Outstanding video of Pato by Mark Matthews

Awesome video of Pato Banton at Stumpjack last month. This video, this song and his spoken word, really give you an excellent picture of the spirit of Pato, of what he's all about. I love how the video captures the crowd response, to what Pato is saying and then in singing the chorus with him near the end of the clip. Please go to this video on youtube and give this video a rating and leave a comment, if you are so inclined.

Video by Mark Matthews, a cat who is developing a rep as someone who is the go-to guy in these parts for consistently high quality video. Check out Mark's handful of youtube videos. I was going to mention a couple of Mark's videos specifically by title, but I just watched them all and honestly, they are all excellent. His ability to find the right piece of music for each video is also quite noteworthy.

It's cool how Pato glances over to the counter when he mentions his granddaughter's name, Cheyenne. He's looking over to my daughter, who's name is also Cheyenne. Nice.

Recent music pics and videos

I've got a whole bunch of images and videos to load onto Flickr and YouTube, and that's what I'm mostly working on today. Some are from last night and the past couple weeks, and some are from several weeks ago when I was having my computer problems. Should get them all up in the next couple of days. Put a few of Kelly Underwood on from last night, am loading video of Bill Walkner and Lloyd Rohr as I type this, and in the cue is Ethan Keller from last night.

Ethan Keller

Last night was a blast with Ethan and Kelly perfoming together (alternating sets). Kelly was great. She continues to impress and and gets better by leaps and bounds every time she plays. I have to tell you again, and persuade you, to check out Ethan Keller if you haven't already, should you ever get a chance to see him perform (here at the Stump, in Milwaukee or wherever). This guy is just way too good to not have a big time recording contract.

His songwriting is better than most anything you'll find in any record store racks, both musically and lyrically, and his inventiveness with technology and instrumentation makes watching him perform a real treat. Every time Ethan has performed here there is always someone in the joint who says to me something like "Man, this guy is awesome!" And each time he's here he always plays stuff we haven't heard him play before, it's always fresh. Do yourself a favor and check him out if you get the chance, and pick up one of his CDs - you can get them here or from Ethan by sending him a message via his myspace site (www.myspace.com/ethankeller), where you can also have him put you on his mailing list to get updates on where he's performing next.

Our pal Nick Weiland is finishing up a new CD too. I'm doing the cover art for it, which I'm very honored to do. Nick and Brian Sanchez will be coming back to the Stump pretty soon. Can't wait, those guys do the blues right.

Dangit! Lost in computer wasteland.

As I write this I'm uploading the last of the videos onto YouTube of JoAnn, Jeannie and Chelsea from Saturday night's performance. Those gals are just the bee's knees! Really strong songwriters and very raw and elemental in their performances. When they perform it's about as close as you can get to the feeling of hanging out at a home party or around a campfire, drinking beer, your pals bringing out their guitars and everyone just having a great time...it's loose and relaxed, a good deal of fun chitchat and laughs, and some truly awesome music.

JoAnn Riedl

YouTube sucks for image quality in the transfer (everything seems to blur a bit), but the sound is pretty good. I'm using a Flip Video camera for everything, a great little gizmo I got from our friend Rob who's down in Texas. The image quality and sound coming off the Flip is excellent; it's on the YouTube end that the image gets fuzzy.

Jeannie Mayotte

I also had some great video of Matt Davies from Friday night and of Greg Pagel from Saturday's noon show. But something happened as I was uploading...everything froze up on the computer for several minutes and when it finally kicked in again all of my videos had been erased. All of them, not just the ones of Matt and Greg, but all of them. Fortunately, the ones of JoAnn, Jeannie and Chelsea were on the camera yet, and not in the Flip files like the others. I'm bummed but what can you do.

Chelsea Z.

Cat woman dances for Stumpjack coffee

Video evidence reveals transformational power of Stumpjack coffee.

Jungle feline creature (dubbed "Mittens" by villagers) is shown reacting after drinking a bowl of Stumpjack coffee left for it by superstitious natives. They claim the beast was actually a tribal princess who had been transformed into a feline by a vengeful witchdoctor. Upon drinking the Stumpjack coffee the spell was reversed and the woman was again herself, albeit with heretofore unknown seductive dancing abilities as shown in this hidden video documentary.

This video actually comes from one of my favorite YouTube channels, GUGUG, which primarily consists of Scottish musicians Gus and Fin performing unbelievably awesome versions of a wide range of tunes from all genres (from "Rawhide" to Bo Diddley to the Sex Pistols to Bob Marley to you name it) on plastic ukuleles, tea chest bass, kazoos, bongos, suit cases, wobble board, melodica, and so on... Every song in their catalog is absolutely stellar, and you'll have a tough time not running through every single video, repeatedly. They're that good. We gotta get these guys over here sometime. Check 'em out and tell me what you think. Trust me on this.

It's Alive!

Finally, the vid of Dan and Derek downloaded. It's on our YouTube account as well as right here. The other video below is of Kerry Michaels playing his song "Just a Dream" from last night's gig. That's on our YouTube account as well. Have a couple more vids to place on there yet...Dan Walkner, another of Kerry, and maybe a couple short silly ones from some chitchat in the shop. YouTube is great but I do wish that the videos would display sharper than they do...they always appear to get a little blurry in the transfer from camera or laptop to YouTube.

Derek Pritzl and Dan Walkner...on tune they wrote together

Kerry Michaels..."Just a Dream"...he nailed it.