Surfin’ in the sand

So an update.  Somewhere along the way I decided to get back into the fun of guitar playing.  I had been listening to a lot of The Mermen, the San Francisco outfit that plays a sort of progressive surf music.  I rounded up my friend Nick Pasco to play some drums.  It just so happens that Nick is a great drummer for surf music, plus his kit is an early 60’s Ludwig combo.  We got our friend Tony Robinson to play bass guitar.  Thus was born Thee Jaguar Sharks, a band destined to bring ocean sounds to the Arizona desert.  We mostly dig the early surf bands like the Bel-Airs, the Chantays, the Shadows, the Ventures, but also have a healthy love for 60’s garage, psyche, and soul. 

 

We crossed paths (or is it waves?) with local surf lovers the Surfside IV and have played two shows together, one at the Ruby Room and one at The Blooze.  Both gigs were so much fun.  In 2009 look for Thee Jaguar Sharks to release our first ever album, full of surfin’ songs and ballads.  Our music can be found at www.myspace.com/theejaguarsharks/

 

New Stuff and T-shirt Shop

I haven’t been all that musically active lately, except that I’m going to try to cover a very rare Jeff Lynne song called “Poor Little You.”

Otherwise, I’ve started to design t-shirts and sell them online via Cafepress.com  The shop is still in development, however, I do have a few designs up already.  www.cafepress.com/teedragon/

Here is a photo of one of the shirts.

 

mellotrons and severe thunderstoms

A few weeks ago I purchased g-force media’s software plug-in of Mellotron samples. I’ve been happily playing around with it–if in fact you bought a real physical Mellotron today, it would cost somewhere around $5,000. The Mellotron was an early version of a sampler. If a band wanted orchestras or choirs on their record but couldn’t afford the cost, they would use a Mellotron. The Mellotron looks like an organ, except when a key is pressed a tape plays the samples of choirs, orchestras, flutes, etc. You’ve heard Mellotrons as the flutes on Strawberry Fields Forever and Stairway to Heaven. The Moody Blues practically made a career out of using the contraption. Mellotrons were not really that stable and so the tapes would sometimes dip in pitch or sound a bit warped, which added to the appeal of the sounds for me.

I just returned from Missouri where severe thunderstorms are as common as telemarketing calls I get on my voicemail everyday. Since I haven’t been back there for about 3 years, it was refreshing for me to see some rain as a nice contrast to the dry Phoenix climate.

On the song licensing front, we met with a publisher a couple of weeks ago who is interested in Broken Nights. This is an exciting prospect, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for some good placements.