on Mississippi Street, we were sitting there waiting for our food and all of sudden who walked in but the man him self, David Eugene Edwards!
He was with a friend and they went and sat at the bar in an adjacent room from where we were sitting.

I mulled over whether to talk to him as I ate my nachos. When I finished I got up to go to the bathroom. I went in to the little bathroom and rehearsed what I wanted to say to him in my head.
When I came out of the bathroom they were no longer sitting at the bar! I was suddenly very disappointed as I was not sure if I would ever have a chance to speak to him again. I figured that they could not have gone far because I was not in the bathroom for more than five minutes and sure enough they were still on the porch. I took a deep breath and walked outside. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you but I just wanted to tell you how much I like your music” I was so nervous as I spoke.
He looked up at me and said “thank you”, I reached out my hand and said “I’m Samuel”. He shuffled with his coffee and his smoke to free a hand to meet mine. I repeated my self and told him again how I had been a fan of his music for a long time, I told him that he was also an inspiration for me to play my own music and his face lit up. I was very nervous because even though I know that he is a person just like me his music has meant so much to me. He struck me as a very shy and humble person much like my self and it was a very humbling experience for me to be able to tell him after all these years that his music has been very inspirational to me.
He and his friend then started to walk away and his friend asked me if I was going to be across the street to see the show, I responded: “I drove 2 hours to see this show and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The show was amazing! I’ve seen Woven Hand once before at the Doug Fir in Portland so I knew it was going to be a great show but I could not have even anticipated how good it actually was.
David twitches and shakes as he plays music, he acts though he is a man possessed. He speaks in tongues, he rolls his eyes and shakes his feet and moves his body in contorted ways.
He kept shaking violently when he first started playing and it looked as though he was shaking off the devil him self so that he could be a better vessel for God’s music, throughout the whole performance he seemed to be at battle with evil spirits. At one point during the show he violently punched the microphone and his hand started to bleed.
Most of the time when I go to a concert I am content to wander around the venue quite a bit and kind of check everything out but both times I’ve seen Woven Hand I’ve wanted to be as close to the stage as I could be. I want to see every thing that they are doing, I want to be as close to the music as I can.
The crowd was very diverse and everyone seemed really into the music, the energy in the room was electric.
Woven Hand’s music defies simple genre categorization, David’s lyrics often refer to his Christan faith but I would not call it church music. It’s heavy and moody with lot’s of unusual rhythms and droning sounds.
I wish that I had some pictures to show you all how amazing it all was but my camera was out of juice and could not be powered by the spirit of the music and crowd alone.
His performance was so incredible, he kept shouting and speaking in tongues, shaking and spitting.
Here are a few videos of Woven Hand performing but they really don’t do the live show justice.

Today I am very tired and still kind of in shock from the whole experience, not only that but I had to go to the dentist.
The whole round trip to the show was about four hours and I was still buzzing from the show so much that I didn’t get to sleep until five in morning.
I had to be at the dentist at eleven thirty this morning, when the dental assistant asked me if I wanted a magazine while I was waiting to “get numb” I told her:
“No thank you, I’m just going to snooze a little bit.”
I’ve always heard that dentists have a high suicide rate and it does not surprise me that much just based purely on the music playing in there. I have to admit though that it was pretty funny when the dental assistant exclaimed “Ace Of Base” when it came on the speakers while the dentist was drilling away at my tooth.

I am now enjoying my new Woven Hand record and enjoying this beautiful Monday slip into Monnight, life is good.

Thanks for listening.

Please help!
Even though life is good I’m still very poor.
Any funds that you could donate through paypal would be greatly appreciated.
This has been a difficult month for me and I could use all the help I can get.
Even just a few dollars to go back into server costs would be helpful.
Please feel free to give as much as you can spare.

Thank you.

Small Talk

Darkness, darkness

Disclaimer:

This post includes some rather dark subject matter.
If you don’t want to read a blog about depression and suicide please feel free to skip this post.
Or if you would like to hear some of my thoughts on depression and how I deal with it please read on.

I have struggled with depression for most of my adult life.
When I was in my early twenty’s I took anti-depression medication for about three years before I moved to California and could not afford to buy the medication any more.
I sat in my girlfriend’s dorm room and smoked cigarettes while drinking Corona beer, I filmed my self gazing out the window and fantasized that I was an amazing artist and one day my footage would be part of some muliti media masterpiece.
Those few days coming off of the medication were very strange, I remember watching the trees as they seemed to change shape right before my eyes.
Though out my life I have often used the trees as a reference point to where my mind is.

Addiction is a very large part of depression.
Through out my life I have not only struggled with addiction to cigarettes, drugs and alcohol but also certain ways of thinking.

Today I have been feeling especially depressed.
I have been diagnosed with depression a few times through out my life.
When I was a teenager my Mom took me the local mental health center and told them that I was feeling suicidal. They than prescribed me sleeping pills. I found this to be rather ironic.
The last time I went to see a doctor they gave me a form to fill out and I answered the depression questions very optimistically in my mind yet when I went in to see the doctor it was all that he seemed to want to talk about.

