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- July 6 -
F+W will get together for a couple hours
Wednesday after I get off work. I'm stoked about jamming again, though (as
I noted earlier) it's almost going to be like starting all over again after a
five week break from playing.
- July 1 -
I've been mulling over an idea for this and the bookofkills.com
web sites...I know I often announce big plans one day and then a week later get
bored with those very "big" plans that seemed so exciting seven days earlier,
but I think this is a good and permanent solution to having a web site that
people still check out pretty regularly (bookofkills.com) and the Fire + Whiskey
site which is admittedly pretty low-key and one that I don't currently foresee
being updated on a daily basis for the time being. So I think I'm going to
create a third site (most likely under an entirely new domain address) that will
somehow combine Book Of Kills information with material related to what I'm
currently doing musically both in Fear + Whiskey and solo, along with whatever
other artistic endeavors I might be dabbling in at the moment. And of
course I could then provide more of a one-stop page where folks could stop by to
read whatever daily features I'd feel like putting up that day, whether they
might be related to F+W, BOK or
music/art/writing/photographs/politics/technology/etc in general. I've
re-discovered, for instance, the old Ain't Records newsletters from the early
'90s. I've also come across letters and postcards and artwork that BOK
fans used to send me (pre-internet) on a regular basis, as well as old posters,
cassette covers, and so on. I could also post archival unreleased
recordings, new quickie recordings (say, just me and a guitar and a Dock Boggs
song) and blah blah blah.
I feel as though I've worked hard over the past twenty years to
build up a relatively big community (for an unknown like me, at least) of folks
from around the world who had become regulars on bookofkills.com and I've
dropped the ball since BOK broke up back in March as far as providing these
people with a reason to check in on a daily basis. In a sense,
bookofkills.com had become a loose congregation of basement lo-fi rock and roll
aficionados with twenty years of Book Of Kills history as the rallying focus.
I admit to letting my focus get a little fuzzy in the last two or three months.
I PROMISE to do better.
This is one
of those ideas I came up with after waking up in the dead of night, which
usually turn out to be good ones...for me at least. (Have I ever told you
how for years I'd wake up at 2 or 3 A.M. on a work night with an idea for a new
lyric or melody that would keep me preoccupied and awake until daybreak?
Regular occurrence for years.) I haven't thought much about how I'd
combine everything yet since this hasn't been a typical summer where I had two
months time to work on a new album or do some painting or what have you because
I've gone straight from teaching to...uh...teaching. (I'm sure most of you
who work without break year in and year out feel deeply for me, but then
again...I'm talking about making music here and when I'm teaching I don't have
much energy left over for creating music or art or whatever in addition to
everything else I have to get done on a daily basis.) Anyhow...I'll think
some more about the idea and perhaps make the changes that seem to be
warranted. Now...it's off to the dental surgeon.
- June 29 -
I suppose if you're "following" this band, you're finding it a
pretty demanding chore to maintain an interest in what we're doing, since we're
not exactly doing much of anything, eh? Well, it has just been a
confluence of things that have all contributed to the lack of movement over the
past month. I anticipated getting back to music this Thursday, only to
develop an infected tooth that is going to result in a root canal and
possibly an apicoectomy
(my first for both! yippee!) Thursday morning. I have never had these
procedures done before, and they say they're not much worse than getting a
cavity filled (we'll see), but I suspect that I'm not going to feel like singing
later that day. Anyhow, I'm feeling pretty antsy about playing music.
It has been years since I went a month or better without playing music and I
can't say that I'm enjoying the time off. I'm not getting any
younger...time spent music-less is precious time lost. Anyhow, I want to
think that we'll start getting down to business in July. It will almost be
like starting over completely!
- June 21 -
Again, Amy was on vacation last week, I think
Jeff had some things to do, and I'll be on vacation on and off this week, so
that's the reason I've been updating the Book Of Kills page with new pictures
and music, as well as the reason why I haven't been paying a whole lot of
attention to the Fear + Whiskey site over the past two weeks. I hope that
next week we'll get back to making some music and I can start updating this page
more regularly.
