Rob the Fiddler

The Sues were invited to play at the 42nd 2008 International Chili festival in Terlingua this year. It was a BLAST. The pictures are all here.

There are actually two chili festivals held next to each other on the same weekend. Both claim to be the original. One is called “Behind the Store” and the other is “CASI“, the Chili Appreciation Society of America. I’m still not entirely sure of the story behind this, but the “Behind the Store” Tolbert/Fowler one is where we played at. Its smaller, but its the one with the highest musical pedigree. Any die hard fan of Texas Music would love to see the likes of Gary P Nunn, Jerry Jeff Walker, Mark David Manders (or us maybe) at this festival.

Its 600 miles from Dallas. A LONG trip. It took us 10 hours to get there (with a few stops). The landscape is beautiful. I wish I had more time to explore on my own. In the meantime, here is a good description of the area I dug up on the interwebs.

DPS was out in full force for the weekend. I was told (and let me tell you, the campground had no lack of storytellers) that 40% of the force was out on the roads. Another report was that all the rookies patrol the roads as training. In any case, they were doing a zero tolerance sweep of ANYBODY on the road. If you were as much as 1 mile over the limit you would get a ticket. We did see a lot of cops on the road. If the intent was to keep folks in the campgrounds…..it worked.

We rolled into camp at Dusk on Thursday and set up tents and Friday we took a road trip to Lajitas.

Most accounts of Lajitas up until a few years ago usually included words like “sleepy”, “hole” and were told with a stinky expression. A goo Its most notable figure after the days of Pancho Villa was the Mayor Clay Henry. Clay Henry is a goat…a beer drinking goat. For a while you could buy a 6 pack and throw down with the mayor.

Apparently things have changed because the town totally bought up in 2003 and turned into a resort. The sleepy town has been turned into what looks like a movie set.

These are actually luxury accommodations behind all of the facades.

Clay Henry was hidden away in “Rehab” as it was no longer politically correct to feed beer to goats. That and PETA threatened to sue.

We came back and mooched around the campground for samples of ribs, chicken, brisket and beans. Those were the competitions for Friday. Plenty of food was provided by the “fire in the hole” boys camping on the “hill”. The Cowboy Breakfast was stellar.

The gig with the Tejas Brothers went well. The crowd danced and yelled and had a great time. It was Halloween night too, so several folks were in costume.

Saturday was the Chili competition. Cooks were up at the crack of dawn a chopping and a cooking. Turn in was at noon.

After turn in, you wander around all the campsites and sample the chili. There is also a presentation aspect to this with all kinds of wacky booths.

Here is Mark David Manders in some kinda zen/chili pose. He had actually asked for a shot of tequila, but got a bowl of red instead.

One thing I noticed was that many folks had custom painted gas stoves.

This distinctive style is painted by Wendell Rankin. I saw at least a dozen stoves across the campground that he had painted. I suppose its the chili equivalent of a rodeo belt buckle.

We were hoping to take a trip to Boquillas. Its a small border town whose economy was dependent on tourists. To get there, you paid a guy to canoe you across the Rio (a 40 ft trip) and then you got a donkey ride into town. It was a good stop for float trips too. Now its pretty much shut down due to heightened security.

Instead, I took a quick trip to the Terlingua ghost town too and checked out the cemetery. The week before, some friends had a skull decorating party. Seemed a fitting place to leave one behind as the next day was the Day of the Dead.

Sat night I played with Mark David Manders and pretty much crashed straight to sleep when we were done. It was nice to hear all the laughing, music and campground noise throughout the night.

Sunday we packed up and faced the long drive home. We had lunch at the Edelweiss Brewery in Alpine, Texas. Surprisingly, I didn’t try the beer. Had a long drive ahead so Ill have to revisit that sometime. The burgers were excellent.

The rest of the band decided to take 67 on the way home. Its a more direct way home, but is potentially slower. The most interesting parts start well past San Angelo and it would be dark by the time I got to that, so I opted to take 20. Besides, on the way down I saw some interesting things in Coyanosa that I wanted to revisit.

I suppose interesting to me is Cotton fields, Chili fields, Pumpkin patches and a fruit stand all in one “no stop light” town. I had never seen chilies growing in a field before. I love growing them, but my plants were never as productive as these. The cotton was all over the place. You know its cotton season when the roads are lined with loose cotton.

The fruit stand had the strangest gourds I have ever seen. To bad nobody was tending the stand. I would have bought one of these. I did stock up on a half dozen topo chicos next door to drink on the way home.

West Texas…looks like this for miles and miles.

I made a quick stop in Midland too. Its a strange city in the middle of nowhere. On the weekend it looks like a ghost town (kinda like Downtown dallas). Nothing was open as far as I could tell downtown. Creepy. I did stop at a drive through Paleta store that was located close to the freeway.

