Not To Be Deterred

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Since I began streaming at the beginning of COVID, I’ve been chasing improvement in the audio of each subsequent stream. I did okay when I played everything on the acoustic, save for the first disastrous foray with YouTube’s live streaming option. What they do is “squeeze” bandwidth if you are using the free version of their live service.

To be fair, YouTube’s strong suit is that it allows you to store your videos and not chew up bandwidth on your own website. For that, they are awesome.

Of course, everyone uses Facebook for everything—including streaming. I get it. You can roll out of bed, push the hair out of your face, grab a guitar and warble out a few tunes.

But what if you are like me, trying to capture a live sound that’s more than you plinking out three chords on your ukulele? Rock and roll (the lo-fi variety) with an electric guitar pushed through an amp and—oh my God!! Distortion!! Then, if you top it with some drums—what the fuck?

Anyways, I decided that OBS might be the way to go. Then, when I began ironing out my mix, then tested it last Thursday on Facebook—major problems. That was it for me and Facebook. I don’t like Zuckerberg for reasons I won’t bother with here. But the major reason is I can’t do what I want to do with Facebook.

Then I had a great idea. I’ve had my JBE WordPress site—this one—since 2013. I’ve been kind of neglecting it the past year, or maybe, a better way of framing it is this way. Rather than recognizing WordPress is a site for my writing, it’s actually quite capable of supporting my music endeavors. With a plug-in or two, I should be able to stream on this site, right? Well, not necessarily.

For those of you who consider technological nirvana, turning your smartphone on and off and setting up your voicemail, this isn’t for you. Hell, I’m not going to elaborate any further than to say, there were more speed bumps than I anticipated. Due to that, I couldn’t capture the actual live stream via video, so I took some time Monday after work to create a facsimile. It comes pretty damn close in capturing the music from Sunday’s first service of the First Bunker Rock Church of Lo-Fi Salvation.

JimBaumerMe delivers, per usual, even if it’s his Plan B, or Plan M.

Stay tuned for the next advisement about our next service—it will be here, not on Facebook.

Launching Rock and Roll Church-Sunday Service

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New England-style Congregational Church (Maine Memory Network)

There was a time when salvation really mattered to me. Perhaps it still does—just in a different way than before.

Music has been something that has offered me a way forward following the tragic death of my son, Mark. Back in August 2018, I never thought I’d be sitting here, promoting a Facebook live event—especially not an event like Rock and Roll Church.

What do I hope to accomplish with a facsimile of a Sunday morning worship service, sans the usual spiritual trappings? Actually, music has a spiritual component that’s often overlooked. I mean, Larry Norman, the father of contemporary Christian music, did ask the question, “why should the devil have all the good music?” Really! Norman knew that music was a medium that could be used powerfully—in his case—to glorify the god who he believed in and exalted in his music.

With a new EP out and songs that I’ve been playing now for a few months, I thought the time was right to roll out a setlist made up of these songs and a few others. Also, as COVID has shut down regular opportunities to play each week via open mics and gigs at music venues, this is a good time to develop some momentum with regular streaming gigs.

I plan to play for an hour or so. I’ll blend a few covers and I’ll probably offer some between song banter, some thoughts on things going on in the world, and a bit of background about the songs I’ll be playing.

Come on down to the First Congregational Bunker Rock Church of Lo-Fi Salvation and join the JimBaumerMe/aka, Reverend Jimi as he shepherd rock lovers through a unique rock and roll experience.

Rock and Roll Church
Facebook Live
Sunday10am

Get Back to Rock and Roll!!

Making the (music) News

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I’ve been reading Aimsel Ponti’s coverage of music for local pubs for years—certainly well over a decade or more. Whether writing about national acts, or local musicians looking to break out of Portland’s crowded music channel, she writes with passion, as well as an understanding that’s all-too-rare in music critics.

When I was cranking out books about baseball, Moxie, and local themes with my book of essays, I knew it was important to let others know about these releases. As I often told my writing students, “never under-estimate the importance of writing a compelling press release.” Many writers (and yes, musicians) miss that lesson.

Can you imagine my surprise while working last week to see a text that said,” Jim, this is Aimsel Ponti…check your email.” I’m glad I did.

