I Need Your Validation and/or Condemnation

[Elspode]

When I was 10 years old (back in 1966), I came to the realization that, if I was going to ever get more than a sympathy fuck, I needed something about me that would have some sort of attractive quality. Since it was the heyday of Brit Rock and high Pop Culture, I decided that I needed to learn to play guitar. So I whined to my mom, and in short order I received a piece of shit electric guitar of Italian origin. I wasn't very good with it, and we were too poor for my lessons to continue, so I learned to play on my own, courtesy of Mel Bay and some 'Top 10 Contemporary Hits" books.

Fast forward about 20 years...still basically unlaid (at least, as far as guitar talent was concerned), I found myself involved with a musical partner of some considerable talent, one Lane Lambert, an early and earnest romantic partner. We met as sophomores in high school, and sparks flew. She was 16, I was 15, and we both loved The Arts, especially those promulgated by The Who, Leon Russell and anyone who knew what frets were. She played the mandolin, I played guitar. We could usually be found at high school parties, alternately necking and crooning out Jimmie Spheeris tunes.

Decades went by. Our romantic involvement fell by the wayside, and we both ended up married to others. Her spouse over these past 20 years has always been supportive and omniscient; my spouses have been, variously, unconcerned and (at present) alternately disconnected and outright oppositional.

As life went by, Lane and I always kept in touch, but our mutual love of music (and performance together) fell by the wayside. Sometime in the early 1990's, we got together again and started doing a repertoire of Celtic standards, finding an audience in United Way benefit wine tastings, the Kansas City Mayoral Ball, numerous weddings, Pagan festivals, and the odd "would you like to come play for free?" events. A self-produced/promoted concert at a local Pagan shop received a nice advance notice courtesy of the KC Star's premiere Arts and Entertainment writer, and we ended up with a receptive and enthusiastic audience of 100+ for what could only be described as an extravaganza of original musical performance (thirty minutes into the gig, we found ourselves introducing our material as "another song about lost love and depression", and everyone fucking loved it).

Band alignments changed, morphed, and dissolved, but throughout it all, we built an enduring set of trad music, combined with original ballads and tales of love lost. We ended up one day on a local origin cable channel, doing a couple of her ballads. I was terrified, but we came out alright. Because we survived that, we set out to create a CD of entirely original music. After all, who was to say that we had no clue?

The CD was a tale based on the story of Tristan and Iseult, a subset of the Arthurian legend; a tale which some scholars believe might have been the basis of the Romeo and Juliet drama expounded by Willie Shakes. Entitled "Tristan and Iseult: A Celtic Love Story', Lane's original music and my arrangements/engineering has sold a reasonable quantity of discs through local independent channels, and also through Amazon.com. ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...music&n=507846 ).

It was supposed to have been done as a complete American Musical Theater production...we even wrote the book to go with it, but it sucked (although the casted reading of it was quite a great time...lots of unintentional humor). Once we knew it wasn't ever going to see a stage production, we just decided to record all the music, and move on. If you want .mp3 samples of this work, email me at endymion@lunalushede.org, and I'll get them to you. Wolf has a copy of the complete CD, and might be able to let you know if it is worth your time at all.

So...fast forward a few more months. An ad in the local paper showed up, looking for someone who could do the music for the plays of William Butler Yeats. A Community Theater group was poised to do a compendium of plays written by the estimable W.B. Yeats, and was seeking to find someone who could put the long lost lyrics of Mssr. Yeats to music, and present it as a part of the play cycle.

As luck would have it, Lane is your basic English Lit major, and she whipped our her Yeats play hardbound (yes, I know...none of us own such a thing, but she did) and put a couple of lyrical pieces to original music.

We went to an audition, and within five minutes, we were the band for the whole production. We put together a group of literate and talented perfomers, and did right by WB Yeats for about three weeks of free performances.

This was almost nine years ago. So, in keeping with our bent for recording history after the history is gone, we have been recording those pieces. I have some rough mixes ready in mp3 format, and I would *really* like my Cellar family to give them a listen, and provide me with some feedback.

Please...give a listen, and let me know what you think. Extra credit given for literate opinions.

www.lunalushede.org/songs

Music is really what I'm all about. Your comments would help to figure out whether or not I should sell the guitars or not.


Pax,
Patrick