Nerdfest Videos are up!

Videos from my most recent performance at Nerdfest 3D are up! Please check out the show you missed! Or re-live the show you made! Note that there are some brand new songs that are not on any of my albums.

Videos courtesy of Miltonius Prime (thanks!)

http://www.myspace.com/miltoniusprime


Frustrating Conversationalist
Sandwich
Old and Cranky
Forget about Youth in Asia
Sit Down, Shut Up
I am a Champion
STDs
I Love Crack
Wash the Dish
Lotion
Man Friend

I Saw a Laser Printer…

Davezine numbers 9 through the most recent Davezine 13 (not including number 11) have all been printed on the trusty HP PSC 750, an inkjet printer/scanner/copier which I have used the living crap out of ever since picking it up sometime in 2002 (or maybe it was 2001?). I have plowed ahead with this printer, using it far beyond its’ intended capacity, even as the panel instructions were displayed in French, refilling the ink after about every 400 or so copies. It has been a finicky, yet durable little guy, and as I am unnaturally loyal to inanimate objects (my partner is a keyboard), it is always hard to admit that I need to move on and make an upgrade.

I decided that Davezine Number 13 would be the last zine to come from the PSC 750. I can describe the process of assembling this zine at home with a printer that only does about 6 pages a minute, but let’s just say it takes an unnaturally long time to put out, say 100 copies of a 40 page publication with this kind of technology. It is with the zine, and my sanity in mind that I look to the future of the Davey G enterprise.

I am buying a new printer. Don’t know exactly when, or what kind (but I have some ideas) and it will be a laser printer. Life has been pretty good to me, and I can actually afford to move out of these dark ages and start printing like a real man.


UPDATE: …and I got one!

I wrote that last part this morning, then decided to look on-line, resuming the search I had started a few weeks ago. And then I went to Staples. And they had the one I was looking for: an HP LaserJet 3055. A clearance discount, and I got the very last one in the store.

I hooked it up, and let me tell you: HOLY CRAP!!! These copies absolutely blow away my old printer. Just for the hell of it, I am copying Davezine #10. Yes. I am now printing like a real man.


www.daveygandthekeyboard.com
(if you can believe it, I have 3 new shows coming up to announce, so stay handy, or tuned in, or whatever the kids are saying...)

Davey G’s Experiment in sales of single copy analog cassette tapes (OR…would anyone actually want that?)

Davey G’s Experiment in sales of single copy analog cassette tapes (OR…would anyone actually want that?)


I am trying something radically different for this next show…at least, I am offering something I have never offered before: a very unique look into my practice regimen. You see, for this show only, I am making recordings of my practices which will be available for sale at my show on Saturday. Only one copy of each practice will exist, making it one of a kind. Oh yeah--it’s cassette tape only. Analog. And there will only by 5: one for each practice this week. So you need to jump on it, if you want a copy.
Each tape is 15 songs long--my set, warts and all, and will be available for 3 bucks.

Saturday’s (probable) Set:

Handshake
Drinking Beer at Grandma’s House
Sandwich
Bed
Office Supply Store
Irritating
Chairman of the Keyboard
Fantasy World
I am a Champion
Wash the Dish
Atari Generation
Be My Friend
Lotion
Man-Friend
Breaking the Law.

Come out to the Collector’s Corner this weekend for free Comic Book Day!
8108 A Harford Road
Baltimore, MD
21234
With Davey G and the Keyboard, the Mandroids, Pablonious Bill, and Person Parcel!



Come around noon to catch the bands--I’ll try to update you on times as soon as I can!
www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

The Ballad of Kyle

My car, the Kyle, has cheated death more than once. After three years with him, he has survived two very serious challenges, as well as a few smaller ones.

The first came two years ago, when I broke down in upstate New York, on my way back from recording “Prepare to be Keyboarded” in Massachusetts. As I cruised down the Taconic State Parkway, idly doing an Andy Rooney impression (“don’t you hate when your car coffee cup holders are…just a bit too small?”) suddenly the engine began revving, and revving, the RPMs going off the scale, the shift light coming on, even though I was already in 5th gear. By the time I reached the top of a big hill to limp into a “scenic overlook,” I knew I was in trouble. Hours later, as the tow truck came and took me to Red Hook, New York, little did I know that this would be where he would stay for 3 weeks as I debated whether this was the end for Kyle until the mechanics finally got around to putting in my new clutch.


A few months after that, I was rear-ended as I was driving in the rain while rocking out to a Bad Religion song. This caused my trunk to be permanently shut. Then sometime last year, my radio was stolen as I was at work--I mean, who the hell steals radios anymore? And then at some point last year my driver’s side door latch broke, causing the door not to shut and making me use rope to hold it while I am stuck climbing in the passenger side.

And lately there has been the problem of Kyle not starting…which is what led to the second major challenge to my ownership of him. As the car sat, not starting at all, in its spot in front of the house, I made calls and inquiries about other cars, assuming that Kyle was dead (or at any rate, too expensive for me to bother with anymore). The next day, for the sheer hell of it I tried to start him up…which he did. Confounded, wondering what to do, I decided to drive him to the local service station. Ever since the “rope holds my door shut” thing, I’ve been hesitant to take him to any mechanic, for fear that he would laugh at me and tell me he didn’t want to bother with my little piece of…Kyle. But he looked at him, and figured out it was the main relay and now he lives. He lives!

I guess I love this car because I feel sorry for it. And yeah, I know it’s gay to call your car a boys name. Shut it.
www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

The Medium is the Message

The last few days I’ve been playing my old cassettes on my tape player that I use for my Davey G. practices, and have been rewarded with the unending joy of the wave of nostalgia they bring. Suddenly it’s 1993 all over again, and I’m listening to They Might Be Giants “Lincoln” album, or the Fastbacks “Zucker,” both were bought in the early ‘90s and neither of which I’ve played because of the continuing trend toward analog obsolescence which have led to Cds and MP3s and the like. These are some of the old albums which are so old and fundamental that I never bothered to update them, so they sat unused in boxes around my house. While it would be possible to purchase them again on CD or download them, the way I remember experiencing this music was always on cassette, with all its inherent flaws yet without some of the issues of Cds (Say what you will about the sound quality of a 15 year old tape, but at least a tape doesn’t skip.). The music would be the same but the experience would be vastly different.
As I brought the cassettes to work and connected the tape player to the stereo, I can also see the wave of nostalgia wash over my late 20-something co-worker. He sings along to every song, songs neither of us have listened to in 10 years. It’s a strange kind of boundless joy I haven’t completely understood--I was truly ecstatic when I listened to the MCKnicknix, an old and forgotten New England band who were my first punk rock show ever, and then Jawbreaker on the flip side (whom I saw twice, getting to shake Blake Schwarzenbach’s hand at the show in Connecticut where a fight broke out during the opening band’s set). It was great to liberate the near-defunct technology and hear the songs of my youth in the form I remember. I find myself wishing I still had my old Dead Kennedys and Circle jerks cassettes which I played out long ago. I know they are still out there in some form, but I know it wouldn’t be the same. That’s not such a bad thing, as a scratchy cassette is nobody’s friend, but I guess that’s not the point. Because (make my corporate Comm. teachers at UB proud) as media guru Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message.”
www.daveygandthekeyboard.com