A Gringa Like Me

 

Well I’m spending a lot of time in my room in Mexico now; I have a nasty head cold or flu something.  Maybe it’s dengue fever.  I hear they have that floating around out here. Anyway,  I’m still gonna play tonight.  My set is at 12:30 tonight.

We’re playing mostly for the expats down here, generally a wizened and ropey-veined  bunch of heavy drinkin fun-lovin’ retirees. And there are the volunteers who run around helping us all out.  

 In fact, one especially sweet lady, Jacqui, who was born here when it was a beautiful gringo-less fishing village, told me the real story of her childhood here, how her father took them out in the fishing boat and when they reached the rocks, he’d say, “Applaud, children!”  and all the hundreds of birds would fly when they clapped their hands.  Now that’s a real show.  That’s the show they should be having here.

It’s funny where we’re staying.  Not exactly comfortable for a gringa like me, but I’m getting used to it.  The overhead fan only turns at tornado velocity as if to want to blow me back over to my side of the border.  Evil fan.  Look.  It's spinning so fast you can't even see the blades.

Phil’s fan chirps.  Incessantly. Like a wind-up tropical bird playing and replaying the floor show of a Disneyland paradise.  Chirp.  Chirp. Chirp.  Next plane of tourists arriving.  Chirp.  Chirp.  Chirp.

Also there’s a weird big picture in a blood-red frame in my room of a baby with curly hair.  Did a family live here before?  Did the baby die?  Why didn’t they take the picture with them?  I’d love to take it down, but maybe the baby did actually die, and its spirit would be pissed off if I took it off the wall. Nothing worse than an angry dead baby.

As long as I’m on the subject of weird, in case you didn’t know, you’re not supposed to put toilet paper in the toilet here.  They say the pipes are really small.  Philbillie says with his indefatigable Philbillie logic, "It’s a third world country, what do you expect?”  but I just don’t get it.  Why would they put in a toilet that can’t handle toilet paper? Now you know in case you ever come down here.  You can thank me later.

And there's more weird in the bathroom, too.  The tile. It's like a gilded and marble Mafioso’s dream of bad-taste luxury, a bas-relief of gold seaweed, coral and bubbles encased in a ring of gold for vapid queen mermaid (that would be me) who to ponder mindlessly, mouth half-agape, as though she has something to say from astride her porcelain and plastic throne.

One last thing.  Can you say door knob warmer?

In the early morning hours when the roar of the diesel trucks and whining scooters have subsided, you hear the ocean waves breaking and loud birds I’ve never heard before, maybe some still left from when this place was a gringo-less paradise. Whoever needed a road, anyway, a luxury hotel, an Italian or sushi restaurant in Mexico?  Drug lords cater to the north American party animals.  Dead bodies lying in the road.  The green palms wave at me in the night.  Here’s what I think.  Everything tells me: gringo go home…

So this promoter walks into a bar…

…and he says, you only have about 400 Facebook fans, so we won’t consider you for our festival.  We might let you come and play-- for free.

Hmmm, (along with some under-the-breath profanities which need not be duplicated here), sez I, my ego bristling.

But wait, I vowed to myself, my New Year’s Resolution, and lifetime resolution, as the new age-etarians are fond of saying, to 

dissolve the ego. 

Getting to that point of needing to dissolve my ego is a bit of a long story, maybe for another blog.  Suffice it to say, it appears to me that we all could benefit by dissolving the ego,  which comprises the brain, judgment, criticism all that fun stuff  and rather work from the heart.  Maybe that’s why we’re all walking around this planet in this lifetime.  Maybe we just didn’t get it last time around…

 

So I decide to go ahead and ask folks to like the music page. First Phil and I sent out a wry little note to our paltry fan base “We Live to be Liked”  which didn’t get too much response. So I look at all my friends on Facebook, about 1200, 1300.  And I’m wondering, who are all these people?  What real contact do I have with them.  I don’t really know most of them at all. And so, I embarked on a project to write each and everyone and ask them if they wouldn’t do me a little favor, and ‘like’ the music page.

 

It’s been a fascinating process.  I've been visiting  their Facebook pages, seeing new babies that have been born, musicians struggling to stay afloat, French people who probably won't understand my post, Dutch people who probably will, folks with parents that had just passed away.   I've been congratulating, consoling, and just being with.  

But each time I got to anybody famous or semi-famous, I was stopped.  I was sure they wouldn’t have time to answer such a puny little cry in the wind. But on I went anyway.  And the surprising thing, they usually all answered, and sometimes I even had a conversation with them.

 

As it turns out the process of connecting with people in this way was far more fun and valuable to me than any festival I might have played.

I’m about halfway through.  So on and on I go wading out in the waters of people, and the circle of friends that is making a small momentary ripple in this vast ocean where we are all the same…

 

More on Maui

Here's an article I recently wrote for Hermonicas.com, a website about women harp players, past and present.
It's got some other pix of the Maui tour.  Hope you enjoy it. -JK

Maui Tour—or I left my Heart in Makawao

Philbillie (my partner, guitar slinger, road manager and engineer/producer) grew up on Maui playing, cutting his teeth in the clubs.  His dad put in the first FM rock radio station on Maui. Philbillie's sister had recently moved back with her 2 boys, so I thought it was high time that we put together a tour and take the occasion to visit them.

