Musical Coffee Break

Tonight on my coffee break I ran down to the Moon & River Cafe to grab a cup of joe and check out some live music. I only had half an hour, so it was a brief sojourn from the rigors of the Gazette copy desk.

 

Anyway, I met this guy Tom Wadsworth several years ago at a party, and our paths have crossed a couple of times since. Most recently I had hoot playing Celtic and old-timey instrumentals with him and a group of scholars at my alma mater. Check out his Web site and get out to one of his gigs real soon.

The Moon & River Cafe just opened a few months ago (maybe a year) in the Stockade section of Schenectady, and it's well worth checking out for the music and the atmosphere (if not for the somewhat dry apple turnovers). It has a calendar chock-full of great local and regional acts, with a heavy bias toward acoustic, folky and rootsy music (you know, the good stuff).

Some family photos

Just a few shots of the kids.

Pining for a new hunk of spruce

 As my wife knows all too well, I've been anxious to buy a new mandolin for the last few months. I had my eye on a fairly cheap but apparently dependable Epiphone model, having given up trying to save the big bucks necessary for a top-shelf instrument.

  How much would you guess an instrument like a mandolin will sell for? The range is awe-inspiring. You can get ridiculous, slapped-together-in-China no-name models on eBay for $50, and on the other end of the spectrum there is this bad boy:

http://www.elderly.com/vintage/items/90U-4291.htm

 

A Little Ink (Shameless Self-Promotion)

Alison Swartz from the Fulton County Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry has mentioned me in her local tourism column:

"On Saturdays, bring your lawn chair to the Gloversville Farmers Market and listen to some live entertainment. Local resident Bill Ackerbauer has played acoustic guitar at the market, and his music has become quite popular in the last couple of years."

- The Sunday Leader-Herald, June 26, 2005

Alison is in charge of promoting local tourism, among other things. She's the prime mover behind the Fulton County First Night event and has done an excellent job with it.

I had Kevin Scott join me on some tunes at yesterday's market, including a cover of Neil Young's song "Love is a Rose," on which I faked my way through a banjo solo. It must take a certain level of insanity to get up in front of strangers in a public venue and play music on an instrument you are barely familiar with. I definitely need more time in the old woodshed with the banjo ... 

Some links, just in case you're interested:

The Fulton County Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry

The Leader-Herald

 

Bo Carter, master of the single entendre

This week I've been listening to a double CD of prewar recordings by country blues guitarist/singer Bo Carter. His playing and his voice are both excellent for the genre, but the thing that stands out (ahem) most about his music is the subject matter and the language. Anybody who knows the first thing about the blues knows the double entendre is one of its standard lyrical devices, and anyone familiar with Robert Johnson's music knows the famous line "you can squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg." But Bo Carter takes this stuff waaaayyy over the top.

  Here's a sampling of  song titles:

(Let Me Put My) Banana in Your Fruit Basktet
Pigmeat is what I Crave
Cigarette Blues ("Smoke my cigarette all night long ...")
Same Thing the Cats Fight About
Mash That Thing
Twist It, Babe
It's Done Got Wet
Pussy Cat Blues
My Pencil Won't Write No More
Ram Rod Daddy
Pin In Your Cushion
Backache Blues

These are just a few of the songs Carter recorded on the subject of sex. Use your imagination on the titles that are less overt. The titles are raunchy enough, but the complete lyrics to any of them would make a sailor blush. One thing that blows my mind (ahem) is that these tunes were mostly waxed around the time of the Great Depression. The other amazing thing is how damned well he plays and sings on these records. I bet seeing him play live at a juke joint would have been like a religious experience, except of course for all the references to his banana and whatnot.  Not the sort of thing you'd hear on mainstream radio, then or now.

No Reason to be Alarmed

I received the following e-mail today from a concerned reader
and fellow blogger:

SmokinBill,

This is an intervention.  You've now gone seven days without posting in your blog and your friends in cyberspace are worried about you.  Put down the guitar or Jameson's or baby or whatever is keeping you from writing something and get back on the horse.  We care about you, man.  

Sincerely,  The Blogosphere

There's really no reason to be alarmed. I have not taken up
heavy consumption of fine Irish whiskey (which Jameson's most
certainly is not, in my opinion. Jameson's tastes a bit like
distilled dirt. I'm a Power's man, more power to your elbow!)

I have, however, had my hands full of both babies and guitars
lately. The good news is that I'll be cutting to part-time
status at work in a few weeks, meaning I'll have lots more time
at home with the family and a bit more time for pickin' and
grinnin'. The other reason for cutting back my work schedule
is to leave more time for school in the fall. I've got 8
credits down and 24 to go on my master's.

