So Many Good Songs..........

The Blue Island Beer Club likes to mix our originals with good cover songs from the rock 'n roll era. We have about 30 originals between us that we can perform live and another 45 or so covers. We like to learn new covers to stay fresh and keep it interesting but there are so many great songs we could do that selecting them becomes a challenge.

Usually one of us (Bruce in most cases) starts playing a great song that he thinks would work. We try to stay away from songs that are overdone to the point of nausea (e.g. Margaritaville) and pick ones that we can do with acoustic guitars that may be familiar but unexpected. We think our Cream repertoire might fit that description.

We haven't learned it yet but Bruce has identified a song that he feels is the greatest song in the universe. I will not reveal its name but it was written by Tom Waits and only has about seven lines of lyrics. Come and hear us and maybe we will be playing it in the next couple of weeks!

Beaks Old Florida again

The Blue Island Beer Club played at Beaks again last night. Bruce and I played two of his originals, one of mine (Stocking Island), and a couple of covers from our repertoire. Beaks is a cool place and draws musicians ranging from aspiring beginners to seasoned professionals. Although musicians usually arrive prepared to play solo or as a duo in our case, it is not uncommon for others to join in on bass or drums or guitar or vocals when they know the song. Somehow they do this without messing up the soloist too much and usually add something. Last night Steve Arvey helped us out with some drums and vocals. Later on there were about five people on stage having a great jam. Lots of fun and sounded good.

Our friend J is back in town and played a set last night. He wrote Way Beyond Midnight a couple of years ago and I contributed a few lyrics. We both had plans to write music for the lyrics and I have a rough draft but no more. So last night, J sang his version which is shockingly different from mine. I was surprised! It all goes to show you.......

CD Finished and "new" guitar

The ICW Blues is finished and is being mastered with help from Bruce Kula (Thanks Bruce). It will be off to CD Baby by the end of the week as well as the Latitudes and Attitudes Radio site. I am tentatively planning to make it available at the Cruisers' Thanksgiving celebration in Vero beach.

In other news, I purchased an elderly acoustic guitar. It reminded me of a Stevie Ray Vaughan story. Stevie reportedly walked into a music store and saw a well-worn Stratocaster hanging on the wall and just knew it would sound good, so he bought it and it became the famous #1 that he used for most of his recordings.

While I do not claim to be Stevie Ray Vaughan, I do like to fool around with older guitars and I have picked out some good ones. I was making my rounds of pawn shops this week and I saw an old Japanese Martin knockoff that was intriguing in that it was a 000 size and looked well made. I took it down and played it and really liked the neck and the construction. It has a 24 3/4" scale length. It didn't sound too great but the strings looked about as old as the guitar (about 30 years) despite the fact that the owner said he had replaced them.

Anyway, I went back and bought it for a favorable price and have spent the afternoon doing some setup work and replacing strings. It now sounds great and has a worn in feel with a smooth, comfortable neck. It has suffered a few dings over the years but I will just live with those. It's called a Ventura V12 and was built in Japan by Matsumoku or one of the other contract builders from the seventies. I took a couple of photos before I fixed it up..........

Goodbye Island

I am wrapping up the last song on my sailing influenced CD, The ICW Blues. The song is called Goodbye Island and is a sort of protest song about a development in the Exuma Islands of The Bahamas.

The island is called Crab Cay (Cay is the Bahamian equivalent of Key and is pronounced Key). Crab Cay is within huge Elizabeth Harbor near George Town, a favorite spot for us and other cruisers. Between Crab Cay and the "mainland" of Great Exuma, there is a well protected smaller harbor known as Redshanks. Redshanks is a hurricane hole with good holding and not much fetch. It can accomodate 20 or so cruising boats, several more if they have a shallow draft. Crab Cay has been uninhabited for a long time, but there the are ruins of a plantation left from the days when Royalists left Virginia and Carolina and moved everything they owned including their slaves to the Bahamas (immortalized in a book called Winds of the Carolinas). Interestingly, the slaves took the last name of the plantation owners when they were freed, hence many of the folks in George Town today share names like Rolle. They also have rights to "generation land", former plantations.

