The Real Pat Blair

The Lone Strangers ‘tour update’ page is broken right now (actually, pretty much the whole Lone Strangers website is broken), so you’ll need to check myspace.com/thelonestrangers for tour updates - there are a BUNCH.
Make a special note of this Sunday’s acoustic show by Matt and Pat - on a playground. Hope to see you there!

I was digging deep in the mp3 collection this morning and came across a “live” album recorded by my high-school band, Albino Death Wheel. [Geek out]It is actually just a stereo board-feed to a cassette player, which I later ran to my computer, normalized to about 200% (I didn’t know any better at the time - I just figured stuff needed to be LOUD), and converted to mp3[/Geek out]. I burned some CDs to make gifts for the band (this was a fairly high-tech undertaking in those days), and figured that would be the end of it. Or not.
About 6 months later, the band was having a CD release party for our first album, “100% Fat Free.” The CD was recorded, the venue was booked and being advertised. The only problem was that, due to a variety of circumstances, only some of which were our fault, the CD was not going to be done for another 2 weeks. That makes for a very lame CD release party.
To tide the crowd over, we home-made a bunch of 6 track cassettes and sold them for (I think) $2. The name of this cassette? “CD”. Yeah, we were clever. Included on “CD” (the cassette) were 2 songs from the album and four live tracks.
Somehow, over the course of about 14 moves in the last 7 years, I seem to have managed to loose all copies of this release. Fortunately, I still have copies of the mp3s used to make the tape called “CD.” The last track, if I am correct, is a song called “This Life,” recorded at our First Concert Ever in August of 1998 (when many of my dedicated readers were still in diapers). Listening to those mp3s, I can say, with complete honesty, that we were not dreadful. Unfortunately, we really weren’t great, either. We had some decent songs (and some terrible ones), some decent musicians (and some indecent ones), and absolutely no idea what we were doing.
The one thing we DID get right, however (probably by complete accident), was how to end a show. This was no 1-chord, thank-you-Cleveland, leave-the-stage BS; we had it DOWN.
The last song was 3 minutes, 15 seconds long, and the last 35 seconds are the ending. Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, I present the BEST. ENDING. EVAR.

Hi, this message is for Bob Smith. My name is Pat Blair, I’m calling from Local Community College regarding the email that you had sent concerning your transcript. I have been out of the office, but I see that, while it looks like a transcript was sent, I am afraid that it might not have been a complete transcript.
Please give me a call at 800-555-1234, extension 5678, so that we can make sure that we get this resolved.
Thanks much!

The other night, an acquaintance of mine got a voice-mail from an officer at a college. In theory, it should have looked something like the above ‘message.’ However, we were treated to what might be the best example of rambling, self-important, incoherent, bureaucrat-speak ever. So, for your listening pleasure, I hereby post the BEST. MESSAGE. EVAR.

(All incriminating names and numbers have been ‘bleeped’ - sorry for the inconvenience)

Another reason that I have not yet purchased a cell phone.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Lone Strangers are now on MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/thelonestrangers. You can go there and hear songs from our EP, Trying and Failing, post comments, and, most importantly, sign up to be our friend.
According to MySpace, as of right now, “The Lone Strangers has 1 friends.” And that’s just not cool at all. For reasons beyond the grammar.