Random Catchup – Page 2 – stevelawson.net

November 1, 2009

NaNoWriMo – Steve Writes A Novel (possibly)

For the last couple of Novembers I’ve been aware of friends of mine being a part of ‘National Novel Writing Month‘, more often referred to (at least, on twitter) as NaNoWriMo.

So this afternoon, on a whim, I thought ‘I wonder if I can write a novel about some musicians who in some imaginary world start a cultural revolution, accidentally’ – I realised that it would be fun to have a go at writing a long-form hypothetical case study on how the world of music might work out. After all, it’s how a lot of novels work – either romantic or dystopic visions of an imaginary future for people and planet. Continue reading “NaNoWriMo – Steve Writes A Novel (possibly)”

July 16, 2009

My Weird Life, or â€˜How I Ended Up Fixing a Bus For the Civil Serviceâ€™

So, if you follow me on Twitter, youâ€™ll have noticed over the last week or two that the ratio of â€˜musicâ€™ to â€˜non-musicâ€™ tweets has tipped hugely in favour of â€˜non…â€™.

Thanks to my involvement in the Amplified project, Iâ€™ve been to a range of different events, talking about social media, capturing conversations around those events and writing it up afterwards. Continue reading “My Weird Life, or â€˜How I Ended Up Fixing a Bus For the Civil Serviceâ€™”

June 12, 2009

Ralston Bowles – The Johnny Cash of Grand Rapids

Ralston Story I:

When The Cheat and I first visited Grand Rapids in 2004, for Sarda and Kari’s wedding, they introduced us to their Neighbour, Ralston Bowles. As well as having an unusually brilliant name, he was introduced to us as being a singer/songwriter who works for a radio station. A description that could just as easily fit Bob Dylan these days, and one that for Ralston was as much of an understatement of what he meant to the music scene in Grand Rapids as it would be for Bobby D. Continue reading “Ralston Bowles – The Johnny Cash of Grand Rapids”

February 16, 2009

wordle wisdom (stevelawson.net word-cloud)

As part of a social media/blogging/online presence lesson with a student of mine this morning, I got him to generate a wordle word-cloud of the things he was interested in, to feature on his ‘about me’ page.

Which got me thinking, so I put in the URL to this site, and here’s the wordle it produced:

…could there be a finer group of words for a musician/geek/blogger/me-type-person to be associated with?

WIN!

Have you made a wordle for your site? If you do, and you add it to their gallery, feel free to post the link below…

January 28, 2009

Update on my broken bass…

Anderson Page and Steve Lawson fighting over Steve's Bass. 'From My Cold Dead Hands' So, as you know, the saga so far is that British Airways smashed up my bass on the way over here back in Mid-Dec. I emailed them and rang them and was told to ‘send them the fragile tag and the bubble wrap receipt‘ – fragile tag was a generic piece of cardboard, and the request for bubble wrap receipt came off like a sick joke, if you’d seen the damage done…

Anyway, over the course of NAMM weekend, quite a few bass builders looked at it, most with a look of horror on their faces. All said it wouldn’t repair adequately, and at best would need to have the spruce top sliced off and replaced. Not good. That’s a few grand’s worth of work.

Fast forward to yesterday, and I finally get to visit the lovely geniuses at Modulus Guitars, who made the bass (and every other solid bodied electric bass I’ve played in the last 16 years). I showed the bass to their chief bass builder, designer and all-round bass building ninja-dude, Joe Perman, and he basically wrote off the body. Because the crack goes ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE BODY by the jack socket, and is right across the grain through the top, any repair is going to be a botch job at best. He said he could make it better, but not great.

So we start discussing other options, after deciding it needs a new body. At this point, the willingness of Joe and Modulus A & R guy and dude-who-sorts-things-out Anderson Page to bend over backwards to help was astounding. Ideas were thrown around, including putting the neck and electronics from my bass on a completely solid body until they had time to build a new one, and even shipping me the body to have Martin Peterson assemble it in London…

First Touch of my new bass body But then a Joe has a light-bulb moment, remembering that there was in fact a semi-hollow Q6 body that had a tiny blemish (I couldn’t even see it!) that meant it couldn’t be sold (their quality control is exceptional). I looked at it, and loved the idea…

‘can I take it home on Thursday then?’ – er no, it’ll take a coupla weeks to get it finished and sprayed and for the lacquer to dry… which reminded me of a conversation I’d had last week with Steve Azola, maker of the incredible Azola upright basses, who was wondering what my bass would be like with a rubbed finish, rather than the heavy lacquer finish. “if we did that kind of finish, would that work?”

