recording and gig update.

Monday night at home after a very long and intense previous week.  I had a lot on my plate with Felsen stuff as well as all manner of other musical related things I do to try and make a living:  teaching a slew of private drum lessons, doing a bunch of rehearsals with other bands as well as playing drums with Roger Rocha’s (guitarist from 4 Non Blondes fame) fantastic band, the Goldenhearts at the Rickshaw Stop in SF and drumming with Paul Manousos & the Legendary East Bay Wrecking Crew at my fav Alameda restaurant Spiesekammer (where I was thrilled to meet and perform for one of my idols from my teenage years---Klaus Flouride from the Dead Kennedy’s.)  At Friday’s big gig at the Brick & Mortar in SF I pulled double duty playing drums with Brad Brooks as well as performing with Felsen.  That show was like planning a wedding.  It was totally crazy the amount of PR we (all 4 bands on the bill) had to do to pack that venue.  In the end though, it was really worth it as it was one of the largest shows we’ve done in SF.  I was totally exhausted from the experience.  The night before the show I got home from a gig around midnight and I found an email from the booker saying only a handful of presale tix had been sold and they were not happy.  I stayed up until about 3 in the morning emailing and messaging people about the gig.  (Did you get one from me?  Check the time that sucker rolled into your inbox).  That freaked me out and needless to say I didn’t get much sleep.  Saturday morning I got up early, taught 7 drum lessons and then headed to day 2 of Felsen’s new album recording project.  so....I’m kinda tired.  

The Brick and Mortar gig though was really special for us.  Big hometown show.  Plenty of the Felsen faithful were in attendance and lots of new faces too.  It was also a hoot to perform for a bunch of our musician friends too.  SF is a pretty tight knit musical community.  Of the four bands on the bill that night, I am currently a member of 2 and am an alum of a 3rd.  Lots of the people who performed that night I’ve been in bands with over the years.  Lots of history.  It was kind of a family reunion.  Some have seen Felsen before and it was great to introduce Felsen to those who haven’t.  The venue was killer and that always helps too. We dug into the music and gave it a little extra.  The bunny showed up and that always takes the show from 4th to 5th gear i.m.h.o. Nights like that reminded us all why we moved to the Bay Area.

We’ve been performing a batch of new songs that we’re road testing, prepping for a new Felsen album and we devoted this past weekend to recording ‘basics’ (getting the drums down and then we build tunes up around those drum trax).  We’re recording at our bass player Cristian Hernandez’s house.  Bless him for allowing this holy mess of chaos to take over his fine home:  drums, amps, cables, microphones, gongs, pizza boxes, beer cans, capos, a glockenspiel, and a vibraphone, guitars and banjos now litter his casa.  I gotta say though, that this is a special process and we’re all really feeling it.  Maybe it’s just the simple fact that we’re recording in Cris’s home that has put us all at ease.  It’s much funner and more relaxed than the big studios that we’ve worked in before.  I love that too, but when you’re paying hundreds of dollars a day to record, on some level it can start to erode your creativity when you’re on a tight budget.  I played cris’s daughter’s pink childrens drumset today for an intro on a song.  I probably wouldn’t have wasted time doing that at a big recording studio where everyone was watching the clock.   This week we do more rehearsals to begin the process of prepping more new songs to record.  The following two weeks we’ll do more overdubs on what we’ve all ready recorded trying to finish that batch of tunes up and then in April we’ll do more basics on the next batch of tunes.  We hope to have all the recording done in May.  Art’s getting married in May so, that’s kind of a deadline to get it all done before he leaves.  Maybe we’ll be mixing while he’s honeymooning.  

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seahorse

We had a really great show this past Friday night at the Seahorse in Sausalito.  The show was put together by Don Zimmer & his record label, Floating Records. Don also played in the opening band Slow Cooked Surprise.  The Seahorse is an upscale restaurant/nightclub on the water in Sausalito.  It’s a big, beautiful venue, much nicer than some of the establishments that we normally play. 

In an effort to make the show special (i.e. try and bring out people), Don asked us to perform our album Breaking Up With Loneliness in its entirety. This is something that we’ve never done before and I gotta be honest, I was kinda nervous about it.  Putting together a set list and putting together a running order of an album are two entirely different things.  We perform mainly in bars.  People want to have fun and forget about their troubles.  They wanna drink beer and maybe dance.  Our set lists usually try to balance those needs with our desire to sneak something artistic into their cerebral cortex.  “Keep It Stupid” usually is our mantra; too many sleepy, sad, introspective tunes does not a happy bar owner like.  Whereas, if you wanna get freaky on your album, go for it!  We compromised: Set one was a bunch of upbeat, fun tunes and some cover songs and set two was The B.U.W.L album.  Would people fall asleep when we played the album?  Would they leave out of sheer boredom?  

