Death Trauma Brutal 2023

Last Thursday a close friend and mentor of mine died.

2023 was a brutal year; in one two day period I lost three friends: Betsy, Jane, and Jan. All four of the above were the real living breathing kind of friends I’d known for years who lived within minutes of me.

Recently, there were also Jerry and Albert, and very local to my inner circle at the time, Jean, even though I never really got to know her.

More recently, Blacktop Jim (that’s my designation: I don’t think anybody else called him that).

I was still mourning my Dad’s death in 2022 when all that happened.

But this last one, my friend Tony……

He and I had our shot at being funny guys at the bar, a little window of opportunity that only lasted a couple of years, but we didn’t connect that way. We connected in the way that comes AFTER that, if you’re among the lucky. I am pretty sure that there was a time that Tony could have watched me work while I was handling Elaine’s weekly food order, and since I do not exactly recall any particular instances, if Tony was in there, he was drinking (and I say that with great respect and love). However, if I was wearing that necktie, I was not drinking, so in the end we never “tied one on” together because I did my Master’s Degree drinking in Storm Lake (and later my Ph.D. in Okoboji) and Tony did his in Royal, Linn Grove, Peterson, and originally Emmetsburg.

He got a head start on the quitting thing. Like by almost twenty years. As it turns out, an incredibly valuable twenty years. I picked his brain liberally and greedily. People got us confused sometimes, which we both thought was weird and funny because WE could tell us apart, but the confused people were seeing haircuts and facial hair and nothing else. That’s how we size people up.

Tony and I intersected when I adopted the quitting thing, and we bonded. He helped me with a lot of stuff. We saw each other often. We had a telephone thing. But it got more interesting than that-it turns out our bond was portable. I eventually moved to Storm Lake and it didn’t make any difference. Because he lived between the two county seat towns, he spent as much time in Storm Lake as he did in Royal anyway.

So that worked and then Death Trauma happened in 2018-19 and I moved again to Spencer, my home town of 50 years ago. Didn’t matter-there was Tony. In fact, being a carpenter, he did a lot of stuff at Menards, but it didn’t stop there. At one time, while he was doing some remodeling for his daughter and her husband, he lived across the street. We’d meet out in the driveway and smoke and I’d play with Kona. I miss Kona. I think passers-by and lookie-Lou’s may have seen us standing out there and wondered how the hippies happened to have taken over that part of the neighborhood. We didn’t look very homogenous with our surroundings,

Tony’s Mom wound up in a Spencer nursing home. He was very devoted, and on his frequent trips to town to see Ma, he’d bang on my door and we’d smoke and talk about things.

He was there, doing that, when my Dad died.

There was no point in us talking about lots of things because we agreed on lots of things anyway and we’d both be the choir in those conversations. We did, however, almost always, talk about being sober.

We’d both had plenty of opportunities to NOT be sober-the standard ones: being broke, divorced, badly in need of a shave and a haircut, that stuff, but we talked about stuff that old-timers had taught him before I even got started quitting. God help me to remember those stories.

This past week, we had one hell of a time, mostly unsuccessful. We both felt crummy, I was pretty sure I had to be contagious, and we were getting pretty close to failing a particular Plan B (which did fail), and there was something wrong with my phone for a little while. Whatever I had made it most comfortable if I called from my bed, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts he was sitting in his chair. So, we went over what’s-next, and I knew his kids were going to visit him the next day and that had to be a good thing.

I had been worried. I know I mentioned that to various people. Tony had been missing stuff lately that he didn’t miss. But I knew that his family would make him go to a doctor. I could relax and quit nagging. The only thing was: he thwarted that opportunity by dying before they got there.

I want to tell myself I could have done something sooner, I could have done something more. I could tell in our last conversation, just like in every other last conversation that I’ve ever had, that we were running out of things to say, and there WERE no more things to do.

I’m not the only guy who can talk like this about Tony like this; there are literally hundreds of guys who can say these things. You know those little pamphlets you get at funerals about the deceased? I have it first hand that Tony saved hundreds of those. He showed up.

We try to talk about “loss” when these things happen. I did not lose anything-I cemented over forty years of spiritual experience into the bag that I carry.

And Tony, you did not graduate.







Barbara Douglass “People Say”

When my marriage disintegrated in 1995, I went to see my friend of four years, Barbara Douglass.

She had been staying in Arizona thinking about her own marriage which had disintegrated earlier that year, and had come to a conclusion, based upon a song that she’d heard.

