STRAUBINICAL PARENTING, EXTRACT

(Dialogue from 2015)

Son: Dad, at the paintball party, I'm going to make a paintball trap.
Dad: What's that?
Son: I'm going to fill a can with paint and throw it at someone.
Dad: Isn't that against the rules?
Son: Dad, it's a redneck paintball place.
Dad: What, rednecks don't have to follow rules?
Son: I don't know.
Dad: So-- if they have "redneck" paintball places, does that mean they have the opposite end of the scale? Do they have a Noel Coward/Cole Porter type of paintball place?
Son: Dad, I'm going outside.

BLACK MUSIC, WHITE WEIRDNESS

  My relationship with black music is complicated. For years, I avoided using any rhythms that could be characterized as “funky,” but not because I didn't love all that stuff. It was precisely because I loved it so much that I didn’t want to see it bungled and defiled by my ineptitude. My band, the Karl Straub Combo, has a rhythm section made up of white guys who aren’t shy about playing black music idioms. They’re damn good at it, too, and it’s inspiring to hear these fellows and play with them. They used to taunt me at rehearsals, when I brought in my country-oriented material, saying things like, Come on, Karl, let some black influences into your music!

  Sometimes they would just grab the reins, and turn a honky tonk song into a partying New Orleans funk number. I loved the concept, so how could I complain? But I always felt a little awkward playing that way, like a guy who puts on a ball gown in order to get into a lifeboat. “Yes, yes, women and children first. Entirely appropriate. Pleased to meet you, despite the circumstances. My name is- er-  Persephone Jenkins.”

SOCIAL MEDIA, THE MAGICAL TOOL THAT I CAN’T STOP USING, THAT WILL SOMEDAY MAKE ME MONEY

Reverbnation, one of the many social media platforms available to musicians looking to keep their bank account static while wasting tons of their time, contacted me the other day. 

  This, in itself, was unsurprising. I get emails from them every week, helpfully reminding me that even in Arlington, there are hundreds of Reverbnation artists who get more traffic than I do. Years ago, my old band (which I referred to then as “my band”) had a big local following that was eager to go see us play whenever and wherever we performed, as long as we appeared within a proscribed three hundred foot area of Wilson Boulevard, and it wasn’t raining. Back then, I had incurred a tiny level of fame which entitled me to stalkers (two), people approaching me to talk about my music when I was eating at a restaurant with my parents (seventeen)  and even sometimes strangers asking me questions about songwriting at bus stops. (I mean the strangers were at bus stops, and when I walked by the bus stops on the way to my car, parked roughly where the Apple Store is now, that day’s stranger would ask me a question about songwriting. “What do you think about bridges?”, I was once asked, by a man wearing a windbreaker although it wasn’t windy. 

  All of this was achieved mostly through word of mouth. This means that people who liked my songs would tell their friends about them (I assume they were their friends. I don’t like to pry), and then those people would go to a show or buy a CD at one of the many record stores in the area. We were terrible at self-promotion, but this whole word of mouth thing helped offset that. We used to pack a small club in Arlington past the point of fire safety, and this situation continued for a while. After years of this, I negotiated a new agreement with the venue, as follows: 

  If I was in the mood to book a gig, it was mutually understood that I was to email the venue no less than ten times with no response. I also had the option of calling on the phone, if I wanted realtime confirmation that the booker wasn’t there. The next phase of the process involved me getting into a vehicle of some sort and driving to the venue in order to be told face to face that the booker had a new direct line, making it possible for VIPs like me to cut out the middleman and find out more quickly that the booker wasn’t there. 

  Once I got into the swing of things with the new system, it provided a healthy element of stability in an otherwise perapatetic existence. For a while, when things were flush, I hired an assistant to help me not book shows, and this made it possible to expand our base of non-operations. My band began to not book gigs all over the area, even occasionally not booking a show in Richmond, or Charlottesville. At one point, a local booking guy who had been not booking me for years in DC moved to New York City, and thus it became possible for me to not book gigs there too. 

  As I got older, I started to realize that the pace was getting to me. Not playing gigs out of town had been fun for a while, and we’d even begun to not break into the festival scene, not booking gigs at some pret-ty prestigious venues where tastemakers and record company people would fail to see us perform. But I came to realize that I was most comfortable not booking gigs locally, where the hometown crowd could get their fix of not seeing us onstage. 

  It was a little scary for a minute, when the economy went south, and the gigs I wasn’t getting started paying less, but although the recovery has been slower than I’d like, I can report that in recent years, venues have been much more generous regarding the amounts they aren’t paying me. Sometimes this means I don’t get paid with a check, and while I prefer to not get paid in cash, I’m flexible. You have to be. 

  These days, I rarely have time to not book gigs, and most of the gigs I don’t play involve a booker contacting me initially, before not responding to my attempts to  follow up. It’s nice to not have to do so much legwork before a gig falls through.

  This brings me back to reverbnation. They tell me that for the first time since I began neglecting my web presence, I’m actually ranked in Arlington’s top forty. As I’ve barely played out under my own name at all in recent years, I’m baffled by this. Is it possible that my new approach to self promotion is actually paying off? 

