The Country Club has proven to be quite a resiliant organisation and am still enjoying my involvement with them.
We get to travel a bit and that's good.

Well it's back to basics for me!

It's not quite as it seems though.

I have invested my time lately in playing in 'House Bands' at Blackboard Concerts!

I really like playing!
However, playing for a maximum of three songs just leaves me cold, literally. You would just have thawed out before you'd have to finish. This appears to me to be a form of some sort of acceptance of a punishment syndrome where the harder things are, the better you like it. Sorry, that's just not me. Instead, I just tuck myself behind the performers and try and support them as best I can. It's not just guitar either, I enjoy playing Bass as well and on even rarer occasions I'll take the slide guitar along.

I had done this for the Latrobe Valley Rhythm and Blues Club, which have a Blackboard concert once a month. I became rather tired of all the guitar heroes there. It appeared to be more of a confrontation than a sharing experience. To cope, I have switched to just playing Bass there. Much more enjoyable. Given the usual statistics that there will be 15:1 ratio of guitarists to Bass players, I could be somewhat in demand.

The reality is that there's some sort of unwritten rule that states: The louder you play and the less you listen to the other players the better the performance! What the ?

I have some residual hearing left and I aim to keep what's left safe for my old age.

Given this situation and the fact that no one seems to be musically literate, the effort just seems to be a waste of time. No amount of effort will motivate the other performers into playing something more musically interesting. It just seems to be the same old songs month after month, year after year. To cap things off, being in a jam, you can't choose your accomplices. The result being that the lowest skilled musician drags the rest of the group down! Why, Oh why, would you want to be part of that?
Time to move on.

Busked at the Boolarra Folk Festival, the only busking job for the whole year.

The Country Club House Band at the Yarram Show 2008
From left to right: Brian, Ron, Francie, Me and Bob

This line up has proved to be more permanent than I originally thought. We are getting out and about and that is a good thing.

Brian started performing before me in the early 1960's and informs me that he had a stint with 'The Cherokees'. Brian sings and performs on either guitar or keyboard.
Ron is a relative new comer to the music scene who sings and plays guitar in a 'Slim Dusty' sort of style.
France sings, yodels and plays guitar in a Country sort of way.
Bob sings and plays guitar. Bob composes quite a lot of songs based on his experiences in a Bush Poetry sort of way and had a win with one of his songs at the Traralgon Eisteddfod.

Brian and I end up playing most of the night as when are not performing, we are backing up other performers.

Update:

Yarragon Pub has become somewhat of an enigma. I doubt if I'll be playing there anytime soon.
I stopped by in October and witnessed Peter Calabro and Liz ? performing and was approached by Barry (the owner) who stated "I have a few vacancies in January" and before even finishing the sentance ran back into the pub and never quite finishing what he started. Clearly I was targeted as a provider of music but was not of a sufficiently high standard to have him give me his full attention. I still doubt I'll be here anytime soon.

I've done quite a bit of travelling lately, and that has proved worthwhile and rewarding. Sunbury, Johnsonville, Leongatha , Upwey, Heyfield, Yarram and more.

Played at the Red Parrot at Noojee a few times and have enjoyed the experience. The owner, Brian loves his music and that's the way I like it: An owner who loves his music.

In an email to me, and others no doubt, the LV R&B Club claim that there have been complaints about the excessive sound level and have taken the extreme, if not unusual step, of using a sound level meter to monitor the level of acts. Not too sure what the penalty is if you go over whatever the limit is.
Maybe it's early days, but, the event still seems very loud. The outside seats would have more people seated at them than do the internal seats.
Some sort of propoganda? Maybe?
If your an adult you can make your own choice. But when parents bring young babies and children along with them, you really have to wonder what hearing damage is being done.

Listening:

The single greatest attribute you need as a supporting player is the ability to listen. Your job is to support someone else. This can be quite tricky at times as the performer may not have charts to read from. If they don't have charts, then you listen really hard for where they are going, as at times even they don't know where they are going.
Timing is the killer here, as performers with not much live experience have a very difficult time of keeping to meter. Yes, they know that the next bar has some words in it and some chords too. Somehow what was intended to be a 4/4 bar ends up being 5/4, 6/4, anything.

Another issue is the tuning of their instruments. It's quite amazing how a performer will leap into a song with their instrument not tuned to standard tuning and even worse, some strings not in tune with the others! How they can not hear this is beyond me. Most performers make an attempt, but some quite clearly do not hear they are out of tune. Terrifying!
I once backed a performer who had two guitars. When the first guitar went out of tune they just reached for the second guitar.

Technology:

I had been using a Roland SD-35 MIDI Player to play my backing music, but increasingly it became a victim of of obsolence.
The device uses 3.5", 720K floppy discs. Just try and buy them now, no hope. The HD variety would just not format. So I moved on and purchased a laptop and that worked very well.
Last year the laptop expired and I was faced with replacing it.
Just prior to the laptop's demise, I had spent a lot of research and development time trying to achieve the same results on a Pocket PC. Fortunately for me, I succeeded and that's what I use now. The only down side is that I can't play MIDI files but have to play MP3 versions of sampled MIDI files. This complicates the creation of new files, but I know how to do it now.

I really have to say at this point that Bill Gates has lost it! The new Microsoft operating system Vista is junk! It's performance and level of paranioa have to be experienced to believe how bad it is relative to XP, the previous version.
Must be a death wish or something on Bill's part. No wonder he's left Microsoft!

Technology 2:

It's happened again! Just as I have mastered the PDA environment, I find that the people who make these devices (read HP, etc) have abandoned the platform in favour of the even more ubiquitous Mobile Phone.
It's all right, I've taken ten deep breaths and I can feel the Chi flowing through me, however I feel even more despondant and pessamistic of ever finding a stable platform. Seems like the only cure is to throw away everything that you have invested in and buy new hardware ... again! Long live retail!

Fairly quiet year and didn't go out to try and win gigs or anything.

Performed at a few private functions and the odd public function by people who tracked me down.
Bless their little cotton socks.

Busked at the Boolara Folk Festival.
Nice to have the food vendors and others, make the effort to walk across to me and thank me for my effort.

Hans and I decided to get together and play some fun acoustic music. I sing and play acoustic lap steel and Hans sings and plays banjo, mandolin and metal resonator guitar.

Boolarra Folk Festival

Hans Visser and I

Well Busking is off the menu nowadays.

It's a complicated decision, but I've made it.
Busking involves a lot of the following:

• Travel
• Finding places that don't fear you.
• A public that has a few coins to throw you.

I hadn't realised it at the time, but busking anywhere near retail stores brings forward the most negative of feelings towards you. Basically, you are a parasite and you are robbing them of an income. The retailers don't take these feelings lightly, they will become most active in trying to 'move on' this vagabond who has set up amongst the legitamite traders.

A few so called friendly festivals have also fallen into the Corporate model trap and treat Buskers like leppers.