3 posts tagged “bumbershoot”

Bumbershoot is at the end of the month in Seattle, anybody planning on going?

I'm experimenting with audio blogging, I plan on trying to do some simple stuff from the festival and getting it posted in near real time. Videos and photos will take a little longer.

Since I'm an employee of Cisco and I'm using and mentioning Cisco products, I should be clear: the views, comments and (hopefully) insights found here are purely mine, not Cisco's. No official or corporate views or policies will be expressed here, only my personal opinions.

Bumbershoot is coming and I want to do something creative or productive. Last year I took a notebook and occasionally scribbled some notes while at the Seattle Center (laying on the ground in Memorial Stadium twice) so it didn't work out all that well. I eventually blogged about it later, but many details were gone by then - I always end up seeing so many bands that by the end of it I forget what they sounded like and what I enjoyed for the majority of them.

Cisco has encouraged us to look at web 2.0 and be creative, so here's what I've come up with. It's mostly nearly web 1.0, at least so far, but I envision eventually linking this to other web 2 apps such as the user editable maps, perhaps get a GPS with path recording, if we can adorn the path with links to the audio blogs, pictures and videos on a map of the center it could get interesting.

I'm experimenting with audio blogging by leaving voice mails on my corporate phone and grabbing the .wav file using Outlook in Windows. It took me some fiddling to figure out the server and password, but it works.

VoiceMessageTest

Pretty slick. I'm using IMAP to connect Outlook into Unity Connection, the voice messaging product from Cisco that I work on. The voice message account just looks like another e-mail account in-box, it's sea-alpha-cuc in this example:

UC Inbox

The inbox shows my voice mail messages with the message attached as a .wav file for each message. I left one using my cell phone sitting at home with my lap-top using VPN over wifi/cable modem with Outlook running and the cuc-install-49 folder selected as shown. The message appeared (and Outlook beeped) in a fraction of a second. Under load it may get slower, but I expect load to be low on Labor Day weekend during Bumbershoot so we should be OK.

The VoiceMessage.wav file can be saved by right clicking on it and selecting Save As. In this example the wav file is 103 KB, just short of 13 seconds of 8 KB/sec audio.

UC Inbox Detail

The sound was better than I had expected, if not spectacular. I added it to this blog as VoiceMessageTest above to the right so you can see - or should I say hear - for yourself.

Uploading it into Vox was mildly trivial. I think from now on I'll use small rather than medium sound icons, but otherwise we're pretty much good to go.

Hmm, sheer genius - I need to go somewhere with live music this weekend to do a dry run, I want to see what a 15 second bit of a song sounds like. Also I want to try talking or perhaps screaming over the music and seeing if we end up with anything intelligible. A job related excuse to hit the bars and drink some beer - I mean listen to some music and audio blog. What'll I think up next!

I saw several good shows, I can't really pick a single best show, so I'll blog about the ones I enjoyed. Among other things.

In February we saw the 1st Annual Presidents Day show. My 2 daughters and their friend went with me. Intros were interesting, particularly the Trucks. Funny and obnoxious women band, I think my daughters (at least the older one and her friend) really enjoyed them. My daughter has a Trucks sticker on her laptop now - the gold standard, ranks right up there with the Briefs.

The Presidents were hot and tight, as always. They were the best act we saw at Bumbershoot a few years ago, and they were on here as well. They also have an hilarious schtick, from the final countdown on one song "On 137" bang bang bang bang... I swear I counted and they did exactly 137, I guess you had to be there - to the final climax of "We're Not Going To Make It" (after the quick spoken review of the Presidents career they usually cram into that song) where the bass player/singer Belew climbs up on the drum set, and jumps into the air, and as he lands they hit that last massive chord - only it wasn't massive, it was a little "blurp" and the show was over. Cracks me up every time, even though I expect it now. We also got to see the Presidents again, crashing an outdoor show at Microsoft. The Microsoft show was also a milestone for my (then) 9 year old son, his first rock show. He enjoyed it quietly, we'll have to teach him to pogo, scream, and mosh. The band messed around quite a bit, including a very odd version of Lump played country tempo, immediately followed by a normal (fast) version. Presidents day show was better, since they didn't get yanked before they were done. At the Microsoft show they were "last songed" before they were ready.

