Enough: Boycott the Hooven Benefit This Weekend

I'm sorry, Corey, but this has to be said, and I'm going to be the one to say it.

First of all, I want to clarify that I am in no way demeaning, slandering, or otherwise badmouthing the life, death, and memory of Chloe Hooven. What happened to her, no child should ever endure, but the sad truth is, some do. Life sucks like that. It's wrong, but it happens.

But, at some point, you have to draw a line, Corey. I'm drawing that line right now.

I'm asking everyone to boycott the Chloe Hooven "benefit" this weekend at Mel's Inn (formerly Pete N' Mel's) in Morrisdale, PA.

Yes, BOYCOTT.

Sadly, Corey, you haven't been 100% with everyone, have you. You took one too many trips to the well. The can? That was the last straw. There's no justification for behavior like that, dude. None. Not even the tragic death of your daughter. In fact, even trying to explain your actions within that context only makes it worse, man.

I'm intentionally dancing around saying what Corey has done, mostly because I want you all to ask him about it. "What's the deal with the can, Corey?" "What did you do with the can, Corey?" These are questions I'd personally like answers to.

If you do go, go only to find out what I'm talking about. Don't pay the cover, and don't stay long. Show Mel some love and buy at least one drink, but as for the benefit, just say no. The bands involved aren't making any money, so they're not losing.

Yeah, I know. I'm telling people to not show up at shows being played by my friends. I'm sorry guys, but once you know what's really going on, you'll also get where I'm coming from on this. Ben, Chris, and especially Greg: I know I said you're not losing anything by playing these shows, but once it all comes out in the wash, you really are losing, and it sucks, because you guys are just trying to do something good.

You're just being used. There is a good reason why we said no to Corey, and Corey knows exactly what that reason is. It's his responsibility to tell people, and to ultimately go down with the very ship he himself torpedoed.

I wish I could say that the heart's in the right place on this one, but at its core, it's all stone and yeast pee, and that's just not right at all. I just can't keep (totally) quiet about this.

Repent, Corey Lee Hooven. It'll take a while to be forgiven, but the sooner you start, the sooner it'll happen...

First Look

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the new Buck-It:

Clockwise from Front: Dave Read (Drums), Bob Haight(Guitars/Vocals), Eric Jacobson (Vocals) and Andy Howard (Bass/Vocals).

Buck-It will be part of Aaron's Rock Concert for The March Of Dimes, along with Dressed To Kill, Ozone Rangers and Rukkus, Sunday September 21st, 2008 @ Electric Avenue in Houtzdale, PA, beginning at 6pm. We go on first, but I'm not entirely sure of the exact order beyond our set.

Edit Bonus: Here's a cameraphone shot of me. Mostly, this is to replace my Blogger Profile Image with something a little less three years ago...


I really should mirror that...

All Around The World

Yes, I know. I start alot of posts with that, it seems. But here's the condensed version: It sucked, sorry.

Lately, I keep hearing people talking about me. And it's not in the usual negative manner, either. No, this time, they're actually speaking well of me, which is a refreshing change of pace. But the whole reason they're talking about me is kinda unnerving, and I hope this post explains why.

"You got robbed," I heard from one kid at random while I was at Sheetz.

"What?!?" I didn't know him at all, and for him to say that to me off the cuff startled me a bit.

"The karaoke contest!"

"Oh, yeah..." I was trying to figure out how this kid, who certainly didn't look old enough to drink, would even remotely know that I was involved in it.

"Dude, I work up there. Almost everyone up there says that it should have been you."

"Yeah, I've been hearing that alot lately..."

After me saying "thanks" a few times, the conversation ended. It's a conversation I've repeated alot in the last few weeks, too. Other contestants, their families, a few other folks who were there; they all think it should have been me to go on to New York with Mike Willz. And to be perfectly honest, Mike and I talked about it, and we both thought it was one person until that night. When we found out it was two, we both sighed in relief, knowing that the likelyhood was that he and I would be going.

And there's the thing: I talked to Mike. I got to know him a bit. We've even talked about co-hosting a show at the Rowland sometime in the future. Point is, we became friends. And it's like that with alot of musicians in our area. We're all friends, or we all have mutual friends. We do shows together.

