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2000 Journal

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02/14/00 - Placed an ad for musicians in the Pitch. It starts on the 17th. I am trying to compile something non-thundering so that we can rehearse in our space. I referenced don-thompson.com in the ad so that players who are online can see what I'm about. It also affords me the chance to elaborate on the ad without the 20 cents-a-word charge. By the way, these ads have yielded some long-time friends and players over the years, including John Bara, Cris Walkinshaw and Dave Bales.

02/17/00 - First day of Pitch ad. Ad will run for 3 weeks. Only a guitar player so far.

02/18/00 - Three more guitar players. A couple of promising calls. I may have to compromise on my original philosophy and just find guitar players who are willing to switch to bongos and whistles. Still, the run is early and the weekend should be interesting.

02/19/00 - Still collecting names and numbers. I almost have enough people compiled to schedule a "get-together" for the first wave of callers.

02/22/00 - Got some promising calls today. Still no calls from my "ideal" player but that's probably a good thing. I think for this project to be a bit outside the box I may have to continually alter some of my perceptions about influences and instrumentation.

02/26/00 - The responses have gotten both, more targeted and more bizzare the longer the ad runs. I am still disappointed that I haven't received very many calls where I feel like the caller and I are on the same page.

03/01/00 - I have one week left in the ad. I may try to put up some flyers to fluff up my options.

03/05/00 - I've talked to another 15-20 guitar players in the last 4 days. Not even a bass player. A 10 year-old called up wanting to play trumpet.

03/07/00 - Got a few responses from non-guitar players but they weren't good matches. One witless character rang up just to argue with me about jazz music. They must not have run cable in his area yet.

03/08/00 - Well, John Evans (I met John and Steven through an ad I answered on 06/22/95 and played with them until 11/08/96) planted a bug in my ear about calling Scott Stemmermann, who is a great guitar player. I dropped him a line and he is in! He asked if I had approached Steven Brown about playing bass. I hadn't since he is busy with Evans in Moxie. I rang him up and he is in! Called back the two percussionists that I wanted and one of them has since found work but where one or more are gathered...

03/09/00 - Talked to a steel guitar player today. Nice guy and may work out later. Right now the plan is to get Scott, Steven and I together and develop a few things and then start adding players in a few weeks. I'm very excited to be playing with these guys again.

03/11/00 - Got a call from Chris, a percussionist. Great attitude and has lots of neat noise-making devices. Will try to get together with him and Crag, a drummer, after a few Thursdays with Scott and Steve.

03/13/00 - Talked to a violinist. Gonna go hear him play on Friday. Met with the percussionist and gave him a CD of song samples to listen to. John Bara loaned me his Takamine for our first practice on Wed.

03/15/00 - First practice. We just plowed through a handful of the songs that we did as Big Perm. It was a little awkward but afterwards we talked a little about how to make the songs a bit more colorful and dynamic so the next practice, Tuesday, should be more interesting. We may have a drummer by then too which may or may not be a good thing.

03/17/00 - John Evans and I went to check out the violinist but I wasn't sure who he was and we had to leave before they started playing.

03/18/00 - Aborted talks with drummer because he was late. Late is bad.

03/21/00 - Second practice. We had our first schedule change and Scott was the casualty. It was actually OK because it gave Chris, Steve and I a chance to work out a few songs. We are currently doing Two Pale Blackberries, Idol of Idols, I Be Safe, Two Heads And A Tail and a new ditty that Steven introduced. Steven thinks that he has a drummer for us.

03/29/00 - Third practice. Another schedule change so couldn't get everyone together. Scott, Steven and I ran through the list and worked on a new ditty. I have an idea for a lyrical variation on Hey Hey Paula for one of the new songs.

03/29/00 - Took Stevens second ditty applied some ideas that I woke up thinking about. Ran another Pitch ad for some wacky instrumentation. 4th practice tonight.

04/08/00 - Got some promising calls from keyboard players and drummers.

04/17/00 - Plopped up some pictures from tonight's practice and some sound files from last week's practice. Talking to drummers the rest of the week.

04/24/00 - Ryan sat in on drums this evening. Frisky and inventive. Gonna try Doug next week. Worked on I Be Safe and tried some jamming, which I am horrible at.