When she played it I knew this was somebody who “got it”, I signed up immediately for the tour and from that point we were inseparable until 2018. No pussyfooting around. I shall forever respect her for that.

She was incorrigible, contrary, opinionated, notorious and blunt. Once or twice, she was even wrong.

Didn’t matter. As her daughter said, I understood her. Maybe not-so-much without the Prozak (weak grin).







Byron’s Bar, Pomeroy, IA

byron's
photo from byrons-bar.com

I thought I knew something about music – I really did. I was born at exactly the right time to be thirteen in 1964, I had various transistor radios and tried to memorize the top 40, I became old enough to drive a car and listen to the radio, I joined a record club, I went to college and discovered that I knew nothing, started over again and memorized the top 100 FM lists, I bought a big stereo and started a record collection, ultimately accidentally starting a record store that I ran for 14 years, went to a lot of Grateful Dead shows, did all the stuff.

Then, after decades of training I discovered Byron’s Bar, Pomeroy, IA (pop. 700) and once again came to believe that I knew next to nothing.

The Rolling Stones have never played at Byron’s Bar, the crown jewel of Iowa listening rooms, located in Pomeroy, Iowa, population around seven hundred.

None of those stadium acts have ever played there, including the Grateful Dead, despite the fact that the Des Moines Register deemed the place “the Deadhead capital of Iowa” in 2015, because the venue boasts a large collection of Grateful Dead memorabilia everywhere you look. Of course, the Dead were never going to play there anyway, since Byron opened the place roughly a year after that band ceased to exist.

Don’t let the Deadhead thing fool you – a few Dead-inspired bands have performed there over the years, but the listening experience there is much broader than that, featuring weekly shows by troubadours ranging from singer-songwriters, folkies, rockers, blues artists, country types, and some who defy categorization, from all over the country and some international destinations. And “listening experience” is emphasized. You’re likely to get scolded if you’re accustomed to disrespecting the artists while they’re playing. Many of them remark that they’re rarely afforded the attention that they get at Byron’s.

The bar itself, at about 1500 square feet, occupies a building that’s over a hundred and twenty-five years old on a street where there’s virtually nothing else except a post office. If you can FIND Main Street, which is a couple of blocks off the highway where many of the local businesses are, Byron’s is on the north end at 112 Main, easily identifiable by the dancing bears on the sign outside, and by the only cars parked along the curb.

Despite seating for around a hundred people, national acts have been known to stop there – Byron likes to mention Todd Snider, Canned Heat and Kinky Friedman to name a few. Well known Iowa artists appear there somewhat regularly. Sunday 5 P.M. shows are the norm, but Byron recently mused that he needs a secretary because sometimes he books additional shows on Saturdays, Fridays or even Thursdays although Thursdays are usually reserved for local singer-songwriter nights or informal jams.

The atmosphere is what now seems to be called “Iowa Nice”. Newcomers will usually be spotted and identified as “Byrons virgins” (in a nice way of course) and will soon discover that the place holds “drawer-ings” during intermissions, at which time Byron awards small prizes, perhaps the most popular of which is the wooden back scratcher, dated and signed by Byron. Also highly sought after is the green plastic Menard’s bucket, often autographed in black Sharpie by nearly everybody in the place.

Hungry? Don’t expect designer burgers or other fare that’s going to drive up your (usually) fifteen dollar investment to get into the place. Byron’s offers Pasquales (a local brand) pizzas from up the road a piece, microwave popcorn and potato chips. It’s all about the music, but if you do go after the pizza, it’s likely that somebody nearby will offer you some of theirs whether they know you or not.

If you’re new, come early and Byron will probably personally greet you, fill you in on some local history about the venue and others will pick up where he left off as he begins to get busy.

It’s all about the music. It’s easy to hobnob with the bands, and if you’re inclined to pick up a souvenir, most of them bring merchandise consisting of CDs, records and t-shirts and the like which they’re almost always happy to autograph. Whether you’re spending money or not, it used to be possible to pick up a poster by the late Mark Gerking, the area artist who provided them for every show for years.

Traveling to get there (and many do)? Accommodations can be found about 20 miles north or south. REALLY traveling (and some do)? Some fans have been known to charter flights into the Fort Dodge airport, about 30 miles away.

Byron’s is a church of sorts without a denomination or sermons outside of the shut-up-and-listen sermon, and the spiritual experience among the regulars and the artists is truly unusual.

