Light from the ending...

Nine down and five to go on my little East Coast tour thank you for all the support and love while I have been here in the home area of the world. Last night was in The Bitter End with J.Aims and the Fever in a phrase we "killed it". Tonight we roll into Garwood and the locally legendary Crossroads with J.Aims and I playing an acoustic set followed by me and the boys as The Dave Tucker Band and the beat goes on and on and on.

Announcement!

I would like to announce a creative partnership of sorts with a wonderfully gifted artist and dear friend Jae.C.Maie. The talks and negotiations are preliminary but I think she and I will come to some agreement about what sorts of adornment my friends and fans would like to be wearing. Please take some time and surf over to her sites and see what she has been cooking up with her own special brand of recycled jewelry. Along with the jewelry we will also be collaborating on some new t-shirt designs.

Insomnia

The scourge of the age of air travel is a seemingly imaginary creation cooked up by those whom while far away from their family's watchful eye have developed "night owl" habits and now faced with the fear of the possible discovery have blamed their nocturnal watch on the airplanes.

I once read an author's take that jet-lag is our body waiting for our soul to catch up, if so I am very curious where mine took a wrong turn.

I sit and wait for dawn and the time to go set the stage up for Saturday night's album release party and performance with Tim Margiotta.

Jersey/NYC Tour Dates

Where it's found.

Increased darkness due to the outdated thinking behind "daylight savings" (as if it's ours to save...) brings with it a burden that varies depending on ones mental state. Prone to the blues? Then the deficit in hours of sunlight after work may bring on a stronger mania. Stressed out? Are the clamps on? Commitments got you down? I say let's join forces and repeal the global decision to shift our hours and call it the "daylight wasting" movement. "Everyone could use a little more sunshine!" would be our motto de jour and tomorrow is our day so let's get back to waking up in darkness and cutting off work before the sunset!

Accomplishment is a related topic and I will devote the next few lines to a rant about it. This week has been a slim one for getting things done outside of my head. Inside there I can multitask like a housewife, zipping thru the mundane things with ease so I can dig into the tasks of my hands sometimes doing both with astonishing results. This week was not one of those weeks it never ceases to amaze me how the minutia of my body can extrapolate into big problems such as sleep. Much is done while we are sleeping with batteries recharging, dreams weaving, eyes bobbing and teeth clenching all while words are unfolding before us I am not feeling the love right now. I may never know about the small things that started it this week but it may have something to do with a chain of events I have no control over. Basically I have had to eat my words about completion of a project because certain large "box-store" construction suppliers didn't have things in stock that they listed on their webpage. Lesson learned I should always let my fingers and a phone do the walking and not rely on "up to date" data from the inter-web.

Talk About Running

The lifestyle of a musician that is performing as well as spending time writing and recording is a bit counter-current to the rest of society and one of the biggest benefits, especially in a city like Los Angeles with it's horrendous traffic, is being able to drive the roads in relative solitude; however the drawback comes in the form of physical exercise. I have been here in the San Fernando Valley about a month now and the weather here is special, special in the way that someone has forgotten to close the door to a room sized kiln when you are happily set up working just a few feet from the portal to the inferno, it must be the way an iron smelter feels as he wrestles with molten steel in crucibles and the forms that he or she intends to fill. To lighten the mood that oppressive heat tends to induce I keep shouting to the non-existent baker or potter "SHUT THE DAM DOOR WOULD YA!"

Over near the coast its not so bad and the pacific breeze tends to lift away some of the sweat that beads up on the skin but here in the enormous valley the stagnant prevails. I wait for the cool of the evening but with so much concrete and asphalt there is not much respite until the wee hours of the morning when it all stars over again. I mean the sweating is as much cooling action as it is purification of the skin and glands so maybe I don't need to run since I am working in an oven set at 110 degrees but it would be nice to think about the possibility of walking on pavement in shoes and not feeling like a melting crayon subjected to hot-plate coloring.

Maybe tomorrow it will break or might I break an egg on the sidewalk and watch it fry? For now no running just glistening in the kiln.

Hummingbird Wars

There is safety in the screening of window, cover of darkness and ridiculously small area it takes to have an arial dog-fight when you are a hummingbird. I am an imbedded correspondent coming to you from the front lines of a skirmish at the Western side of the San Fernando Valley here in Southern California. Gathering material from the front lines is simple enough indeed armed with a cool beverage, swim trunks, computer and a good book I can leisurely ponder the maneuverings of the little buggers as they chirp and flutter around like Star Wars Tie Fighters. Today's battle is over a red plastic flower that holds the nectar of the gods. Like a religious warlord there is one who stands guard over the siphon of sugar like an Oracle at Delphi carefully hidden behind a shrub in wait for the next kamikaze wave to come attempt a tasting of the forbidden. Swift retribution is dealt out on the daring, although no contact is ever made between the birds the fear is enough to keep away and try, try again.

From what I have been gathering about my current place in life is that the melee once known as the "record industry" is very much like the combat I just described. The red plastic feeder is the airplay and charts that track them the warlord protectors are the critics and deep pockets that either stub off the creative but weak or fund the good looking and popular acts that promise the most sugar. Hollywood is the patio and music is the air through which they fly actively pursuing a more creative means to reach the goal, a red plastic flower.

First Days Forever Amazing

Wednesday morning 1am August the 25th I became a Californian once again. My Dodge Caravan surviving the journey west until I reached my destination. Having passed through Herndon, Norfolk and Richmond Virginia I headed west towards Denver Colorado and points beyond. All along the my route heading west my mantra for me and my caravan was "I am resigned to live where my car breaks down" having loaded it up with tools and guitars, soldering-irons and spare parts and almost all of my earthy possessions I had loaded myself for bear. Last night as I was driving home from a drink with some of my friends from the last time around I pulled onto the 101 and drove up Cahuenga Pass my temperature gauge pinned on HOT! and suddenly I was in the throws of my mantra being actualized its a strange feeling not be be panicked by situation such as that. I reached down and turned the heat on full blast, hazard button depressed, blinker to the right and slowed to a crawl hoping I could find a station open to remedy my heat issue. Opening the radiator is not a smart idea when the engine is hot but with the right precautions (and no fluid in it) its not very hot so I opened it and poured a whole gallon of green stuff in and headed home with an even temperature and clear lanes on the over-sized highways. So here I live!

I had thought I might stop in Vegas coming down from the heights of the Rockies and Vail, Colorado but once on the road I decided to push on through to the end of my road and as the previous paragraph illustrated it's a good thing that I did otherwise I'd be living there. I wasn't here more than 20 minutes after pulling in at 1am and being greeted by Abe Parker, (Wendy's son), that I was invited to join his band "Like Baboons" as guitarist and singer. We stayed up till 4am talking about songs and music theory and laying plans for the domination of the scene up here in "The Valley." Yesterday and today its been over 100 degrees here and my new room just like my van doesn't have A/C I guess it's my cross to bear this summer.