Joe’s eyes lit up – it was a plan that allowed them to use a body that couldn’t be sold, to experiment with a new finish for their basses AND I get a perfect working bass to go home with. The old body on mine becomes a write-off, but the new bass will be a whole other bass adventure for me. The wood combination is different (walnut top on an alder body) so will add a different flavour to my music. Always a nice game to play 🙂

As you can see in the photo at the top, part of me is loathe to let go of the bass that has been MY sound for a decade. It’s what happens at the end of my arms, a new limb… But that’s not going to happen, it’s not going to be fixed, BA saw to that by completely trashing the old one.

Good job bass manufacturers don’t function like airlines.

We’ll be heading back to Modulus tomorrow morning to see how they are getting on with it… More photos and blog posts then!

January 17, 2009

Photos from NAMM so far…

Steve Lawson and a photo of Geddy Lee... or is it the other way round! NAMM so far has been a whole lot of fun – have met up with loads of great friends, checked out some fab music gear, chatted a lot, drank coffee, playing some music on the looperlative booth (and discovered a couple of amazing new Looperlative features – video coming on those ASAP!)

Of course, I’ve also run into loads of pictures of Geddy Lee looking scarily like me as always (see above), but below is a round up of the rest of my pictures so far from NAMM – bass gear-wise, my favourite things so far have been the Mark Audio powered speakers (not really bass gear, more portable PA equipment – looks PERFECT for what Lobelia and I do!) and the new Ernie Ball bass with the push button pick-up controls… the great sound of it really took me by surprise.

Have met lots of of twitter friends too, which is rather lovely, and not a small number of people whose opening gambit has been ‘dude, I LOVE your blog’ – so this post is for you lot! 🙂

December 24, 2008

My response to Balance PR

Here’s the email I just sent to Balance PR: (read the full account of the story thus far here )

“The money is finally in my account.

Thanks for the extra to cover the DAYS I’ve spent chasing you to finally actually get paid. Oh no, my mistake, there isn’t any.

God only knows how long it would’ve been if I hadn’t bothered.

Inexcusably bad service. I hope that anyone I know that you ask to do any freelance work for you in the future asks for the money up front, or writes some MAJOR late payment penalty clauses into the contract.

I wouldn’t have had time for that, because, if you remember that long ago, I dropped pretty much everything I was doing in that week to help you guys out. I postponed 2 days of teaching work, and didn’t demand to see a written contract, given that you only had 3 days to get it together. Even when you cut the amount of work in half, half way through the project, I didn’t kick up a fuss, just got on with what I was doing.

Sadly, your appalling contractor relations meant that I have now had to spend God-knows how long chasing the money from you – it’s not like it’s a lot of money in the context of PR – wasting time when I could have actually been WORKING.

I hope, for the sake of the freelancers you employ, you never pull a stunt like this again, never rack up this many missed deadlines and lies about when you’re going to make the payment, and that you just implement a simple policy of paying by bank transfer on or BEFORE the 30 day grace period after an invoice has been submitted.

For my part, I’ll be telling everyone in PR who cares to listen the story of your late payment, poor communication, lack of apology and failure to offer any recompense for my extra time.

Steve”

…let’s see what they say in response…

(photo at the top is by Jenn Jenn)

December 22, 2008

Thunder and Rainbows – the heaven and hell of life on the road.

OK, before I start, this post is going to get VERY sad indeed. So if you’re just reading this for a light-hearted update of what’s going on in my life, during your lunch hour at work. Probably best to leave it til later. Bookmark it and come back.

So anyway, we’re 2 shows into our house-concert tour now. Currently in Milwaukee, with the very lovely Tracy Apps. we played a house concert here last night. More on that in a moment.

The night before, we were in Toledo, at the home of Steven Guerrero – an amazing solo bassist and good friend who helped us find a gig last time we were in the area, and this time offered to host the house concert. He had another solo bassist friend – Trentin Lee Manning – that they’d been planning to do a house concert with, so it seemed perfect to hook the two up and do a solo bass (+ lobelia) night. I’d not met Trentin, but had heard really good things about him and was looking forward to meeting him and hearing him play.

We got there and set up, but no sign of Trentin. We left messages on his phone, but gig time arrived and we’d heard nothing, so got on with the show – maybe he’d canceled but run out of battery on his phone. Whatever, we were sure we’d find out later.

The gig went SO well – I’d not seen Steven play before, and was genuinely floored by how good his set was. Great sounds, great playing but above all, some seriously beautiful melody playing and writing. Some of my favourite solo bass stuff I’ve heard in a long time.