When you’ve been there once, you are forever left without an excuse for failing to repeat that. It’s the center of the Universe.







The High School Model

When I was in high school, my dad asked me one day “why aren’t you dating girls?”

At the time, I really didn’t have an answer- I hadn’t thought of that. I was perfectly complacent with what I was doing at the time, which was mainly studying things and writing stuff.

But ok, I’m hormonal, and I think dating has something to do with that, so I got started late in my senior year. There was no instruction manual, you learned that stuff from peers. Often, they didn’t have any clues either unless they were predators. We went to the Roof Garden a lot. I liked the bands, not-so-much the dancing, but I did it, high school style.

Then I graduated, and now it was time to learn the college version of dating. I did actually go on one, and we were both delighted to not kiss each other at the end of that because we didn’t like each other (candidly) in the first place (it was a blind date).

So I skipped that. It wasn’t necessary among us hippies (it was the early 70s). You just loved the one you were with, like Stephen Stills taught us to do. As far as I know, that’s the only instruction I ever received and I guess it worked ok, until my friend Mark loved Judy Angel Eyes just because he was with her and that made me real mad and ruined my life and stuff.

I crawled back to my home town, and when I went to find my friend at a bowling alley the night I blew back into town, a girl who had just graduated from high school (or was maybe just about to) landed on my lap there, so I bought her expensive earrings and married her. That lasted twenty years.

We parted bitterly after SHE loved somebody she was with, and I moved instantly into a living arrangement in another town that lasted even longer, and it worked, mainly because we had nothing but time to explore the possibilities, and then she died. There are SOME instructions for that.

I gave it over a year to mourn and think about things and moved back to my home town again. A woman who recognized me but otherwise knew nothing about me invited me over to watch television.

Then, I returned to the high school model of dating, with some modifications like I don’t open the passenger door to see if the girl can slide in wearing that mini skirt without me seeing “something”. But that’s a digression; I did most of the other stuff the way I understood it, and it ended in utter failure: the Breakup three years later.

I do not understand the Breakup. It’s distinctly from the high school model-the hippie version was just don’t come around here no more.

I also do not understand The Divorce, which I neatly didn’t mention until now. I refused to participate in my own. I just got a letter one day in November that I was divorced.

I suspect that not all dissolutions end without agreements, surely they’re not ALL unilateral, but mine certainly were.

I think all this might have happened because I followed the high school model. I haven’t been there for a long long time.

I suppose the trick is to develop my own model. That oughta be interesting. It’s gonna be original at least.







Role Of Mono In Audience Recordings

Record producer Terry Melcher didn’t believe in stereo, passing it off as a fad. The people listening to pop music were driving cars, and cars only had one speaker.

So, there are subtle differences between his stereo and mono mixes because he left the stereo to an assistant, at least in the case of Paul Revere And The Raiders.

But this is about crowd noise. We’ve been wondering if crowd noise can be suppressed in audience recordings, since our recorder employs at least three microphones while we’re using it and apparently much of the crowd noise is out of phase. That means if we mix the recording down to mono, some of that will get zapped (I can’t remember the correct technical term). Doesn’t it?

While yours truly is convinced, we had a great opportunity tonight to test it. At the beginning of the third set by Nick Dittmeier And The Sawdusters, the band opened with a song named “O’Bannon Woods”, and the crowd was slow to quiet down. At the same time, the house PA was playing music that they play during intermissions, and nobody turned it down. One of those speakers is close to our mic, so we were temporarily recording from two different sources from two different directions at two different volumes.

Here are two versions of an identical track: one stereo as it was recorded, one mixed to mono:

Stereo Audio “O’Bannon Woods”
Mono Audio “O’Bannon Woods”

I still do my best listening in my car. It has more than one speaker, but I think I’m gonna like the mono better.

Recording data for nerds:
Zoom H2n, set to auto-gain: concert, side mics set to +3, maybe 8′ up in the air maybe 8′ away, from Bose L1.

rainy day rain drop







Christmas Eve At The Grotto

Last Christmas Eve (2021), I had the unusual experience of visiting the Grotto Of The Redemption at West Bend, Iowa. That is not something I would ordinarily work into my holiday festivities but then again the weather was unusually mild, and we had out-of-town visitors who wanted to do that.

As those unfamiliar with the place will be able to tell, The Grotto, as we call it locally, is a religious shrine. We were there on Christmas Eve. Almost nobody else was. That struck me as odd.