- June 14 -
Today was my final day as a "regular" teacher, although I will share teaching
duties with a friend this summer. I've been asked countless times what
I'll do now. I'm not really sure. I'm too old to start a musical
career, but I hope that I'll at least have a little more time on a regular basis
to write and record when I feel like it rather than only a couple months in the
summer when I'm able to restore some semblance of the psychic and creative
energy (that hasn't been sapped from me by my job) I need to make music.
Of course, I'm not going to simply stop working either, but I hope to be able to
find something not too demanding as far as time or intellect goes. If I
could find work as a janitor two days a week, I'd probably jump at the job!
Anyhow, once I feel recharged enough to do so, I'll probably turn much more of
my focus to music and start releasing singles and uploading more material on the
BOK web site, as well as, of course, get Fire +
Whiskey up and running.
- June 7 -
While I know I said a little while back that I wasn't going to
mention Book Of Kills anymore on this website, I do think this merits an
exception to the rule...I have decided to go ahead and upload the final BOK show
for anyone who wants to download it or hear it. You can go to
bookofkills.com for details.
- June 6 -
We practiced today. It was fun for me because for the first
time we really focused on trying to put together the first song we've written
together as a band ("Far and Few"? I don't know...we haven't decided on a
title). In fact, we probably devoted 2/3's of the practice working on that
one song. It was fun. Gary Bugg spent a fair part of the practice
watching and offering some helpful observations. I believe he was
sincerely impressed with the song. It's similar in structure to the demo,
of course, but it's also far more interesting as a group production and much
quirkier.
I/Amy/We've talked a lot on the web site (and amongst the three of us) about the
fact that we are moving rather slowly, and admittedly we are, but then again
we're not professional musicians. We're just three normal people who
somehow or another have ended up in a little musical trio together. I
think we all agreed today that it would probably be September before we think
about playing a show somewhere...perhaps even further down the road than that.
Maybe we'll lose some folks' attention, maybe not. Regardless, we'll get
together when we can and when we're finally ready, we can only hope to score a
few shows locally and make a positive impression. In the meantime, it's
clear to me that I need to practice on my own a little more diligently.
Amy is going on vacation with her family after school ends this
week. I'll be going on vacation the week after that. It looks to me
as though we'll probably just shut down until early July and then I hope we can
put a little more concerted work into getting a few more songs under our
collective belts and tighten up the songs we do know now. I hope that we
can start work on a second new song soon.
By the way, I might (haven't listened to the recordings yet) end up putting a
few snippets of audio from the practice session today. If you're checking
out F + W regularly or semi-regularly, you might find it interesting listening.
Speaking of audio...I think it would be really fun to record a couple tracks
this summer and put them up on bandcamp.com as a new single. Haven't
really discussed this with Amy and Jeff because the notion just struck me.
- May 31 -
Sadly, we had to cancel our appearance at the birthday
celebration (in honor of Betsy, Amy's mom) yesterday because Jeff was recovering
from a bout with food poisoning. The Eugenes played, however, along with a
rousing set by Wisher (Dustin Bugg's and Brian Temples's long-time band).
It was a real joy to see those guys back in action after so many years. A
special bonus: Wisher did a set of Who songs! One of the guests
(himself a very good drummer) offered to sit in for Jeff, but we figured it
would be best to decline his very kind offer.
By the way, Jeff just recently bought a set of Tama Rock Star drums.
- May 29 -
I think from now on that I'm going to devote this web
site exclusively to Fear + Whiskey. I will continue to make fairly regular
updates to bookofkills.com (particularly
photographs and music), but I won't be announcing them on this web page anymore.
I will occasionally update the news page on
bookofkills.com as well.
- May 27 -
We're gonna practice today and then we'll be
making our "live debut" this coming Sunday. If the results aren't totally
disastrous, I might upload our little 2-3 song set.
- May 23 -
2001's Hoggett Heads is now available for download from
BandCamp.com.
- May 19 -
Don't expect anyone's too interested in this,
but I thought it would be worth noting that I've deactivated my Facebook
account. I might well soon deactivate my MySpace account as well.