So now Crab Cay has been purchased by a US developer who is a member of the family that is the largest pork distributor in the US. The island is being developed for the super rich and includes a marina with slips for 100' + yachts and lots that are for sale for several million dollars.

Crab Cay

While I recognize that tempus fugits and developers develop, the aggravating thing about this one is that the developers have pressured the Bahamian government into giving them the rights to the water several hundred feet from land effectively eliminating the right of boaters to anchor in Redshanks. Normally, a landowner only has rights to the land down to the high tide line. They have also built a low bridge from Crab Cay to Great Exuma which prevents most boats from taking the shortest route to town..

The Bahamas are littered with failed developments and this one could well join the rest of them, especially when recession rears its ugly head. The trend of the Bahamians to kowtow to the wants of developers is unsettling however.

Goodbye Island is a lament to this situation. Money talks!

Two Girls and Jolli Mons

The ICW Blues CD is nearly finished and I have posted a new song which is going to be included in the final CD. It is called Two Girls and, contrary to popular expectation, it is about our "his and hers" inflatable dinghies that are tied up behind our sailboat Mandalay when we are anchored somewhere for a while. Here is the link.

Two Girls

Tonight, Wednesday, The Blue Island Beer Club will play a set at Jolli Mons in Dunedin, Florida, which is just north of Clearwater. We are on at 7:50. Jolli Mons is a cool restaurant with a nice outdoor eating area and a covered Tiki style stage. Dunedin (a Scottish name pronounced like Done Eatin', not Tuned In) is a cute town full of shops, restaurants and winding streets and is located right on the Gulf of Mexico. Come and see us!

Jolli Mons

Just Plain Folks Showcase (JPF)

Today The Blue Island Beer Club made one of its irregular appearances at the JPF Showcase. JPF is an international organization of songwriters and musicians. It primarily exists on the World Wide Web in the form of a set of bulletin boards. But the people are real, and the members get together and perform their music in different gathering spots around the world.

Just Plain Folks

The Tampa Bay Chapter holds a monthly showcase at the Whistlestop in Safety Harbor. Each musician plays a few songs to entertain the audience and demonstrate his or her songs and skills. The local chapter coordinator is presently Jerry Jakala who organizes and publicizes the Showcase.

Today's Showcase included 9 performers - all solo except for Bruce and me. Everybody played a guitar and sang - one guitar was electric and the rest were acoustic. We played five songs......some from Wednesday's setlist including Bruce's new song I Didn't Know It Was Wrong.

Lots of fun!

Seven String Acoustic Guitars

If you see the Blue Island Beer Club playing in person, you may notice that Bruce and I each have an acoustic guitar with seven strings......what???? Seven strings? What for?

There are a number of seven string guitars on the market but most of them are electric guitars with an additional low string tuned to B below the low E. These are for the shredders of the world who want to go loooow. What we play however, is a seven string with a second G string tuned an octave higher than the normal G string. These two G strings are located close together and are played in unison and sound like a pair of strings on a 12-string guitar. On a 12-string, all the strings are paired, whereas on a seven string, only the G is paired.

The advantage is that a seven string plays and sounds like a six string except that it has a little more jangle. Solos can be played normally or can feature the paired strings for the 12-string jangly sound. Roger McGuinn, founder of the Byrds, worked with Martin to produce two signature models with seven strings. He uses a seven string so that he can quickly switch between his folk/blues songs and his Byrds jangle.

Seven strings are very uncommon and we always are asked about ours when we play them in public.

Post Election Party at Beaks

Last night was the post election party at Beaks Old Florida. The Blue Island Beer Club debuted a new song by Bruce called I Didn't Know It Was Wrong which is about the criticism that Florida condominium owners receive from native Floridians......and how their holier then thou attitude is not really justified based on some of the stuff they have pulled over the years. A cool song. I hope the audience could understand the lyrics.

And then we did some hippie songs to celebrate the election results, not to mention the fact that it is over. I'm So Glad (Cream/Skip James) and Volunteers of America (Jefferson Airplane) and a couple of others.