Dallas needs this:

Good times. The Sues plan on going next year….playing or not.

So the Boys Named Sue were hired to play a wedding in Marfa, Tx.
Marfa is a LONG ways away so it was easily the longest road trip we have taken. Its difficult enough just to get the band to play outside of 635. The trip down was pretty brutal. We were supposed to leave Dubs at 10am, but with all the delays and whatnot…we left Dallas around 1:45. Typical.
Snakebite couldn’t make the trip, so we had the help of “Party Cove Sue” to help us out.

Dirty!

Dub has a new GPS in his car so I got to mess with that. We spent the first hour debating if it was a better idea to follow the directions or just take 20 most of the way. Come Abilene, we opted to follow the computer…which was probably the fastest. For the next 300 miles of hwy 67, we probably saw 20 cars total. Go technology.

The first highlight of the trip was when we hit the Comanche springs restaurant in Fort Stockton. Its main attraction is the Big Chef Sitting Bull burger. It serves 4 to 6 people and is FREE if you eat it (with fries) in an hour.

Dub had to give it a try. Mostly because he had a cousin (Kegman) who had made an excellent run at it a year or so before. Our waitress seriously tried to talk him out of it. Dub insisted. John even got some footage of them making the burger in the kitchen. When it came out…DANG..check this out

Here is the burger against a 1/4 lb burger!!!!

Party Cove just looks ill.

He had a go at it..but didn’t finish it. Luckily the motel had a mini fridge so we could keep it around and take bites over the weekend. (Yuck)

We pulled into Marfa around 11:30pm. After unloading the truck, it was closing time for the bar, but most of the wedding party was still loitering in the Thunderbird parking lot. I retired early, while the rest of the band went with the remaining wedding party to try and see the marfa lights.

We started the next day with pizza from Pizza Foundation.

It was some EXCELLENT pizza. I highly recommend it.

I walked around town a bit after, but I cant say that Marfa did much for me. The town is kinda like a Texas version of Aspen…but without 98% of the high dollar amenities. I looked at the pictures on the real estate office…most places were 150k to start (for shacks.)
Tons of art galleries…but the restaurants were modest. ( A good thing) Food was certainly good, but homey. Lots of people walking around with cell phones and yet, no Starbucks. The only retail coffee was at the gas station. Its a unique place. Maybe the best way to describe it is a place for rich Dallasites to go, but where they seem to be happy NOT bringing all that Dallas crap with them. (Just the cell phones and laptops…gotta tell everybody where you are at right?)

The weather and view is breathtaking. I hope to go back so I can see Big Bend.

The Wedding reception was a blast. We got fed the most amazing food. Quail (deboned!), Lobster, Pork and beef tenderloin (OH GOD!!! IT WAS AMAZING) and a most stellar Gumbo. The groom’s family are in the food biz…so that was an important part of the party…and spared no expense.

I was fascinated by all the candles.

the venue was pretty nice. Apparently Sonic Youth played there a year ago. We where told this many times. Yo La Tango was going to be there in a month. Did I mention that the town was filled with hipsters?

We dreaded Sunday’s drive back to Dallas. Amazingly, we got out of town by noon. We had quick stop at Alpine for food and a picture op at Jackassic Park.

Had a good time at the Bar of Soap for the first DFW Synth DIY meetup.

Lots of folks showed up and there were plenty of rigs set up for folks to see and here.

Pictures are here and here.

We had An arp 2600, Doepfer A-100, and several custom built modulars and a few things that can just be described as “other”.

Paul from synthtech was also there with his new modules on hand like the MOTM-520 Cloud Generator MOTM-730 Voltage-Controlled Pulse Divider.

Mostly we met each other and learned a bit. Its a good start to get a community together to do things like trade knowledge, tools, and time to learn more about this stuff.

if your interested
email us at the myspace

http://www.myspace.com/dfwsynthdiy

I bought a Midibuddy a year or so back on ebay with the intention of using it to trigger loops in Ableton. I had hoped it was as easy as plug-n-play but no such luck.

I gave it another try last night and after banging my head against the wall I finally figured it out.

The problem is that need the midi buddy only sends out song selects and program changes. These are not suitable to trigger scenes in Ableton. The solution is to use the free programs Midi OX and Midi Yoke.

The instructions are a little on the lean side but once I figured it out, it all made sense.

First you need to install midi yoke. This is basically a virtual patch bay. Next you install the Midi OX.

This program allows you to capture Midi info and filter/modify it to your liking. In my case, I needed to convert the Program changes to CC messages. Some care needs to be done there too though because to get the toggle to work, you need to set the value to something high too like 99 or else ableton seems to ignore the message. It makes sense. For example, on the MAudio O2, if you want the control buttons to trigger a scene, you need to program the board to send something like 99…otherwise it just sends 0 and increments.

