Has the summer really come and gone. The Dylan vacation seems like a great, distant memory.
Have you seen No Direction Home? It is an excellent biography of Dylan’s early years with Dylan talking openly about his music. Worth watching and owning. One frustrating things is to realize how much video footage they have in vaults that is not being released. Pennebaker took color videos of the 66 tour. There is also the Hard Rain tour from the 70’s. We want that stuff.
I posted a garage recording of my old band, Expecting Rain, which was done June 04. Thanks to Heidi Jury on keyboards and backup vocals, Todd King on lead guitar, Jeff Smith on bass and Matt Chandler on drums. Robert Arsenault may be on mandolin but its hard to hear in the mix. Thanks to Todd for recording and mixing the track. Click on the title to link.
I did lead vocals, accoustic guitar and harmonica. Sounds primitive but that was us back then. We started in March and played weekly until August with a few personnel changes. It was a great time and we made big progess, especially considering I only started performing in February. Today our sound is much tighter and more rock – audiences don’t want slow ballads although Knockin always goes over well. They usually want to rock out.
Performing has been a great joy to me. I usually do one open mic a week and jam frequently with other musicians, amazingly mostly people in their 20’s. We had a great jam last night at Piazza Joe’s Restaurant. Half of the night was Metal – the other was Bob Dylan material. Our second set was on fire – we rocked the night out. It creates quite a buzz. We had 26 people, up from 16 the week before and 8 the first week. We are climbing but may die anyways – owners like to make money on the bar – a fact of business life.
Anyone else out there performing Dylan material in their area? How and when? What kind of reaction are you getting and who is your audience.a