You know what's sort of funny? It's almost getting to be old-fashioned for
a band to have its own web page not associated with MySpace or whatever other
web sites there are supposedly dedicated to music. Whatever...I just got
tired of Facebook changing its agreement terms every other month. Most
importantly, I rarely got on Facebook anyway and I logged on to MySpace even
less! What was the point? Besides, I think it's kind of quaint that
folks have to seek out a band's actual (unique) web page if they want to keep up
with it.
- May 16 -
As I've noted previously, I will be reporting significant news
about my musical past, so to speak, here on the F+W page. Though I will
focus first and foremost on the band, I do want to keep folks apprised of
information concerning BOK that some of you might be interested in.
Anyway, as I reported not too long ago, I will be putting The Ballad Of Jim
Shelley back up on bookofkills.com in the near future. In the long
term, I am still considering adding a significant amount of new material to the
old stuff in the hopes of transforming what I've already written into something
a little more multi-layered. In the short term, since BOK is now no more I
can write the last chapter, or chapters (depending on how long winded I feel
like being) concerning my time in George Nipe's band, The Plague Dogs and the
final days of Book Of Kills with George and Mike Hicks (and, of course, Teker.)
I've thought often about the guys (Mike and George in particular) over the last
few weeks and about how much fun I had with them and how much great music we
made together. I miss them. It was rather disconcerting to simply
stop jamming with them. I'd been playing non-stop with George for three
years. You don't just end a musical relationship like that without it
hurting and being a little disorienting. But...everything ends. I
suppose you either move along or you end, too. Whatever...I'll
begin writing the last chapters this week. I don't know when I'll start
posting them.
- May 10 -
We're going to practice Thursday. Might add a cover or two.
I imagine we'll also pick out 2-3 songs to do for our little debut "gig" May 30.
Since I've essentially stopped regularly attending to
bookofkills.com, I'm going to update changes to that web page here for anyone
who might be interested. I have not abandoned that site; I'm merely
focusing on Fear + Whiskey. That being said, over the next couple months I
will be adding considerable content, both audio and visual, to bookofkills.com
and I will let you who're following F + W know what's going on with any updates
I make, since I know quite a few folks who now visit this page regularly are
coming from bookofkills.com. Anyhow, I am in the very slow process of
adding hundreds of photographs from 1987 to the recent past on the Book Of Kills
page. I made a meager beginning today by
uploading a couple of pre-BOK pages with a total of four photographs.
(I've long known that there are quite a few photographs of BOK and pre-BOK bands
in the area, but have not been able to lay my hands on them for one reason or
another.) I won't always be announcing each update to bookofkills.com, so
check over there when you feel like it. Starting this summer, I will start
uploading audio files which will remain there on a permanent basis. Some
of them will be previously unreleased stuff, including (possibly) the final BOK
show.
- May 7 -
We had what I told Jeff and Amy was a great practice...the best
one of the 5-6 we've had thus far. It's going to be tough for us to get
together a lot in any one week simply because Amy has two young children, I've
got two grandchildren and we've all got jobs. So, as long as we're
playing together, we'll face the same old dilemma that so many adults who try to
balance family and outside interests face: Finding time for the outside
interests 'cause family always comes first. But if we can have productive
workouts like the one we had last night, we'll be okay.
Anyhow...we worked on adding a couple of new songs and made really decent
headway into learning them. One of them was "Shake
My Tree" from my '08 album This Is Your Book Of Kills...a song that I've
been really chomping at the bit to do since I recorded it. While it
consists of three chords, it's actually an extremely challenging song to put
together from a band standpoint. After we got through the whole thing,
there was no doubt in any of our minds that the song was going to be pretty
killer live.
The other thing we worked on was the first song that Amy and I have written
together. No name for it just yet. I was equally stoked about this
one. One thing I'm hoping to be able to do is write more songs as a band
than I have in the past (though admittedly there have been a couple stretches in
the past where I and another band member were able to write some pretty decent
songs. I'm thinking of the four or five songs I wrote with Aaron
Farrington during our stint in The Karl Rove, and the four or five songs I wrote
with George Nipe and Mike Hicks while I was the bass player in Plague Dogs.
