Sorry for the silence on the blog front.  I’m sure that those of you who’ve been checking in here at BFS&T know by now that when I don’t write anything for a while, it usually means that I’ve been experiencing a deluge of activity in real life, which leaves precious little time for reflection, let alone writing.  This time has certainly been no exception, with lots of out-of-town gigs, lots of recording, and lots of gallivanting around the Pacific Northwest at all hours of the day and night.  Here’s the view from the cabaret venue where PolishCellist and I played in Seattle a week ago:

IrishBand played in Astoria, Oregon last weekend, as part of a poetry festival that brought in the likes of Bill Carter.  There was a freak snowstorm that night, and we somehow found ourselves in the midst of a snowball fight or three, always with random people.  That was probably my favorite memory of the trip.  Also, should you find yourself in that neck of the woods, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Clemente’s restaurant.  Their food is incredible, and they treated us like royalty during our stay there.  We became fast friends with the owners and staff.

In the midst of all this, my friend and I started a new band in which she sings and writes lyrics and melodies, while I write the music and play all the instruments on our recordings.  So far, I’ve been playing acoustic guitar at our gigs, but the recordings have lots of other instruments, so naturally, the subject of finding more band members arose.  I’ve been involved with the singer-songwriter scene for the last ten years, in which the members may change many times.  I’ve also been invited to join existing bands, whether to replace a member who has left, or to bring my own particular type of musicality to the band.  It’s been a really long time since I’ve played an active role in recruiting band members for a project of my own.  It’s exciting and daunting at the same time, and that calls for a story.

For about four years, I was the lead guitarist and producer for a woman who, for the pseudonymic purposes of this blog, will be called Bird.  Our original plan was for me to be the bass player, since good bass players are so hard to find, but after auditioning a few guitarists (and realizing that the overwhelming majority of guitarists play in the exact same blues-based way, which was of no interest to us), we decided that I should have that role and that we should seek a bass player instead.  We auditioned a couple of bassists, one of whom bragged about his ability to play the upright bass, but as soon as he pulled it out, it was obvious to us that he was clueless about it.  We finally did find a really good player, who had actually auditioned for us as a guitarist first, but was still interested even after he found out about our change of plans.

Once that hurdle was behind us, the search was on for a drummer.  The three of us knew that this would pose the biggest challenge, since good drummers are already scarce enough, and a newly-formed band has precious little to offer, financially speaking.  We started by posting an ad on ListByCraig, which turned up the usual suspects of tire-kickers and carless (sometimes even drumless!) slackers.  We then posted a free ad in MessengerGodAlternativePaper, which yielded us a couple of interesting prospects.  ProspectOne, in his late twenties, showed up with an endless series of stories about bands he’d been in and tours he’d been on, and the layers of stickers adorning his drum cases lent credence to his stories.  His playing, however, did not.  He was horrendous, and if you closed your eyes, you’d have thought that a seven-year-old was behind the drums.   We slogged through three or four songs (he’d driven clear across town to play with us, after all), then thanked him and told him we’d let him know.

Not long after that fiasco, we drove out to BeaverSuburb to play with ProspectTwo, a guy in his mid-forties who was becoming overwhelmed by his career as a doctor, and who wanted to spice up his life by reconnecting with his love of playing the drums.  He had a beautiful house, and a beautiful drum kit, and a beautiful PA system to sing through.  He cooked beautiful frittatas for us (I had to check the spelling of ‘frittatas’ just now) and squeezed beautiful fresh orange juice for us by hand.  He was a great guy, and extremely intelligent, and we quite enjoyed his company.  His drumming, like that of the previous guy, left a bit to be desired.  His skills were not nearly as lacking as the other guy’s, certainly, but his playing was far from solid, and despite all the positive qualities he offered, we knew he would never be able to meet our drumming needs.

