Rock Candy

Witch/Earthless played Montreal and Providence on Saturday and Sunday. Both good. Boston tonight. It's snowed lots .both days

Witch, Providence

Earthless, Providence

Isaah andAntoine 

J with Earhless guys

Graveyard Train

Started a Witch tour on Thursday. That night we started driving to Totonto from Bratlleboro Vermont and got stuck at the top of a mountain for a couple of hours. It was snowing pretty hard and a truck had jack knifed. Spent the time at a gas station/trading post. Kinda fun.

Eventually we got to Toronto on Friday and headed for the venue. The show was at the Horshoe Tavern, a good club. Everything went well. Earthless is on the tour and we met up with them as well as Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene. 

Witch soundcheck

J and Kevin Drew

J 

Trading post

The Wild, The Innocent

I filled in for a friend of mine at Kenny's Castaways last night. It was Karaoke night and I expected the worst. Wasn't too bad though. The PA is pretty good and the the room sounds decent. Even had a couple of old Bleeker Street hippie dudes get up and sing some CSNY and Hendrix. Weird, you would think they would have moved on a bit, but no. Anyway, Bruce Springsteen played his first NYC show at Kenny's which makes it historic in my book. Made miss CBGB though. If Kenny's can hang on since 1967, would have thought CB's could too, but no.

"Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?"

Kick Out the Jams

So I've been sitting here all night listening to the PBS pundits argue about the stimulus bill. You have to wonder what's up with the bums in Washington. It seems pretty simple, put together a plan that will get people spending some money and hopefully get people back to work. Being unemployed in a crapped out economy is no joke. Unless you've been there I don't think you can understand how depressing a state it is. I doubt that many of our current representatives can relate because at the basic level, they don't understand that  unemployment statistics for most people are: "I have a job, unemployment is 0%" or "I don't have a job, unemployment is 100%".  Members of Congress still have a job. If they want to put together a stimulus plan they should contact some reasonably intelligent unemployed person and ask them what they would do. I imagine they would come up with a plan something like this.

1. Give every taxpayer a $5,000 prepaid Visa card, not good for cash, to be used to buy whatever. These days you can use it to buy essentials such as food.

2. Suspend payroll taxes for a year.

3. Increase unemployment benefits to $450 per week for everybody, good for 2 years.

No idea how much something like this would cost but it would probably decrease the fear of depression that is causing people to stop spending and give the economy a good boost.

I suspect though that whatever gets passed, the rich will not get poorer.

The Interpreter

The Fluid at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Haven't had much to write about lately. I mixed two show for the Fluid last weekend. They were great, I had never seen them before. A nice mix of punk and hard rock. They played Maxwells and Music Hall of Williamsburg.  I know their singer, John, from when he was in New United Monster Show, in NYC. 

I also mixed the Overcasters, friends of the Fluid from Denver. They were quite good, very psychedelic, amazing sounding guitars. Check them out if you can.

The Music Hall is a very cool venue. It sounds great and the staff are incredibly nice and helpful. They have a Yamaha PM 5D digital console. Never thought I'd say this but I'm starting to prefer digital consoles to analog. There are so many more things you can do on them. They don't sound quite as good as Midas analog boards but how often do I get to use one of those anyway.

Rest In Peace

Ron Asheton

I just found out that Ron Asheton is dead. It's sad, it's a bummer. Ron was one of the good guys. I was fortunate to know him. He could really play guitar.