5.28.2006
ON A ROAD LESS TRAVELED JAREN 5/27 It's been a 5 star week. Top secret work by the Disciplines. MUCH more to come. Celebration was undertaked at Teddy's juke joint and at Claus' place. Suddenly it was 5.30 and everyone had to leave. Incredibly, after some liberal applications of champagne, I managed to shower shave and pack all my things. I guess I put on a little show for the assembled traveling party--Briskeby, Marit Larsen and band, and the crew, before heaving myself into the luggage bay and going to sleep in some of the weirdest positions ever. After 10 hours or more of driving we got to Jaren, a little town near Stavanger. THere was a multi-venue festival of Norwegian artists playing all around town. Conveniently, our show was in a small hotel which was also our accomodations. We got there around 5 and I righted myself with some steak and a glass of chardonnay. No soundcheck, so I ventured out and found a shopping mall with a toy store--perfect, and I did birthday shopping for Aden. Back at the hotel--free wifi, some ironing, repacking for the early morning flights back to Paris. Finally I emerged and Briskeby went on. I watched the whole set from the wings and had a great time, and came up at the end to perform 'Joe Dallesandro' and a rather racous impromptu 'Flavor of the Month'. After the show I met lots of friendly and drunk Jarenese, and had pretty much a full beer spilled on me, by one enthusiastic fan. I spent a long time chatting with the Marit Larsen band, the Briskebys etc. Had a drink or two and headed to the room. I was awakened by the hotel at 5--I hadn't heard my alarm and the taxi was there! I threw on the clean clothes I had ironed the previous day and threw my stuff in my suitcase. Stavanger airport is pretty small so check in didn't take much effort. I was so tired I don't even remember going thru security. I slept as much as I could--too short of a flight to get much done. Had a short layover in Oslo and slept all of that flight too. I even passed out at bag claim waiting for my suitcase to offload. But by the time I got home around noon and was able to celebrate Aden's birthday, and French mother's day, all that flying around was erased. I don't want to tell too much about the Disciplines, but...is very good. Very, very, very good. Love KS Paris
5.21.2006
ONE OF THOSE When I flew to the France a couple of weeks ago, with 3 huge suitcases and two guitars, plus two carry ons, and found out that due to Air Canada's scheduling shift my flight was leaving an hour and 15 minutes earlier than I had planned for, meaning I got to the airport with only 45 minutes to spare, had too many bags and one overweight--the fact I was so late worked to my advantage--Air Canada didn't charge me for the excess baggage, and I was rushed thru the first class security to get me to the plane, which I made. My bags arrived perfectly fine on the other side, save for the strap peg on my bass which broke off (no big deal, I was intending to replace it with proper strap locks anyway). My bags had followed my effortlessly from Seattle to Toronto to Paris. In Toronto it's not 100% clear that you don't have to claim and recheck your bags if you are a transfer passenger, so I was worried I might have misunderstood the directions of the customs officers; as it turns out, I did not and everything was fine. When I got to CDG *three* hours plus before my flight to Atlanta, a direct flight on Air France, I was thinking I had all the time in the world to enjoy a lunch, read a paper, have a coffee, etc. I went firstly to check in with one suitcase, not too heavy, one bass guitar, and one carry on. I should have taken the weather upon my departure as a sign. There was what I can only call a Texas-style rain storm that flared up just about when the shuttle arrived (and the shuttle arrived 10 minutes early--which is never good, I'm never ready if someone arrives early). Wind was blowing, and certainly an inch or two of rain fell in about half an hour--it really looked like a monsoon. And then it was done. A few stalled cars on the highway and some spots where there were four inches or so of water, but I got to CDG at about 12.40--more than 3 hours early for the flight. I proceeded to check-in, and was told, unbelieveably, that the flight was oversold I had been moved to standby...I was incredulous. They said it was based on who checked in first--I was checkingin 3 hours before the flight, I mean, there was no line, so...who were these early birds? Well, they were people who were transferring from other flights. There had been some dealys that caused people to miss their connections in Paris so they were on this flight too. It was a bit tense, but I managed to keep my temper. Eventually, a