February 27, 2010

You wanna see a COOL Fresno rock history site?

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 6:34 pm

The site to go to is http://stagedive-records.com/fresnopunkhistoryhome

Dale Stewart, one of the guests for our Underground Garden show at the Rogue Festiva (it’s episode 3 on Sunday March 5th at 5pm at Veni Vidi Vici), did it right. This site is the real deal. It’s a very informative site (with lots and lots of pictures from the times) about the Fresno punk scene in the late 70′s and early 80′s. If you are at all interested in punk (Fresno or otherwise), you’ll want to bookmark this site.   Pictured above is NBJ (the band with such a rude name that you’ll have to ask privately what it stood for ) playing at Roeding Park. This was a great gig (I’ve got some pix of it myself laying around here somewheres). The band in the picture below was in attendance, but weren’t on the bill that day —The Short Order Cooks. They went to Hoover High ( a  year behind myself) and  yes, they did get a lot of guff (to put it politely) from the predominately “Rush” and “Supertramp” t-shirt wearing  student body.  (Both of these pictures are from the stagedive records site….check it out!)

February 25, 2010

Folly’s Pool..one of the first bands featured in the upcoming Rogue Fest show

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 11:25 am

Folly's Pool LP 70's era album cover

I met Doug Carlson for the first time a few weeks back at Full Circle Brewery. I remember seeing his band Folly’s Pool back when I was a kid of about 15. They took some time (ok…a decade or two) off, and are now back and playing.
Doug is one of the featured guests in our very first episode of our upcoming Rogue Festival show: “The Underground Garden: scenesters, tall-tales and Fresno rock n’ roll.”
Along with Jerry Satterburg, who will represent for the 60′s era band 12 Miles Out, Doug will fill us in on his band, Fresno’s music scene in the 70′s and the scene around Fresno’s classic music club, The Wild Blue Yonder.
Don’t miss this show —Rogue opening night, Friday, March 5th at 7:30pm at Veni Vidi Vici!

Folly's Pool today

February 17, 2010

Getting Close

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 11:22 am

Picking up the master today. I have to listen to it (making sure there’s no weird glitches), then mail it off, then Ross has to mail in the art, then wait for the US Post.

At the same time….preparing the Rogue Show with Tom Magill, and getting word out to the artists about the Underground Garden “Art Piece”….it’s all coming together, but my brain is beginning to hurt a bit. (see G.L. Gumby photo in last post)–I think I just don’t have enough gigabites in mah head and the hard-drive’s starting to make odd noises.

February 10, 2010

My Brain’s Too Small

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 11:27 am

There are a lot of aspects to this Underground Garden Project, and they all need to be worked up simultaneously. This means juggling. This means keeping track. This means trying not to drop the ball. This mean organizing myself and my time.
Yikes!
Yesterday, I did make a sort of chart. It’s in little columns: “Rogue Show” “Other Rogue responsibilities” “Art Piece” “CD release” “The album” “other upcoming gigs”.
I xeroxed it. Then I took one of the copies and wrote under each heading the stuff that needs to be done right away. Sort of an expanded and indexed version of notes I sometimes write of the things I need to remember to do on any given day. Cuz my brain’s too small to hold all this stuff!

February 5, 2010

Why Do We Do It?

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 5:26 pm

As part of the Underground Garden Project, I’ve been toting my little video camera around and asking people things like
“Is local music important?
Why?”      
Another way to have asked the same question migt have been, “Is it valuable?”, “What’s it for?” or to put it in a harsher light, “What is it good for?” or “Why do we/you/they/I bother?”

 Two  sentences that begin with ‘certainly’:

Certainly every band that’s booked a club, hustled the promotion and still had a very very humble turn-out (it’s happened to everyone at one time or another) might feel like they weren’t valued.

Certainly it must be more than ‘money’ and ‘fame’ that drives an artist….because those commodities are only rarely given in trade for their goods.

Other questions that come up are:

“Does local music/art have a positive effect on a community/town?” 
“Do the arts play a part in the local economy?”

These are all questions that I’d love to hear people’s answers to. 
I am, at root, an idealist, an optimist.

Still, these questions sort of boil down to :
“Why do we bother?”

February 3, 2010

Handing the CD over to be ‘mastered’.(gulp)

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 9:53 am

It’s hard letting go of a project, especially one that’s close to your heart,
one that represents hours and hours of your time, one you’ve spent months
obsessing over, one you’ve examined and tweaked and made
the tiniest, barely perceptible adjustments to.
But this is the next step. Turning in the mixes of our new album to be
mastered at a local studio.

For those not steeped in the recording process, this is the stage where you hand over already mixed recordings to a mastering engineer who will polish it up for final release.
He’ll make sure all the songs are the same volume, clean up any unwanted noise, perhaps make small EQ adjustments here and there, add a little (hopefully not too much) compression to even out the sound, and then he/she will present you with a Master CD (in exchange for a not-small bag o’ sheckels) which you will then hand over to some company who will now manufacture your album from this master.
It’s part of the process.
It’s smart to have another set of ears do a final check on your work.
But still….it’s hard.
To let it go.

Luckily, I feel that it’s in pretty good hands. Bill Sayre from FastTraxx studio over on Broadway, south of Belmont in Fresno, is taking care of it. We talked a while, shared philosophies on everything from microphones to the rock n’ roll bands of the 70’s, and I think he’s the man for the job.

The job should be done in less than two weeks, and then it’s time to mail it in and wait for the mailman to bring me boxes and boxes of the new CD. Even more fun than waiting for that submarine that really motors through the bathtub that you ordered from the back of Cap’n Crunch….I never got that thing to work. Baking soda?

FastTraxx studio

February 1, 2010

Keeping things started…

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 4:35 pm

I started this blog to document and comment on the formation of the crazy large-scale idea: The Underground Garden.

If you poke around on this site as well as my home music site, you’ll get the idea. It’s an album, it’s a series of three Rogue Performance Festival shows, it’s a cooperative visual art piece, it’s a series of small video films, it’s a CD release party AND it’s a blog.

It’s all built around this idea of The Underground Garden—-the idea that a local music/art scene is alive and interconnected. There’s also the parallel I see between Forestiere’s Underground Garden and Fresno’s (or maybe anybody’s) local music/art scene.—–wonderful, full-of-personality, but yet also under-explored. My hopes for this project is that it will be a tiny step in curing that last part and also an affirmation of local musicians and artist.

Ghandi said something like (don’t you love accurate quotations?!): It doesn’t matter how small a thing is; it is most important that you do it.

Here’s hoping for a few months of wonderful explorations, collaborations and maybe some noisy and fun music!

Getting This Started

Category: Uncategorized — admin @ 4:16 pm

Special thanks to Marcel at Jungle Webs. I spent my afternoon yesterday with him as he updated and repaired my website, as well as setting things up so that I could start this blog.

Check out JungleWebs for your WebNeeds folks!