Here I am playing and singing Morning Has Broken (the Cat Stevens version, not the original hymn). This is my first video where I actually recorded the performance on a recording studio and then dubbed the recording over the video. I clipped out forty seconds in the original take where I had made a mistake.

In all, it took me about two hundred hours of work, because my recording studio came from an archeological dig, and my video production system is free software running on a computer I bought with box tops from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. I had to connect it all together with baling wire, duct tape, and plenty of cursing. Seriously, MacGyver would have been stumped. I crave to tell the story of my hilarious technical difficulties, but it would make a trilogy of feature-length films, and I’d still have to leave a bunch of stuff out.

Eh, I’m a musician. Suffering for my art, and all that.

Chickens get a bad rap, probably just because they’re edible, and nobody likes to think they’re eating someone cool. But chickens are actually pretty cool. For one thing, in every chicken beats the heart of a giant rampaging dinosaur. If you listen carefully to this video you can hear Godzilla’s great great great …. great grandson singing in the yard. His name is Timid Tina, and he’s gorgeous.

In other chicken news, a chicken recently got in my house and laid an egg in my bed. That counts as sex, if you think about it.

Here’s another video from the Blue Period. As you can see, I forgot to turn on the light. Oh well, the axe sounds pretty good through the camera mic.

I was just reading about Rob Parissi, the Wild Cherry frontman who wrote “Play That Funky Music”:

“Play That Funky Music” was sampled by Vanilla Ice in 1990 (for which Parissi was not credited; he later won $500,000 in a copyright infringement lawsuit)…

Now they tell me. I could have written a song for Vanilla Ice to illegally sample. Instead I chose to do my own cover of “Play That Funky Music”. What can I say? I love that song!

Lucky for me, I’ve got friends like Doug Fergus. Doug plays a mean bass, and he’s been promoting his new act, Naked in Public. Somehow Doug got in touch with Rob Parissi, and told him there’s this guy who does a ukulele cover of “Play That Funky Music”. Parissi was intrigued and asked to see any available video.

What the heck. A fellow could do lots worse than to have Vanilla Ice’s problems. Rob Parissi? Don’t mind if I do!