The Avondale Estates Autumnfest

Is this is a stunning look or what? You might not be able to read the menue on the food booth in the background but besides hamburgers and fries, you can also get fried Twinkies and Fried Oreos. No, I didn't.
It was a cold day in Avondale Estates, a pretty suburban town a few miles east of Atlanta. We performed for its Autumn festival last year and they invited us back; a good sign. I don't think the temperature got above 50 degrees and the wind was a pretty constant hurricane strength (that's my weather report and I'm sticking to it; others reported it somewhat milder), but it was still warmer than the condo association gig last Sunday night.
We were using their sound system, which only came with three microphones. We use gazillions of them for instruments and singers and just to have hanging around. Fortunately, Mike Nugent brought a good supply of our equipment and set it up before we started and they had a good sound guy who put it all together.
We are getting to the Final Days; not of Armageddon but of producing the much-awaited CD, "Hey Dog." Nugent is working with the production company; he has sent all the copy, spoken on the phone with their artists about design, made decisions about colors, layouts and other looks, and I am sure we are in excellent hands. We were using some pictures of our recording session that I snapped on my phone so, of course there were none of me and they were of questionable quality. I called my friend Don McClellan, who has been a reporter at Channel 2 even longer than I. His son Scott took lots of pictures during the recording session in the studio and Don e-mailed a bunch to me as soon as I called him, then I forwarded them from my Blackberry to Nugent, who shot them off to the production company, all in a matter of minutes! Technology is great when it works. Soctt also shot video of us recording, and when we get the final CD we'll send him and Don copies and then--get this--Don said he will marry the video and the final CD audio mix for a music video. Then if I can put it on this blog...COOL! We'll see; this involves huge leaps into the technological future (okay, it's only the future to me, but still...).

This is our new bass player, Beth Stevenson. Besides being super-nice and a terrific bass player, she has the sweetest old dog who is senile and mostly deaf (except when Mary screamed once for a song that involves a scream and scared the crap out of the dog) (to hear why a scream is needed in a song, get the CD), she also has a huge and really interesting job.
She works at the CDC and is at the center of coordinating the biggest and fastest vaccination effort EVER, for the swine flu. They have to coordidnate production, distribution, information, getting all the doctors and health departments and everyone else on board. And here's the cool thing; she has a Masters Degree in doing all this stuff, and all these PhDs and MDs have to recognize that she really knows what she's doing, so there's a cultural thing going on. She's working really, really hard at that, and still carving out time to play bass with Hicks With Picks in a really cool embroidered western shirt. She's told us the name of the company that makes those shirts TWICE and I forget. Bummer. Since she has to lug a big bass around, we hold all the rehearsals at her house, and she's even cool with us invading every week. So is her husband, John, who seems to be as nice as Beth is. Amazing! Beth also did not eat the Fried Twinkies or Fried Oreos. So shes smart, too.