She’d sent me some questions and was on deadline for her latest Face the Music column. Could I answer and get them back, along with a photo? You don’t have to ask twice on that one, Aimsel!

Photo of JimBaumerMe, making music in The Bunker (Mary Baumer photo)

This morning, I am featured along with three other artists in her music column, as musicians who’ve made the most of the last year of lockdown. I’m honored to share space with fellow Maine artists, Alice Limoges, Stephanie Atkins, and Oshima Brothers. Continue reading →

The Art of Songwriting: Tom Brady (GOAT)

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I’m someone with considerable experience listening to sports talk radio over the course of the past 35 years. The week leading up to the Super Bowl has always been something I’ve kept on my personal radar. This year, the strangest year ever, things about sports (even the Super Bowl) seem to have been pushed to the fringes, shoved there by all-things-COVID.

Perhaps it has something to do with not really running with a tribe anymore. Or, not working in a physical space with other humans. Every workplace I’ve ever been part of would have had someone running a Super Bowl pool, soliciting predictions with a pot of cash going to the winner. Maybe New Englanders were depressed because their favorite son had found success somewhere else, out from the constraints of the Krafts and the Hoodie Man.

But this year, nothing: nada! Working from home, the daily Skype was filled with the usual inane banter about dogs and things people didn’t know about how to do their jobs. Nothing about Tom Brady, or thoughts about how New England’s favorite son might fare in the land of the sun. No openings to insert, “I just wrote a song about Tom Brady–check it out.” Actually, no one at work gives two shits about anything related to my life–I learned that all-too-well the week of the fourth anniversary of Mark’s death. Not one note or inquiry like, “how are you doing” from a team leader or manager. Oh well. Continue reading →

John Prine Didn’t Do Lo-fi

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America is an atomized and disconnected space. I’ve felt that disconnection in a visceral way since January 21, 2017. That’s the night my wife and I learned that our only son had been killed: walking along an isolated stretch of highway in Florida. Mark had just turned 33.

In my case, loneliness feels exacerbated by social media. To be truthful, there are moments when it seems like it might be part of sinister plan concocted by our overlords to keep us as divided and disconnected as never before. Why even make the effort to remain connected when you can push a button on your screen?

I don’t know a lot about Ben Sasse, senator from Nebraska. I’ve heard him speak on news shows and I know he has a book called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How To Heal. Personally, I have little hope that we’ll stop hating each other—that’s not my point, here. But in reading something over the weekend about Sasse and his book, I was reminded again about my opening point: our isolation (and how I cope daily with my own).

Sasse’s book addresses elements like an “evaporation of social capital,” which is the “glue that binds us together,” as I’ve written about before. This one item struck me just like someone had slapped me in the face. “Loneliness—not obesity, cancer or heart disease—is the nation’s number one health crisis.” Sasse writes that “persistent loneliness reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness.” Or, you could be so fucking lonely that you just end it for good and kill yourself. To feel isolated day after day takes a toll. Continue reading →

Predictions for a New Year

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Last year at Christmas, I could barely play 5 songs. By “play,” I mean sitting with my guitar and being able to make it through a song, knowing the words and chords without relying on sheet music. I had a couple of songs I was close to “nailing,” but the others I cloyed my way through.

A year later, I can now play an hour’s worth of music (or more) and my setlist is now in the double digits. I’ll still miss a chord change now-and-then, but I’m confident in my ability to play music. This from someone who believed the messaging that he’d never be good enough to perform with a guitar.

What’s the difference a year later?

A good portion of my growth can be attributed to practice. Most of the previous 365 days of 2020 (in the midst of a global pandemic), I spent hours alone in my basement: just me, three guitars (two electrics, one acoustic), a combo amp, a laptop, and a small Bose speaker. I acquired a two-channel PA midway through 2020 and a couple of microphones. These tools allowed me to approximate the live performance space, or a reasonable facsimile.