After that round of auditions, we were starting to become disillusioned, and (if I’m going to be completely honest) even a bit jaded.  We tried a new tactic, which was to actually pay money and place an ad in the Musicians Wanted section of the main weekly alternative paper in town, which provided us with a distinctly higher caliber of applicants.  The next person we auditioned was amazing.  He had just moved to Portland, he was a great player, and he had a great personality as well.  We felt like the four of us gelled as musicians, and we sounded like a real band for the first time.   After we had played through our list of songs, we sat around and chatted about Life In General, and about Music, and about Other Stuff too.  Before we knew it, another hour had passed.  Then, the subject of Money came up, and the atmosphere in the room completely changed.  He turned quiet and weird and defensive, and blurted out something about how he needed to be compensated for this and that if he was going to be in the band, and that he was used to making so much money in his other bands back in Colorado or wherever, and that if we couldn’t guarantee that much, he’d have to look elsewhere.  We had no delusions of grandeur, and we made it clear to everyone potentially involved that this was a brand new band, and we might never make money, but we believed in what we were doing, and we expected all of the members to feel the same way.  He made an awkward getaway, and the three of us were left scratching our heads.  Years later, he became a well-respected drummer around town, but I daresay that most people will remember him for being robbed and assaulted in the middle of the night while riding his bike, then being run over by TWO different cars driven by drunks who were friends caravanning home after a night of partying.  Both of them fled the scene.  Drummer did not survive, and the one driver that was convicted was sentenced to an insultingly small fine, a few days in jail, and a short time in a drug treatment program.  In a strange twist of musical fate, I was invited to play cello and accordion on a song that was written by a friend of mine a few months ago as a tribute to him.  The song has recently been released, and I just saw an update on SocialNetwork that said it will be played on a local music ‘spotlight’ show tonight.

The final guy we met had also just moved to Portland from Yakima, which is where I grew up too.  He asked lots of pertinent questions about the songs, and played very tastefully and dynamically.  He even commented on Bird’s blue guitar, which he said matched his blue drum set, and meant that he was ‘in.’  He was our guy, and we all knew it.  The lineup was complete.

The four of us played together for the next few years, until the electric version of the Bird band split up and morphed into an acoustic lineup that didn’t involve the three of us.  But we’re all still friends, and Bassist and Drummer are still out and about.  They even play together in a new incarnation of a really great band that’s been around for a while.  Drummer was lucky enough to tour with the Canadian band The Paperboys, which was a tremendous opportunity, not least of which because they were his favorite band.

We tried out a keyboard player for a month or two, but he could never make time to rehearse with us or learn the songs, and he was going to Australia, and he always wanted to come to my place and videotape my hands when I played the parts, so that he could learn them exactly.  He always seemed to have a reason why he didn’t know the songs.  To be fair to him, he was a genuinely nice guy, and he even came to watch a couple of our early shows, but it didn’t quite work to have him in the band.

This is what the audition process is like, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s challenging, and grueling, and fun, and interesting, and frustrating, but ultimately rewarding, and it’s a necessary part of the musical life.  The good news is that I’m not just starting out anymore, and I know a bunch of people, and I have lots more experience under my metaphorical belt, and I have a MOSTLY good reputation, but it’s still going to be a tough process.  Who knows; I may even end up being the drummer in this new band.  For now, the biggest news is that the two of us submitted a song to the annual compilation of up-and-coming Portland bands, and we’ll find out this spring if we make the cut or not.  IrishBand submitted a song too, and both songs are very unusual in the overall Portland ‘scene’, which I believe will help our chances immensely.

Naturally, I’ll keep you posted.

2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3′s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

déja vu – what it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

I’m not really sure what to write about the last week.  I started about ten different sentences, and all of them seemed inadequate.  This may be a long entry.

The week was a flurry of activity, and much of it was either painful or surreal.  Mom’s friend was with her overnight to hold her hand and get her through the worst of the tremors and fits of sadness that woke her in the middle of the night.   The phone would start ringing early in the morning, and it wouldn’t stop until late in the evening.  The three of us (Brother, Mom’s friend and I) screened all the calls and relayed the messages, but after a couple of days we let the answering machine do what it was designed to do.  Everyone was very sweet and wanted to offer their condolences, but it was too much for Mom to deal with, so we handled them as tersely and courteously as we could.  We made sure that one of us was with Mom at all times, because she had occasional meltdowns, and whoever was around would go and wrap their arms around her while she sobbed.

