It’s been a good couple of days. We ended up using Heather’s knitting connections and hooked up with another knit shop owner out here in Kansas City, Missouri for the weekend. It really sort of saved us – all of our Columbia, MO friends (our next stop, where we’re headed now) were in St. Louis for the weekend for the Comvergence Conspiracy Collective show there. I wanted to get over there but, coming from the opposite direction it would’ve meant doubling back and $40 in gas and the killing of any opportunity to make any money… it just seems to line up every once in a while, you’re just in the wrong part of the country and have no money left and… and then you discover someone like Cowboy Bob just HAPPENS to Live half an hour down the road from the Carribou Coffee you’ve taken shelter in…
The host of the Kansas City Songwriter Association’s Song Pull performing some new tunes in front of an intrigued audience and multiple cameras. Somewhere along the line I seem to have accidentally deleted my picture of his BILLION capos – 6 or 7 capos placed on the guitar for his song “Capo Madness”. I liked hanging out with this group, every performer knew the next performer’s songs and played and sang along. It was a lot of fun.
He HEEE!!!! X-Files pinball! Smack up Fluke Man!!! (shlup shlup shlup!)
We actually ended up playing a couple of house concertish sort of things over the weekend, selling some CDs and being well-fed. As much as I don’t have much belief in the holidays, it WAS kind of good to have someplace to go for Easter. Whether I’m worried about anyone’s particular resurrection and the eggs carried within the traditional holiday bunnies, it’s nice to be surrounded by the general melee of family interactions and antics and insanity. Pretending to follow the tangle of the girlfriends and the boys’ time in school and the newest motorcycles and the family trip to the bike rally and whatsisname’s new camera and GET OFF THAT CHAIR AND LEAVE HIM ALONE!!! and just the general energy of a multi-generational gathering. We were glad to be taken in, glad to be accepted. It was good to be accepted.
Heather and I hangout with Bob at his knit shop – Knit Craft – which is the knit shop with… (winces) … heart.
Making some art here and there.
Last Friday we’d actually fallen in with the Kansas City Singer Songwriter Association and played their open mic. We hadn’t expected all the hubbub associated with that, either. It was intimidating to walk in and get called to a back room where we get interviewed befor a camera – our performance and interview will eventually be posted on songpull.com. I’m not sure if I should even advertise that until I take a look at it first since I broke a string in the middle of everything… grrrowl. We ended up crashing with one of the other performers we met that night, John Mitchell, who wrote some really amazing tunes like the “Picker’s Party” in which he calls musicians to form a political party of their own. All in all, it was a great community of singer/songwriters building off of one another, really honing their craft. I miss being in a circle like that.
Monday finds us racing along our familiar I-70 towards our now-familiar Columbia, MO to do a radio show with Jeff Wheeler on KOPN. We plan to play our newer material to show off for him a bit, get Susan dancing if she’s listening in. Maybe get the parrots reaquainted with our voices before we land there. We’re listening to We’re About 9 and squinting into the sunshine and generally pleased to be headed East, clustered with the truckers, having dodged the storms and the flooding – we’re generally lucky puppies. If the nuclear holocaust ever comes to pass, you’ll want to pack up and travel with us because we’ll fall into good people, good places and the fallout will probably blow right around us.
Shit. Knock on wood!