1st SET:  I’ve performed at the Seahorse a few times before playing drums with a different band and it isn’t a real late night joint.  People eat dinner and maybe stay for a little while before they gotta get home:  The babysitter is waiting! It is what it is (fav Felsen expression).  The people who were gonna split, split. It didn’t matter how good/bad we were.  Some eardrums were not use to live rock and roll.  It’s never a great feeling seeing someone plugging their ears midway into your 2nd song (twirling hippie woman, you know who you are).  We turned down (a bit).  At times, I could hear the pick scraping across the strings of my guitar, my ELECTRIC GUITAR! Even then it was still too loud for some.  I had to deliver the bad news to our beast-like rock drumming mountainous manbeast of a rock drummer that despite his frustrations at work, he needed to play a bit quieter.  For God’s sake, chardonnay was being served! He took it well.  We toned it down.  We made it through the set.  Managed to play a few new tunes, had people dancing.  People applauded.  CDs were purchased (thank you).  

2nd SET:  A noticeable thinning of the crowd occurred on the set break.  This happens with set breaks.  The people who stayed though really were the die hard music fans at this point.  We had two fans drive up from Paso Robles (3hr 54 min drive) for the show and a few other hardcore Felsen faithful were there.  I joked with the audience about playing the album, letting them know I had some trepidation about doing so, worrying that it might put people to sleep.  Man was I wrong.  I underestimated these folks.  They were with us fully and gave 100 percent.  The rock tunes were easy, those always work, but the quiet stuff???? that’s where this audience really impressed me.  We played Secret Life of Guns, an older couple slow danced.  (Did they know the tune is about the insanity of guns and the epidemic of mass shootings in the US?).  People listened.  We played the title tune, Breaking Up With Loneliness which is about as deep and introspective of a tune as we’ve got.  The bridge says “I dreamed about dying again last night”.  Our hardcore fans were singing along every word.  I went down into the audience and gathered all the people around me and we sang the refrain of that together “I’m breaking up with loneliness”.  That’s powerful to hear a room full of people singing that.  It’s like old time religion and these were the newly converted. It was spiritual.  Did you feel it?  We played a few more easy rockers.  We played Honolulu which again is a pretty deep themed tune.  I’m a cancer survivor.  I had 5 major surgeries due to that shit.  Honolulu is about that awful time waiting for the surgery to begin and you’d rather be anywhere else.  Maybe someplace tropical.  “In my dreams I’d rather be, with a wave crashing over me”.  We finished off with Take Me Back which Felsen has never performed.  We were too lazy and too busy preparing new material to record while touring to work up a proper full band version of the tune, so we stripped it down with acoustic guitar, Dylan on Banjo, Cristian on backing vocals and Art on shaker. All 4 of us went down into the audience.  People huddled around us.  We busked.  It was musical intimacy: all hands on deck with the audience singing along at the end.  It was quiet. Too bad the twirling hippie woman split.  The good people called for an encore and we gave them a debut of a new song Better Thoughts.  I had a front row audience member hold up the sheet of lyrics for me to read--that’s how new the song was.  Lyrics were finished Friday morning.  It was loud, real loud at times, but good, real good.  

Flingers!

In the small time world of business transactions that is Felsen, we have recently learned a valuable lesson.  Get it in writing!  I know, I know...I should have already learned this lesson long ago.  I’ve been burned a number of times.  It’s kinda embarrassing to me that after so many years in the biz that I/we still, from time to time, get bitten in the ass.  But I’ve been burned even when I had it in writing: they, the scumbags who reneged on their contract, knew that it was more of a pain in the ass for me and would ultimately cost me more in legal expenses to pursue than the original amount owed to me. End story: they win, I lose. Small claims court=large pain in ass.  What do you do?  Write a negative Yelp review and teach those unscrupulous motherscrappers a lesson?  (not my style--plus I’m too lazy).  So... I’m gonna vent here on my blog. Maybe write a song about it (probably not). And definitely send at least one more sternly worded email.