Contests like that, while fun, are ultimately, for the poorer among us, just quick cash and prizes for our talents. Most area musicians don't even do them (some see it as the bar leagues to their local 'big leagues', itself the bar circuit). Me? Well, working at the Avenue running a karaoke show has made it more or less part of my entertainment job as a whole, so to me, it's just another night at the office.

But my office is a stage. Rock on!

The competition angle isn't what we're really in it for. We all win, place, or show, but it's always someone different among us. That night, it was Autumn and Mike, not me. I've cashed out a couple of times before, and won quite a few fun ones, so it's no big deal. Wasn't a cash prize involved unless you made the nationals, anyway, and then the competition is just too tight to make it worth it.

I've known Autumn forever. Her whole family is musical, so it's no surprise. Her mom and aunt are themselves wonderful singers, her dad an accomplished sound engineer (and probably musician as well) in his own right, so the genes are there for her talent. Mike, I'd just met some weeks before when I qualified, but he's certainly a highly talented guy, definitely in the upper echelon of our own karaoke circuit. To talk to, he's a very easy going guy, someone I'd certainly hang out with.

To us, it's not about who got robbed, or what judges, who'd never judged a karaoke contest before in their lives, don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. We had fun doing it, and entertained a whole shitload of people in the process. That's what we're really in it for in the end: we do what we do to entertain people, to make them smile and have fun.


Besides: I got the Buck-It gig. Sounds like it's chock-full-o'-WIN to me, not to mention the steady paydays to come from it. Screw $2000 for a national prize. I'll have that in a few weeks with these guys, and then lather, rinse, repeat...

Astral Plane I've Traveled Through

Well, the results are in, and I managed to qualify for the finals last night. So far, Frank Sinatra and Queen have done me right (and I hope I've done right by them as well), and now I have to pick two songs for the Finals. Later on today, I'll have some video of the last night's contestants for all of you to watch, including my performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Yeah, I went there, big whoop! Wanna fight about it?

But that wasn't the highlight of the evening, no. "How," you ask, "could qualifying for the regional finals of an (supposedly) international Karaoke contest not be the highlight of your evening?" The highlight, as it turns out, began earlier in the day when I discovered that local rock heroes Buck-It were looking for a new lead singer. Bonus! So of course, I sent them a message, along with links to some of my work online (mostly my YouTube Channel, where anyone can find me singing and goofing off) and an invite to come check me out at last night's contest.

TJ, the bass player, replied, and came to hang out with us at the contest last night. The end result? I have an audition tomorrow at 12:30, and it's gonna be teh hawesome. We're gonna rock some songs from Coal Chamber, Seven Mary Three, Drowning Pool, Pantera, Rage Against the Machine, Alice in Chains, and more. I'm pretty sure I impressed the hell out of TJ last night, and I can't wait to carry that over to Dave and Bob as well. My guess is, TJ had quite a few good things to say, because their MySpace message to me this morning sounded incredibly positive! ROCK!

So, last night was a good one. Tonight, I'll be running a special Saturday Karaoke session at Electric Avenue, so if you're local, come on down and hang out! Of course it'll be a good time, because let's face it: good times are just how I roll...

Luck Be A Lady

So I hear it through the grapevine that the Moshannon Valley Super Bowl is having a Karaoke contest. Took me a while since the start of the thing, but last Friday, I finally made my way up the hill to the lanes and took the mic.

Talk about fun! The joint was damn near packed, which rocked, since that gave me my largest audience in quite a while. And as the title of this entry proclaims, my weapon of choice that night was none other than the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra.

It was a slightly chilly Monday night in Manhattan, but I still decided that a long sleeved shirt was enough to keep me from shivering. The lights of Times Square were bright, and even though it was nearly midnight, things were as busy as ever. It was my first time in the City that Never Sleeps, and having already done the two things I'd set out to do (see Ground Zero and get a picture of me flipping the bird to MTV Studios, when I find it I'll repost it), Justin and I spent some time wandering up and down Broadway.

After getting a beer at Tonic, served by the single hottest straight-off-the-boat Irish girl I've ever seen (another picture I'll repost when I find it), we walked up the legendary street and came to The Colony Record and Radio Center. I'd heard about the place before - to any music afficionado, it's pretty much the place to find hard-to-find recordings and related media. It's also the home of the single largest in-store Karaoke CD selection I'd ever seen in my life.