On the musical front, the following news: Last week I started my
regular summer gig at the farmers market in Gloversville. I'll
be playing there every Saturday (except July 9 and 16)
from 10 a.m. to noon through September. I'm trying to arrange
for someone to fill in for me on the days I'll be absent.
I've been working on a possible duo situation with
a local guitar player and singer named Kevin Scott. We've begun
building a set of acoustic rock and other rootsy stuff, but it will be a
few more sessions before we know for sure how it will work out.
I'll keep you posted. (I'm soliciting ideas for possible band
names ... "Fruits of Sheer Whimsy" and "Children of
the Chicken" are right out.)

Raking and baking them also not nice

 

We had a story in the paper today about this guy, who's accused of shaking his 5-week-old baby to death in a hospital room in Schenectady. Very sad. It's the sort of thing that is often met with the comment that the law should require people to get a license to have children. I'm not sure about that, but I have another proposal that might completely rid the world of the nasty baby-shaking phenomenon: The parents who get stressed out by their kids but don't take it out on the kids should have the right to take it out on the parents who do. As a stay-at-home, work-all-night dad, I know I would be able to tap into a large reserve of frustration given a few minutes alone with one of these cretins.

A Brief Return to my Art Inquiry

For those of you who might have been nonplussed by my entry a few weeks ago about the difficulty of judging and appreciating art, I came across a little piece of art criticism recently that I think you might enjoy.

Thomas Hoving wrote the piece for the Los Angeles Times about the classic Grant Wood painting "American Gothic." (The image I've inserted here is a spoof of the painting for acoustic music lovers, courtesy of Mandolin Cafe.)

I love the fact that the man in the overhauls and jacket is the painter's dentist, and the woman is his sister.

I won't include the whole piece here, which probably wouldn't be legal, but I'll give you a taste of Hoving's clear summation of the significance of this iconic American painting:

"American Gothic" is an exquisitely painted portrait of the
highest quality that ranks with any of America's great portraits. It
is gentle, mischievous and satirical. It is packed with sophisticated
visual puns and renders homage to a golden age of art -- the Northern
European late Gothic period -- without slavishly aping it.
In short, it's a crackling, iron-hard yet sinuously soft,
killer-diller study of a slice of humanity, perhaps of a bygone era
but one that resonates today, proclaiming something ancient and
enduring -- and something sacred, too.

Here is a link to another informative piece about the painting: The Art Institute of Chicago

 

A Wee Film

I thought I'd throw this link up on the old blog in case anybody has missed it on my main Web page. It's just a short movie of me playing a Mississippi John Hurt song called "Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me." It's only noteworthy because the software I edited it with allowed me to make it look like a grainy, old black-and-white flick.

If I can find the time (not likely), I'd like to do a short film on my hometown. I'm thinking it would be two minutes of footage showing some of Johnstown's highlights and lowlights. If you care to suggest a site that should be included, leave a comment here on the blog or e-mail me at smokinbill@aol.com.

Our New Motto

Our 3-year-old son Liam has taken up the bizarre habit of licking his baby brother on the forehead. Yes, licking him. It's strange and unsettling, but for our household it seems par for the course. Simply telling Liam "No! Don't Lick the Baby!" doesn't seem to have any effect, so Jen composed the following catchphrase, which we as a family have adopted as our new motto:

No lickin' ... unless it's chicken!

Liam enjoys the rhyme so much that it successfully distracts him from the licking of 6-month-old Carter (aka "Baby Goose," which is another story altogether). However, he has started responding to our cries of "No Lickin' ..." with the response "Baby Chicken! Baby Chicken!"  Which I take to mean either Liam thinks his baby brother is a small chicken, or he is simply asserting that Carter tastes like chicken.

All this talk of babies and chickens reminds me of an experience I had while living in Jamaica as an exchange student many years ago. One particular weekend* I visited some other exchange students at the Bonnyview Hotel in Port Antonio. One of the people in the group was an attractive girl from Belgium. Her English was actually quite good, but she could not recall a particular word, so she asked me, "What is it you call the children of the chicken?"  The word she was thinking of was "chick," and she wanted someone to explain to her why somebody referred to her as a "hot children of the chicken." She apparently heard someone thought she was a "hot chick," and in the failed attempt at translation she conjured up an image of a frying egg, which must have seemed vaguely like an insult.  

I feel compelled to note that Children of the Chicken would make a great name for a band. Perhaps I should keep a running archive of all the great potential band names I stumble onto in the writing of this blog. For those keeping track, so far we have "Fruits of Sheer Whimsy" and now "Children of the Chicken."

(* It ended up being a whole week because of a road-wrecking mudslide, but again, that's another story altogether. It seems the Bonnyview Hotel is now called the Fern Hill Club Hotel. Too bad; I don't recall any ferns, but the view was indeed bonny.)