Goodbye...again

Well it is that time again. I am on my yearly pilgrimage to the Kerrville Folk Festival. I am going to live in a flexible nylon hut on the side of a hill in South Texas for a week, get horribly sunburned, hang out with a bunch of stinky hippies, play a lot of acoustic music and...be happy.

The only downside continues to be that I don't own an acoustic bass. I have to either string an extension cord to town(about nine miles away) or play something else, so I take my 12-string.

I'll see y'all in a week or so.

david meissner said:

i've got one you can borrow ...
sent you a PM ...

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I saw your PM last night when I got back. Thanks for the offer! I truly appreciate it in the spirit it was given, but you really really win because you get the extra karma points for having offered it without having had to actually have it come back to you full of kaliche(sp?) dust. Seriously. Thanks, man.

kserg said:

Um... Q always looks out for himself... that how he got those GUNS for ARMS...

We shall not forget that b2dq is also qintar suspect as he is the only one of us to defeat a shark.

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But remember. It was a really little shark.

Kelly Lee said:

Make sure you don't eat the brownies!

Seriously though, have a good time and take some sunblock!

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Even regular brownies don't particularly tempt me. I got fat because of cheese and beer, not sweets. And I even managed to come home much less sunburned than last year.

Pacman said:

Man, try to stay cool! It's HOT here! If you get into town, stop by for a beer!

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It was fairly hot, but not like some years I've gone. And the nights were dropping to the high '60's, so that was awesome. I just had to act like any other Irishman in a desert and move from shade to shade.

Me, again.

Last year the coolest thing I encountered was a way to actually play audible bass at the campfire jam sessions. The same is true for this year.

Last year it was a washtub bass that had a 40" scale fretless neck mounted like the mast on a sailboat. It sounded like a DB, but looked like a washtub bass. It's called a cabletub, and if the maker ever finds a way to make a full range version I'll definitely be having one. I saw two last year, a two-string, and a three-string-tuned EA and EAD. They are not quite ready for the real world, but are definitely getting there.

This year I saw a guy named Jeff playing a Tacoma Thunderchief that was MUCH more audible than one would expect. He also was carrying a small soft sided ice chest. In the small ice chest was a battery suchas you see in a UPS/emergency power supply, a car power amp, and a small speaker. When he wants to be really surreptitious, he also puts one or two beers in it. He had a wireless rig set up as well, so there were no connecting cables to give hints to anyone who didn't figure it out on their own. People kept commenting on how well they could hear his bass. I think he spoiled the surprise on the last night because he turned it up quite a bit.

So, maybe that's what I need to do: rig a small 'stealth' amp and get an ABG that will play through it without being seen to do so. A fretless Thunderchief would be awesome.

Yeah. I had a lot of fun. It's my happy place.

I work First Aid as a volunteer while I'm down there so I'll kind of belong more. This year we had a LOT of gastroenteritis cases at the festival. There was much speculation as to where they were coming from. People blamed the staff kitchens, the toilet facilities, swimming in the river, and any number of other things. I tried to explain about how good handwashing would make things much better and sometimes they got it.

But the part that was funny was that nobody wanted to have to spit out a six syllable word for this stomach flu, so in stead of 'gastroenteritis' it was called variably: the kerr-demic, kerr-coli, kerr-bola, the hippie plague, the hippie crud, and my favorite: hippie-titis.

Unfortunately this year brike my streak as a first aid volunteer. I had volunteered for seven or eight years without having to call an ambulance on my shift. I had had to advise people to get an ambulance while I was off shift, but officially that was their ambulance, not mine. This time I had to call one on my shift. I had two other patients that needed ambulances after that one. Both went by private vehicle in stead, over my objections. The last of those was a probable heart attack on the last night of the festival.

Musically, the festival was amazing for the most part. My wifes coolest and most interesting cousin, Slim Richey, has a new swing band. He found an incredible singer who could basically be his granddaughter, Her name is Katherine Edmondson (I think. It's like that if that wasn't it.) so the band is now "Slim Richey and Kat's Meow". They were awesome. Slim's wife, Francie plays DB in the group. They also have a drummer and trumpeter whose names I can't remember.(Efram and Bobby? Somebody I met there was named both of those things.)

I got to jam with Dana Cooper. He's incredible. I saw Tom Prasada-Rao and his new wife Cary Prasada-Rao, formerly Cooper. She used to be a backup singer he had worked with. Then she became his singing partner (Collectively they're the Dreamsicles.) then about three weeks ago she became his wife. That's pretty sweet.

This year was the first time somebody I don't know sang one of my songs back to me. That was pretty surreal.

And on 'Devilday' (06/06/06), an impromptu jam out in the middle of the road swung waaaaaaay into strange territory when this one guy started doing acoustic Queen and Black Sabbath songs and inviting people to sing along. War Pigs and Best Friend were both surprisingly awesome done acoustically.

I'll post more again when I get back. I have to go wash all the dust filled clothes we took down, and my washing machine is kaput.

I desperately want one. I mean I really really really really want one. I have a serious burning urge to have some kind of bass that can be heard clearly while playing outside with about a half-dozen dreadnaughts.

I mean...yeah. They're OK.

Whoa. I almost lost my cool there.