John Hendow

My dad likes to stay up late and read. I know he’s often bored at night and that he enjoys listening to music, but with everyone else trying to sleep he needs something with headphones. For a few years he’s been using a portable CD player and carrying around some discs. It’s not terribly practical.

One of the benefits to having a geeky son is that you may find some kind of technology foisted upon you. So as an experiment I put some dad-friendly music on my iPod nano and let him use it for a few days. It was a definite hit. He loves the idea of having a big collection of music to listen to, but the nested menu system in the nano was confusing for him. My concern was that he would spend his time trying to get it to work rather than enjoying music.  I looked at the Apple web site and it seemed like the iPod shuffle would be a better choice for him.

So this week I ordered a custom-engraved iPod for him, and will fill it up with some of his favorite music to get him started. It’s going to be fun to see how this goes. I know the music will be a bit hit, and it’s possible he’ll develop an interest in podcast content as well.

Tonight we will be attending the Seattle Opera’s performance of La Traviata at McCaw Hall. This year’s subscription is for all but the final opera; I simply couldn’t get excited about seeing Amelia although I hear it’s quite good. So, it’s all Verdi for us this year.

Since being entirely renovated, McCaw Hall is a fabulous venue and is flattering to unamplified vocal performances. It will be especially interesting to hear this evening’s performance given the challenging score. I’ll resist the urge to provide a tweetcast throughout the evening…

On Friday night The 1 Uppers played at the Rendezvous in Seattle. Among my favorite aspects of this venue is their dinner menu which includes a fabulous Mac and Cheese. I freely admit to having a pathological focus on my lifelong quest for the ultimate Mac and Cheese, and the ultimate French Toast. Everybody has a mission, and this noble cause is mine.

Almost immediately upon loading our gear onto the stage and beginning a quick soundcheck, there was a disheartening “pop” followed by the smell of smoke. Caben’s bass amp apparently decided to take the night off. Fortunately our practice room is a short car ride away, and he successfully procured a stand-in amp before our set began.

While I was enjoying dinner and a beer, the co-billed band “Fasten With Pins” performed a wonderful set of a cappella music. The three vocalists in the band blend beautifully and  it’s always fun to hear them.

We took the stage with the six of us occupying our customary positions on the stage. For a portion of the set, we invited “Fasten With Pins” to join us and sing backups. The stage at the Rendezvous is just about big enough for nine people… good thing we’re a cozy bunch! All of the songs in our set went quite well, and I’d say our rendition of “Maybe Probably” was easily the best we’ve ever delivered. At the end of our set the audience seemed interested in an encore, so we decided to premiere a song we’ve been working on for this week’s show. It was well received.

This was a fun evening. Both of my parents were in attendance, which is a rarity. Neither of them had heard this band before, and I doubt they’d classify themselves as fans of country music. On the way home, they both said they really enjoyed the show. Then again, they might have just been acting polite to ensure I’d give them a ride back to the house.

The Condensed Version
This past weekend, The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed two shows at the fabulous Crystal Ballroom in Portland. I got a flat tire. My niece had a baby. I drank beer. The Seahawks got stomped.

Friday
While en route to this gig the sidewall on my driver’s side rear tire blow out. This is a very unusual type of tire failure and can be extremely dangerous. It happened while on the freeway while going about 60 MPH. I was lucky it didn’t make the car spin or flip. I was also lucky to find a service station (that still actually works on cars) and they had a suitable replacement tire. So despite being inconvenienced by the tire failure I was still in Portland pretty early and succeeded in loading into the venue with plenty of spare time. Enough spare time, in fact, to find a nice sidewalk pub and have a beer. Jeff joined me after a bit, and we happened to see Kristi and Colleen walking by, so they joined us as well.

The gig was a lot of fun. Super Diamond was in great form and they were a delight to hang out with. The crew at the Crystal Ballroom is 100% professional, easy going, and funny as heck. It makes the experience of playing there so enjoyable for us when the crew is having fun too. I discovered that the gain stages in my Pod XT Live had somehow gotten a little too hot, and were adding more distortion to my signal path than I like. I didn’t have an opportunity to adjust these settings on the fly, so I just backed off the volume a bit and went with it.  This was a short set and we burned through it quickly, followed by perhaps the fastest teardown in the history of the band… I think we were offstage with all our gear within 5 minutes of ending our final song.

Saturday
I woke up Saturday and went to visit with family in Portland. My niece was due to deliver her baby at any moment, and I left for load-in at around 1:30. She gave birth at 2:42. I didn’t get to see the newborn girl, but received pictures via iPhone. She’s a beauty and I look forward to welcoming her to the family and reading her “The Stinky Cheese Man”.