05/01/00 - Douglas sat in with us tonight. Seemed to work quite well and he lives awfully close by. We worked some more on I Be Safe and on the Egyptian Santana thing of Steven's. Right now our "set" consists of Hey Paul, Monkeys/Idol of Idols, Two Heads and a Tail, Two Pale Blackberries, I Be Safe and Steve's new song.

05/25/00 - Douglas is going to drum with us until he finds a working band so we are still essentially looking. I am desperate for a clarinet player. Chris suggested going to UMKC and posting flyers there.

06/05/00 - Stemmermann has left to populate the earth two at a time. Phillip Brown may take his spot or we may just leave it open for now. Lots of development on the new material front. Doing more things with keyboards. Steven and I are playing with trading Cakewalk idea files back and forth through the net. Will post some .mp3s as soon as the new songs grow words.

06/07/00 - Very productive rehearsal. Worked on Steve's old "Santana Thingy" which is now operating under the new temporary title of "Egyptian Sage". Things are coming together fabulously well. Will be talking to some folks over the next two weeks about assuming a keyboards/guitarist role and still looking for wind instruments. May replace some of the existing GFS stuff on the music page with some newer versions this week.

06/11/00 - Came up with an idea and a rough outline for words for the Egyptian Sage. Cris Walkinshaw is going to drum with us for fun one night this week.

06/22/00 - John Bara sat in with us. Phil is coming along nicely. Had a very productive practice and made significant progress on I Be Safe, Egyptiain Sage/Animalpeople and Steve's new frisky ditty.

06/24/00 - Steven and I spent a lot of time talking today and, based on some personnel issues, decided to make some changes. I am going to move to drums so we will be talking to some people to fill a acoustic guitar/keyboardist role. Then we will go ahead and start work late in the summer on recording the handful of tunes that we know. When that has been accomplished, we can start working on adding the additional instrumentation that we want for the band. I think having a plan with a goal at the end will be a big positive. I already feel sort of relieved.

06/26/00 - So, Patrick is in. Patrick sings, plays guitar and writes songs. He met Steven and John Evans at some point after I left Big Perm. I'm moving to drums. Phil is taking Scott's place. Steven and Chris stay put. We will start trying to do some double practice weeks so that Patrick and I can get up to game speed before we start recording.

06/29/00 - First rehearsal with most of the new arrangement. Scott finished making his twins! Probably won't have any new sound files for at least a couple of weeks when everyone is on the same page.

07/13/00 - Had our 4th rehearsal with the new arrangement. It's tightening up nicely. Patrick has a great ear for harmony and is already sweetening up the songs vocally. We actually got through the set quickly enough last night to start work on 3 new songs, including Jesus and I. We are going to record practice tonight so I'll be adding some long-overdue sound clips to the site tomorrow morning.

07/16/00 - I am a bit behind on updating the sound files for GFS. The few things that I have up are back when it was just Stemmermann, Brown, Marks and myself. The lineup has changed pretty dramatically since that time and I need for the site to reflect that. The problem is that there is a learning curve when you add new people so some of the songs still have some hiccups in them. Also, sometimes there are recording glitches (once the electronic click track was left on all practice) or challenges that cost us a night's worth of music to discover and resolve. There are some promising moments from the last two practices but I may just wait until this Thursday and then I will have 3 weeks of material to pick from.

07/21/00 - Chris rejoined us last night so we are pretty much a full band now. Still would like to have a wind instrument or two but we already have 5 people jammed into a pretty small room. I have 3 practices of mp3s so will add some sound files this weekend.

07/22/00 - Posted GFS versions of Animalpeople, Hey Paul, Monkeys, Idol of Idols and Two Heads and a Tail.

07/25/00 - Very productive practice. Smoothing out Pat's new songs and also worked on an ooom pah song that I am dying to write words for. I also need to finish words for the Manic song and give it a proper title.

07/27/00 - Pat and Chris were both gone so we worked on identifying and correcting some problems. We added a melody line lifted from Kraftwerk's The Model to Idol of Idols. We also worked on marrying Map of the World and Animal's Snout. It was fun singing those tunes again. I miss David Bales.

08/02/00 - Focused on new stuff. Worked on Squirrel Town (formerly Manic Munchkin) and Sugar Boogie. Talked about starting the recording process in September.

08/05/00 - Moved GFS related materials from Corky Versus The Sun to this site.

