Tag Archives: JimBaumerME

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 →

A Guitar Saved My Life

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The governor has shut me down. Just when I was starting to slide into a groove of sorts with my guitar-playing and getting out to various open mics, the governor in what seems like simply a random dictate—has snatched away these weekly chances for me to take my music from the basement bunker onto a stage. It’s become a way to push myself to become better, which only comes when you perform. Song lyrics and chords that you nail flawlessly when it’s just you alone in a practice space suddenly disappear when nerves hit prior to going on before strangers.

Mark was killed in January 21, 2017. During the second year of living through grief and loss, things seemed to get worse, if that was even possible. The summer of 2018, I became deeply depressed. I contemplated ways to kill myself. The loss of Mark and the isolation of being alone all day in a large house with no one calling or even emailing me made life seem untenable. As much as I loved Mary and didn’t want to inflict even more pain on her than she was already carrying around, I just couldn’t see any options.

On the darkest day of my life other than the night we learned Mark was killed, I was moving towards a final decision. But, for some reason, I walked towards the corner office I had in our house we were renting in Brunswick. To this day, I still don’t know why. Maybe to buy some time before making an irreversible choice.

Sitting in the corner was my guitar case holding the Yamaha acoustic I bought back in 1989 at Buckdancer’s Choice in Portland. Just recently, Mary found the original sales slip. I paid $140 for an instrument that has brought me joy, along with frustration for 30 years. I say “frustration” because at that point in my life, I’d never managed to push through that “wall” that all guitar players have to pass through on the journey towards being proficient on their instrument. I read a book earlier this year and the author said something to the effect that “the guitar is an easy instrument to learn: it’s a difficult instrument to master.”

Until 2018, I never committed to mastering the guitar. Oh, I’d have periods that would last a few months to a year when I’d play enough so that I built callouses on my fretting hand. I’d learn Christmas songs for the holidays, or in 2001, while attending a Vineyard Church in Lewiston, I became the small group worship leader, the guy who played simple songs on my guitar and led us in worship songs each week. That’s how I learned about Michael Pritzl and The Violet Burning, a band I now cover.

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Working Out More Songs

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Another attempt to find a drummer today. These inquiries launched into the digital void haven’t delivered a timekeeper, yet.

All-too-often, some guy wants you to “hit him up,” which seems to be code for “when you do all the work of writing the songs, scoring the gigs, call me and maybe I’ll show up for the payday.” Or something like that.

A week ago Tuesday, I followed a three-piece in Mechanic Falls that were amazing. The band were two brothers (I think) slightly younger than me. They’d been playing for awhile. The drummer who was co-hosting with Chris Floyd was a young man from Jay named Bobby. He has a band of his own, The Only Hope. I appreciated Bobby (and Chris) backing me on “Creep” by Radiohead, and my own song, “Walking Down the Road.”

For the past week, I’ve been thinking how my experiences at open mics might become remarkably different if I could show up with a bunch of songs that I’d been working on with a drummer, instead of hoping the band that I just met minutes before playing will be able to follow me in my own original songs. Then, in some settings, I have to have what I want to play vetted, ensuring the house band knows the song. Maybe I don’t want to learn a bunch of songs that everyone else plays.

Yesterday on my drive back and forth to Brunswick to see my chiropractor with a side jog to my old hometown to see my sister, I listened to Teenage Fanclub. The Fannies are one of a host of bands I could probably listen to daily and not grow tired of. I’m so glad I made the trek to Boston a year ago in March to catch them. It was another one of my solitary adventures.

Prior to my trip to the Hub, I tried banging out some of my faves by the Fannies. For whatever reason, I didn’t have much success. I’m a better player now than I was back then. Maybe that’s why I was able to work this one out, even transposing it in a different key so I wouldn’t be forced to play it dropped down a step and could keep my one electric in standard tuning. That will be good when I roll this one out, live.

What an amazing fucking scene from 1992. It’s Reading, in the rain, and the crowd is being transported to some other place by a bunch of 20-somethings who’ve managed to continue making meaningful music nearly 30 years later.

“Everything Flows” is not the type of song a 25-or-so-old kid writes: a plaintive ode to the passing of time with lines like “see you get older every year/but you don’t change, I don’t notice you changing.”

Looking forward to playing this one live in the near future.

Oh, and the biz card makes it official: I’m now calling myself a musician along with writer.

The business of music.

And since one can never have too much of the Fannies in their lives, here’s a show they did in NYC back in ’93 for some Japanese television station.