Delta flight was found that should have left already but was delayed and they got me a seat on it. Of course, I didn't get my luggage til today. Luckily Dewitt, REM's guitar tech, was working for Big Star and lent me the exact same bass I would have brought, courtesy of Mike Mills (merci b.c.). I went around town yesterday and got a few things to get me thru the day--toilettries, a phone charger, and what turned out to be a better headset than the one I that was in my suitcase. I consoled myself with some excellent ribs at Fat Matt's rib shack, and grabbed a NY times knowing I wouldn't read it til my flight tonight. On with the show. ATLANTA 5/22 As the afternoon cooled it was time to go down to the festival, Dewitt picked me up at the hotel and dropped me at the backstage entrance, and I met up with a few friends, got them in and we went backstage to the Southern Comfort Music Festival in Centennial Olympic Park. A free show sponsored by the beverage co., makers of many a morning-after-prom-night hangover. My hat's off to the folks who put this on, it was run well, the staff and security were friendly, and the audience was incredibly happy to have two days of free music. When I arrived the sun was blazing still, De la Soul were onstage delivering/representing and I was wearing perscription shades (contacts in the luggage and no optometrists had my perscription type in stock--it's a bit unusual, so this was a long shot at best anyway. I had played a few Posies shows last year in these shades after the champagne incident, so I was OK with it. And Big Star's show isn't so physical as the Posies that I might realize my biggest fear, why I don't like ot wear glasses onstage, which is that they might fall off and be lost and leave me virtually blind onstage. I really have terrible vision w/o lenses. DLS was done, the various Big Star members assembled and we started to get our shit together onstage. Our backline is really simple, so, no big deal. The monitor guy had read the wrong tech rider and thought we had requested no tom mics on the drum kit, but that was rectified. After my travel ordeal, I was wrung out enough to be kind of over the hump of anxiety and stress and thus I was completely relaxed when we played--and it was a great show, one of the best B* gigs in a long time. Alex was happy onstage, we all played great, and the crowd was really into it. I met the drummer of the Flaming Lips afterwards, who turns out to be a Posies fan, of the new album inclusive, and both he & Steven really dug the show. And then we were treated to one of the best shows I've seen in a long, long time. I've seen the Lips in various incarnations--the 4 piece rock band in the 90s, the drummerless version around the year 2000, and the development of this current lineup. Moe's in Seattle in prob. 97, the Showbox aorund 2000, Benicassim 2001, T in the Park 2003, and the Beck tour's hilariously confrontational New York date a few years ago. Maybe a couple of other times. And this was by far the best show I've seen them do. And that's saying something. That drummer is amazing, you know the visuals by now...and...Bohmemian Rhapsody...I kid you not. Fantastic night. Also: the new Snow Patrol album, 'Eyes Open' features a couple of songs I play keyboards on. Great rec., check it. Love KS Atlanta GA
5.14.2006
PLUG INS New photos are up in the photo section...I try and do this in the first half of every month... Paris == arrived. Unpacked. Sorted. Bought hangers. No hangers on. Set up laptop studio, and circumvented midi snafus by using Aden's casio-like keyboard for beats and sounds. Wine consumed, sun enjoyed, animal parts catalogued and summarily eaten. TV has migrated to the front room so the stereo is discombobulated for the short term, will pick up a new CD player soon and resume music listening. Very good article on the recording of Big Star's music in general and 'September Gurls' in specific in a recent issue of Sound on Sound, a UK music-recording-gear-etc mag (thank you Ieuan). Meeting musicians here already. Spectacular rain yesterday...today is grey, breezy and very, very enjoyable. This week has Mudhoney, PUSA, and Fiery Furnaces coming thru, will prob. make most of those. End of the week I'm heading back to the states for big big big star show in Atlanta. Make yer mom happy. Get some flowers and pick your crap off the floor. Better still, get your own place and a job while you're at it. At last, if you live in Paris, and play tennis, for heaven's sake, email me. Love KS Paris
5.11.2006
