This’ll be the first time in a good long while that I’ve played with my band outside of California, and it’s high time that we did so!
In addition to me, Bryan, Rick and Joe perpetrating the kinda stuff that we perpetrate as a quartet, for part of our set we’ll be supplemented by Dave Bainbridge & Sally Minnear (who will also do a set of their own earlier in the evening). The addition of Dave and Sally will allow us to play several pieces that either rarely or never get an airing onstage. Matt Dorsey will open the evening with a solo set. It’s a full night of really good music you’ll definitely want to be a part of.
Please join us if you can! Tell your friends to come too! If people come out to see these shows, that greatly increases the likelihood that we’ll be able to do it again, travel to more places, etc. etc. We want to play for you! Let’s make this happen.
I’ll be writing to you again within the week, with news of multiple things live music-wise, but this teeny tiny missive is meant to inform you of one specific thing happening on August 1:
THE FINAL FREAKS ALBUM COMES TO BANDCAMP FRIDAY THIS FRIDAY, AUGUST 1!
It’s the release of FREAKS IN A MELLOW MOOD VOL. 3 by MIKE KENEALLY and BRYAN BELLER!!
Coming to Bandcamp, the platform that continues to respect artists and listeners alike.
Additionally, August 1 is BANDCAMP FRIDAY, the occasional blessed day where Bandcamp itself doesn’t take even a miniscule cut of the proceeds – all money earned on Bandcamp Friday goes only to the artist and/or label.
(We still love and appreciate it when you buy something from us at any time on any day, but boy Bandcamp Friday has been a tremendously helpful phenomenon for us and for countless other independent artists and labels. In a world that is running short of such things, it’s been an absolute blessing, and we appreciate your support of it.)
10. SUPERMARKET PEOPLE (Bryan Beller song, Rochester Nov. 8 ‘03)
11. SPEARMINT PUP (Cambridge, Nov. 6 ‘03)
12. INCA ROADS (Zappa cover, edited from the Cambridge, Paramus, Williamsport and Littleton shows)
The download also comes with a snazzy pdf booklet featuring numerous Scott Chatfield photos of me and Bryan at Niagara Falls during the tour, and detailed song-by-song liner notes from me.
As the title would indicate, FREAKS IN A MELLOW MOOD VOL. 3 is the third volume of recordings (also the FINAL volume, as it happens) from November 2003, when Bryan Beller and I were traveling across the land along with Scott Chatfield (in multiple roles as road/tour manager, driver, merch man and digital recordist), flitting from music store to music store, staging acoustic duo performances on behalf of Taylor Guitars. In addition to the standard acoustic guitars they were renowned for, they’d also started to manufacture for a while some very spectacular acoustic bass instruments, so both Bryan and myself were representing their products.
Scott recorded a bunch of the shows, and those recordings lay on a hard drive for a couple of decades. At some point semi-recently, our trusted Exo-associate Chris Opperman got his ears around those dusty old recordings, and produced an invaluable spreadsheet listing each song from each performance, with special attention paid to those songs he felt were worthy of release.
When I took delivery of the recordings last year and began loading them into Pro Tools at home, I gratefully referred to the notes made by Mr. Opperman, and got myself to mixing. And now we’ve reached Volume Three of this groundbreaking venture. (All right, I’ve gone too far now – we’re not necessarily breaking ground, but I do think all three of these acoustic albums are really nifty.)
This album goes live this Friday August 1, Bandcamp Friday. Scott says it’s probably his favorite of the three volumes. We hope you enjoy it at least as much as he does!
Opening for us at all the gigs will be the brutally talented Travis Larson, doing a solo set of his wonderful guitar compositions.
If you haven’t seen ProgJect yet, and you enjoy classic ’70s progressive rock, and you can come to any of these towns, you will find this gig with your while. It is freaking FUN.
