OK, you can stop feeling guilty now. About downloading MP3s, anyhow. Fairtunes to the rescue. I like this. A website that let’s you make a payment directly to a musician in return for MP3s you’ve downloaded. This leaves the record labels out of the loop. Boohoo. If you donate even a couple bucks for one album’s worth of music, the artist is getting more from you than they’d ever get from the sale of one CD.
I’m a big fan of Internet radio (I’m also a big fan of having a relatively fast full-time Internet connection). While a lot of the channels out there have limited playlists that just loop around, you can still get exposed to a lot of new stuff. Like this Calypso cover of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”. I think I’ll need to buy that album.
Went and saw the Sir Finks at the Carousel Lounge last night with Tracy. The band has been augmented with a chick on keyboards, wearing her Carnaby Street finest (as were some folks in the audience). The smoke and percussive volume (they’re usually not that loud) started getting to us after a while, so not long after her friends Georgia and Cheryl finally showed, we wound up leaving.
Tracy and I went and saw Dave Edmunds Saturday night at the Cactus Cafe. What a great show! It was a solo show. He had on this shirt, a swirly purple and black pattern on velvet that would make suitable wallpaper at a goth-hippy whorehouse. He was playing a pretty black Guild acoustic run through four effects boxes. A lot of thumb-picking, with a bluegrass style that threatened to lapse into Smokey Mountain Breakdown at times. A lot of old standards played in inventive ways–he did an instrumental version of the Beatles’ Lady Madonna, and the audience would all shout out “see how they run” at the appropriate moment. He played a little classical guitar, then he played Classical Gas and followed that with his very unique take on classical music, in this case Mozart.For his encore, he came out with a Telecaster that had some weird device lashed on below the bridge; it turned out that this was a remote control for a rhythm box that accompanied him on a wild version of Flight of the Bumblebees.
Checked out a band that was on my “to check out” list last night. Victrola. They’ve got a regular Monday-night gig at the Empanada Parlour. They’re good. Early New Orleans style jazz, torch songs, that sort of thing.
On my way home, I snapped one of the brake cables on my bike. This has never happened to me before. Fixed that today, and replaced the other cable as a preventative measure. Also installed new brake pads, as long as I was in there. I hate installing new brake pads. Takes forever to get them adjusted, and I never get them quite right.