Silas' Blog: Pinball Blog, Entry #2 6/20/2010

This was soooo close to being the perfect pinball tour. So close. Maybe it still could be. It's only mid-tour. I'm in Madison, WI, sitting on a futon, waiting to feel up to being up. More dates to find Junkyard.

It started out great on the pinball front. Did some awesome workshops at the St. Louis School of Folk run by our friends Ryan Spearman and Kelly Wells, went to a diner and were about to go see a Brooklyn-transplanted-to-Austin band (because it is such a rare bird to find these days), but I mentioned pinball to our hosts.

Ryan said, "I love pinball. I haven't played in years but there is a bar in town that I haven't been to yet called 'The Silver Ballroom' with a bunch of machines.

He had me at "Silver."

Rad middle-aged punker bar with 17 machines. No Good Goffers, The Machine, Fly Fishing, and the gamed I worked on: Championship Pub. I played this game for personal and sentimental reasons and I'm glad I did. What a fun and easy game. Who wants, after driving 8 hours and doing 2 hours of work, to play a machine like Twilight Zone that beats you up and takes your money? Nobody, that's who. It is essentially a boxing-themed game. There are a couple of really cool …

Just had my first sip of coffee. Amazing.

… features like the jump rope mini-game and the method of fighting, which is where you shoot the ball up a ramp and hit the animatronic boxer. Easy, fun and totally functional. That's all a fella needs. Heck, if I could find a lady with those kinda traits …

The machines are really well maintained and the staff are punk rock rude, so it's perfect. Plus they have GIANT (I capitalized it so that the structure of the writing would replicate the intended substance — i.e., big beer = big word) PBR cans.

OK. So. I started out not having any interest in truck stops. I'm a Yankee with delicate, over-refined (for my tax bracket) sensibilities. What could I possibly want from a place which hosts the likes of lot lizards and purveys a wide range of radar detector detector detectors?

One word: pinball.

One never expects to be driving around needing to take a leak and get some gas, walk into a Love's in rural Wisconsin, and find a totally working, tilt generous, Medieval Madness. That's right. You heard me. Medieval Madness.  Worked great.  5 plays for $2.   These are the little gifts that get us through right?

Played a gig at the High Noon Saloon .  Cool bar. They had The Sapranos.  Not a huge fan of that machine because of the safe in the middle, which acts as a dead spot that sends the ball down the center hole.  Also the flippers were super weak and misfired sometimes.  This, of course, didn't stop me from putting in $4, but that's neither here nor there.  I finally did get fed up and left a credit in the machine.  It proceeded to blink at me all through our set, like the "Tell-Tale Credit" that Poe wrote about. My rant on stage about it that prompted a fellow in the audience to play if ease the anxiety and ended up in someone else's blog post.  You just never know when your out of proportion, vulgarity laden, tirade is going to touch someone.  You know, really make an impact. Ok.  I'll zip through the rest.

Ames, IA-T3. Easy. Nothing memorable.

Lincoln, NE-Zoo Bar had Scared Stiff, the Elvira themed game.  Got to here a big man with a knife almost get thrown out for shouting as loud as he could about how mad he was that socialists were making his insurance company lose money.  

Lawrence, KS- Replay Lounge is named after pinball and has a  PB theme. However, they only had three, very expensive, new machines-Spiderman 3, Indiana Jone and Batman 2.  Didn't play much cause I couldn't afford it on a musician's pay.

- That is all, Silas

We are now National Resophonic Guitar Artists!

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Very pleased and proud to be recognized by National Resophonic Guitars as "Featured Artists!" Made in America by our fellow Americans, in a happy happy shop made by the nicest cats you should ever meet.

Whoever said "they don't make 'em like they used to" never held a brand new National Guitar, I'll wager.

Slias plays the National Resophonic RM-1 Mandolin exclusively and Mark plays a factory second wood body Estrallita, but recommends the new wood body Triolian as the model closest in sound and feel to his own. And when you do order yours, be sure to ask on one of those SHARP old-school National pick guards, available in mother of toilet seat or tortoiseshell. Tell 'em the Big Fella sent ya!

Go get you one!