We each had a thousand different feelings about this whole situation, and we spent lots of time discussing them.  We talked about the good things Stepdad did for us, the predicament he left Mom in, the personal quirks he had, and the mountain of tasks that lay ahead.  Brother started going through her finances, and luckily she was well taken care of in that respect.

In his note, Stepdad said that he wanted to be cremated, and that he didn’t want a graveside or memorial service.  “Cheap everything” was what he specified.  I’m glad that Mom decided to have both services, though, because it’s been hard enough to make sense of it all, even after seeing him at the funeral home.  In fact, when we arrived for the viewing, the woman asked if we were with the family, and we said we were.  I stepped up to go in first, and the woman motioned for me to walk down the hall.  I was expecting a chapel or something, with a little room on the side, so when I walked in to the tiny viewing room, I found myself right in front of the coffin and was very much caught off guard.  Stepdad looked like himself, and they did an excellent job of restoring him, especially given the nature of his death.  When Mom was able to go in, she made a point of touching his hair on the ‘natural’ side of his head that had been unaffected by the gun shot.

There were lots of family gatherings, as you would imagine.  They went surprisingly well, despite the fact that some of us had not seen each other for many years.  Times like those were when I felt the most estranged and uncomfortable, because some of the people there were ones I’ve made a conscious effort to keep a safe distance from.  I have a pretty low threshold for intense socializing anyway, but I had to ignore my impulses to flee and had to just tough it out.

Stepdad’s daughters scanned a ton of pictures and made a great slide show for the memorial service, which was very touching and honest.  They also had some pictures enlarged and placed on the table in the entry of the church, along with some things of his to remember him by, like his fishing equipment and tool bags that he took everywhere. That was a really nice touch.

The pastor of the church was friends with Stepdad, and he knew him well enough that the service felt genuine and unforced.  The church belongs to a very conservative denomination, and until very recently, they believed that when someone commits suicide, they are instantaneously banished to hell.  Thankfully for Stepdad, that belief has been tempered by modern knowledge of depression and mental illness, but I’m sure that some of the older folks in the congregation will be struggling to reconcile that.  The pastor said that this was his first time dealing with a suicide, and he was very candid about the fact that he did some research and found that the banished-to-hell idea came from Constantine instead of “from God”, so he felt very sure that Stepdad was where he wanted to be.  He spoke a great deal about depression being an illness that Stepdad struggled with, and that it wasn’t the work of evil forces or anything.  The previous pastor spoke a bit as well, and there was a lot of talk about Satan and evil, in a way that left a bad taste in many of our mouths.  That stuff is fine for a church service, but not for a memorial.  Incidentally, I still remember the last time I went to that church (we sort of went along with my mom for a while), and the theme of his sermon that day – “We Think Too Much” – was diametrically opposed to my spiritual ideologies, which were (and still are) tenuous even in the best of times.  The nicest part of the service, I thought, happened when they had an ‘open mic’ time for family and friends to share their memories.  There was just the right blend of laughter and tears, and it was very beautiful.  Brother read one of the Psalms earlier in the service, and I played cello during the slide show.

The rest of the week was spent taking care of Mom and of her house.  We all pitched in to do some of the things that needed to be done, and Brother’s Wife spent a bunch of time cleaning the house thoroughly.  We’d spent so much energy planning the service, and making the programs, and all the zillions of things that you have to deal with during the worst possible time, that by Friday, we were feeling a bit claustrophobic and needed some time apart, so Brother and I asked if we could have the evening free to meet up with a friend or two.  She readily agreed, and we gladly took the opportunity for a night out.  Brother and I went back to our respective homes on Sunday.  My drive home was pretty scary, since northwestern Oregon got hit by a particularly heavy storm that night.  It was so hard to see the road that I stopped in Cascade Locks to eat a veggie burger and calm my rattled nerves.