Bruce played the Ebow on Breathe and I tried it on Lucky Man but could not get the buzz going. (Of course it worked fine at home when I practiced).

A fun evening with some good players.

Moving Mandalay

We are moving our sailboat Mandalay from one slip to another. Today, we set up some dock lines but the tide was pretty low and we were concerned that we might bump the bottom. We will do the actual move on Thursday since the tide will be up nearly two feet in the morning. We have been renting a slip that was unused in the summer and used by the owner in the winter. This year, we are not going cruising to the Bahamas so we need a slip all winter long. A little digging uncovered another neighbor who has one he is not using. Sure beats going to a public marina. It's only a five minute walk from our condo.

Recording Audaciously.......

When I started recording in my home studio (or as some people refer to it, the bedroom), I wanted to test the waters without spending a lot of money. A friend purchased a dedicated recorder for about $800 and while I thought it sounded great, $800 was not in my budget. I stumbled across a recording program on a CD on Ebay for $15 which claimed to do everything you could want using your computer. I could afford $15 so I purchased the CD and went to work.

I soon discovered that the CD contained a version of the free software called Audacity along with some sample recordings and a few extras. I could have downloaded the software for nothing, but the seller was within his rights to re-package and sell Audacity and it was worth $15 to me to discover that it existed. It is available here....http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Since then, Audacity has been revised and updated and is still the program I use for all my recordings. If you are interested in using your computer as a recording studio, I recommend giving Audacity a try. The quality of the recordings is the same as you would get from any purchased recording program. Since Audacity is free and is developed by "h0bbyists", it is simpler than most of the other programs. Audacity is probably not the program to use if you want to use a lot of MIDI samples or use loops to make rap "beats". But if you just want to record actual music and overdub as many tracks as you like, Audacity works very well. You can perform all kinds of operations to the recorded tracks, like adding reverb or delay, equalization, compression, etc. You can cut and paste tracks after they have been recorded and so on. This free program can do in five minutes what the Beatles' engineer would spend days doing.......and it does it with higher fidelity and more control.

Isn't technology amazing?

(note to all recording artists - this does not mean your songs will be better than those of The Beatles!).

The Blue Island Beer Club

The Blue Island Beer Club is a duo consisting of Bruce Kula and myself. We rehearsed yesterday and drank a couple of our favorite adult beverages (India Pale Ale from different breweries is a favorite). In addition to the beer, our influences are the blues and the islands hence our name. There is also a Chicago suburb called Blue Island which the grapevine describes as seedy but I have not been there in many years to verify.



We have a CD available on CD Baby. http://cdbaby.com/cd/blueislandbeerclub with samples available.

We worked on one of Bruce's new compositions yesterday and plan to debut it on Wednesday at Beaks Old Florida. We also plan to do a song or two inspired by the election and then do a couple of hippie songs.

Come and see us if you are in St. Pete!

Finally bought a keyboard.........

I took piano lessons for a while as a kid. I was not very successful, perhaps due to lack of motivation since the stars I watched on TV played the guitar. So I am not a keyboard player by any means, but I do know where the notes are and can figure out chords and such.

I have been mulling over getting a keyboard so I could add some new sounds to my recordings, but I was unwilling to commit a lot of funds. I almost bought one in a pawn shop on two different occasions, but both times I backed away thinking that a new one with a guarantee and no beer stains was not much more expensive.

So on Thursday, I went to the Guitar Center where they had a Yamaha on sale for $80, plus I had a 10% off coupon. The keyboard was compact and offered lots of tones and some percussion. I bought the keyboard and by the next day was adding tracks to the CD. It has some good quality sounds including an excellent piano. The keyboard has one amazing feature that is akin to using a capo on a guitar. If you want to play in a key with too many sharps and flats, you can simply adjust the keyboard pitch up or down a half step at a time and play in a more amenable key. I can play in C a lot better than E!

Today was garage sale day at our condo complex. What a waste of a beautiful morning. We were rewarded with a little more space and a few (very) extra dollars, but it was not worth the aggravation of people beating up on our prices which were already about a tenth of what a similar item would cost in a store. We did get to chat with the neighbors a bit.

Cheers!