Lo and I played a great gig too – really lovely audience, great connection, all good.

That is, until about an hour after the show when I checked my email to find a message from Pete Skjold, the bass builder that Trentin had been visiting on his way to see us, saying that Trentin had been killed in a car accident that afternoon. As you can imagine, the four of us (Lo, me, Steven G and his wife) were so shocked. What on earth do you do with that? Steven rang Pete, and got a few more details, but the shock was overwhelming. What a horrible, tragic, awful thing to happen. Trentin was 22 years old, Steven had met and played with him, and had been telling us how great a player he was, how much potential he had. Now we’d never get to meet him.

And for his family… Beyond words. We were shocked, upset and saddened. Their lives would never be the same again.

So we were there still feeling the warmth and friendship of our amazing hosts, glowing from such a lovely gig to such friendly people and now reeling from such a tragic and shocking piece of news.

And what’s more, we had hundreds more miles of snowy driving to do. Not really the best prospect to face after news like that.

So it was with some trepidation that we made our way back out onto the roads the next morning, still unable to properly process the news of the night before. I’m not sure there is a place to properly file all the feelings associated with such a random even, such a tragic event of someone you nearly met.

Thank God, the roads were as clear as can be all the way from Toledo up here to Milwaukee. We were late arriving, but we weren’t about to rush it.

So we walked in and the looping ideas/solo performance masterclass started as soon as I’d taken my coat off. I talked while setting up my gear about what a whole range of things relating to the possibilities, pitfalls and audience engagement ideas of looped music (and looped video). A really fascinating conversation with a lovely diverse group of musicians and performers. Great stuff.

Great stuff, followed by another really lovely gig. One in which we were able to talk a little about the tragedy of the day before. It’s one of the things I love about house concerts – it’s a conversation between performer and audience in a way that bigger gigs can’t be. You can chat, you can change things around, you can hold a conversation about things that matter. (the entire gig is archived here) – again, we played pretty well, and got to hang out with a load of lovely, interesting, engaging friendly people. In the midst of the sadness surrounding Trentin’s passing, we have two amazing shows, make lots of great new friends and find that the significance of what we do, both for us and in terms of the people it brings us into contact with, is huge. This really is the best playing environment I can imagine, especially when you have to deal with the ‘thunder and rainbows’ that life throws at us, even when on tour.

And today we got to spend the day with Tracy – we’ve known tapps for a long time in the virtual realm, but getting to sit round and chat, eat, and even play some music at her church this morning brings friendships to another level. It’s been another great day.

Tomorrow we drive to Chicago, for gig #3. Another amazing group of people no doubt await, but, God-willing, no more tragedy.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Trentin’s family and friends. Listen to him and read more about him on Myspace.

…oh, and the title? That’s from a song by Martyn Joseph (the words are, I think, by Martyn Joseph and Stewart Henderson) – I can’t find a link to the song or a paid download of it, though it may be on iTunes. here are the words:

The light or the shade, concealed or displayed
Enemies, friends, opposite ends
Bitter or sweet, ruffled or neat
Feathers or lead, silent or said
Generous or mean, corporate or green
Vagrant or lord, the dove or the sword
Distinct or obscure, prosperous or poor
Devil or saint, we are and we ain’t

Intricate mysteries
Life’s secret code
Cul-de-sac signposts
On yellow brickroads
Ambiguous answers
The question’s still â€œWhyâ€
Thunder and rainbows
From the same sky

Champagne or dust, banquet or crust
Authentic or fake, angel or snake
Flower or thorn, prestine or torn
Desert or sea, the throne and the tree

Intricate mysteries
Life’s secret code
Cul-de-sac signposts
On yellow brickroads
Ambiguous answers
The question’s still â€œWhyâ€
Thunder and rainbows
From the same sky

The light or the shade, concealed or displayed
Enemies, friends, opposite ends
Flower or thorn, prestine or torn
Desert or sea, the throne and the tree

Intricate mysteries
Life’s secret code
Cul-de-sac signposts
On yellow brickroads
Ambiguous answers
The question’s still â€œWhyâ€
Thunder and rainbows

(and the photo at the top is by ChrisLev2001 – here’s a link to the original )

December 18, 2008

British Airways wrecked my bass :(

So, we’ve arrived in Ohio, hanging out with Lobelia’s family.

We flew into Newark airport at the weekend, with British Airways, the plane was very late taking off, late getting into the airport, and we took ages getting through immigration. As a result, I was exhausted and didn’t check my bass out at the airport, cos the case looked fine.