The girls got me tickets for the Who for Fathers Day, so I got to see them over the summer. Pretty good show, but since they were  flogging a new album they played too much of that and not enough of the old stuff we know and love. I never saw them with Keith Moon, but I saw them several times with Entwistle, I miss him. Probably the best rock bass player I've ever seen or heard. Now that he's gone too they aren't quite the same, but they did have Pete's brother playing backing guitar parts and a keyboard (I wonder if it was Rabbit, who played on the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack again? He played with them when I saw them on their first tour after Moon passed away) so the sound had good depth. Elaborate 3 part moving projected video screen above the band added some visuals to the show.

Fell asleep at a heavy metal show at El Corazon - if the lyrics are unintelligible growling, the music had better be extremely good, or it's going to put me to sleep. They weren't. Don't recall who the bands were.

Saw a punk show at El Corazon that kept me awake, much better show but I've forgotten the bands. Maybe The Divorce was on the  bill? I should ask my daughters, maybe they'd recall. It was someone in the audiences birthday, so they took a cake onto stage, sang happy birthday, and smashed it into his face. Gotta love that punk ethic. It was hot, so they were spraying water on us. The icing and cake along with the water made for an extremely slick mosh pit with people falling all over. Then the beer started leaking from the ceiling. Definitely one for the ages.

Bumbershoot had some great moments, but I was suffering from the aftereffects of an emergency root canal, which made me hard to please. If they weren't good enough to make me ignore the pain, we didn't stay long. Googol Bordello was the highlight - they had 'em and us packed in and dancing. Not sure what "Wear Purple" was about, but the critique of governments and warnings not to trust them sure rang true, and that music is an automatic party every time. Another highlight was seeing the Lashes first show since their lead guitarist took a bad spinal injury. Seeing him up there shredding away in a wheel chair was inspiring, and the prank call to the TV station was classic, even if (as some sod in the audience pointed out) they called the wrong station, it's Fox that overlooks the stage back behind the Science Center, not KIRO. To quote the band, "way to ruin a good prank!" Instant classic performance, I hope to catch them on New Years day after mass at Sonic Boom records. Probably crowded, but it should be fun.
I also enjoyed the Agro-Lites & The Trucks; speaking of instant classics, hearing the Trucks vocalist explain that "our parents are here, so we were going to skip 'Pervs in the Bushes' but we decided to do it anyway" sure added some spice. Fergie was better than I expected, but my expectations were pretty low. Blondie was good, Steve Miller was good, they gave him an extra-long time slot. Saw School Yard Heroes as well, they seem to be doing well; we saw them at the EMP Sound-Off (Battle of the Bands) years ago, they can be fun. They no longer do "I Hate Your F___ing Boyfriend" which was a personal favorite, doesn't fit their style any more.
I took my new digital camera and took some pictures, but due to crowds, motion, and poor light, they mostly didn't turn out.

Ones that got away:
Young Fresh Fellows at Seafair hydroplane races - couldn't quite get my bleep together to make it to this show. I saw the YFF at Bumbershoot when I was teen, very late 70's I think, at the Mural Amphitheater. Fun show, about the only chance I got to see local bands I read about in the Rocket was at Bumbershoot, since I was too young for bars. I saw them again on New Years Eve at the Backstage in Ballard in 1987. My wife was pregnant with out first child so we didn't drink much. Good show, they had some of the female singers from the Dinette Set doing backing vocals for the "Young Fresh Fellow's Theme." I have a CD of covers of YFF songs (Presidents doing Rock & Roll Pest Control, great covers of Teenage Dogs in Trouble, 99 Girls, etc.) and I would've liked to here the band do 'em. Dang.

Neil Young show - he put on a long show that got great reviews. Wish I had gone, it was pricey but there may not be many (or any) more chances to see him, and I never did manage to see him. I particularly like playing and singing Neil Young's music, the man is a genius who has created an amazing body of work over decades. Dang.

Too many others to list (Police reunion, Flaming Lips, was Sleater Kinney's final show this year? At least I saw them a couple of times). Every week there are good shows I don't go to. Dang.