Papa Rah

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C At Long Last!!! B

óBlackjack Tailor’s 1986 vinyl LP - “Rockin The Boat” – has been digitized and re-released at www.cdbaby.com/cd/blackjacktailor. You can either buy a copy of the CD or you can by downloads, whichever you prefer. Papa Rah’s second album – “Paroxysms Of Apathy” originally released in 2006, is also available at www.cdbaby.com/cd/paparah.

óWant to see Papa live? You have several options. You can either catch him as a member of the band Axis Of Blues, a psychedelic blues pop quartet currently playing a variety of venues in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. You can also catch him with the Dogwatch Nautical Band, a sea chantey band that’s entertained the Bay Area nautical community for the past 30 years. Or you can catch him playing either solo or teaming up with other various Bay Area musicians. Just visit the gigs section to find times and places.

Blog Entry {10/13/08}

óIf I could only clone myself, this is what I’d try to accomplish:

1. Do everything to make my family safe and secure.

2. Devote enough time to my day gig, so that I learned more and did more.

3. Be more politically active, and work for change.

4. Be available to friends whenever they need me, whenever we wanted to play, or do whatever.

5. Devote more time to play at the Ren Faire and at Dickens Faire.

6. Master the art of Irish, bluegrass, country and old-timey fiddle bowing

7. Work on my slide guitar.

8. Spend more time on my lead guitar playing.

9. Sing a heck of a lot more.

While I’m at it, I’d like to learn how to read hieroglyphs, explore martial arts, go hiking in the Sierras, and try to ski…

…as it is, if I can just get to work on time in the mornings, that’d be a start…

Blog Entry {7/25/08}

óA cautionary tale: So I’ve finally carved out some spare time, allowing me the opportunity to go out into the studio and do some administrative tasks I’d been meaning to get to for what seemed like ages – namely, to back up all the unused songs on the recording studio’s hard drive and download them onto my computer for safe keeping and use later. Most of the files I’d planned to transfer were quick two minute slices of song ideas, snippets of melody lines, and the odd little bit here and there – like a three song demo song by Layla, my three year old. It was late and I was bushed. The process can take as long as 20 minutes a song depending on how many tracks/memory I used. I’d been in the studio, napping on the couch as the songs downloaded, for something like two and half hours and all I’d downloaded was four songs. I sleepily got up and checked to see if the song was finished and I noticed it was. I also noticed an error message on the studio’s display screen. I quickly leafed through the manual and determined that I was supposed to turn the unit off and then back on again and that would correct the problem. I did so. But when it came back up there was another error message stating that there was a drive error and asked me if I wanted to fix it? I thought to myself, that’s probably a good idea, so I clicked “yes”. The message said “initializing” with a moving graph of a stylus writing on a stack of disks that was spinning. I was still sleepily thinking, “Oh, this is going to take a while”, and wondered when it would be done.

But just then it finished.

The song number that came up wasn’t the one I’d been working on. I’d been on song 005 of 044. Now, the display showed 001. And where there should have been a title of a song, there was only “new song” listed. My heart sank. I actually felt the blood leave my face.

Initializing.

That means getting initial…as in going back to the way it was…before I’d stored all that music on there. I desperately tried to find the other songs, with my heart breaking, and my mouth getting dryer and dryer with panic. There were none. They were all gone. And then it hit. The album. Paroxysms of Apathy. All the raw, basic tracks were gone. I wasn’t going to be able to re-master the songs as I’d planned to do when I got a little more money. Then I realized all the other things that were now gone. Song ideas and melodies that I can’t even hope to recall are all gone. What might have been my Sgt. Peppers, or my Stairway To Heaven, now not even a memory. Just gone.

This happened last night, and after a few shots of whiskey lovingly prescribed by Michelle, I went to bed feeling like an amputee with ghost pains where my creativity used to be. This morning it was bleak in my universe so Michelle and Layla both provided space. At work I went through the motions of my day, until the afternoon when I was describing the tragedy to my co-worker Mike Freidman. He asked how I’d mastered the project. I described to him how I’d recorded all the parts on the KORG D1200 and then converted each track to a WAV file that I transferred to my computer where I used those files in Sony Acid Pro software to master the finished album. Mike simply said, so your raw tracks are still on your computer. I could have kissed the man. He was right. It wasn’t the unvarnished tracks, but I could at least separate the instruments for re-mastering. I’ve still lost a lot of creative stuff, stuff that will be impossible to replace, but I have a lot more than I thought I did last night and this morning.

Sadly, I’ve lost those recordings of Layla’s singing. Who knows, someday she may be the latest pop diva (currently her ambition is to be a mermaid rock star police woman). I would have loved to have her fans hear how she sang at the age of three. But now I’m the only being alive that remembers that session in our living room with her on her small chair, clinging onto adult sized earphones, practically swallowing the microphone while she belted out Old MacDonald and Wheels On the Bus and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I can record her again, but that magical moment lives only in my memory now.

Moral: BACK UP EVERYTHING ON YOUR COMPUTERS THAT MEANS ANYTHING TO YOU. You might not get another chance…

Blog Entry {7/20/08}

óSo much to do, so much to see, no time to do it. It was so different 20-odd years ago. It seemed like I had all the time in the world, and in fact I did. I lazed around all morning and afternoon long, picking on the guitar, writing songs. Come the evening and it was band practice, or it was socializing, or it was playing gigs, or it was attending gigs, or helping out other bands with their gigs. And strangely, there wasn’t that much to do. As long as I practiced and played the occasional gig, my expectations were met. I had a lot of time on my hands.

Now, on a personal level, there’s a good karma job I really love that takes up 40 hours a week, there’s the most wonderful family in the world to spend time with (both a lovely and captivating wife and a precocious and energetic daughter), and there’s household stuff to do. And now that said daughter is getting a little older, we’ve started checking off the fun to do list we’d made when we first met. We’ve started traveling, with our first family trip to Maui in July.

Then there’s music. I’ve been blessed by being able to play along with some really great musicians in a greatly diverse musical scene. There are gigs with Axis of Blues and Dogwatch Nautical Band to attend and practice for. There’s my own songwriting that goes on at its own pace. There’s the business side of MandoFrets Music that can take up lengthy chunks of time. When I get the opportunity, there’s the Bruno Band folks that I like to jangle strings with.

Busy, busy, busy. Still…it’s pretty much the best life I can imagine.