Calaveras: News

We've had quite the two week stretch as a band. A week ago Saturday, we played for an hour on KALW in San Francisco, with JoAnn Mar interviewing us and the irrepressible Richard Rice between songs about the SF Folk Festival. As the KALW poster-children for the festival, we got some wonderful publicity and a chance to connect with the Bay Area's loyal folkies before the event. As a result, we ran into people over and over again at the festival telling us they heard us on the radio and made a point of coming to our show and buying our CDs. Hooray for Marconi!

The next day, we had our CD release concert and fundraiser for South African AIDS prevention at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. The church cleared over $6,300 for the cause and we and they were elated. We also sold a big pile of our new CDs, and had a great time playing to a terrific audience. Thanks again to John Jacob and Mark, the church's sound guy, for taming the big, bouncy sanctuary, to minister Pat de Jong for inviting us, Sam Bevan for adding his hot bass licks to everything, and to everyone who bought those tickets!

The festival gig was at the end of a harrowing day--a 10 AM bat mitzvah for our dear friends the Hirsch's, a 12 noon luncheon at our house for a university women's club, a 4:00 wedding in the Oakland hills at which we played the processional, and a 5:40 show at the SF Folk Festival (just Greg and Vickie, with Dave on vacation). 'That made it all the more gratifying to meet so many people who said they really enjoyed our music.

So now, after a little lunchtime outdoor gig at Redwood City tomorrow, it's on to the Kate Wolf Festival this weekend to hang out with the kids, do some campfire singing and let some other musicians do the hard work on stage.

Hope to see you there!

Greg and Vickie

It's finally finished. No more in-depth discussions of how much dobro, whither the accordian, which vocal is a little flat, what made THAT sound. Green Girl is in the capable hands of the CD duplicator and should be in ours any day. We are grateful for the efforts of all the wonderful people who made it a reality, and especially our engineer/co-producer, John Jacob, whose steadfast efforts through some trying personal times (John's mom fell very ill during the project and passed away the day after he delivered the master to us) were above and beyond the call.

We have scheduled the CD release concert for June 15 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. It is also a benefit concert for one of the church's missions, HIV/AIDS prevention in South Africa. In a world of headline-grabbing catastrophes and disasters, it is easy to lose sight of more systemic human tragedies, like the relentless onslaught of HIV/AIDS in poorer countries like South Africa, where one out of five people are infected. But this stalwart little congregation in Berkeley continues to dedicate itself to the very worldly mission of trying to help people wherever the need is greatest. We are proud to be contributing to the cause.

We have also added a couple links on our site to places we have full-MP3's climbing the charts--FolkAlley.com's open mic and EZFolk.com (where songs from the new album are already for sale for $.99). As of yesterday, we had the top two rated songs on FolkAlley and one song in the top 20 (out of 9,500) on EZ Folk. If you like our music, please go to the sites and give us a listen and some stars--it will help us stay among the ranks that get noticed. We'll also have the new CD's for sale shortly on CDBaby and through digital distribution via iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.

We truly hope to see you at the CD Release concert--we'll have the incredible Sam Bevan with us on bass, a lot of the songs from the new album, and a couple of surprises, all for a great cause.

Greg, Vickie and Dave

It's been a long, hard winter--but as the earth spirits turn the hills a brilliant green, our third album, "Green Girl" is finally quickening as well. John Jacob has spent countless hours gathering top notch musicians (e.g., Tim Ellis--guitar, Sam Bevan--bass, Jim Norris--drums, Pete Grant--pedal steel, national guitar and dobro, and Joe Craven--nearly everything else, just for starters) coaxing good performances out of us and putting together exceptional acoustic mixes. He captured our voices with a microphone that he says can record a jet engine at close range with nearly zero distortion and Vickie's voice sounds as clear, warm and mature as it ever has (but Greg overloaded it once--go figure).

We've put a couple samples on the site in their pre-mix, very-close-to-final versions--check out Green Girl, Peace of My Love and Bad Dog. We're excited and exhausted, and hope to have the album on the street in a few weeks.

There is always this little wall of resistance that builds up just as I sit down to write about the band. I wonder--how many little details of our personal quest can we inflict on others before they conclude we are massive egotists who find our own petty accomplishments the most fascinating thing in life? I don't know really, but it'll be fun to find out.

Today's update is about the Southwest Folk Alliance and our studio project. We spent a great weekend in Austin last month getting to know a lot of terrific people, including Dalis, the coordinator of the event, Mad Agnes, a cool liittle folk band from Connecticut, Gypsy Heart, a duo with a phenomenal bailalaika player, Jon Vesner, Cathy Mattea's husband and a terrific songwriter, and a bunch of nice Texans with nice things to say about our music. The farther south I get, the less I can tell when people are just being southern ladies and gentlemen and when they mean what they say, but being from the hard-knock world of Oakland, I'll take nice whether it is sincere or not. We got several invitaitons to return and play, which we hope to turn into a mini-tour in a year or two.