  My new method, which I’ve turned to with the goal of negotiating a changing music business landscape, is my own invention. I call it the “Reminding People That I’m Alive” method. When I go out to a venue now, like Gypsy Sally’s, people see me and say, ah, he’s evidently still alive. When I get on stage at a jam session, especially Neel Singh’s at Villain and Saint,  I generally plug into a big amp and crank it up. The result? Immediate clarity regarding my existence. As René Descartes once said, “Is he not? No he is not not. Does that mean he is not? It does not. Or, wait a minute. Maybe it does.”   

  The same goes for my blog, where I write stuff of the sort you’re reading now. Or The Hot Plate Show, where I’m writing and recording music and blather. All of this is supposed to lead to monetization somehow. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I am gathering and collating data on people who are burdened with impeccable taste and discernment. If that sounds like you, to you, then I can promise that in the future, I’ll be using a combination of cutting edge technology and a human brain (a brain that was lousy at this even when the brain was current, and this brain sometimes develops bugs following updates) in order to sell merchandise to you. This merchandise may take many forms, but it will all be Karl Straub merchandise. Could be music recordings— although that will require some older brains to learn about downloading. Could be a book— perhaps written on my phone and turned into a paperweight through the efforts of one of the many vanity presses in the USA. Could be some sort of cap. I can guarantee you of one thing, though— it won’t be ceramic-erotic tschotzkes. 

  

  

RULE BRITTANYA!

  I’ve been checking out some of these apps where you can “cut the cord” and watch a bunch of shows and movies on your pocket size Telescreen. They are a mixed bag, I must say, but the most curious one so far is the Pluto app. This app gives me access to countless channels broadcasting films I managed to avoid when they were fresh, featuring actors I wish I’d never heard of, as well as many programs with cryptic and intriguing titles. In many cases, the nature of the channel is entirely baffling. One is called the Gorilla Channel, and it seems to be much like CNN, except that instead of 24 hours a day of newslike material, it’s 24 hours a day of rubes and their kids staring at gorillas through a bay window. The rubes will talk to the apes, as one might talk to fish in a tank, saying things like, “go get him,” and “what’s that big one doing?” I’ve always been perplexed by why people like to say “go get him” so much. I’m not really an animal lover, but apparently part of the appeal is watching one animal run after another one, and then playfully knock him into a coma. 

  Because I am a parent, and always looking for tips on nurturing, I was drawn to a show called Bikini Day Care. Perhaps the nurturing part was coming up after the commercial break, but the segment I caught featured some rock singer who felt the need to wear both a bandanna and a cap at the same time, while chatting with a size six young lady in a size five shirt about how another young lady had poured a bunch of salsa into her Samsonite luggage. In a voiceover, the rock star allowed as how he was attracted to Kayla, or Britnee, or someone, and she was hot, but the last thing he needed now was drama. It’s the danger of consorting with hot women, I learned, that with hotness comes drama. You have to watch your step when you’re choosing among hot women that were supplied by a TV producer. Here at our house, we sometimes buy salsa, but mostly we put it on eggs and nachos and things, because after a long day of nurturing, we’re too tired to pour it into each other’s suitcases. 

  The One Foot in the Grave Channel runs vintage programs for people with vintage prostates. I was able to catch an episode of Peter Gunn, which is a show dating back to the Classic TV period, when two of the best minutes of music ever recorded would run over the credits of a program that turned out to be rife with jawdropping idiocy. The handsome titular character walked around in a nightclub milieu packed with white people who either played jazz or listened to it, while gorgeous women nursed highballs. It sounds pretty good, but once you’re watching, it’s hard to ignore the wooden clunk of the hip dialogue, which mercifully is sometimes drowned out by Mancini flutes. As with the Bikini Nurturing, I guess the gunplay was coming up after the commercial break. 

  Some channels I gave a miss and never looked back. Here’s an example of the elitism I’m known for— when I see that a channel called The Cat Channel has a show called Cats, Cats, Cats, it strikes me as lazy. And I’m unwilling to watch any show about Bigfoot, especially if it’s two hours long, since I read that there are people who believe that Bigfoot can’t be killed by a bullet because he is able to travel between dimensions. I have a dim memory of once hearing someone claim the same thing about Bea Arthur. 

  As I clicked around in search of watchable content, I occasionally checked back in to see where they were at with the scantily-clad nurturing, and was appalled to discover that the show features a kind of busty Star Chamber, where ladies who’d previously dallied with the star of the show sat in a tribunal judging the current crop of croptops. A lot of high level amateur psychoanalysing was going on, with most of the women being described as having “issues,” and one poor gal with the portmanteau-bimbeaux name of Brittanya coming in for a great deal of abuse. Nobody liked her, or her cowboy hat, and they weren’t inclined to mince words on the subject. My guess would be that they probably voted her off Bikini Island not long afterward. 

  

  

  

TEN OF SWORDS

Please watch this space for my upcoming posts about albums and books that have affected me.
I’m in the process of posting these things on Facebook, following challenges from friends to do so. But it’s taking me forever. When I get all of it written, I’ll post it here for archival purposes. So, if you’re having trouble waiting to hear what I have to say about James Brown Live at the Apollo, or Ring Lardner’s short stories, sit tight! They’ll go on Facebook as I pop them out, and eventually I’ll put all of it here on the blog for perusal by the faithful.