Heeeeere’s Tweety-Hoarse!

Boy, the new 1200 x 600 header playground for Twitter accounts has been a blast to play with over the past week. I finished up the last of my accounts on Thursday night and have everything all installed. This is a reduced size copy of the @HoarseMan header. To see what all of the pictures are, just click on the image to see the full size annotated picture.

Half size image of HoarseMan Twitter Header – click to see the annotated full size version.

All eleven headers for the the ChaliceMedia Twitter Accounts will be up on the ChaliceMedia Blog and the ChaliceMedia Facebook page over next several days.  IMPORTANT! The ChaliceMedia Facebook page has been in a limited content R&D stage since I laid out the first version. It’s never been promoted so the only follower you’ll find there is HoarseMan. If the page has any interest for you, please click the like button and forward it to some friends. There will be much more coming up over the next few months.

Seeya,
Legenda verum est
Hoarseman

The Real Stuff, Categorically Speaking

Categories from the mind of the HoarseMan… What do they really mean?

OK, so HoarseMan discovered that they were called “Topics” instead of Categories… No big deal. He’s pretty sure you’ll get the idea.

Abuckortwo

• HoarseMan Meaning: Business, jobs, just making a living in general – potential snark alert.
• RealMeaning: “You’re kidding me, right?”

Apilahooey

• HoarseMan Meaning: This is – beyond the shadow of a doubt – stuff that HoarseMan has just made up. Did you know he has a website called “Ron’s Lies.”
• Real Meaning: It’s true, sometimes the HoarseMan tells lies.

Apoapsis ¹

• HoarseMan Meaning: The Apoapsis: stuff gets written here when the HoarseMan is feeling way off center
• Real Meaning: noun – (astronomy) the point in an orbit farthest from the body being orbited [ant: periapsis] WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

5 Best Reasons for Opening an All Original Music Nightclub

Why we're born with two hands...

• Five (5) Cinco* — Original musicians are usually better looking — not this guy, though.
• Four (4) Cuatro* — The women who like original musicians are always better looking.
• Three (3) Tres* — Original musicians are — well — more original.
• Two (2) Dos* — Minimal fees to licensing agencies, sometimes none at all.(++)
• One (1) Uno* — No one screaming “Free Bird” in a drunken stupor.

*bi-lingual notes:
Important, no seventh-grade Spanish teachers were injured in the making of this post.

• Uno – as in “Uno that guy what plays the harp on the sout’ side?”
• Dos – as in “Dos, a Deerse…” or is it Homer and his identical twin?
• Tres – 1) as in Amigos, from the globally — no, universally — famous trio of Denver Broncos players in the late 1980s, 2) what you pick up from the deli when you’re having a party.
• Cuatro – All wheel drive
• Cinco – hmmm… I know it’s not the network guys – maybe a corporation that runs whorehouses?

(++) Disclaimer: This could be bullpucky. How do I know? I’m not a lawyer. It just sounded like a good idea at the time.

Saxa Cantum,
HM

PS, Okay, maybe I miss playing… just a little bit.

Do the Songs in Your Head Have a History?

The Mystery (mk I), June 1986; standing Dave Ford, Paul Stenvig, Gene Treppeda, Mark Devere; sitting Craig Devere; photo by Ron Heimbecher

Since the Memorial Day weekend I’ve had some songs playing in my head. Not too unusual but these songs are all from the same album, one that hasn’t been heard by too many people. I have two copies of the CD, both of which are numbered (3 & 4) and signed by the producer. I think the reason this album is in my head is that it was recorded, all nine songs, and mixed over a single Memorial Day weekend twenty-five years ago.

My lifetime friend Paul Stenvig owns a company called Beyond Sound, which in turn owns the Capture Communications Group record label. Just before Memorial Day weekend in 1986, he had the opportunity to give a new model Tascam one-inch multi-track recorder an evaluation run.

“Take it and ‘play with it’ over the weekend,” they said. They didn’t understand how seriously Paul ‘played’ with things. A few phone calls later, a marathon session was set, and I was invited to co-engineer. The musicians, a group of friends Paul had been working with, weren’t really a band but had been playing together for a while and had a few songs laid out. The songs had been composed by brothers Craig and Mark Devere and friend Dave Ford, and I hadn’t heard any of them prior to the start of the session.

With the exception of Paul, everyone had regular day jobs, I was working in the local cop shop, so the session started at 5:30 on Friday night. By about ten, we had laid down reference tracks for ten songs and set up a schedule for each of the musicians to work separately on overdubs. Paul and I crashed at the studio for a couple of hours at a time while we swapped engineering tasks. We scheduled mixdown for Monday. Seventy-five hours after we started, we had master tapes for an album called How Many Pieces and a new band named The Mystery.

Craig Devere, vocals; Mark Devere, keyboards and vocals; Dave Ford, guitars; Paul Stenvig, bass; and Gene Treppeda, drums. More songs, and a number of music videos later, I joined The Mystery (mk.II) on vocals, keyboards, and guitars.

How Many Pieces back cover

Here’s the track list. Perhaps I’ll have more in the future about some of these songs.
1. R.E.R.E.S.T.B.
2. Glass Wall
3. Carpenters & Builders
4. Solid Ground
5. Angels Pin
6. Make a Wish
7. Man No Eat
8. Rock Slide
9. So I

 

We didn’t do video for any of these tracks, but over the period of several months following this amazing weekend, we did a number of music videos featuring the same musicians, many of which were incorporated into the television comedy series Detective Rock Hound, from Beyond Sound.