We got home and within a week started our next CD project. We've been at it hot and heavy (when we aren't working, eating or sleeping) ever since. Our producer John Jacob lined up some wonderful musicians, and we are (swear to God) enjoying the experience, which can often be pretty stressful. Sam Bevin has reinvented all of our bass parts--he's as comfortable with a fretless electric as a stand-up, and creates melodic bits of brilliance where we would just thump the one and five. He also livens up the control room by bringing his eleven-month old daughter Penelope to hang out and try to eat patch cords. Jim the drummer was like a ZEN master, the most mellow drummer we've ever encountered, and completely at home in every genre we tried. And Tim Ellis came down from Portland to give us a sparkling high guitar counterpoint to a lot of our rhythm and lead guitar work, and to rip a few solos. All three of them were fun to work with, professional, incredibly talented and without any visible sign of arrogance, which we know is not the norm. Oh yeah, and the music is just laying us on the floor. If I can figure out how, I will put a few rough cuts on the site as we go along--we love 'em..

So we have the rhythm section and lead done on 14 songs, and will be adding some color (harmonica, pedal steel, fiddle, mandolin, maybe a concertina) and then heading into vocal work(hopefully before the cold and flu season claims any of our throats). We'll then decide whether a song or two ends up on the cutting room floor, fight over cover design, liner notes, etc. and with a little luck, we should be wrapping up the project in late November.

Our next big adventure is in Portland at the beginning of November, the Far West Folk Alliance Conference. We'll be sharing a guerrilla showcase room with a band called TinCat. These things tend to go all night, so we'll be flying up Friday late, sleepless in Portland til Sunday and back at work Monday. I don't think musicians abuse booze and drugs that much, they just look that way after three or four days without sleep.

We hope to see you in Portland or after the holidays, when we plan to have several CD release parties. Invitiations to follow.

Greg, Vickie and Dave

A little luck never hurts. The Folk Alliance organization puts on big regional conventions, and the centerpiece is their talent showcases, where a few performers are spotlighted in the main ballroom, prime time on Friday and Saturday night. Last month, we were registering for the Far West Folk Alliance Conference in Portland Oregon this November, and noticed that while their showcase slots were already full, the Southwest conference in Austin this October was still accepting applications. We sent in our application and never heard back. Today we happened to check their website to see who was going to be featured, and low and behold, there we were, booked for Saturday night.

What we've realized over the years is that the folks at the venues who book bands are busy, and have access to lots and lots of bands. They aren't particularly concerned about any one band, cause there are a hundred more lined up to take their place. So if a band isn't looking out for itself, nobody else will.

In this case, all's well that ends well. . . we're in, we found out about it in time to book a flight, and we're thrilled to be selected. Hope to see you in Austin!

Sometimes you work for years to get a good booking, and sometimes good things happen just out of the blue (after years of working to get good bookings). We played a concert at Lake Vasona in June to a nice local crowd of a couple hundred folks, and the next day we got an email from the producer of West Coast Live, a local, nationally syndicated radio program, saying he loved the concert and asking us to play on the show. We said sure, and all of a sudden, we're playing live next Saturday (Sept. 8), on scores of radio stations for thousands of people! We're thrilled to have the opportunity, and hope you will catch us locally on KALW 91.7

Greg, Victoria and Dave

Finally. It’s been 14 years of noisy coffee houses, noisier bars, stoned sound engineers, deep discussions, major interruptions, occasional flashes of brilliance, and a common dream that keeps fluttering in and out of our consciousness. And here we are, on the web at last.

We hope you like the site, which we intend to update and improve regularly. The songs now displayed were mostly recorded in 1998 and 1999, and we’ve been doing a lot since, just not making recordings of it. But all that will change soon, as we are headed back into the studio with John Jacobs, a brilliantly talented engineer/producer, and hope to emerge by year end with a folk-oriented album of our best stuff of the past six or seven years.

We have gained and lost a couple of fan bases over the years as we stepped into and out of, and into and out of, the spotlight. We are hoping to gain one again as we aim in earnest for a higher rung of whatever ladder this is that all of us musicians and writers and singers with day jobs are steadily climbing.

Why now? A lot of things are pointing us in this direction. Our kids are old enough to hang out at shows and even sell CDs, our lives and those of dear friends have offered up plenty of raw material, and our set lists have been getting stronger year after year as we hack away at our lesser efforts with Darwinian ruthlessness. Recently, the world seems to be giving us a nudge to give it a shot--in the past three months, we’ve had one after another incident (the urging on of fans, gigs offered to us we used to only dream of, and the enthusiastic kindness of strangers at our shows) that suggest it’s a good time to once again cast our bread on the water.

Thanks for visiting--we hope we’ll see you at a show or two down the road.

Greg, Victoria and Dave