Czardas

Okay, it's time for a real change of pace here at the countdown to Cthulhu's Day. It was back in 1984 or so and my girlfriend asked Gordon Butler, the fiddler in the Calhoon Brothers, to do a "gypsy" song for her. I had no idea of what to do but Gordon brought his violin over to my house one day where I had my electronic piano set up and said, "Let's do this song called Czardas. It sounds sort of gypsy and it goes like this." He ran through the chord progression (which was in some gawdawful flat key) and I said, "Let's record."

I wasn't sure of the rhythm of the song and Gordon said to just fumble around the beat. Then he took off.

Afterwards, I said I was surprised I was able to play all the way through without making a major mistake and he agreed. But don't listen to the keyboard. Listen to the violin. It's fantastic. Why didn't we ever think of playing something like this at the bar? The dancers would have loved it.

CZARDAS

 

The Mighty Calhoon Brothers (1985)

Mark Coker, Gordon Butler, Steve Roberts, Fender Tucker

All Alone Together

How about an old C&W tune by Poco that we used to play back at the Las Cruces Inn? Like so many songs, we played it, then forgot about it, and never picked it up again. I figured it would be a breeze since this is exactly what I used to play all night long, but that was 35 years ago, and it's hard to find a good, solid C&W guitar tone on the equipment I have. I have 50 different kinds of fuzz but hardly any clean sounds.

ALL ALONE TOGETHER

Nashville

One wouldn't think that I would be doing a song by the Indigo Girls, but one would be wrong. Ellie Tornblom, who does some beautiful videos of cover songs accompanied by her dancing children, suggested that our online group tackle a 1993 album, Rites of Passage, and I ended up with Nashville, which is right down my alley. I fuzzed it up a bit and Pat Booned the melody and it turned out much better than I would have thought for a Knees Calhoon version of an Indigo Girls song.

NASHVILLE

I did two versions of the song, almost identical. If you'd like to hear the first version, here it is. Mainly I was trying to "clean up" the first version when I did the second. Also, I filmed myself recording the second version for the video which I hope to put up on Youtube soon.

NASHVILLE (Take One)