I have no crystal ball and hence, no sense of the next time I’ll be in front of an audience of flesh and blood humans. Once our “esteemed” leader, Governor “Crackhead,” shut everything down this fall, she deprived me of my weekly opportunity to get out and hit open mics. This was an essential part of my growth as a performer. No matter how much you practice, standing on a stage in front of a bunch of total strangers is an entirely different animal than sitting alone in the basement. Songs you’ve nailed time and time again become clunky messes played live in front of an audience. But, falling on my face made me better. Continue reading →

I Started a Bandcamp

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Most people rarely follow their hearts/dreams. It’s so much easier to simply wish upon a star.

Back in the late 1990s, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Then, Stephen King told me that being a writer wasn’t simply wishing you wanted to be a writer. “Oh,” I thought. I guess there’s some work involved. You have to write. Indeed.

I learned my lesson about writing. But what about music?

Playing the guitar is something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve had a guitar and I’ve had seasons when I played it quite a bit. But inevitably, it would always end up back in the case, with the case building up a sheen of dust. Hard lessons don’t always stay with us.

My son was killed in 2017. Life came to a standstill for me, or pretty damn close. I could barely function for months. Then, one afternoon, my guitar came out of the case and it’s stayed out ever since.

I wrote “Walking Down the Road” last summer, in August, right after we moved to Biddeford. It’s about Mark’s final walk, as told in his voice, if he could still speak to us. I even have the first lo-fi recording of it made on my phone, in my clothes closet. I thought that would make for a great makeshift studio. I’ve since migrated to my basement, “my bunker” as my wife calls it. She actually decorated it a week ago, and now I have Christmas lights down there.

Having a Bandcamp page is something I’ve thought about. But for some reason, I held off setting one up. I guess I needed more time in the “woodshed.”

JimBaumerME on the Bandcamp

I’ve written 15 songs over the past year. I have an album’s worth of material. I’m starting to create some stark home recordings of my songs. Others like Guided by Voices, Swearing at Motorists, and Daniel Johnston have done similar things. They are certainly artists worth modeling myself after, but at the same time, I’m not really looking to be just like them–they’re guideposts for sure–but I have my own sense of where I want to go as a musician.

So, if you are inclined, bookmark my Bandcamp page. I’ll continue to post new songs and before long, there will be a full-length album.

 

Christmas Songs on Pearl Harbor Day

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We have been focused on the COVID Cloud since last March. That’s eight months, earthlings!

Like most false narratives, the design of it fixates on some fractional element of a much larger malady and malfunction. In the case of the COVID (or the “Kovidika,” as I’ve started calling it, one of my numerous descriptors seeking to mock the fear and loathing all about me), Americans seem hard-wired against accepting anything that promises pain: we deny death, lack empathy for anyone suffering through tough times (like grief and loss), and perhaps worse—refuse to own any responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in. It’s as if we’re all clamoring for the Staples “easy button” in some national ceremonial act, hoping away the COVID. Oh, right. I almost forgot. The vaccine will save us. Stupid me.

Today is the first Monday in December. Did you remember it’s National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. Will the day come when white people will have to denounce the events that occurred on that day in 1941? Locally, another windstorm has darkened significant portions of Maine’s power grid. Does Janet Mills see this as a problem? I don’t imagine any of the media sock puppets consider thqt worth investigating any further than a perfunctory posting of numbers of people without power—just like they do each day, fogging their fear, telling us of more positive tests of peopl with COVID. They are invested in numbers lacking context or meaning.

Our infrastructure is badly in need of an upgrade. The solution seems to be stringing more fiber optic cable in order for us to Zoom in perpetuity. But what about our crumbling roads, a malfunctioning power grid that’s the same one we’ve had for 70 years, not to mention our buckling bridges. I have fostered a keen interest in the topic of infrastructure. In fact, I pitched a series of investigative articles to this guy back in the day. He handed me off to some American expat living in Germany who passed on my articles. Not that they weren’t any good, they just didn’t match his “style” of writing. He’s now manning the switch on a fear-fog machine of his own, like much of those remaining in the legacy media. All the journalists with any remaining moral compunction have abandoned panic porn to write honestly, like this guy. I admire his work along with a handful of others. The rest, I’ve left in the dust to pander and put forth their propaganda passing as news. Continue reading →

Factoring in Fear

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Blogging for me began back in 2002. I occupied a cubicle in a soul-sucking job for a major disability insurer. Every minute I spent there was a minute I’d never recover. Fortunately, I didn’t invest  much energy into furthering Whitey’s corporate agenda and instead began planning my plan of exit.

