The Mandelbear's Musings

I was sitting around idly wondering what to do for my Songs for Saturday post when I got the news via min0taur that Bert Jansch had died last week. It doesn't even seem to have hit his official website yet, but it hit me hard. Bert was one of my heros.

The song that immediately popped into my head was Needle Of Death -- it was on his first album, which I bought close to the year it came out, 1965. I think it's still the only album of his I ever owned, but his sharp-edged songwriting and astounding fingerpicking left a lasting impression.

I could spend hours browsing through the recordings on YouTube. I probably will. For now I'll just leave you with Angie, from his first album, and this video of him performing Alice's Wonderland.

We went to the Dickens Fair today -- all but the chaoswolf, who had a job interview scheduled at Macy's. Apart from the Y.D. getting bored and a little whiny after only about 2 hours, it was pleasant. The flower_cat and I could easily have stayed all afternoon listening to the music.

My largest purchase was a tail coat, since that's what the Wolfling wants me to wear for the wedding. Also picked up some CDs from Glenn Morgan. Had a bit of a chat about CD manufacturing -- he's one of several musicians I've met recently who have started burning and printing their own disks. I gather it's about half the cost of pressing, and of course you don't have the inventory. I probably don't want to go that route, though.

Spent much of the morning tracking down and formatting a good version of Froggy Went A-Courtin'. Getting it up on the website involved a little makefile debugging -- I've moved things around quite a lot trying to get to a saner distribution of files on the internal server.

Felt very sleepy driving home. This may be due in part to having been awakened abruptly at 6am by the Cat mistaking the coffee grinder for the phone ringing. What the Wolfling was doing making coffee at that hour, I don't know, but I wish she could do it on weekdays when I have to take her and her sister to school.

I finally sat down and keyed in my (current) version of "House Carpenter", mainly as background for "Demon Lover". My version comes mostly from the singing of Joan Baez, since that's the one I learned first, but I've pulled in a couple from Child to highlight the demonic nature of the lover, and cleaned up the pronoun usage a bit. I still haven't decided whether to do it in concert -- probably not, since it's pretty long -- but will probably haul it out in a circle. Especially if I can get cflute to help out with the inevitable follower.

Come to think of it, this would work pretty well as a duet, too. Don't think I've ever heard it done that way.