The Saturday show at the Crystal Ballroom was a private event, specifically a wedding reception. I arrived early and set up my gear with the primary objective of getting those Pod XT Live gain settings under control. It took about 20 minutes to run through all the banks of patches and make adjustments. We soundchecked with some of the new songs we planned to play that night including a new Paul Simon track. After soundcheck Mack and I took a quick trip to Apple Music where I picked up a regulated power supply for my pedalboard (project ahead… pictures and narrative to follow). Once we got to playing things went beautifully. The crowd got up and danced, and I was surprised to see some friends from Seattle were in attendance. Apparently they are friends with the bride. The show was over early enough that I managed to get back to the hotel, get a late night snack / beer, and flop into bed before 12:30 AM.

Sunday
The morning was a big success. Cornflake-encrusted French toast, excellent French press coffee from Costa Rica, and fine company. The weather was nice and we walked around Portland a bit before heading back North to Seattle. I listened to the Seahawks game on the radio, which at least spared me the added misery of watching them get clobbered by Arizona. Hopefully the bye week will help put the wind back in our sails.

Shortly after midnight last night I decided to pour myself a shot of single malt and take in the view. Having arrived at the age of 46 I have nothing to add to the millenia of accumulated human wisdom. However, of some things I am certain:

1. I am blessed with good health. The thing about this is there isn’t a particularly identifiable justification for it. I didn’t earn it, I simply got dealt a decent hand. I have a few minor mileage-related issues (occasional sore back, imperfect vision, increasing use of the word “whippersnapper”), but overall I appear to be on target for a pretty long run of happy living. Thank you, genetic programming.
2. I am surrounded by amazing wonderful people. Great family, awesome wife, fabulous friends. I was thinking of how many people in this world that I love… it’s a big bunch of humans, and I am very fortunate to have so many that I call friends. Thank you for sharing your lives with me.
3. I am very lucky to have such a strong passion for music. It’s possible to spend your entire life wandering around the planet without finding your muse. Mine smacked me on the head as a kid and since that young age it’s been a huge focus for me. I love playing music. My parents thought I would outgrow this interest. They also used to tell me that I would reflect on my favorite music from my teenage years and wonder how I ever could stand such crummy stuff. We’re talking about KISS, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Miles Davis and Rush. I’ll absolutely cop to having had crappy taste in a lot of stuff as kid, but I still love all that music. I really wish I had kept my KISS lunchbox.
4. I successfully escaped the turmoil of youth without losing my grounding in what it felt like. People tend to dismiss what young people think and feel, telling them they’ll eventually look back at and (with the perspective of an adult) recognize that things weren’t all that big a deal after all. It’s arguably true in retrospect, but that doesn’t invalidate what we felt at that age. It really DID matter. I hope I never forget that when I talk with young people.
5. Monty Python is funny. Groucho Marx is funny. Spike Jones is funny. Some stuff is funny and timeless. If I ever stop laughing at Monty Python you have my permission to clobber me with a 16 tonne weight.
6. Dinosaurs are inarguably cool. My 2nd grade teacher gets credit for turning me on to dinosaurs. Thank you, Mrs. Carey, wherever you are.
7. The 1965 Mustang is the second coolest car ever made. It is only surpassed by the 1966 Batmobile from the TV series. If I’m allowed to buy a car for my midlife crisis, it’s going to be the Batmobile and I will drive it to work every day. I might even dress like Batman and pull up next to policement at stop lights and say “greetings, fellow crimefighter”.
8. Beer and coffee are actually tasty. I didn’t believe this in my youth because the only beer I could get ahold of was Olympia (ack) since that’s what my dad liked, and he used to drink instant coffee (ack). Since then we’ve both grown up and now we both enjoy better beer and better coffee.
9. My parents are actually pretty cool. I still hope they’re finally going to tell me they adopted me from a passing group of mysterious traveling minstrels (thus explaining my music thing). Oh, and the part about how the minstrels were insanely rich and now are completely dead except for me, thus making me the sole heir to their zillions of dollars. But until such time as they inform me of my true heritage, I’m pretty pleased with them as parents.
10. Despite my occasional jokes about being raised by penguins, I really do appreciate the years I spent in Catholic school. The experiences, friendships, and moral grounding was valuable and meaningful. I am also glad that I transferred to a public high school and graduated with a combined perspective. Those years among the nuns and priests were actually not so bad. Although I still have an irrational fear of rulers.