A co-worker with topnotch design skills built a functional website at my behest. He never charged me a penny, either. The most important element of the site was that it including a blogging platform. As a writer looking to up my game and work on my craft, I was off to the races with a space to publish my own writing.

Since 2003, I’ve had several blogs including this one. My writing has been bylined in a host of print publications and online. I’ve hit the markers I set out for nearly 20 years ago.

Occasionally, I look back at something I wrote. The blog I maintained from 2004 until I launched this one in 2012, Words Matter, is still out there. Since I just completed rereading George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, I was curious about what I might have picked up previously and perhaps noted somewhere.

Interestingly, these prior blog posts serve as a “trail of breadcrumbs” back to what I was thinking at the time. Just like in the present, I was concerned about the use of fear and hysteria (back in 2006) and also, the limbing of what is considered “proper” in what we are allowed to think and say. These are both central tenets to Orwell’s book that I’m amazed was written in 1949 and is still eerily relevant—just as if he’d written it last week.

In my blog post from 2006 at the Words Matter blog, I wrote this about fear:

Yesterday, while driving home from some appointments in Dover-Foxcroft, I was scanning the radio dial for something tolerable, or at least wouldn’t put me to sleep. For a five minute period, my better judgment took leave and I found myself listening to the demagoguery of Sean Hannity, during his afternoon exercise in right wing ideological indoctrination. This man is certifiably insane. His propaganda-laced tirades are lapped up eagerly by his brain-addled listeners, who subscribe to this kind of bigotry-infused and racist rhetoric. He was prattling on about the need for the U.S. to support their friends (in this case, Israel) in the battle against “Islamofascism,” a term invented by the haters on the right.

Fourteen years later, I could rewrite this, change a few names and terms and it would read this way to detail something that happened to me back in April. I haven’t looked back: Continue reading →

Dignity to the End

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Last Saturday, we hosted a live streaming show by yours truly from the saloon in our house. It’s called the Double Deuce and I call these streamers, “Live From the Double Deuce.” Yeah. Real original. Don’t like it—name your own shows. Oh that’s right, you don’t have any. Okay, enough of being mean. Let’s all make America kind again. Oh, never mind. [lyrical reference]

My sister mentioned one of my songs I played, “Bobcaygeon,” by The Tragically Hip.

I’ve been a fan of the Hip since I drove up to Montreal with Mary and Mark to visit Canadian members of her extended family. Mark was probably eight or nine. We ended up going to an Expos game at the Olympic Stadium. Probably the Braves were in town. We went down to St. Catherine’s Street, part of the city’s shopping district. There was one of those classic department stores, Eaton’s. Eaton’s was a multi-story emporium that every large city had in the late 19th and through much of the 20th centuries. Of course, the big box phenomenon brought about their demise and Jeff Bezos and Amazon ended up finishing them off. Eaton’s officially shut its doors in 1999. Back in 1990, the store still maintained a vibrant buzz with its multiple floors of consumer goods including music. Of course, if all you know is scrolling through items on a small phone screen, you’ll never understand the art of tastefully arrayed items with a purpose, in an actual physical space: think retail Feng shui, or something similar. But that was the lure and wonder of places like Eaton’s.

The T. Eaton Co. Ltd. store in downtown Montreal

That visit is where I scored my initial piece of plastic ware from the hip. This being the 1990s, it came in cassette form and the title was Road Apples. I knew the band due to their song “New Orleans is Sinking” on Maine’s last freeform FM station, WTOS. I probably bought the tape on the strength of that one song (which isn’t on this recording, btw). Glad I did. I became a huge fan. Have been to this day.

Road Apples (1991) by The Tragically Hip

Phantom Power, the record that “Bobcaygeon” is on, is one of my favorite Hip records. I always liked that song and I learned it as one of my first five songs on my quest to master 10 songs so I’d have an actual setlist. I’ve blown past that self-imposed barrier. Continue reading →