LIGHT THIS CANDLE In astronaut argot, that means launch is set in motion, ignited, chemicals come together in an irreversible and fearsome conversion to surreal amounts of energy, and any objects attached are propelled past the forces that hold things to the surface, the mapped, the known. Space is known scientifically, but there’s very little experiential literature about what it’s like to be on the frontier of the emptiness that surrounds our infinitesimally detailed, scurried over, exploited world. Beyond there are worlds, but mostly dust. And yet this endless sea of unconnected dust has far more mass than the solid object we adhere to. I have launched my own untethered journey into a black firmament of unknown combinations ahead, unforeseen variations on the all-too-familiar earthly clichés of my homeworld, Seattle. Where I’ve been coming back to refresh and reflect and organize my music, my relationships, my self-definition, for the last 20 years. I arrived in Seattle in 1986, to attend the University of Washington. It was the first time I realized I was on a quest to absorb and experience and catalogue the intricacies of wisdom—as expressed by shared knowledge from humans, or their creations, or the mystical expressions of nature that impart messages from the very creation of the world itself. I wasn’t going to get a degree. I wasn’t there to make myself employable. I was embarking on a cataloguing mission, to draw my conclusions from as vast a body of experience as I could envelop and distill from this mixture the ur-substance called wisdom. I knew that music was my calling and thus my vocation was irrelevant. But as important and useful music has been to my journey, it’s just a tool. It’s a tool I use naturally, so it takes a prominent role in my life. But what I am really on earth to do is understand humans and use what I learn to provide a perspective that rises above the conventions that we accept in lieu of what is inside of all of us—the mechanism for reaching freedom, truth and harmony. No struggle. No attacking what one doesn’t understand. Effortless living in the pleasure of the moment. I find myself experiencing and creating those conditions often in my life—it’s pleasure, so once sampled it’s all you want to taste from that point on. Freedom feels like…well, what Buddhists and other mystics talk about—existence without need, but still with variety, flavor and stimulation. But without a price to pay, without guilt, without freaking people out because you just jumped the queue, exempted yourself from the rules. I have more than a few friends and loved ones who just keep believing that pleasure has to be paid for with unpleasantness, pain, and a Newtonian payback. It’s only true if you convince yourself it’s true. So, choices lead you to opportunities, and you can’t fuck up. Every experience is an opportunity to know more. My huge leap of faith is to dive fully in to a new country, with a new life. Leaving the familiar and reinventing my situation in a way I couldn’t have imagined just 3.5 years ago. Thank God for my wanderlust. It’s kept me from familiarity in anything—I look at places, at my own relationship to people and activities in a new way all the time. I step back from a situation, leave it for awhile and come back to it and find that I’ve grown and the relationship I’m re-encountering is telling me something new—either it’s stuck, or it’s degenerating, or it’s transforming upward. I left my house, which of course I’ve really altered in the last months, so it was a familiar place but also totally reinvented by the work I did in it. And I let it go. I had a long goodbye early this morning. The backyard was coated in fallen blossoms from a huge flowering tree. It was a deep pink carpet. I took it as a farewell present, a message, in its way. I got in my car and drove to the airport. MEMPHIS 5/5 Mellow Big Star gig at the Memphis in May Festival—the crowd was more sober, less numerous, and more tranquil than I experienced in our past appearances. Our show was both mellow and rough around the edges. And then it was done. I had a couple of beers with Bill and Jeff from Rykodisc and Jeff Powell who recorded the big star album. I went back to my hotel and…that was it. I was in Memphis for about 16 hours. Check out ‘SOAM5’, live performances from the Univ. of Minnesota’s ‘Radio K’. The Posies perform ‘I Guess You’re Right’ and you’ll also find live tracks from Metric and Sam Prekop & Archer Prewitt. www.radiok.org Love KS On Air Canada flight 542 from Seattle to Toronto
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The latest release by Ken Stringfellow is a split EP with Spain's Muy Fellini, featuring never-heard-before music incl. Ken's take on Bob Dylan, released by
King of Patio records
in Spain on Oct 8, 2009.
Order it directly from Muy Fellini here www.myspace.com/muyfellini
10" VINYL ONLY!!!
older news :
8/3/2003
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