Fast forward to this morning, and this is what greeted me –

yup, proper smashed up. A crack from the end of the neck to the jack socket, right through the top. Yes, I was proper shocked. Shocked to the point of zen-like calm initially, which morphed into post-shock shaking pretty quickly.

This is the bass I’ve played for nearly 10 years. It’s unique. it’s perfect. It is, without a doubt, my favourite instrument I’ve ever played, seen or dreamt about.

And British Airways have destroyed it. So I started the process of getting in touch with them. Called the US number on the site ‘file a claim when you get home’… er, no, I’m here til the end of January ‘OK file the claim on the website’. Filled in the website form. got an email back,

” sorry your guitar is broken, please send us your fragile take and bubble wrap receipt.
Fenil Krishikar
British Airways Customer Relations”

So I write back “huh? Bubble Wrap receipt? what use is that? It was in a CASE. A case that has flown round the world dozens of times.”

My guess at this stage is that the bubble wrap and fragile tag bits are basically entrapment – they have clauses in their insurance terms that exclude them from liability if your bass doesn’t have bubble wrap on. Was this mentioned to me at the airport? nope. Did I sign a waiver of liability? of course not.

So we’ll see what happens, whether BA do the right thing, pay up, and help me get it fixed. Or if they don’t, we’ll get to work with the email and phone calls, right team?

December 17, 2008

What to do when companies don't pay – my dealings with Balance PR.

Scrooge - perhaps he's doing the accounts for Balance PR Here’s the story – about 2 months ago, I did some freelance PR work for Balance PR, working on a music promotion thing. The job was at incredibly late notice, but they needed something doing that I was in a very good position to help them with, we agreed a fee and I got on with it.

For various reasons, the job with Balance PR was curtailed half way through, but the work that I’d done had gone well, and I invoiced according to the hourly/daily rate we’d agreed, on the 16th October. that makes the due date 15th November.

Fast forward over 2 months and I still haven’t been paid, despite email and phone assurances from them that I’d be paid, and even that I’d BEEN paid. ‘The cheque will go out monday’, ‘we’ll make a bank transfer tomorrow’, ‘the cheque has been sent by registered post’. Continuous failure to complete the payment has meant that I’ve come away to the USA without the money for the job, and I’ll have to file an LBA from here.

I had a couple of lame reasons for non-payment, a couple of what sounded like heart-felt apologies, and a whole load of ‘I’m sorry, Ryan isn’t in the office at the moment’ followed by a never-answered mobile call. No meaningful explanations, no offers of compensation, just lots of fielded calls and missed payment deadlines.

So, my advice is, if you ever get asked to work for Balance PR is to ask for the money up front or write very stiff non-payment clauses into your contract with them, and have it signed and witnessed. Whether or not this is systemic in the company, I’ve no idea. But I do know a couple of other people that have had to wait for a long time to be paid – way past the due dates of the invoices.

Companies that treat freelancers like this need to be exposed. It’s a stupid, petty and illegal thing to do, and makes life harder for everyone. What have Balance PR got out of not paying for me? About 75p in interest in the bank on what they owe me? Bollocks, it’s just piss poor practice.

There are contact details on Balance’s website should you wish to email or call them and suggest they sort out their business practice.

So, Freelancers, please use the comments to list things you’ve done to get payment, and also to list companies that haven’t paid and how it was resolved – please do only list your own verifiable experiences (I’ve got the email trail for all of this, with lists of missed dates and broken promises),

And if anyone from Balance PR wants to publicly apologise, explain, be contrite, etc. Feel free. The floor is yours. I’d rather you just paid me though, plus an extra Â£100 or so for the time I’ve spent having to chance the invoice due to your incompetence.

The reason I’m writing this publicly is because Balance are a PR company. That’s public relations. We are the public. and if you piss off the public, lie to them and break legal contracts, they tend to ‘go public’. It’s just the way it is.

The life of a freelancer can be amazing. We’re in a position to do what we do best for a whole range of people. Balance are in a position to use some of the amazing pool of freelance knowledge in London. Let’s face it, if you’re in PR, you need specialists to call on. So why make their lives more precarious because you can’t be bothered to make a bank transfer to pay an invoice? The money’s tiny in PR terms. For me, it’s a lot, and it could end up the difference between going overdrawn or not at the bank. I have to budget well to live on what I earn, and my budgeting shouldn’t have to compensate for the lack of business ethics of the people I’m working with.

It’s a shame really, because the job itself was a fun one, and with a few more weeks notice, could’ve been great. Will I be working for Balance PR again? not without cash up front…

[EDIT] this was finally all settled, without the need for legal action… just. Case closed 🙂