Month: September 2003

You’ll notice an altered, if not new, block on the right side titled “Sites Worth Linking To.” There are three ways to get your site listed.

1. Be a local musician with a blog style site updated no less than once per week.
2. Have a kick ass blog style site that gets updated no less than once per week and be from the Philadelphia area.
3. Know me in real life and update at least once per week.

My goal is to motivate the musicians who read this site to become more vocal online and promote whatever kind of scene we have going on here.

If your site fits into any of the above categories, I strongly encourage you to let me know about it.

For those of you without websites or with websites that are a pain to update, try one of these services.
Blog-city
Blogger
Livejournal

Egg headed electronic superstar Moby is angry about how the RIAA is treating his fans and wondered what would happen if he downloaded some of his own music.

so apparently the riaa are sueing one of our very own moby.com board members, liquidlevel, for file-sharing.
personally i just can’t see any good in coming from punishing people for being music fans and making the effort to hear new music.
i’m almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3’s of my own songs on my hard-drive.
-moby

I’ve been surprised at how quiet musicians have been about the RIAA lawsuits.

The new layout is almost finished. I decided to lower the right side blocks down so they’re even with the left side. I also made some changes that allow me to display the right side blocks on all pages, not just the front page.

It seems done for now, but I think I might want to add something to the right side of the title area. I’m not sure what to do there yet.

What would be really cool is if I could make the title image a random selection from a group of images.

A month ago my DVD player stopped working, forcing Jeanne and me to watch the end of the Third Man on my computer. Best Buy held on to the player for 4 weeks fixing it, but when I got it back last night it still wouldn’t work! I feel like I’m living at that freaking store lately.

There are two possibilities.

1. Best Buy didn’t fix it and hoped I wouldn’t notice.
2. Best Buy fixed it so poorly it couldn’t withstand the the stress of being carried out of the store and riding in the car.

Either way it’s pretty poor service.

I’ve been working dilligently on a new design for this site using the latest web trends and technologies. Tables are out, divs are in, and Cascading Style Sheets rule the day. If you hate how this looks go here and change your theme to “Super Green” to use the old layout. Yes I know the old theme isn’t green at all, much less super green. It’s a long story.

This is definitely not finished, but the goal is to weed out any small post nuke problems that prevent me from easily redesigning the site every so often. I’m not sure I’m crazy about the green color for the visited links.

If you’re not seeing the new theme head here and change your theme to “Boxed.”

If you’re using IE, it might look pretty bad for now. I’m fixing it. It should be somewhat fixed by now. I highly suggest you all try out Mozilla 1.4. It’s the best web browser out there.

Philadelphia anti-folk king Adam Brodsky set a world record playing 50 shows in 50 states in 50 days. It’s kind of funny to call that a world record, since the Chinese, Australians, North Koreans have little chance of challenging Adam’s tour, although statisically China has about 4 Adam Brodskys. It’s still a freaking amazing achievement, especially considering I’ve done 3 gigs/open mics in a week and felt a little worn out afterwards. The farthest I had to drive was Bryn Mawr, although I walked from 8th and Market to 4th and Girard a few weeks ago. You should really check out his tour journal, especially Day 49 where he rips apart the band Foundation Stone.

although i really don?t like to trash other bands, i think i will make an exception here. i was put on the bill with a stupid hippie regge band called foundation stone.

as far as i can tell foundation stone is comprised of a cunt of a frontwoman who is also canadian. some dirty hippie of a guitar player who is also a dick, a bass player who was only a mild jackass, and a drummer who is actually kind of ok.

i was scheduled for 10,and i went on the very minute the sound guy said, lets get started 10:30

so i was going to play 40 minutes and get off. well 30 minutes into my set williamina Cuntzler comes to the side of the stage and says ?this is your last song” i can?t fucking believe it. these assholes think they own the night. so their 7 fans can hear about jah. well in the words of texco vee of the meat men i say “blow me jah”

i say “look i?m schedueld for a 40 minute set, its only been 30” she says, well you went on late.
“i went on when they told me to go on”
“do one more”
“look i?ll compromise, i?ll do two more” here i was giving more ground in the name of civility
“do one more”

so i did one more and was faced with the no win situation of either keeping my mouth shut, or taking trash from teh state about another band. neither of whidh appealed to me so as i?ve steamed for the past couple days, i decided i?do the only responsible mature sensible thing. and that is to trash them on the internet.

again their name is foundation stone, and i advise any of the 30 of you who might read this to never go see their shittly little poseur white regge band.

