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thundershack journal volume zero

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

John Wheeler (Hayseed Dixie, Molding, The Deconstruction Brothers) came by tonight to add some drums and guitar tracks.

Eric’s new project grows nearer to completion. We intend to master it this month while John is in town recording new Hayseed Dixie material at his Nashville studio. Hayseed Dixie is a bluegrass band that plays rock, to over simplify. Their first CD was A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC. It did very well and established the band as a touring entity. Other recordings include A Hot Piece of Grass, Kiss My Grass: A Hillbilly Tribute to Kiss, Money Talks, Back in Black,and Hells Bells.

When John took the act to Europe and the British Isles he found the money enough better there that they have stopped touring in the US and spend much of their time overseas. In fact John is looking to buy a home across the water. So it is a treat for his friends at Thundershack to find John back in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. We have him lined up to add some fiddle parts soon to some new material. The new Hayseed material—their new CD will be all original songs—may represent evolution beyond the onstage bluegrass (no drummer) format, for he brought a London drummer, Mark Garfield (of the Bristish band Neck) to town with him. John can play any instrument but he can’t play them all at the same time. He’s limited that way. Mark and the Hayseed bass player Jake Byers came with John tonight. The band also includes two sons of Don Reno, the iconic bluegrass banjo player who was second only to Earl Scruggs as a banjo star in the days when bluegrass was new; Dale Reno plays mandolin, guitar, etc., and Don Wayne Reno plays banjo. The musicianship of Hayseed Dixie is of a very high level.

John Wheeler has been an important member of Molding for a long time, and he recorded Eric’s new material first, starting about a year ago, playing most of the instruments and singing most of the harmony vocals himself. When he retuned to Europe before the recordings were mature, Brodie and Bob imported the tracks to Crankensten, Thundershack’s ancient audio work station (computer) and they have been tweaking the songs for months now, picking up guitar parts by Bob and harmony vocals by Cinjun Tate. They are powerful painful honest funny songs—great songs—punk country pop rock songs presented with unsportsmanlike virtuosity. Unfortunately, Eric is leaning toward calling the CD a Molding record instead of an Eric Watkins record. I feel the latter would be a more accurate representation. Whatever the artist's name turns out to be, the title may be “Pol Pot Tortures Buddha.”

October 11, 2007

Stack's final rehearsal before going the Cincinatti club The Mad Frog for a Saturday night. Show. They are playing extremely well now. Cincinatti area folk have a treat coming.

October 13, 2007

Tonight, Brodie and I finished Oohlungwhodie Oohnolay. Mix issues had become so compicated that I despaired of ever finishing it, but Brodie stepped in and rendered back to me the sound I heard in my head better than my own mixes ever had.

This piece was prodded out of me by the poet Sharon Doubiago. She had read some of my Radnor Lake poems in my books 5 Speed and Ghost Trees and said nice things but said that "Radnor" was "too hard" a name, "too Saxon" for the experience my poems showed. She said I should express my native heritage. ( We had discovered we shared Cherokee ancestry when we met at the 2005 Walla Walla Poetry Party). I argued with her some but then I realized that introducing a "Cherokee name for Radnor Lake" would give me an excuse for the line "the wind is sacred there" in my poem "Lavetta Swift Bench 2/3/99."

I did the research and learned that "the wind is sacred there" in Cherokee is "oohlungwhodee oohnolay" and incorportated that into the poem (this version of the poem was published on Centrifugal Eye online poetry journal--it's still up at http://home.earthlink.net/~centrifugaleye/id22.html ). I sent it to Sharon and she praised it and said I should do a "chant poem" to illustrate the pronunciation of the phase. Almost a year later, when I was feeling a need to work with my voice over-layered, in a style I used on early Poetry Out Loud in the seventies, it came to me that "Oohlungwhodee Oohnolay" would make a good rhythm track. The idea perculated in my head another year and then last spring I began it and this summer when the heat sapped my spirit the poem lifted me. Everytime I'd force myself thru torpor to enter work on the poem I'd be lifted. There were sixteen tracks of Klyd Watkins vocals as the first draft.

Since then David Atkins has added percussion, and Stack guitarist Keith White has added reserved acoustic guitar parts. Ginny Tate, a partner that Linda and I worked with in the Poetry Out Loud days, came up from Christiana, Tennessee, and added a part, the first time we'd worked together in, maybe, twentyfive years. Then my wife Linda, tho she is never pain free, found the toughness to come to the backyard building and add a part too. That's very special to me. I hope a few people will like it as much as I do.

October 16 2007

Stack has a relaxed evening loading back in after the triumph at The Mad Frog

October 22 2007

Brodie, Bob, Eric and David mising One Foot in the Garden

October 26 2007

This Friday night we had a special treat. Rick White came by to give us some lead tracks. We had planned on using a fiddle for the final lead touches on One Foot In The Garden, which has become the projected tenth track of Molding 4, Budha Tormented by Pol Pot, but John Wheeler has become too deeply invovled with recording the new Hayseed Dixie CD and we never got around to calling Loretta MacKeever, so when Rick told Bob he wanted to do some playing we knew where we needed him. Rick White was--most of you know this--a guitarist with the Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies (along with Bob Watkins)--so he was part of the first recordings ever made at Thundershack. His side project band Scalded Dawg practiced here, and he worked on the (never finished) Neon Murray and Level projects. It seems to me Rick was the one most devastated by the ending of SCW and he put his guitar down for a while. We hope this will be the first of many times he fires up at Thundershack.

Also working on inserting the bass parts for One Foot In The Garden. We certainly meant to use Steve Burgess but didn't get it done and then we found ourselves at the deadline with Steve out of town on vacation. Eric called June Kato in LA, and June recorded a couple of tracks to an mp3 we emailed him and he passed them to us on the internet!

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