Truck Stop

Now, I don't really know if this is the truckers name or if that's what he's haulin' but I know a lot of boys back home in San Francisco that'll be mighty glad to see him pull up. Catching these humorous photos on the road is always a chuckle, but it's the ones you miss that can stay with you a while. While driving back down from Denmark we saw a plain, white truck the said simply on the sides and rear: "SMUT TRANSPORT" but the camera, alas, was not at hand so you'll have to take my word.

Labba-Dabba-Doooo!

O.K., first off. Sorry for the long delay in getting out a new post. We have found that getting to a
Wi-Fi connection is still a bit more difficult than they would have us believe. And most of them are run by large ISP/telco's so they are just raping people out on the road to get online. Yes, there are free ones popping up here and there, but they're few and far-between. Plus, there's a little Catch-22: Finding one requires you to be online, but you gotta find one to get online.

Fortunately, we are in Ingelmunster, Belgium for the Labadoux Festival and are hosted by a good friend, Johanne who has a high-speed line as well as a special fridge stocked high with many of Belgium's finest brews. This festival featured Dave Edmunds as headliner as well as many other cool folk, rock and world-music acts from all over the world.


Jenny and Philbillie sidling up on "Hasta La Pasta" This also marks our reuinion with fiddler Paul Susan who was out with us on the summer of '04 Euro tour.


"Steady" Ed and Ian B. have a little moment with the audience while Thumper does what he does best: THUMP!

Gay Paree: A Day with the Animals

We spent a solid week of 12-hour days laying basic tracks for the latest disk to be titled "Wood & Steel" with our pal Ian Bolin pitching in mightily with guitar and arrangemental duties. After this intensive effort we took off for a few days to recharge the batteries and enjoy Paris. The real reason was to hook up with our old friends from San Francisco, Eric McFadden, Paula O'Rourke and percussionist extroardinaire Wally Ingram. These three have recently landed the dream-gig as back-up band for Eric Burdon known also as "The New Animals" First, though, they did a show as the Eric McFadden Trio at the Paris club La Java on Wed night as a release party for two of Eric's disks on the french label "Bad Reputation" one of which is "Devil Moon" recorded and co-produced by yours truly, Philbillie. It was just the coolest to see the gang and hear them play in the City of Light. here's a couple of pix crappily shot with my camera phone including an action shot of Jenny blowing the harmonica on the show-closer and title cut, "Devil Moon.

The next night we are at the big, modern Radio France studios in the shadow of the Eiffel tower for a special live broadcast concert with Eric Burdon and The New Animals. It was a great night of classic Animals tunes and some of his new stuff and what a thrill to see our pals onstage with such a rock legend.

And we couldn't resist the obligatory photo-op with the man himself:

Eric is one of Jenny's hero's so When Paula introduced Jenny to Eric,
She tells him: "This is the woman who taught me about the blues."
It was quite the little lovefest.

And when Wally introduced me to him Eric said: "SECURITY!!!"

Eric Burdon and the New Animals are on tour throughout Europe for the next few weeks so if you are on the Continent, check 'em out.

Secrets of the music Business

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
-Hunter S.Thompson

I have, for some time kept tacked up a print-out of this quote by the late doctor on my recording console to remind me and whoever is recording at the time just how evil the whole thing really is. Evil in a way that in only the last couple of years has reached a level of absurdity and hypocrisy usually found only in politics. This is actually no accident as the ever-expanding yet increasingly irrelevant comglomeration called "The Majors" and their lobbyist/attack dog the RIAA look to the government to assist in their campaign to restrict developement of new technologies and litigation against twelve-year-old downloaders.

The latest turd-juggling by these weasels is a new lawsuit brought in an attempt to have it ruled that ripping a disk to a portable player is not covered under "fair use" allowances. What this means that it would be considered bootlegging if you ripped your own legally purchased CD to be listened to on your own i-pod!
What they are really trying to move towards is a business model of selling the same thing over and over in different formats: Buy a (protected) disk, pay again to download for your portable and... don't forget the ringtones! And get this: while the lawers were making this arguament, the RIAA website still posted a statement (from a previous suit) that they wanted the buyer to enjoy their legally purchased disks on their i-pods, boomboxes, cars as long as they were not illegally shared. It seems obvious that the real idea here is to kill the CD business (not to mention the used CD business) in favor of downloads which have the fattest, juiciest profit margins imaginable. I believe the real upshot here is that the days of the record companies are over and they are just lashing out like a dying, wild pig with a spear stuck in it's side.

There is no disputing that they do, indeed, have the craft of promotion and marketing down cold and that is really what these entities will be relegated to. Along with perhaps a role as investors and distributors.

But then, what do I know? Maybe the best way to hasten this ugly death would be to stop buying any product represented by the RIAA and spend more time searching out and supporting new, unknown artists. Two good places to start would be MySpace Music and CD Baby.
G'head... do it!

Fraternite', Egalite', Supermarche'!

