I’ve had the honor of playing shows with Blue Grass Boys, Bob Black, Tom Ewing and Mark Hembree, in a band called (not shockingly) Blue Grass Boys Reunion. Here’s some clips of these boys doin’ there thing…

You can watch the rest on “The Tube”…

RIP sir… it was a pleasure to work for you.

Mike Compton was kind enough to have me up for a few songs during his recent show at the Cafe Carpe.

Blue Grass Boys Reunion performed this past weekend in WI, MN and IA. Here’s a cut from Friday night’s show at Leo & Leona’s in Bangor, WI. The lineup included Blue Grass Boys Tom Ewing, Bob Black and Mark Hembree; with myself and Paul Kienitz on mandolin and fiddle.

This was my first time singing tenor with Tom and we had some fun on this one…

When I blogged about Music XRay being a scam, I seriously did not expect anyone to give two hoots or half a holler ’bout it… but for whatever reason some do and thus, I’ve been forced to wade through various comments and emails about it. And seeing as folks are coming here for that anyway, I though I should extend the literal and also mention that Sonic Bids is also most definitely a scam. This is of course only my opinion and you should judge for yourself but I’ll share a bit of my experience with Sonic Bids.

I book bands for a popular music festival in a major dairy producing state and every year, SonicBids contacts me looking for us to use their service to accept band submissions. The first year they contacted us, though I had read the bad reviews, I decided to have a look for myself so I signed up my band to test it out. The spam started immediately and was unrelenting. Now this should be all you really need to know as no legit business would spam folks and is an excellent indication of the kind of company you’re dealing with. Still, I spent a bit of time checking out SonicBids.

I was really being too nice to them… but it’s not all their fault, they’re only enabling the scam; promoters are allowing the scam. Let me cut to the chase: legit promoters don’t charge bands to submit themselves for a gig. Period.

But on top of that, the site just sucks. I mean, as a promoter, I couldn’t easily search through the bands on their site and find ones I’d be interested in hiring. Searching for genre was worthless, no good way to search by location, keywords didn’t return reasonable results, etc…. So I couldn’t and wouldn’t use their site to find an artist. Which makes it necessary to let the bands find me… which just happens to support their paradigm.

The icing on the cake was when the SonicBids recruiter called again (and they will hound you forever; they still call every year) and explained that “the submission process can be a revenue stream”. I told him we wouldn’t be using their service and cited the reasons above.

Long story only slightly longer: technology has made it easier than ever for musicians to market themselves (for free even) and promoters to find the bands that will make their events a success. If SonicBids actually cared about helping bands and promoters connect, they could use technology towards that goal but instead they used it to reinvent payola.

Scamming musicians is nothing new. They’re easy marks, whose best defense mechanism against the scammers lining up to get a hand in their wallets, is the lack of funds within. But musicians’ lack of money doesn’t stop these scam artists from trying… it just means they have to scam in bulk.

Case in point: Music Xray. Music Xray will tell you they are providing a service to these musicians by offering “exposure opportunities”, that put their music in front of “Music Industry Professional”… for a fee. Right, so if you’re a musician, instead of buying that QuickStop burrito, you can pay $3+ to submit your music to one of these “exposure opportunities” and have your music reviewed by an “industry professional”. Of course, anyone can sign up to be one of these said “professionals”. Yup, anyone and their uncle can sign up as one and start creating “opportunities” that charge musicians a submission fee. Or you could just cut out the middle man and give your uncle Lenny $3 to tell you how great you are (thanks Lenny!).

Think American Idol, except all the thousands and thousands of contestants have to pay to have to pay each judge for every “opportunity” to perform for them and instead of Simon, you get berated by uncle Lenny (who was in a band once). And in this scenario, Music Xray would be the TV producers who get to make coin off the whole thing, while declaring their innocence of any wrong-doing. It’s not their fault Lenny is really a refrigerator repair man and can’t cary a tune in a bucket.

Want more proof? Music Xray are also prolific spammers. Once you’re on their list, they will email you constantly with “opportunities” from a range of email domains, so you can’t kill them off with a spam filter. You can keep trying to “unsubscribe” but it won’t do you any good. Classy! How much money would you give to a spammer?

And Music Xray also searches for, and responds to, articles that discus their business as being a scam (like this one). This in itself is an obvious mark of a shady business.

So, is Music Xray a scam? Maybe it depends on how much you like QuickStop burritos. Judge for yourself…

Every six months I am required to play a little game with Charter Communications. They offer me a special promotional price on my internet and cable TV that lasts for 6 months. At the end of the 6 months, I call back and renew the promotion. Obviously they expect me to forget but I just set a Google Calendar reminder a day before it expires and poof; new promotion. It’s pretty stupid but I’ve been doing it for many years. For my participation in this little dance, I get internet and basic analog cable for $44.98–which is cheaper than just internet alone. Otherwise I would just cancel cable TV altogether… which I would gladly do; HD over the air is great and more than I need.

Our little requisite dance also gives them the opportunity to try and up-sell me on their phone service… with the ridiculous notion that if somehow I spend more money on their crap, I will save more money. Whatever. But my question is: are they completely stupid or some of their customer are. Probably a bit of both.

Long story only slightly longer… if you want cheaper internet and could give a crap about cable TV, this is the way to go and only requires about 4 minutes of your life biannually.

UPDATE: I received an email in response to this post from a manager at Charter (Eric K.). He informed me that Charter now offers an internet only, 2 year contract for $29.99. As I explained to Eric, I’m not a fan of contracts or companies that use them as they’re an obvious sign of poor business practices. That said, I would also prefer to just pay a fair price for internet and lose the cable TV altogether (free, over-the-air HD is more than enough TV for me).

So I’ve signed up for this contracted $29.99/mo internet-only service and canceled TV (though it did take two calls to make it happen; the first agent stating (incorrectly) that I needed a TV service to get the deal). Maybe in the future they’ll lose the contracts and promotions and whatnot… we’ll see. For now, my dance card is full for two years.

If you can’t spare the time to enjoy the entire 85 glorious minutes of the Prez at the GOP lunch, at least watch Jon Stewart’s short recap of the event. Awesomeness level is 9.3.

Tradition dictates that I sit courtside at a Bulls game every year… this tradition also includes them losing whenever we go. Brought to you in beautiful HTML5…