Turns out everyone wants to go to Maui.  We brought along bass player Dave Newman, and the fabulous Eric McFadden www.ericmcfadden.com who has played with P-Funk, Eric Burdon, and lots of famous folk too numerous to name here.  Let's just say he's one hot guitar guy. 

While there, we had the good fortune to hook up with a great drummer, Josh Greenbaum, who we wanted to steal away from the island and bring him back to SF.  Might just steal him yet.

We got to stay in a beautiful place, Rainbow Acres, way up a windy road on a mountain in a eucalyptus forest.  It’s a farm where they grow and sell all kinds of succulents and cacti.  Wherever we went we were making fast new friends and fans.

Philbillie had some old radio contacts and we played a benefit for the community radio station there, Radio Mana'o, making fast friends with the DJs there, especially singer/songwriters Dorothy Betz and Les Adams www.betzandadam.com.  Here's a shot of us all jammed into the tiny studio there.

Touring a new market for the first time can be worrisome. You just don’t know if anyone’s gonna show up to hear you, especially if they never heard of you.  We had a number of club dates in the tourist part of the 

island, Kihei, and as the word got out, (on the coconut wireless as they call it)  more and more folks came to see us.  

  

We got to play Charlie’s, Willy Nelson’s hangout, which was really fun, and by the time we did the Radio Mana’o benefit at Casanova, they had one of the best turnouts they ever had in something like 15 years of benefits. 

One of the high points was a house concert that was put together by master guitar-builder Stephen Grimes www.grimesguitars.com.  This guy has built guitars for George Benson (four of ‘em!), Leo Kottke, Willy Nelson, Larry Coryell and the list goes on.  We got to hang in his studio and play with crazy-ass amazing guitars!  Ukeleles, too.  By the way, you better pronounce it right over there—that’s oo-koo-lay-lay.  It’ll save you a few scowls if you say it right.  Steve had put together a very cool house concert for us.  It was the first one he did, and it pretty much sold out.

Here’s Dave Newman playing a Steve Grimes guitar:

If the Tiki gods are willing, we’ll be back in March for another tour, since we’ve had a festival offer.  Another chance to go back to paradise.  It is paradise, yes, but only for the people who are there who make it so.  Aloha and mahalo.

The Kindness of Strangers

Olinda,  Maui

 

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”—Blanche du Bois

(I think she said this after being violated by Stanley Kowalski.)

We are up a winding road in the cool reaches of a forest upcountry.

Driving up there are brown horses, white horses standing the green shade like a Gauguin painting, flocks of stumpy-tailed goats, huge lush overgrowth of vines and flowers, yellow and red hibiscus everywhere that long-haired women tuck behind their ears, white sweet plumeria blossoms fallen onto thick green lawns.

Little jangly suburban houses are scattered over the jungle towns of Makawao and Haiku.  The words are lovely, rolling off the tongue—Kauhikoa,  Kekaolike, Kula…

But further down to the coast the more the island smacks of Southern California beach cities, hotter and stickier, with sad condos, refrigerated big box stores, giant blue ice drinks, fancy desperate resorts, and poor people picking glumly along the shopping aisles looking at price tags.

They say there are ancient ghosts here.  When the moon is full, warrior ghosts, the night marchers, haunt their old paths near ancient rock temples.  They say if you hear their drums, take off all your clothing, lie face down on the ground, or they may tap your shoulder and you will join their eternal march. 

I keep thinking about life here before Hollywood, before 50’s pin-up Hawaiian babes, before Amerika.  Before Captain Cook. 

A couple of millennia of taro pounding, vicious bloody fighting between brown anthill islands.  Fighting each other. But not fighting nature.

The first thing the missionaries did was plant kiawe trees with sharp thorns that would drop on the ground, so the Hawaiians would have to wear shoes.   

And they made the bare-breasted hula dancers wear shirts.  The nakedness shocked their Victorian sensibilities.

In the rich tourist resorts, the grounds are swept immaculate, the green is clipped and natural world held briefly at bay.  Brown men serve white women tall drinks with ice.

Beautiful fruits, both wild and cultivated:  Surinam cherries, white pineapple, mandarin trees. And rats.  Rats under the porch.  Scuttling English rats from Captain Cook’s scuttled ships.  Rats eating the fallen fruit.

The island has been violated by the kindness of strangers.  Waves of it washing up its shores.  Ghost warriors beat their drums and march down the night.

Head of Fire, Feet of Clay

                                                                                  July 13 2011, San Francisco

Four months already and I haven’t come up with another blog.  Swore I’d write one once a month, but I just didn’t get around to it.   

I kept journals for years and years.  Why oh why is it so hard for me to sit down and write the damn blog?

