Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The Sleeper Wakens

I can hardly believe that it's been over four years since I've performed my songs in public. I was hired to play at the very end of the season for our municipal outdoor music festival "Utica Monday Night." The evening came to an anti-climactic close when my amplifier stopped working in the middle of a number, and I was forced to carry on unplugged. Fortunately, there were so few people in attendance that all could hear me perfectly well. I had already sold my electric piano by then, and played the whole show with my guitar.

Since then, aside from dusting off my songs to play for the occasional curious visitor, I haven't much thought about music. I spent two years writing and trying to find an agent for my satirical novel, and two more years getting deeply involved in politics--with futility being the result in both cases. The book sits in the proverbial drawer, and the American people have rubber-stamped our Crusade to jump-start the Apocalypse. So here I sit, broken-hearted, with a Wellbutrin in one hand and a beer in the other. What's a body to do?

Well, I still had my songs, after all my other projects hit their respective fans--and while everybody within a 25-mile radius who wanted to hear them had already heard them and then turned back toward their televisions, there was the rest of the country to consider. People in Upstate New York (Central Region) are notable in that their sense of humor tends to be of the derisive, "get a horse" ilk--and in that they consider any local talent, by definition, "lousy." But, my wife assured me, the songs were good. And millions of people (purportedly able to appreciate fanciful humor) had not heard them.

Not having a contract with some major label or distributor, I decided to put the latest definitive recording I made up on eBay. This was a tape that I made for my own reference (and to present to a friend who was going overseas) on November 9, 1996. Having transcribed the master to a CD-R several years ago, it was an easy matter to load the thing into my computer. Now I could produce good copies and sell them directly without having to arm-wrestle the Man for royalties.

Thus I resume the quixotic musical odyssey I began over twenty-five years ago--about which more later.

1 Comments:

Blogger Andy said...

Or so the label tells me. I do so many things that I shouldn't be doing that it's hard to know where that ranks on the list. But, yeah--you're right.

6:07 PM  

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