Shopping in France is really fun. And there are two ways to go about it: the weekly marche' can be found in just about every small town, especially in the more rural, aggie areas. It's just a bunch of stalls set up for the day, usually in the town square. Here you will find a selection of foodstuffs that are, by and large, straight from the local producers and so is not only the freshest possible, but it will, of course, reflect the various regional differences of which France has such a staggering diversity. The marche' is usually colorful and lively and sometimes downright beautiful especially in certain places like Provence. This has been going on pretty much the same way as far as I can tell for centuries and it still works just great.

The other way is the SUPERMARCHE'. This is a concept that was taken directly from the good 'ol USA and it is pretty much what you would expect, although for the first few times you see it here it's so surprising that it actually seems like quite a novelty. And, of course, the french being the french, they have imbued the whole thing with their own unique Je Ne Sais Quoi. It's not only the retail outlets, either: they seem to have really taken to the whole consumerist creed that we have forged so singularly. So I derive great amusement from how they sometimes interpret the ideas of product concept, packaging and marketing. It can sometimes be so clunky that it's funny and it can sometimes be quite prosaic.

So from time to time I will share a few of my discount discoveries here in the hopes that you'll maybe even gain an understanding of some subtler aspects of our beret'd buddies.

Food is obviously a big subject in France and we'll get to that department.

But first, let's get a few personal items:

Here's a nice shirt although I don't find anything particularly funny about it. Unless by "FunnyBoy" you are talking about the fellas in San Francisco who are referred to as "Bears".

And I'm pretty sure that a dress with this brand name
would be a really tough sell in America.

"Dim? Maybe so, but what a pair 'o gams!"

Pushing our cart over to the Toiletries aisle we find...

For that "Essence of Plumber" scent that really drives the gals wild.

OK, we've worked up a pretty good appetite and it's time to throw some chow in the cart.

First up is some breakfast cereal:Ah, yes! The breakfast of champions:
"Gee, mom can I have some more?
Aw, come on...
Just a little taste, mom?..
JUST GIMME THE F****N CEREAL BEFORE I CUT YOU, BE-YATCH!!!

Now, mind you, we're still in the Supermarche'...

Pigs for sale: Pets or Meat?

Next up: more MEAT!

Medieval Acoustic Dream

One cool thing about playing in Europe for extended periods is that you often have opportunity to hook up with musicians who work in genre's different than your own. Back in the land of the big PX there are so many players doing the same thing you are that one tends to forget there is anything else outside your little Alt-Country/Metal/Hip-Hop/Feminist Folk scene. I have just finished a project with an extroardinary Dutch composer & guitarist named Ian Boelens.

While he is adept at many acoustic fingerstyle techniques, this project was a full CD of his own Celtic and Medieval flavored compositions. These were recorded at his studio near Amsterdam and then we spent a week here at JennyCo Studios FR mixing and mastering. This kind of thing is done regularly these days as it is normally quite easy to record on, say, Pro-Tools, and then carry or e-mail session or .WAV files to someone elses platform, say... Cubase. Well, I have for many years been using the Roland platform.

Starting with a VS-1680 and more recently moving up to the flagship VS-2480HD workstation.
Yes, I know all the pros & cons of PC based vs. standalone workstations. This doesn't have nearly the detailed editing capabilties or the sheer number of plug-ins available but it does have a few and they're really good ones. I also don't need an external controller or mixer in order to mix "out of the box" (because it IS a controller with full flying faders automation), or record without latency. There simply is none. You can even use it as a very powerful control surface for a number of popular programs like Cubase, Pro-Tools, etc. The main thing is it's totally portable, sturdy and reliable. I have had only two crashes in nearly seven years and they were both my fault. Just try getting through even one session on a Mac or PC without one sad- face or blue screen of death. You can tell by now that I love this platform especially since you can now import and export .WAV files for a certain amount of cross-platform comptibility. But!, (everybody's got a big but) that doesn't mean it's easy to do so and this now is my only gripe with this otherwise great machine.


All this has come home to roost for this project for which I had to import 15 .wav files recorded on Ian's Mac/Logic set-up. One-At-A-Time.
The actual mixing, EQ'ing, reverb, all that went great, but then if you want to export the finished product for instance to CD Architect or some other platform you have to do it again in the opposite direction. This system was meant to allow one to record, mix, master and burn the final CD all on one machine which it does just great, but the ability to import/export non-Roland projects is really only a convenience feature.

Just so you don't think I'm not too "with it" as the kids say, I do, in fact, use programs such as Nuendo, Soundforge, CD Architect and others for certain things and as these get more face time I think the Roland will come in real handy as a control surface and master clock.

Anyway it all got done, but it was just very time-consuming and only later did I discover during some online research and manual diving that the VS does actually offer more elegant methods to accomplish what we did. So another lesson learned. Chief of which is one I have always known but tend to forget in my desire to bull through: RTFM or Read The F*****g Manual.