Folk Alliance Conferenece, Memphis TN 2011

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Atomic Duo, aka my old pal Silas and I, traveled north to Memphis to attend the Folk Alliance Conference. Our goal was to come meet some folks, pun intended, and see if anybody else likes what we do as much as we do.

As it turns out, lots of folks do! Had a wonderful meeting with Si Kahn, who has been an inspiration for many years, and picked up quite a few pointers from him. Saw lots of truly amazing and talented acts; Jerron Paxton, Two Man Gentleman Band, Betse Ellis and every single band who performed at the Steam Powered Preservation Society's informal showcases, (follow the link to hear two live tunes from us.) Got quite a bit of jamming in with friends old and new. And saw soooo much good music being made by genuinely nice people that it puts to lie the tired yarn that "there's no good music today."

Here's a few little highlights:

First up, from a "Rooted Traditions" showcase hosted by roots guitar maestro Andy Cohen, we were asked to perform only tunes by our "masters." We chose Gil Scott Herron (w/ our jugband rendition of "Whitey On The Moon") and this lovely little Scott Joplin gem, "Scott Joplin's New Rag."

And here's the first tune from our formal showcase, the world debut of Silas' new composition "Trickle Down."

Here's the lyrics (all rights reserved, c Silas Lowe.):

Verse

My mother raised me up alone

working three jobs at a time

Barely made enough each week

to put away a dime

So I don’t want to hear about the wealthy’s pain and woes

Cause they ain’t trickled nothing down to help the working poor

Chorus

They talk about trickle down but I ain’t seen a drop

They say they worked the hardest for all the things they got

But they don’t know the pain to raise a failing dust bowl crop

It’s time things started flowing from the bottom to the top

Verse

They trickled all the money to banks in Switzerland

They trickled all our children to fight Afghanistan

They trickled all the good jobs down to Mexico

But they ain’t trickled nothing down to help the working poor

They talk about trickle down but I ain’t seen a drop

They say they worked the hardest for all the things they got

They ain’t lived a lifetime pushing round a dusty mop

It’s time things started flowing from the bottom to the top

Verse The pressure sure is building

and something’s gonna crash

the credit cards are all maxed out and no one uses cash

Things had best start changing soon

cause the bottoms gonna blow

and they won’t like what boils up from the starving poor

They talk about trickle down but I ain’t seen a drop

They say they worked the hardest for all the things they got

But they don’t hungry child whose crying just won’t stop

It’s time things started flowing from the bottom to the top

Mark's Blog: What is "folk" music anyway?

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

So there I was on Facebook, answering some post when the Folk Alliance conference came up randomly, and one of my FB friends recalls I was a speaker on a panel called "What is Folk" when the conference was held in Austin a few years back. I mentioned that my participation on that panel was greeted with quite a bit less enthusiasm as I had hoped. I was asked "why?" and this is what came out: (For the record, I have nothing but praise for the FA as a body, but the motivations of a great many of it's attendees are completely foreign to my understanding of the word "folk.")  

I proffered the opinion that the definition of "folk music" was music played by people who didn't want to be left out of the party; music of functions and families. That what my pal Brian Marshall told me years ago, and that's as good a definition as I have encountered. This didn't sit too well with "singer-songwriter" attendees, who's only attachment to music (in my experience) is what can it do for them rather than the perspective of the traditional folk musician who sees himself as serving a function of his/her culture as a whole, music only being a slight fraction of the equation; language, faith, dance, cuisine are all intertwined and carried along by music which is definitely not the myopic focus. The "Folkie" wants to tell you all about themselves and their crappy little lives, demanding the attention and validation of strangers, no different from anyone in the entertainment business. (LIKE ME, BTW) They embark on a commercial career and if they don't make their bread, they stop and go back to whatever they should have been doing in the first place. Conversely, the traditional musician is busy living a life inside a culture, and just happens to play music and most likely will for all of their lives, whether or not they are every examined outside of their community.

