The Drummer Dies

The phone rang kind of early this morning before we were up, and my husband kept saying, "oh man, oh man." 

When he got off the phone, he said the drummer of The Fifteen, a band he plays with occasionally, had passed out Friday night and whoever was there couldn't wake him up. Even though he didn't know the guy real well, he was in a spin all day, trying to find out when the funeral was. Nobody was answering their cell phones. Then he mentioned the guy also played in the Pat McGee Band, so I googled Pat McGee, which sent me to a Wikipedia entry, which had already been updated.

Drummer Chris Williams passed away peacefully in his home October 28th 2006.

So I Was High on the Hog Once

I mentioned to my husband the other day that I had come under fire for never having attended a High on the Hog. "Yes, we did," he said.

We went the one year it was held on Mayo Island, the year Chuck made the brown "Southpork" T-shirts when each character in South Park looked like a pig. According to the shirt, the bill that year (1998) was Page Wilson & Reckless Abandon, Jim Dudley's Chez Roue, the Janet Martin Band, Car Bomb Inc. (one of my favorites), and Bobby Parker and the Blues Night Band.

My husband literally has a hundred T-shirts or more, and this is after we took out three garbage bags full of them several years ago. His whole life story is told in souvenir T-shirts. And someone else's life as well, because his mother always brings him back a shirt from her vacations, so he has shirts from places he's never been. But he only wears about 10 of them, which reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry riffs on the theory of the favorite T-shirt, which one fateful day doesn't survive the wash and dry, and the second favorite T-shirt takes its place, and on down the line.

This is Not a Socialist Web Site

One thing I've always had to contend with during 11 years of doing a print version of the Richmond Music Journal was the theory that, despite the fact I owned it, produced it, sold the ads, did all the work, etc., some people thought it was supposed to be a people's newspaper and thus be what they wanted it to be, cover local music the way they thought it should be covered, include the bands they wanted to read about in a devoted, supportive way they imagined a local newspaper should be (on what planet, I don't know...papers that did take this approach never made it a year, if you recall).

They have called me every kind of ugly, sexist, woman-bashing name, both privately and publicly, for not meeting their expectations.

The paper was never a significant money-maker for me. My success was that it never went into debt as others did. I printed every submission about local music. Sorry, but I am not going to write everything, and if nobody else writes about it, then it's not going to be written about. I have never had a staff. Never could afford one. In that sense, the paper was socialist and open to everyone. But no one else wanted to do the work.

Those who I consider essential contributors to the paper were the infamous Killer Montone, my partners in the midnight rambling years, Lisa Honeycutt and Anne Soffee, and my last two devoted writers, Robert Stutler and Walter Boelt (who I never met in person). Other writers came and went, but those were the main ones. I had some very devoted advertisers, too, like Moondance, Poe's Pub, A Major Music, Boulevard Deli, and Oasis that kept the paper alive. And if you wrote a couple of things or contributed a few photos over the 11 years, thank you very, very much, but you didn't go to the mountain top with us so it's not like I owe you until the end of time.

The web site is even more mine, and I truly do what I want with it and what I have time to do. I pay for it, why shouldn't I? Do your own Web site.

And I have never, ever said I was an expert on music or even knew anything about it. I am good at publishing a paper that doesn't go into debt. That was my skill. I depended on other people's knowledge and tastes for content. When I wrote, it was about what I thought and where I wanted to go, without any claims that I was an expert. There are some local music events and traditions I have never attended, I admit. There's an in-crowd in the local music scene that I have never been a part of and didn't enjoy hanging out with because their heads were often very far up their butts. I sometimes  think they were part of the reason more things didn't happen in Richmond. Some of them were nice, but in the Richmond tradition, they just kept hanging on to the way things once were.

I'm not going to debate this with some of you anymore, especially those who haven't even noticed the paper has been gone for more than two years. Just like you were never required to read the paper, you need not visit here either. Go do your own web site.