A long time ago I played a random drumming gig at a kinda neat venue in Ben Lomond, CA called Henflings.  I made a mental note about the place and tucked it away.  Years later when I put Felsen together and I’d blown through all the invitations to open for my friends bands and it was time to book our own gigs, I reached out to this place and sent an email booking inquiry.  The owner/booker got back to me and said “no dice”.  They book hard rock, blues and cover bands.  Felsen’s music wasn’t a good fit. No hard feelings.  Again I tucked it away.  I knew we rocked hard on stage, but the first album was anything but hard rocking:  sad, dark, introspective and quiet--yes, Molly Hatchet--no. Oh well.  A year and a half later we came out with “Breaking up With Loneliness”.  Definitely plenty of upbeat rockers on that one.  Just for shits and giggles I sent it to him again.  This time he got back to me and offered us a Thurs night.  That’s a long drive down there on a thurs night.  It took a bit of arm twisting, but my band agreed and we went and did the gig and had a reasonably good time.  Not really our long-term desired demographic there in the hills of Santa Cruz, but it’s a gig, we made some money and we sold some CDs.  A few weeks later, they called and offered us a 2nd gig this time on a Saturday night. Wow, were moving up in the world!  

Again we schlepped it down there (144 mile round trip journey).  The gig was OK. Crowd response was average. Some people loved it while some people wanted Molly Hatchet, Skynard and Floyd.  Some people wanted to smoke their locally grown weed with us while others probably wanted to burn us at the stake.  Allow me to explain. I am aware that I push people’s buttons. I get up in people’s faces when we’re playing.  I go out into the audience.  I physically corral people, herding them onto the dance floor when necessary--or break down the “Third Wall”  as they say in the theater world.  Prometheus brings fire to the people! ( I saw harmonica virtuoso Sugar Blue do this same shtick long ago at Rosa’s west side club in Chicago--I took notes.)  I write songs about hot button topics like “Secret Life of Guns”--inspired by mental giant Sara Pallin’s campaign slogan--Don’t Retreat, Reload.  Or a song about the killing of Oscar Grant (Ghost of the American Experience).  I got a big mouth.  I berate the audience about turning off their cell phones.  I strongly encourage people to buy our CDs (especially at venues where there’s no cover charge).  It’s not always comfortable, but it is entertaining.  It’s gotta be done and it’s gotta be better than TV.  Maybe I stepped over the line.  I’ll admit to that. I’m sure I have done so and will probably do so again.  Oh well.  

After that 2nd gig, we all felt like we were done with Henflings.  Again, not our long-term desired demographic.  Just another gig.  We kinda forgot about the place. And then I got an email 8 months later from the new booker who had actually been tending bar both times we previously performed at ‘Flingers.  Well go figure, she loved it.   She’s a fan and she wants us back AND she’s offering us a cash guarantee. Ok, now THAT we can do.  We found a date that worked.  I made a poster, sent them copies, I even sent down a stack of FREE PROMO CDs to hand out to patrons to help get the locals amped up about our gig.  Things were looking up for Felsen! Then about a week before the gig I got an email  cancelling our gig.  Apparently the boss didn’t share her good feelings towards Felsen.  I felt bad for the booker.  She’s a fan.  I’m sure she felt crappy about it.  I emailed her and said thanks for sticking your neck out for Felsen...but yeah we’re gonna need that money regardless.  The boss probably looked at the schedule on his calendar a week before the show and remembered us as the band with the loudmouth singer with left leaning political agenda and said “no dice” to his booking agent.  My bandmates (including myself) turned down other paying gigs that we could have done with other bands on that night to go do a gig with Felsen.  Worse yet was that we had a tour coming up the week after the Henflings gig and we needed that money for essentials like gas, motels, pizza, moonshine and Voodoo Donuts.  Still no word from the good people at ‘Flingers.  No money.  I included my address  where they could send a check.  Go figure, it hasn’t arrived just yet.  Regarding the tour: we managed to slide through that one not in debt. We got lucky on CD sales.  But had Henflings payed us, we could have payed ourselves a little something for the tour. Maybe our wives/fiances would have looked at us a little different had we come home from tour not empty handed--again.  Being a single mom for 4 days while your hubby is out on the road not making any money certainly does suck.  So dear Henflings, I’m waiting on that check.  Until then I will refrain from writing trash on Yelp.  Infact, when that check arrives I promise to write you a Yelp sonnett pledging my eternal love and patronage.  Maybe I’ll even write you a song (ok probably not).