Scratch a "Folkie" and typically find a person who has actively rejected their own cultures and traditions and then cleave to growing proto-culture that shares their world view (think Kerrville Folk Fest.) Over time, I'm sure this will eventually create it's own "culture" of a sort, but frankly I find it rings untrue to me. And ultimately every one of these types ends up, hat in hand, back at the door of the tradition they spent a life rejecting. (Examples abound, but Faron Young telling Jerry Lee Lewis, who re-entered Nashville after his career in rock fizzled, to "get down on his knees and beg forgiveness" of the the country artists who kept going while rock and roll tore at the fabric of their culture. Don't get me started on Jewish Folkies who re-imagine themselves Jewish only after they struck out with the goyim.) Today there are "Folkie" versions of every great musical tradition on the Earth it seems and the participants of such versions cheerfully identify themselves as dilettantes, which lines up well with the deeply Imperialistic traditions of dominant consumer culture that has hobbled our country. If you presented a traditional musician to this tribe, they uniformly recoil in terror, recognizing that deep down they actually despise the culture from which the music was born and is a part of.

Danny Barnes' essay on "I know why you're not into music" points out that there's "plenty of music for people who hate music, books for people who hate books, etc." Danny also told me years ago in reference to the explosion of "we started as a punk band but now we're trad C & W" bands that overran Austin in the late 80's, "All these cats are all hot to play country music, but none of 'em would dare go out into the country have to deal with the people who like country music. They do alright with the hipsters in town, but I'd like to see them deal with the drunks at the Satin Sabre in LaGrange for instance." Truthfully, all they ever really did was create a self referential "scene" where out-of-work musicians play for other out-of-work musicians and the waitresses who support them. If anyone describes a "scene," this is most likely what they are talking about; a fully inward looking proto-culture. Scenes. Like "Rock-a-Billy," or "jazz" or whatever ghetto a group of people tend to create for themselves. Gather long enough, and share enough of a world view and viola' you have a safe, manufactured little culture. Hippies anyone? I just had to have this whole conversation with a sad character who's been trying to force fit a modern instrument into a traditional dance music for decades now with only an embarrassing admixture to show for it.

As a "Folkie,"and lets be honest here we are talking about people with white skin who speak English almost entirely, he's fully empowered by his wealth and his privilige to see culture as a smorgasboard, where he can pick and choose what elements suit his personal musical vision. How could he see it any way really, having had only consumerism and advertising as a cultural legacy? It can be argued further that it's just those sort of people that propel traditions forward and there is indeed some truth in that line of thinking. However, the important (and missing in this thesis) element is how does this change come to a tradition? From within it? Is there a community of like minded, language, custom and faith connected people who within their own experience accepted change? Or is it the outsider who imposes their concept onto a culture. The steel guitar entered French speaking "cajun" music many years ago, as did the accordion before it, naturally and from an internal experimentation. Same for the arrival of the Greek bouzouki in Ireland and the button accordion to the Spanish speaking south west US. Revolutionary as their introductions may have been, they still arose as a reaction of a community well versed in their own traditions.

My pal Henry Sapoznik has a litmus test for who's coming from inside the music and who haven't done their homework. It's really easy: walk up to a band playing "klezmer-punk" or "klezmer-jazz" or some other clumsy fusion, hold a Colt 1911 .45 up against the band leaders temple and say "Play me an old fashioned Jewish Bulgar, one my zayde would recognize." 9 times out of 10, sadly, the test doesn't end well. But within communities there are indeed master musicians who have imbibed the totality of their own cultures, assuming a collective voice and then and only then are capable of making truly revolutionary music that would in fact speak to the aspirations of a people while propelling them forward. (Call me crazy, but that was precisely what I had hoped Bad Livers had done for traditional American music. Only time will tell if we did any real good, and I ain't holding out hope.) Otherwise, to use an appropriate Yiddish response, 'you can't pee on my back and tell me it's rain." Further quoting Big Mon "that ain't no part of Bluegrass, that ain't no part of nothing." Nothing indeed. PS: Oh, I guess I should make a pitch for Hank Bradley's ground breaking essay on this very subject called "Counterfeiting, Stealing, and Cultural Plundering: a manual for applied ethnomusicologists with 12 tunes for fiddle composed by the author" 1989. Available from the author.