I figured it might interest you to hear the story of some of the songs coming out on the new release...

Head of Fire, Feet of Clay

Got no fear, and I got no hope

Rollin down the river in a tin can boat

Don’t throw me a line ‘cause it’s much too late

Head of fire, feet of clay

My true love taught me not to feel

Taught me when to run, taught me how to steal

So I stole his heart and I gave it away

Head of fire, feet of clay

I’m the last big chief in this one-cow town

Won’t crawl, won’t kneel and I won’t bow down

So they left me lying where I lay

Head of fire, feet of clay

Kick down the dead, climb the graveyard wall

When you get to the top, boy, you better not fall

You laugh when they say it’s gonna end this way

Head of fire, feet of clay

*   *   *    *    *

Well, at the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I especially like this one.  One of the best moments for me in my musical life, Bill Bottrell chose this one (and another one called “Say Goodbye.”) to produce out of all my material.  He played drums on it.  We went up north to his studio in Mendocino which has been closed off for a few months, and in the process it had gotten moldy.  I was singing in an isolation booth, and started to get an asthma attack, but I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to whine, wanted to be brave!…you can hear it in my voice, but it adds an oddly cool quality.

I took inspiration on this song from a few places.  The title was an ”Untouchables” episode from 1960 that came on in the wee hours www.imdb.com/title/tt0737756/ and I thought the title would make a great song.  I didn’t know what to make of it at the time.

The line about the “tin can boat” seems to me like I might have heard something like it in a Dylan song, but I might have dreamed it, or just imagined I heard it and filled in the spaces.  You can get some great lines like that.  I never found the Dylan song with that line.  Maybe you know it.  Well, it’s belongs to this song now.

The last verse’s first couplet comes from a 2008 PBS special on the black Indians of New Orleans called the “Order of Myths.”  There’s an old guy talking about the stuff he sings, nonsense stuff, but I thought it was very poetic:

Make fire, make thunder

Kick down tombstones

Midnight put the dead on the wall

Dude tell you I’ll make a tireless climber

Slip the wall

Get to the top

you better not jump or fall

Help Wanted

Well, we’re got seven tunes in the can.  They are sounding better than anything I’ve done before!  And we think we might have a few songs that might have legs.

The question now is how to get them into the right hands.

As we all know, the music business is a tough biscuit to chew. It's a shark pool, so you really need a shark on your side if you don't want to be trampled in the dust.  Heck, you’d need a landshark…

 Is anybody out there up to the task? Are you willing to break a few legs, cut off a few thumbs, and maybe just be a little ruthless? Would you trade your grandmother to Somalian pirates for the chance to have your client make the big time? Lord knows that what it takes these days. 

Back in 1966, in the time of the Summer of Love, The Beatles gave David Crosby an advance tape of the song, “A Day in the Life.” When Buffalo Springfield's manager found this out, he sent an attractive young girl over to Crosby's house to steal the tape. 

He then took it to the biggest DJ in L.A. and offered it to him with the stipulation that he play his clients' new song, “For What It's Worth” every time he played the new Beatles’ song. A scoop like that wasn't to be passed up, and so the deal was made. By the end of that summer, everyone in L.A. knew “For What It's Worth” like it was the national anthem, and it made the charts.

I want a manager like that--someone willing to go the whole nine yards, someone who will bend every effort, and comes from a long line of effort-benders. I want someone who won't take no for an answer, even while being pepper-sprayed or menaced by attack dogs in front of a large record company's headquarters. 

It takes a lot of wherewithal to front a successful band, and we want someone with large quantities of it.
Are you out there? We'll leave a light on for you.

Creating the Perfect World

Philbillie says I should blog about Bill. Okay.  Here’s what happened. 

We decided to use as a part of the new record an older recording of one of our favorite songs “Head of Fire, Feet of Clay” that we tracked some years ago with super-producer Bill Bottrell (Michael Jackson, Sheryl Crow,  Tom Petty, Shelby Lynne, the list goes on) at his studio in Mendocino.  

We had high hopes of him recording the entire album, and we took home a CD of a rough mix, thinking we might finish it someday with Bill. But as it turned out, after the first sessions, Bill was lured back to the bright lights of Tinseltown.

We thought about re-recording it from scratch 

but realized that his version had really become the definitive one for us.  But we only had (what we thought) was a rough mix. 

When we recently talked to Bill about doing a final mix for this song, for various reasons, it wasn’t feasible to remix, and in any case upon re-listening Bill thought it was excellent as it was and gave us his blessing to release it.  However, we wrote that "in a perfect world 'Head of Fire' would have one more element, sustaining, like either steel or strings," but added that the mix sounded blankety-blank awesome.

So we gave a holler to our first-call pedal steel guy, Dave Zirbel who did a gorgeously executed track.  Here’s a glimpse of Dave at work on the tune:

http://tinyurl.com/4pe53qn

 And so I guess it’s done now, at last.  But isn’t the perfect world always a work in progress?