On Saturday 10/10 The 1 Uppers played at Conor Byrne in Ballard. It was a fun evening of music despite the band being a man short. The other guitarist, Kris, was unavailable that night so I held down electric guitar duties on my own. One thing I definitely noticed was that I don’t have nearly his depth of great licks as a guitarist. But I enjoyed being able to fill a little more space with denser patches. Overall it was a fun night and I look forward to having Kris rejoin us for the next gig.

Jon Hyde did his usual amazing job of playing great pedal steel on every song. He never seems to run out of ideas, and I love hearing him drop chord substitutions into the changes. Caben and Eric are rock-solid in the rhythm section, and David does a fine job on lead vocals. The 1 Uppers continues to be a very satisfying musical experience for me, and I feel fortunate to be in the band with great friends.

My amp sounded pretty good. This is the first 1 Uppers gig that I’ve played since having it reworked by Velvetone. The tonal balance seems better and it doesn’t break up at such a low volume. I can understand why this is Fender’s most popular guitar amp of all time. It’s really a great piece of equipment. I’m still messing with my patches on the PodXT Live, but I think I’m settling into a good collection of general-purpose patches for this band. I’ll be working on my pedalboard setup over the next few weeks, and hopefully this will give me an opportunity to tweak settings with the whole system.

The next 1 Uppers gig is coming up in a few weeks. We’re working on some covers for a multi-band show. More info to come…

Last weekend The Dudley Manlove Quartet played at a wedding reception in Pullman. Because the show was relatively early in the afternoon, we had to leave Seattle at 9:00 AM… we were well supplied with coffee and banana bread to help us survive the trip Eastward. The drive to Pullman is (mostly) interesting and I enjoyed the van banter and Jeff’s excellent DJ selections. As we neared Pullman I hooked up my iPod to study the guitar solo from “The Final Countdown” (special request by the bride and groom).

The actual event took place in a barn in Colton, about 10 miles South of Pullman. It was a beautiful rustic barn with a wonderful atmosphere, and somewhat chilly and drafty too… but that minor inconvenience was soon forgotten once we got to playing and the crowd began to dance. This was one of those wedding receptions where everyone started dancing from the very fist tune and the enthusiastic energy was flowing until the very last note. Many of the guests had shakers, rattles, maracas, and other rhythm gizmos. I had some reinforcement in the guitar section… a couple of young boys had inflatable guitars and were hanging around the front of the stage imitating me. So I invited them up to stand right next to me and to rock out with the band, instantly transforming us into Lynyrd Skynyrd (or some other band with a 3 guitars). They stayed onstage with me for all three sets! One of them was watching me very intently and moving his hands when I did. During the big solos in “The Final Countdown” and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” we all struck our best rock poses in unison. They got their first tast of being in a band… I’m sure their parents are now thanking me for derailing whatever career plans they had in mind for those kids.

Most of the night went really smoothly. I thought there were a couple of spots that could use a bit of work a future rehearsal, but overall this was a great gig. After we packed up and got back to the hotel, the rhythm section huddled for a game of Texas Hold’Em. The trip home involved driving through a fairly large dust storm; so much dust was blowing around that everything had a strange brown/orange hue and even then sun was noticeably dimmed. Visibility was very poor and I wondered whether they state patrol would close the road at some point. We found out that about an hour later they did close the road for several hours due to zero visibility conditions. I’m glad we got through it early enough to make it home at a decent hour.

All the really great band roadtrips come with a theme. For this one it was “The Final Countdown” which has a disturbingly hooky intro. Just singing that little fanfare was enough to get us all going. We played it so well that I suspect it will surface at a future gig. Another fine adventure. Onward to the next one!

Over the past two months I’ve been putting a lot more time into practicing and transcribing. This has been largely due to my involvement in The Dudley Manlove Quartet where I’m in the very fortunate position of being surrounded by great musicians. So I’ve been working to ensure I’m in getting my parts together for our songs. One of the dividends that is paid by doing this is that my playing is improving in general. Last night I practiced with The 1 Uppers and was covering both of the electric guitar parts; we have a show coming up next weekend and Kris won’t be able to play that night, so I’m doing my best to provide some fraction of his awesomeness. Our rehearsal last night felt great and I think part of my comfort level was directly due to having spent more time lately playing in more styles.

This weekend The Dudley Manlove Quartet will be playing an event and we’ve been asked to perform “The Final Countdown” by Europe (!). It’s one of those songs that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to back in the 80s and with only a few days’ notice I’m having to transcribe the fairly pyrotechnic guitar solo. The more I challenge myself, it seems the better I feel about the results. I suppose this is hardly a revelation. But it sure feels good when I’m attuned and in the moment. My goal is reach that space on a more regular basis in all that I do.