I like this one because it is essentially an homage to The Flaming Lips, The
Beatles and Pink Floyd and it goes from poppy rock and roll lilt to totally
unexpected dissonant anarchy in a matter of seconds.
I was hoping to have some sound bytes but messed up the volume on my Zoom...the
recording was way distorted. I'll keep it anyway as a reminder of the
practice where I think we turned the corner and became a real band.
One last note before the weekend...it looks as though we're going to play 2-3
songs at a party on May 30. Not sure what we'll do yet. I'm sure
I'll record it.
- May 6 -
Practice today. It has been two weeks since last we got
together. Could be pretty ugly! But it will be good to be playing
again, that's for sure. We'll most likely be trying out two songs,
including a newly written one. More info soon.
Are you feeling confused about which web site to read? Confused as to
which Views page will be updated today and which one tomorrow? Checking
the News pages on both sites? Feeling torn between the past and the
future? Well, you are not alone. I understand now why gbv.com simply went
dead and became a static archive after Guided By Voices went kaput. It's
just too hard trying to keep two different band sites up to date simultaneously.
I thought I could do it, but I can't. Or I suppose I should say I don't
want to. So what I'm going to do is use the Fire +Whiskey page as a
conduit through which all current musical news will flow, even if it's
about Book Of Kills stuff (which admittedly won't be all that often.) So,
I guess in the next couple days we will say goodbye to BOOKOFKILLS.COM as an
active web page. Don't be sad...it's all for the best.
- May 4 -
Now this is pretty cool. I asked Jeff and
Amy to add their thoughts to this page as often as they wanted, since I get
tired sometimes
of being the only one who writes anything about the band I'm in, and lo and
behold Amy actually did write something! Freaking awesome!
Go here to
read Amy's first thoughts on the new band! (I hope the first of many
missives from both Amy and Jeff.)
It's gonna be cool to watch this band grow from
a clunky little thing that's not sure who it is into (eventually) a really
exciting, really good group.
- May 3 -
I think we'll probably practice this week! I've been
thinking about songs to do, both covers and originals, a lot over the last two
weeks.
Haven't come to any conclusions about much of anything, however.
- April 30, 2010 -
Okay, I have posted two pictures. Go
here to see them.
- April 27, 2010 -
Welcome To “Fear & Whiskey”...
...your source for Fear &
Whiskey news, show information, set lists, media, merchandise, ephemera in
general, and more. I suppose some of you are thinking, "It took him two
weeks to come up with this?" Yeah...this is pretty bare bones.
But the more I thought about it, the more I decided I really just wanted
something simple. Something easy to keep up with. Something that was
about Fear and Whiskey's music and that's it. I do want to thank Alex
Hulvey for volunteering to design a web page. His ideas were invaluable.
Thanks, Alex!
There isn’t much to report currently. After all, Amy, Jeff
and I have only been together for four or five practices. Also, most of the
links above aren’t even active yet. But I’ll get around to putting up more
content over the next few weeks. I hope to have an RSS feed going soon. I’m
still working out the kinks as far as that goes.
If you’re wondering, the inspiration for the group’s name came from a classic
Mekons album from way back in 1985. While I suppose some folks might think that
“Fear & Whiskey” lends itself to the impression that our music would fall into
the so-called Americana genre, the truth is we just liked the sound of
the words and so did the friends who we asked for a little feedback from on the
matter.
I
hope to feature not just my own thoughts on the band, but Amy's and Jeff's as
well, at least when the spirit moves them.
As far as shows go, playing out’s mainly the reason we got together in the first
place, though I suspect there are other reasons such as wanting to write new
songs, maybe recording on occasion, and just the general fun aspect of playing
rock and roll with friends. We’re going to take our time, though, before we
start gigging. We don’t have any fancy notions about ourselves. If we can
squeeze in one or two live performances a month, that’ll more than suffice.
We’re glad you were interested enough to keep checking back to see if we’d
gotten online, and we sure hope you’ll join in with us on our little musical
adventure.
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