Since then, a friend, Damon Hintz, has just recklessly shared a working copy of his first musical composition in 12 years, and I have dutifully stolen it, since I have been pre-absolved, and it seems to fit nicely with my little slide show I made to commemorate the visit. Damon has not named the piece yet, and he might not even be finished with it yet, but it’s good enough for me. I might suggest “I Absolve You” as nice title, but I’ll bet that wasn’t what he had in mind.







Jumping Into An Empty Pool

I have a web site which is sixteen years old. Its main objective is to peddle some collectible record albums (recently simplified-there was more).

On that site, I’ve categorized the record albums by decades: fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and up-to-now. It of course is also sorted by genre and artist and all that stuff, but the decade categories are most important to me.

This was always SUPPOSED to be capped at five hundred listings, but then I discovered flipping records at Facebook a little over a year go and I’ve never made it to five hundred.

I think there’s a new generation of record buyers who are drawn to the social aspect of trading on Facebook.  Imagine that-it USED to be like that at eBay.  Facebook should just buy eBay.

I have a fairly large stock and have been working at steadily replenishing things, and the screenshot from today sort of demonstrates a bell curve with a funny shape: eight from the fifties, sixty-one from the sixties, two hundred twenty-eight from the seventies, one hundred and five from the eighties, and five from the nineties.

In other words, I decided to get into the business just in time for the industry to switch to another format. There WEREN’T any damn records in the nineties. Oh, there, were a few, especially in the early part of the decade, but when I flung open the doors in late 1987, the industry was already converting to CD’s and when I gave up in early 2001, they we rethinking that.

Brilliant, eh?

Fortunately, while I was just standing there doing nothing, lots of people dumped their record albums on me, eventually driving my partner to divorce me, among other things. Since I was there to peddle records anyway, I dived into “used records”.

When I moved from the brick and mortar to the Internet, I took it all with me. The store didn’t have the traditional going-out-of-business sale. Since I was destined to move twice in the coming twenty years, I lugged hundreds of pounds of records with me from town to town and stored many of them in less-than-ideal spaces, but many boxes did survive.

Then, in October 2020, Facebook introduced “and shipping” or whatever they call it to their Marketplace. Based on local person to person sales, I was no fan of Marketplace because that horse-trading in local groups and meeting each other at Walgreen’s just didn’t fit my lifestyle. But I know a LOT about shipping, e-commerce-wise, and Facebook seemed to want to see record albums, which became “hot” again in 2017, according to Wikipedia. Facebook gave away the store in incentives and I hauled a hundred pounds of records to the Post Office until I had to stop because I was out of boxes and the new Postmaster General had declared war on his own Post Office.

It took a little while to reload and reorganize, and the holiday season, which does touch record albums, was over, and we had a nice steady year throughout most of it, and then they did it again! Facebook bought a bunch of postage for a bunch of Marketplace shoppers and gave them 20 per cent off, and it was wonderful, and I shipped a hundred pounds of records to the Post Office again.

So, now we only have four hundred records again after they ravaged our stock, but we are working on the problem. Since we produce audio tracks of everything we sell, we can’t go faster than at least forty-five minutes per album because we record those samples in real time. Yes, I could set the turntable on 78 and compensate for that in the Audacity recording, but I just don’t.

The stock at the Facebook store will dwindle for a couple of weeks now while we put together a new group, but everything you see at Facebook STARTS at our site, which is supposed to building a great big customer base of its own. The general strategy for pulling stock from the site to take to FB is to work the oldest listings there first.

That means, if we’ve REALLY sucked you in, you should watch our near-daily additions at the Thingery. That’s here:

Just a tip to the wise.

The web site is actually little bit broken, so we hid all the other categories, but I personally like it better as a just-records site and may spin off  “the other stuff” to a couple of various places, including maybe a new Zen Cart with which I am tinkering.

We’ve got some nice stuff planned for our Facebook Shop: as listings there drop under sixty, we’re going to replace them with sealed albums for a while. People like those.

Rainy Day Music Raindrop










Thanks either way.

2021 04 14 Bgawk!

by Humboldt Ho’s Publication date 2021-05-14 Audience Noise, Drunken Patrons, Worst audience sabotage you ever heard, “some” digital editing used.

Notes:

Venue and performers have been anonymized to protect the innocent. That said, we recently saw (heard) an entire show of three sets trashed by lunatics. Since we drive 130 miles round trip to get this stuff, we can’t come home empty handed, so we reversed our regular recording procedure and threw out the music and kept the garbage, featured here.