Since then, we’ve all been struggling to make sense of everything.  It still doesn’t seem real.   Both Brother and I have been feeling a distinct lack of motivation.  I had a few things that were planned already, and I’m doing them all, but I’m doing them on auto-pilot, and I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience a lot of the time.   This is Halloween weekend, too, so there are a thousand parties and things happening, but my first inclination is to give them all a miss.  This would ordinarily be a week of celebration, since my birthday was a week and a half ago, and the previous few birthdays have all been stretched out into two-week extended parties, but I’m just not up to that right now.

There are more things, good and bad, that I may add to this later, but I wanted to write a little bit and start the process of focusing my thoughts again.  This kind of thing never makes sense, though, and many questions will always remain unanswered.

My stepdad committed suicide yesterday morning.

I got the call from my mom yesterday afternoon.  She asked if I was sitting down, and I told her I was.  I expected to hear that one of the dogs had died, or that one of her elderly friends was suffering from cancer or something, but she said that she came home from exercise class and was surprised by some notes Stepdad had left for her, then she went into the garage and found him dead from a gunshot wound.  None of us had any reason to see this coming.

He’d been suffering from a subtle chemical imbalance for three decades, and it had been well-managed the whole time, but his illness had taken a turn for the worse during the last couple of years, and he’d been unable to slough off his hopeless and obsessive thoughts.  He would sit listlessly in a chair, with a book in his lap, and stare off into space.  It was heartbreaking to see him at such a low ebb. He felt guilty for things he’d done, and for things he’d left undone, and for things that were outside of his control.  A year or so ago, his doctor had found a medication that seemed to work, at least for a while, but for the last few months, none of the various medications had taken hold.  Two weeks ago, the doctors discovered that he had low levels of testosterone, so they added some new medications to the anti-depressants they’d already prescribed.

I have to be honest; our relationship was challenging and difficult, even in the best of times.  We were about as opposite as it’s possible for two people to be.  When I was in high school and college, we could barely speak to each other without arguing.  Once, he even pushed me backwards down the hallway after a particularly ridiculous argument.  When I walked out the door that day, I knew I was saying the harshest and most shocking words his conservative Christian ears could hear:  “Go to hell.”

Over the last ten years, things have been much better.  He and I have mellowed with time and age, and my mom has been very good about creating bonds, as well as family events and traditions, and Stepdad and I became much closer.  But, as is the case with so many families, it’s never been easy.  That being said, he’s made great strides (and so have the rest of us) and I would say that this branch of our strange family tree is definitely the better for it.  He was the strong, silent type; always quick to help in whatever way he could.  He could fix absolutely anything, and he had an uncanny intuition for the way things worked, even if he’d never set eyes on them before.  It didn’t matter whether the things were cars, washing machines, or fruit trees; he somehow knew exactly what it took to make them flourish or perform at their best, which is an amazing gift.

I can’t help but think that the solution to his chemical imbalance was a mere week or two away, and that if he’d been able to hold on for a short time longer (or if he’d used pills instead of a gun) he’d still be here, and we’d all have that much more time together to sort out the medical issues.  For the last few months, he was gamely going along with the regimen of pills, and checkups, and everything that goes along with that sort of thing.  The e-mails and phone calls from my mom have been hopeful and promising.

I don’t know what else to say.  I can’t imagine what my mom must be going through.  I’ve had a couple of friends who have attempted suicide (both of whom are thriving now, thankfully), but Mom and Stepdad were married for almost twenty-five years, and they have countless links and ties to each others’ lives.  Luckily, Mom has people she can turn to for support during this terrible time, and she has a close friend who’s staying with her until my brother and I can get up there and be with her too.  Brother is heading over tonight, and I’m going tomorrow. Sister-in-Law and Niece will be joining us later in the week for the funeral service.

Please send some good thoughts (it’s too soon for phone calls) in my mom’s direction; she’ll be needing them.  And for God’s sake, if there’s someone in your life that you appreciate, do them a favor and let them know it.