Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Loving Jae

I married my fine and funny wife two years ago this coming weekend; we're really looking forward to revisiting the scene of the crime. We had the best wedding ever, a tropical week-long blast down in Key West with family and friends that was emblematic of our relationship. Wild, wacky, gorgeous, fun, surreal, joyful and intense. That's us in a nutshell.

She's in New York on business at the moment, so it's the cats, the dog, the snake and me, planted solidly in the studio with everything I need at arm's reach. I love you honey. But when you go - I dive headfirst into work in lieu of pining. Besides, we talk often enough during the day to make it better. The fact that we still act like newlyweds is both an endearing feature of our marriage and something that makes us infinitely hateable, to the point of scorn and derision. If we had a petrodollar for every time someone said to us "Geez, get a room", I could personally pay down the national trade deficit.


As we head back down to Key West (where we have family), it's a beautiful and amazing consideration, these past couple of years. Never could I have forseen the blessings of life at this stage in the big, crazy cycle. Never could I have imagined loving a woman the way that I love Jae - an all-encompassing, spiritually connected love that knows how to dodge sudden cracks in our Earth steps and fallen branches in our paths.

A love of dual abundance and sacrifice, of bright highs and dark lows, of balance and perpetuity. She is inspiration and salvation, little girl and all woman. She's my wife. And I really, really like her. And to paraphrase a certain musical "she lo-oves me, and I love her, and she lo-oves me for loving her and I lo-ove her for loving me and we love each other. Because neither of us got enough love in our childhoods. And that's showbiz. Kid."

Happy Anniversary, Baby!

Love,

Me

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

The Dulcitar Report: May 16th

If you've been reading this blog for the past few entries, you know that I'm pretty contained. It hasn't reached that "night before Christmas" kind of special where you just can't sleep and still you're just daydreaming and drooling about all of the next morning goodness. The next morning, at this point, is when the sun peeks over the edge of the world, a new pot of coffee is on the way and there's a big happy FedEx truck pulling up to our big happy house. I'll try not to scream like a little girl, but it just might happen. There's no surpressing fitz o' glee, as I like to call them. Your "F.O.G." You know it. You get it.

But right now, I'm cool as the other side of the pillow; still getting pretty excited, especially with this latest batch of pictures from Dulcitar central.

Doug says:
"While sanding/buffing we had a couple of buff throughs to the primer coat. Had to re-spray and let cure/wet sand all over again, then yet another buff through in a different spot! ARRRG! That will learn me not to follow manufacture's recommended # of coats. 3 coats? Nope- 6 coats next time!"




Look at that color, look at that shine! Look at the dolphin swimming in it all!



Holy cow! Now THAT'S hi-gloss!







That's right sexy.


Doug says:

"These LEDS are VERY bright and I was able to match the luminosity as well. They didnt have as many as I needed in stock so I had to order more. Once they are all installed I can finally glue the fingerboard on, get it fretted and start loading some pickups and electronics into this thing! This will happen fairly quickly once all the finish and structural work is behind us.- Stay tuned!"




This is really incredible, watching this new instrument come into existence, and it's been really killer to hang out virtually in the workshop with Doug. I'm pretty stoked. If you could see the grin on my face, you'd know this to be true.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Orchestrating



I've been buried this week working on a new piece; it's a simple melody that I'm exploring in a number of different variations. Using an orchestra layout, I'm actually building the music at the same time that I build the arrangement, which is something new for me. What's frustrating is that my current MIDI set-up is only registering half of the instruments, which leaves me with half an orchestra, effectively. Until I can resolve that issue, I'm pushing ahead and will post a .mid file here as soon as I finish a first draft

Sunday, May 07, 2006

The Cinco De Mayo Report



Cinco De Mayo was a flippin' blast. Phillip, the bloke who was running sound for the event, did a great job with what he had, considering that forty feet back or so, every club on Wall Street had DJ music thumping out of the darkness, which made for a cosmic soup of aural hijinks. Jae and I missed Deja, which was a letdown - but Koolus was rather good, a latin rock band that mixed it up bilingually and sported a very visible throng of fans all wearing similar black t-shirts. One Drop was superb - the mix sounded sort of muddy, maybe perhaps "muddy" is too strong a word here and I'm really thinking about "oatmeal", which is not as heavy as mud, but still not as clear as crystal punch either. But they rocked to spite all that, with Roland Simmons flown in on guitar to fill a big personnel void, and I mean "flown in" figuratively. I've got stories about Roland and me on the road with Big Shirley back in '97 and they involve girls, whiskey, vomit and destroying a dressing room in South Carolina. I wouldn't kid.

Robby Copeland, ex of Pop Canon was playing drums with them as well, and there are more stories of a tour with those guys to a theme park in Alabama called Visionland and a show at a pizza joint in Montevallo. Stephen King Town. But another time, maybe.

We set up and did a quick sound check around 11 pm, "Ring-A-Ding", and noticed about 100 people start dancing near the front of the stage, which is not a terrible way to be introduced to your audience. It was a very great show, total fun every step of the way and I love playing ball with these guys up there. Our shows, in the whole seven year history of the band, having always been stretchy, turn this way and that depending on what's going on around us. So it was just totally delightful to stretch things out like "Cuckoo Tom" and "Black Indian" and sort of strut around inside of them for awhile. And by the third or fourth song, people are laying bottles of Corona and shots of Cuervo up on the stage, so there were times when we were simply grooving as I delivered the booze to the boys. We had the crowd toasting after every song in big nasty shouts of "a-yi!" and pulled Dwight Johnson up on stage to sing during "Positive Vibes", along with Lynn Finch,my lovely wife, Jae, and some guy with a cigarette who came up for a little while and then went back down into the crowd again. Take a look at the pictures and see just how insane it was. Uncle Charles, Mark and Rob all delivered the goods - there were people asking how to buy CDs from the front of the stage because we didn't have a table set-up, there was no room for a table because of all the bodies, some of whom had been partying since two that afternoon. Some handled it better than others.

It was terrific fun, all of it. And then interesting later on around 2 am when the cops do their whistle blowing "clear the area" sweep, which is one of the spookiest things I've ever experienced. The cops basically fan out and begin blowing their whistles in alternating long and short bursts, occasionally making shoving motions with their hands, some of them shouting "let's head out." Welcome to our police state.

Huge thanks to Wall Street Plaza for having us back!

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Cinco De Mayo time!



After our rowdy set at their Fat Tuesday Celebration this past February, the gang at Wall Street Plaza in downtown Orlando have kindly invited Mohave back to once again headline their 8th annual Cinco De Mayo Block Party and we would have been silly burros to refuse.

We're looking forward to another great show Friday night on the outdoor stage, smack dab in the middle of downtown and sharing the bill with Deja, Koolus and One Drop. The fun is taking place all day till all night Friday and from 5-7 pm, your first shot of tequila or margarita is ON THE HOUSE! You can't beat that with a piƱata stick. May 5th in Wall Street Plaza. Do it right!