News

Via the best ever, with instructions copied verbatim:

it's easy i promise. copy this list, post it on your blog. leave in the bands you have seen perform live and delete the ones you haven't seen. finally add new ones that you have seen until you have 25 bands. one * means the previous person had that band on their list. two ** means that the last two people who did this before you had that band on their list. add an * if you have seen the same band as me.

So here's my version. Odd that there's almost no overlap, when I love a lot of the bands in the previous list. I can't quite bring myself to believe I haven't seen Bob Mould. And I wonder if I can count Interpol since I saw Sam in the Holy Terrors several bazillion times? Nah.

1. metallica ****
2. paul westerberg
3. the replacements
4. elvis costello
5. cheap trick
6. frank zappa
7. richard thompson
8. michelle shocked
9. marilyn manson
10. the mavericks
11. jeff beck
12. nrbq
13. chris whitley
14. bruce springsteen
15. the who
16. paul mccartney
17. stevie ray vaughan
18. glen phillips
19. eric clapton
20. clarence gatemouth brown
21. prince
22. u2
23. r.e.m.
24. lone justice
25. the genitorturers

Yeah, I'm kinda old. Kiss my ass.

Had to mention that I got my Taylor back from J. Michael Instruments yesterday, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Hadn't been happy about the plugged-in sound (and old under-saddle Fishman setup); Jay recommended a B-Band dual-pickup system, with an onboard blender to a mono out.

First off, the new setup sounds amazing. As in, actually sounds like the guitar, instead of all quacky and piezo-y. And having blender/volume at hand, plus no more outboard preamp, is gonna be great.

While he was at it, of his own volition, Jay did a beautiful setup and action adjustment on the guitar. And wouldn't let it leave the store without polishing up the face. And just generally did beautiful work, and gave a shit about the results, even though as a luthier and seller of high-end guitars, he has better things to occupy his time than my little pickup job.

So chalk up one more customer-for-life. I'm sure he already has many.

Thinking of adding some social / interactivity features to openmikes.org -- nothing major, just something to make it more interesting / useful to players, and maybe inspire them to contribute more updates.

I'm thinking of a lightweight registration -- just gimme an email and a handle, no spam will be sent, the email's not displayed, just for verification. And an optional URL. Then, you can log in and mark a given open mike, on a given day, with "I'm going". So musical acquaintances might better answer the question "is it worth going to... tonight". And of course, clicking on your name in the displayed list would lead to your upcoming open mike "calendar", for all to see -- with a link to that optional URL of yours. Note that this registration would *only* be required if you wanted to add your info in this way - I would never put up the slightest barrier to actually viewing the listings.

And now that you can do this, you'll want to add that night you're checking out that's *not* in our database yet, just so you can add the wonderfulness of you.

Second thought might be lowering the barrier to entry for adding a night -- I currently don't add them if I can't find a solid address, etc. Might arguably be better to allow the "incomplete" data in, with explicit requests displayed for the rest of the data.

And if I did that, then perhaps an automated click-the-email-link-to-verify system to get new nights posted more quickly (currently, there's a bottleneck, and its name is me).

Thoughts? Suggestions? Altoids?

Update, March 8, 2006: Starting to work on some of this. Beta-testers wanted.

So I did indeed poke my head out while in Tampa, at Yeoman's Road Pub. That was fun -- nice people, some really talented performers, a huge beer selection, damn good shepherd's pie. My kind of night.

Update: Removed the photo link, as the site hosting it no longer exists, and now appears to host malware. Bad picture, anyway.

For what it's worth, I'm in Tampa on business at the moment... and every so often, I'll take advantage of my own damn site and find an open mike to visit. Tonight, that would be Yeoman's Road Pub. See you there, whoever "you" might be.