Suicide is something that I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about, I hear that this is a normal side effect to depression but it’s something that one never really get’s used to, I have lost several beautiful friends to suicide and it hurts me so much to think about what it would do to my loved ones if I ever ended my own life.
When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994 I was 14 years old, I remember vividly where I was when I heard the news.
I was standing on the front porch of my Step Father’s house and he came outside and said something like: “That Nirvana guy killed him self”.
I remember being in such dis-belief because I had just seen an interview he had done with Kennedy on MTV and he kept talking about how happy he was with his wife and his kid, now I realize that the interview was probably filmed months before his death.
His suicide effected so many people, anyone who ever rocked out Smells Like Teen Spirit was left looking into the cold dark eyes of suicide.
Last night I watched a documentary film about the Seattle music scene in the late 1980s and 90s called Hype!, it had a lot of the music in it that I was listening to when I was a teenager and at one point there was footage of the vigil held for Kurt under the space needle and it brought back so much emotion for me I started crying.
Even though sometimes I think about suicide I could never hurt my friends and family in that way and Kurt always reminds me of that.

Kurt also reminds me to play music and that always makes me feel better about life.

Thank you so much for listening.

Radio Experiment Vol IV

Vol IV is entitled “Old”

Open Mic #47

Tonight I went down to Sam Bond’s Garage in the Whitaker neighborhood for their Monday night open mic.

This is the first time I’ve ever been to this particular open mic and the first time I have ever played at Sam Bond’s Garage.

Most open mics that I have been to have a list that you put your name on, usually next to a time slot and that’s when you play.

I have also been to a few open mics that don’t have lists at all.

This Open Mic was more like the later, there were two jars, an early jar and a bigger late jar, you write your name on a little piece of paper and put in the one or both of the jars and than hope that the host picks your name out of the jar.

Most people play an open mic because they want to see what it’s like to perform in front of an audience and often times it’s because they don’t have any experience doing so.

These people are most likely nervous and may have some stage fright, the last thing you want to do to them is cause them more anxiety.

I not only suffer from stage fright but I also have quite a bit of social anxiety.

I don’t know why but I have a really hard time with small talk and often times I’m not really sure what people are talking about, sometimes it is hard for me to focus on what someone is saying when there is a lot of noise or many people talking all at once.

Most of the time I don’t get too nervous before I play.

I always remind my self that I am only capable of doing my best and if someone doesn’t like it they will probably forget anyways.

When you put your name in a jar and hope that it gets drawn, it adds a whole new level of anxiety.

I wasn’t sure when I was going to play or if I was going to play at all, call me crazy but this caused me a bit of anxiety.

My name did get drawn, from the smaller “early jar”.

This happened while I was in the bathroom, I could hear the host from the stage asking if I was still there and luckily for me I had some friends that told him that I was still there and still wanted to play.

My friends Cris and Amblin

For my set I played: “Ice Cream“, “MJ” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” by Bob Dylan.

I got a free ginger ale and enjoyed a rockin’ set by friends Cris Hardy and Amblin.

Over all it was a pretty good open mic, there were a lot of really good musicians and was cool to play on an actual stage.

That being said, I would probably not recommend this open mic for someone who’s new to performing.

Thanks for listening.

An Apology to Tom Waits

Tom Waits.

Ever heard of him?

I may have been a bit harsh in my last post.

I think Tom will forgive me

Captain Beefheart Was A Man

Don Van Vliet otherwise known as Captain Beefheart died on December 17th 2010.

Captain Beefheart was childhood friends with Frank Zappa.

I remember the first time I heard Tom Waits and I thought to my self: “What a unique voice”. That was before I heard Captain Beefheart and pretty much figured out that all that Tom had done was take a little Captain Beefheart with some Bruce Springsteen and called it a masterpiece. Tom was also friends with the late Frank Zappa and toured with him much like Captain Beefheart. Anyways, I’m off on some kind of tangent about the connection between Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and really what I want to talk about is this recording I made.

When I heard that the Captain had passed I decided that I wanted to record something in his honor, I can’t say that I’m even all that versed in his music but there’s something about a guy who calls him self Beefheart.

If you’re not familiar with his music he has a very scratchy rough blues voice, much like Tom Waits.

I wanted to capture that and I also wanted to capture his often un orthodox method of song writing, I just plugged everything in and started playing.

After playing something on the guitar I listened back to discover that something was terribly wrong with the recording equipment, it was all distorted and messed up. I knew that I could not replicate the guitar part I had just done so going against my perfectionist audiophile tendencies I left it the way it was.

I figured it was probably the ghost of Captain Beefheart helping me to create the perfect sonic masterpiece.

A few hours after I recorded the main track I recorded an acoustic part that I used as an intro to the song, this is a very tongue in cheek sort of Axle Rose sort of thing.

Anyways, without further ado:

It’s Not Working (Ode To Captain Beefheart)

Rest in peace Captain Beefheart.

We’ll miss you in this world.

Thanks for listening.