Great job Adam. Sorry I never got off my ass and actually went to one of your shows. I promise never to make the Puerto Rico joke again and I will discourage its use by others.

Someone at Comcast must be drinking Mug rootbeer because the Internet keeps going on and off today. Last night’s open mic was fun and at least four of my relatives showed up. If there were any more they’d need a blood test to proove it. I don’t know if anyone cares when I talk about the problems and changes with the Tree House’s sound system, but mostly musicians read this site so maybe you do. Some guy I never met before, Tom, walked in last night while I was setting up and said he was the guy who originally set up the sound system and was here to fix it. I knew it wasn’t set up right, but it sounded fine for the last few weeks. Tom’s new configuration allows us to mix the monitors, which is nice and everything else works pretty much the same way. He tried to blame the screwed up sound system on Roz, but he wasn’t getting any agreement from me on that point. When the Tree House first opened some weekend performer ripped apart the mixing board and reconfigured the system enough to make it unusable. Roz worked his ass off for the first few weeks getting it to work and then getting a decent sound out of it. He did it for free, because he likes seeing original music in Collingswood and I’m sure Tina and Randy appreciate that.

1. Ben Garvey – I continued my Johnny Cash tribute with “Big River” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” I also played a ton of other songs including Beck’s “Cut in Half Blues,” and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees.

2. Mark Garvey – My dad came out for the 2nd time and did a few John Prine covers.

3. John Shaughnessy – I liked the Guster cover he did. He’ll be playing the Tree House on October 4th.

4. garth – He made it this time after canceling a few times and we’re glad he did.

5. Sarah Allen – Awesome as usual and she’s playing the Tree House on October 10th.

6. Cynthia – Paid homage to her favorite blues musicians and Billie Holiday.

7. The TV Food People aka Matt Winn – Matt stopped by to promote the “Rock Against Rape” show in NewARK, DE.

8. Willie Tapps – Trotted out a new guitar he bought at a flea market and it sounded great. Flea markets guitars can be great.

9. Bob Michel – He has one of those voices that slices through the EQ no matter how you mix it. That’s a good thing.

10. Eric and Mike aka “The Forest Greens” – According to Mike their band name has a deeper meaning. He probably thinks he was kidding, but feel free to submit a possible origin for their band name. Extra credit goes to anyone who writes it in the typical “How did you get your name?” style response every stupid band interview has.

11. Maria – She sounds awesome these days. At one point she said her next song was by a Purple man, but it turned out to be “When Doves Cry” and not one of Grimace’s songs as I guessed.

We’ve had hurricanes and tornados this week, but that won’t stop the Tree House open mic from going on. The show starts at 8:00PM and you can signup here. online.

See you there!

For the past few days I’ve been working on a new layout for the site that doesn’t use HTML Tables. You can check out the progress by going here (remember, it’s unfinished) and selecting the FreeBlue theme.

The new poll has been well received. It’s from a longstanding argument Jeanne and I have over which is better. I was hoping vanilla would stay on top, but it looks like all the choco-fiends have taken over.

Did anyone else lose power for a while last week? Mine was out from about 12:30AM on Friday until 6:30PM later that day. Not fun, but at least we have it now unlike many Virginians. At first they thought West Virgina had been affected by the storm as well, but it turned out they didn’t have electricity to begin with.

Please hit me.

My good friends in Reju will be playing with Jason Wheatley tomorrow night, 8:00PM, at John and Peter’s in New Hope, PA.

[John and Peter’s is a] quaint Euro-style Tavern in New Hope, PA. To reach the stage area, you descend about 4 steps to a wide sliding door. You slide the door open and immediately travel back in time. Come find out what we mean.

Adrien has described the place to me as a “hobbit hole,” but in a good way.

Also, you may recall Reju’s gig a few weeks ago at the Moorestown Fun Day. Turns out it didn’t go so well.

This weekend, the band (sans Kevin) played for the Family Fun Day event at Strawbridge Lake in Moorestown, NJ. We were convinced at one point that this event would draw a good crowd filled with happy children and attentive parents…. We couldn’t have been more incorrect.

Not only were we blessed with the tail end of a rain storm, we were scheduled to play a HALF hour before the event actually began (which brought us a crowd of about 2), and our HALF-hour set was cut in HALF due to the fact that there were no mic stands and we had to run to the Perkins Center for the Arts to borrow theirs. The Bose sound system we used turned out to be more suited for Karaoke than it was for a live band… and the sound guy (looking much like a bouncer) had a little trouble figuring out that it is a no-no to plug the acoustic guitar into the same channel as the vocal mic. It wasn’t his fault, but it would have helped to know some of these things before hand.