Here are some snapshots of what I did.

After the yoke is installed, you pick the midi input from the soundcard or USB (an Uno in my case) and send the output to the Yoke. I sent it to 3.

The mapping was done like this.

Basically it says grab all the Prg Changes and send them as Ctrl messages on channel 2. Send a value of 99 all the time. This worked for me.

Now on Ableton just take the input as yoke 3.

From there, you sends should be heard from Ableton and it can learn in Midi Mapping mode.

From Dallas Observer

Boys Named Sue
Best Country/Roots, Best Song (”Honky-Tonk If Yer Horny”)

Once again, you readers have proven that while you may know little about country music, you certainly know a thing or two about having a good time—and if you’ve been drunk at a bar in Dallas in the last five years, you’ve probably had a good time or two with the Boys Named Sue. A BR5-49 for the Jackass set, the Sues drink hard and play harder, mixing classic covers, zany originals and goofy medleys into maybe the most entertaining train wreck in town. “With the Sues, we all say, ‘What is the stupidest thing we can do?’” says frontman John Pedigo. “Then someone will say, “Hey everybody! Watch this!!!” And then we all jump off the bridge.”

Take for instance DOMA Best Song “Honky-Tonk If Yer Horny,” which recalls the spirit of comic country classics like “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” “Convoy” and “Up in Smoke” as it tells the tale of a truck-stop hooker named Clementine, “a guaranteed good time.” Leading off The Hits—the Sues’ proper debut—with a bang, the song proves once and for all that the Sues are the local kings of the beer-drinkin’ anthem. “The Hits was intentionally conceptual,” says Pedigo. “And by conceptual I mean we got together in one night with two cases of beer and a bottle of Tuaca and wrote the entire album and recorded it soon after. I don’t think we recorded a song without giggling.”

But it’s not all goofin’ off for the Sues, as The Hits also features some fine straight country tunes, from the easy shuffle of “Travelin’ Down” to “Amber Friends,” a tear-in-your-beer salute to the Sues’ favorite liquid therapists, all spiked with the lovely, lilting fiddle lines of the band’s secret weapon, instrumentalist Bobby Sue.

As for what’s next for the three-time DOMA kings of country, it’s anyone’s guess, but it will certainly involve alcohol. “The Sues will continue to reign supreme and out-drink everyone under the sun,” says Pedigo. “It’s funny to watch people attempt to keep up with us. Sorry, but it’s impossible. [Bassist Ward Richmond] and I alone ‘beat’ Australia and New Zealand and that ain’t easy.” And with drinkin’ songs as good as these, it’s hard not to believe him. —N.W.B.

So I get a call from Mark David Manders on Thursday asking what my calendar looks like for a gig on Wed. Usually Im pretty booked, but it looked open….still, by the tone of his voice, it sounded like the gig was a bit more involved. Usually I have to ask if its in Odessa, Lubbock or further before just saying I can do it. Turns out he needed a fiddler for a show in Puerto Vallarta. Five days, all-inclusive, everything paid for and we just play on Wed night for a two hour set. SWEET!

Luckily I got my passport figured out in April, just in case I needed to take a quick trip to Mexico with my girlfriend. From what I heard, folks have a 12 week plus wait up for passports. I got my expedited from a kinda shakey looking operation in Richardson, but it did only take two weeks. AA passport is run by a guy named Sonny. Its legit and the guy is really nice….it just has a strange vibe to it. Its a little weird to see stacks of passports with birth certificates stuffed in them strewn across the room, but Im sure his organization skills are better than mine.

Springing the request to take a full week off of work to my boss was pretty easy. Its more of a matter of asking “Hey, I got a free vacation…but I need to leave on Monday, should I take it?”. Im the master of the “loaded question”.

So the resort is doing a “Texas music” week theme with the folks at Love and War. They shipped some Love and War menu items and have texas artists like Mark David Manders, Austin Cunningham and Jessie Dayton.

The resort is Marival in Nuevo Vallarta. This apparently is a “resort only” part of the beach. It was more like a compound getting into the place. Its a ways from any towns, but if your just interested in a little swimming, lounging and reading a good book, this is the place.

The room I got is very nice. Its a suite right on the beach.

The first day was spent
mostly accustomizing myself to the various buffets and snack eateries as well as
the numerous bars. All-inclusive is pretty dangerous.

Did some picking with the Dayton gang and watched the sunset.

For FREE!!!

The pics are here

More will be added as I snap pics…but I have to pay for Wifi, so it might be sporatic.

This is the lobby.