One of my best friends from Back in the Day has started a blog.

We’re talking middle school here, you know, back in the day–when a typewriter was a dodo bird that pecked really fast on a stone tablet and Yabba Dabba Doo was a popular catchphrase.  Back then, we only had three directions, because South hadn’t been invented yet.

Anyway, the title of his blog is “The Lurking Parade.”

This is a title we’ve been passing around for a long time.  You see, way back when, I was into computers–I had a Commodore Amiga, actually–and came up with this random title generator for short stories.  I fed the names of hundreds of novels and albums into the computer program, and it hacked them up and pieced them back together.  One of the ones that stuck was evidently a combination of “The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft and “The Soft Parade” by The Doors.

I don’t know why this name stuck, exactly, except it’s kind of neat how a parade generally does anything but lurk.

Oddly, my friend came up with another title I’ve used extensively–a play on the Doors’ “The Spy” and Animal Logic’s “Spy in the House of Love”.  Don’t know why, but the title “A Spy in the House of Pancakes” has always stuck with me; there’s even a song on my next Jamendo album by that name.

OK, evidently, when you are all over the internet like me, if you step away for three days, you come back to an incredible mountain of messages and things to do, see, or read.

At any rate, mission accomplished–sort of. I have recorded six solid conga drum tracks. These were quite complex, and in grand total, I recorded more than 22 drum tracks and 4 cowbell tracks. I also made progress in putting bass, keys, and melody on one song, but I will not mix down until this evening.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I post at least once a day.  Well, I’m taking a break this weekend.  Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday is this Monday, and I have a three day weekend to do nothing but record and create.  I’m temporarily going to disappear from the Internet and return on Tuesday, January 16, 2007.

OK, I just spent half an hour trying to get tables to work correctly on this blog.  I want to be able to include chord charts without using external image files or, worst of all, the system I’ve been using, a bunch of lines in proportional font that clump together in the worst possible places.  Like this:

Em7 | A7 | Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7

Every time I try, one of the lines in the table gets deleted whenever I save the entry.

I can’t seem to solve this problem today, and I’m out of time for the evening.

In October of 2005, I unofficially became a hermit. I still went to work, of course, but I made what I call an “Inward Turn.”

Up until that month, I’d been very active in the local band community (Gainesville, FL). Then, well, things happened, and I just gave up on people, for approximately a year. I kept to myself, practiced, made my music–learned to play conga drums, developed a bit of style & panache on the keyboard, picked up a few more fingerstyle acoustic skills, and worked on my bass improvisation.

A few months ago, Jessica York, a friend of mine from the Gainesvillebands.com days, invited me to her birthday, out of the blue. Funny what these little things can do; it got me out of my shell. Jess is one of the coolest folks on the planet, and it was incredibly good of her to remember this one particular lost sheep.

Through Jess I was able to reconnect with my old friend, Morgan Caraway. Morgan is my inspiration. He is widely regarded as one of the most talented bass players in town, and I’d venture to say, he’d be the best in any town he chose to move to. The review I’ve often given his playing is that if you dumped a box of china down a set of stairs, Morgan could make up a bassline that would be perfect for it and make it sound like music.

Want to hear him? Check this out, he’s on bass in Nim Sum:

• The band’s Myspace page.
• The band’s website.

Morgan was once part of one of my favorite bands of all time–I’m not even qualifying that by saying local band, I mean bands in general of all time–El Robot.

Now, I would direct you to some cool place where you could listen to their music, but, alas, there is no longer a web page in existence with their tunes. Which is too bad: their music was innovative, wildly creative, and unmatched by any band in town before or since.

It wasn’t just Morgan. His partner, Allen Shorter, has a wicked, if not unbelievable, vinyl LP collection from which he sampled, remixed, rewired, and remade entire sets of albums into totally new creations.

On the first album, Allen wrote hilarious and clever lyrics. Then, on the 2nd El Robot album, he pulled off a song called “Two” that was deep, and full of truths that aren’t often spoken out loud. It was an amazing transformation.

Allen has moved on to running a home studio; Morgan has moved on to many new bands and even some solo work. I suppose we can’t be prisoners of our past–innovation is about moving on, and love is sometimes about letting go.

But I’m glad to have reconnected.

To learn more about El Robot, read the article in the Gainesville Sun that started it all.