08/10/00 - Made a lot of changes to the way we have been recording practices. Didn't get a lot of work done musically but hopefully the things we learned tonight will pay dividends when we begin recording in earnest.

08/15/00 - More struggles with sound so not a real good musical workout.

08/17/00 - Gave up for recording for the night and just played music. What a difference when the red, blinking light isn't on! Going to start recording 2nd week of September.

08/18/00 - Had some ideas for CD names. Suggested "Bandar-log", "Counting Sparrows" and "Sheila" to the fellows.

09/08/00 - Rickey Ricardo did a neat mock-African Martin Denny style tune on I Love Lucy that I nipped for a new song. We worked on it a little tonight. I'm leaning towards Cicadas for subject matter.

09/10/00 - We're down to one practice a week for a while so the logs are going to thin out a bit. We are a couple of weeks away from starting to record songs and are currently in the process of picking a couple to start with.

09/12/00 - Decided on recording Pat's "Down" and either Monkeys or Hey Paul. There are some interesting musical moments inbetween songs during practices that we record but never come back to. Tonight we established a procedure that will let us work on the new bits once a week. Three or four bits doth a song make.

10/19/00 - We compiled some of the extra ditties into a new song called Twelve that I'll introduce words for tonight. We still have a neat little 3/4 number of T-Bone's and my Ricky Ricardo influenced bit to work with. Recording is delayed a few more weeks, which is good because we are really just starting to communicate and participate as a "band".

10/19/00 - Ran through Twelve and it seemed to go OK. We still need to dream up a bridge and some sort of instrumentation for a solo. Talked a bit afterwards about maybe doing a performance when we are done recording.

11/13/00 - I bought an old blue-sparkle Ludwig kit last week. I need to get new heads before we start recording this weekend. We have several new dittys in progress, tenatively titled Peteena, Flap, and Little Joe and Rosalie. I am way behind on uploading new tunes or even new versions of old tunes.

11/15/00 - Pat and I worked on marrying bits for Little Joe and Rosalie. John Evans swapped heads on the drums and tuned 'em up. He's the gift that just keeps giving.

11/16/00 - First time working on Little Joe and Rosalie. We also have music for Peteena Says and words and music for Flap.

11/17/00 - We start recording tomorrow. Last night we selected Animal People and Hey Paul to start with. We are going to start with some of the least-favorite tunes with the idea that by the time we get all of the bugs worked out we will be working on the good stuff. These two songs are fairly straight-foward too. Hey Paul will be done fast and hard tomorrow. At the end of the process we will record a more lounge-like version at a slower speed. We hope to get scratch tracks and good drum recordings for both songs this weekend. Wrote words for Peteena Says.

11/18/00 - Worked from noon until 8 PM. A bunch of that was related to tearing down the drums, setting up the drums, changing rims, tearing down the drums and setting up the drums. We got two pretty strong scratch and drum tracks down. John was great and the sound he got out of the Ludwigs was amazing. Pictures coming soon.

11/28/00 - Having a hard time getting to the set list each week because of all the new songs. In the last couple of months we have added 5 new ditties: Noggin, Peteena Says, Flap, Little Joe and Rosalie and 12.

12/22/00 - We are planning on recording drums next week for 12 and either Animal's Snout or Two Heads and a Tail. Oddly enough, the first two songs we recorded don't have any scheduled tempo changes but virtually every remaining song does. This means that we can't record a scratch track for me to drum to. We'll have to record the drums "live" and pray that I can count to 4 at the proper speeds for about 3 mintues at a time.

12/23/00 - Put up some recent samples of 12, Flap and Noggin. Also added some pics.

12/27/00 - Recorded scratch tracks for Animal's Snout and Two Heads and a Tail. These were both pretty straight forward and we were able to let the drum machine run unattended.

12/28/00 - Steve conquered the tempo issue with the drum machine last night and we were able to get a working scratch track for 12. We discovered a new problem when I was already under headphones and a new Camry's worth of shiny microphones - the trippy sequence at the end is at yet another speed. John was going to fix that by speeding up the end of the song but I managed to pull it off without any aids! This gives us 5 tunes to work with until the new ones are up to snuff or the spring, whichever comes first.

12/29/00 - Added Babble and Raspberry to the set list. Both are partial songs but should come along quickly.

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