And the Music? Absolutely stunning! Twelve gorgeous sound poems played with a skill and depth of feeling that often brings tears. I hope to share some bits as soon as all the copyright stuff is cool.

So long,
Philbillie

Coding Hell

Let's get one little detail clear:I am not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination. I am a guitarist, a recording engineer, a certified electronics tech and a fair shade-tree mechanic, as long as there is no fuel injection involved. But I have, by virtue of being a handy kind of a guy, been the webmaster for my partner's website www.jennykerr.com and my own, as well as a few others for friends. But to call myself a real web developer would be more than a stretch. It would be preposterous. Kind of like calling Alanis Morissette an actual guitarist. Or G-Dubya a great orator.

No, real web-dev (a little lingo, there) requires an arcane skill known as "coding" if you want to really make some web magic happen. The people I know who do this are a whole other race of smart guys and gals who have my respect. What I've been doing is the web equivalent of Karaoke. I just take a pre-fab page and add my own crap onto it. To achieve this dubious result I have been using MS Frontpage which is sort of the Hamburger Helper of web developement tools. They say that if you bang your head against the wall long enough, you gotta get something right and I have my share of lumps to verify this. I have, over the years, seen that all the fancy-schmancy stuff is not nearly as important as getting the basics right like not making it too cluttered and making it easy for people to see what you're trying to communicate.

Sort of like making music.

Having said that, I have just learned a new trick all by myself (look, Ma...I'm in the deep end!) that required me to learn some (extremely) rudimenatary XML coding. The result is a simple but cool and extremely useful MP3 player that lives on Jenny's website and plays a handful of songs without the usual rigamarole of downloading, saving, different media players, blah, blah...

Now, I am fully aware the most of the code slingers I know could have banged out this little nugget like "dropping a deuce" in the morning, but then where's the satisfaction in that? It's only when you get under the hood and bust a few knuckles that you get a real apppreciation for these things.

So, keep practicing, Alanis. And George? Well, never mind.

Snow Day

For those who were raised in parts where snow is a regular seasonal occurrence, so-called "snow-days" allow for schools to close when the precipitation is real heavy and spend the time wasting each other with snowballs or hanging inside watching cartoons and rifling through dad's SI Swimsuit issue/Playboy/Spanker's Monthly.

I don't know anything about this. I was born and raised in Southern California where in the 70's "snow-day" was something else entirely. I probably won't be getting into that.

No, I write this because we now find ourselves in a small stone cottage in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. This is a place where the deep, deep medieval history of France is at it's most profound. People still go to Sunday masses in churches that were built around the 1300's when the French were still trying to kick the Brits' asses back to the Isles during the 100 Years' War. There is now a british invasion of another kind. More on that some other time. This is still largely a rural area. And while there are towns and cities with supermarkets, McDonalds' and all the rest, most live out in the boonies and often heat with wood fire.

Who cares?
Well, I didn't, much, until the snow started coming down and it became apparent that the small electric space heaters in here were just not gonna' do the trick. So, I says: let's scroogle on into town (only 12 kilometers/7miles) and get a bundle of wood, some hot chocolate and maybe a DVD (sorry, no dish) After confidently scraping six inches of snow off the van windows and pulling out, I get no farther than 30 feet, attempting to go up a small incline to the road and find out that, hey!, that white stuff really is pretty slick.

Good going, Cali-Boy.
I manage without incident to back it through my own tracks to the rectangular hole in the snow that was my parking spot. So here we sit back in the cabin coldly eyeing up the antiques.

Being snowed in does have it's advantages, though. We take the occasion to get back to work on the currently-in-progress Jenny Kerr disk "Wood and Steel", an acoustic disk that will lean in the blues direction. It's pretty easy to be in that frame of mind out here in the mysteriously beautiful Perigord woods. This new collection should be ready in time for the Spring tour which will take us up to Scandinavia and most of Western Europe.

Peace,

Philbillie

"The journey of a thousand miles...

...starts with that first, lurching stumble."

I first heard of th' Blog thing only a couple of years ago and by then I had been doing what turns out to be pretty much the same thing on my "Dispatches From The Road" page of my partners' site: www.jennykerr.com wherein I would set forth semi-regular entries describing daily life on each tour. These really only amounted to longish captions under selected photos, taken of various mundane happenings from the tour van, onstage and elsewhere and were originally intended to be just a little scrapbook kind of thing for our own amusement. It soon turned out, though, to be the most visited page on the site due, I'm sure, to the Pulitzer-level photography and my witty, sparkling prose.

This, then, will be an attempt to tighten things up a bit, make it more regular and expand it to include the recording process, as well as cooking, dating and hunting tips, gossip and name-dropping, road survival, gigging tips and all manner of anecdotal advice on being an International Americana/Roots-Rock Ambassador of Musical Good-Will in a part of the world (i.e. everywhere) where your president is as hated as your music is loved.

Peace,
Philbillie