This was our goal, to freshen up the songbook at Electric Avenue with some new discs. The associate, Joe, was a true New Yorker if I'd ever seen one. He had it all: The golf cap, the south Brooklyn accent, and the lines of years spent honing his craft on one of the busiest streets in the world hewed onto his brow. He asked us what we were looking for, and I'd already had the answer in my head for some time.

I was looking for the definitive Frank Sinatra collection, and Joe knew right where to look. "If you want Sinatra," he said, "then this right here is the way to go." I got the impression that he'd made this suggestion to quite a few customers before us, because this man didn't even flinch. It didn't take him a moment or two to scan the shelf and find it, he was on top of it like Brad on Angelina.

"It's the original orchestrations," he explained, "basically a carbon copy of Sinatra's studio bands. You won't find anything better, period." He handed me the case: It was a four disc set, replete with pretty much every single major hit the Chairman ever released, and then some. I quickly skimmed over the track list, and found the song I'd been looking for.

I'd sang it before, Tag has it in his collection. But that version (I can't remember who the publisher was, but it wasn't this set or any Sound Choice disc) lacked the intro to the song, pretty much castrating it and starting cold when the music hits full swing. I wanted that intro, because it established the song as a whole, and it made for a right-sweet opening once the full band hit. That extra 45 seconds is the difference between singing the song and giving a performance of the song, at least in my twisted little brain.

Somehow, Justin managed to get that set, valued at $150 by itself, as well as another $150 worth of Sound Choice and Legends discs, all for... You guessed it, $150. I couldn't wait to get back to the Avenue and pop disc three into the CD+G box, but at the same time, I still had the concrete jungle of New York City to explore, and plenty of time to do it in...

Since most of the crowd was the older set, I thought that Frankie would sit well with them, and I was happy to discover that I wasn't wrong in the slightest. When the music started, I noticed several folks make "oh my goodness" faces and comments amongst themselves. Others took a bit more time to realize what the song was, but when they did, they got big smiles as well. With the right song chosen, all I had to do was nail it.

And since it'd been almost four years since Justin and I had found that Sinatra CD+G collection at The Colony, it came like second nature.

But even the best laid plans of Nerds and Men go awry, and my performance was marred by one of the more embarrassing things that can happen to a man such as myself: My top teeth, which are false, de-suctioned themselves from my gums and decided to freefall to my bottom teeth, which are my own, just as I was hitting the last word. That note is probably the highest in the song, and since it's one of those "big finish" situations, you have to go for broke.

In what proves that I have a big mouth, I opened a bit too wide, and my choppers got away from me. Awk-ward!

That aside, I still managed to tie with the other qualifier, and it wasn't an easy win, either. The other four people who entered were all very good in their own rights, and each deserved to join us in our trek to the finals. This contest is no joke, the competition is hot, and I'm going to have to find some even bigger guns to pull out for subsequent rounds...

(This is the first time I've ever told a story within a story, or at least I think it is. Didn't turn out too badly, IMHO. I don't think it'll be a regular thing, but it's always fun to try something new...)

Carvin' It Up

Because this was done with a camera primarily used for stills, the video and audio quality aren't the greatest. Story of my videos' lives, right? Only good ones are the ones done with that nifty handy cam of Justin's.

Anywho, check out Butcher Shop live, with special guest E-Rock (aka Me), doing some Green Day live last night at Electric Avenue. As Andy would say, "YouTube to you!"

See if you can catch the reference to Crayon Shin-chan...

On A Dark Desert Highway

Praise be unto Darwin, who, in his stuffed monkey wisdom and grace, has blessed us this day with teh goodness and hawesome. Ahhh, man.

And there was much rejoicing (yay).

The Audio from Wil's performance is up and live on teh Intarwebs (which is a series of tubes), and there are several ways for you to get your hands on it. I won't type anymore so you can get to downloadin':

• Directly from Pulp Gamer, who was kind enough to record, encode and release it (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• As a backup, Wil has posted a copy available on WWdN:IX itself (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• A Rapidshare Link, provided by WWdN:IX Reader Patrick G
• And two torrents: One on The Pirate Bay from WWdN:IX Reader Michael S
• And the other on Mininova courtesy of yours truly, The Lost Prophyt

I reccomend the last route, since I'm seeding that puppy as we speak, and will continue to do so as long as I have the uptime. That might be a bit shaky right now, though, given the fact that, six feet in front of me and through not much more than brick and glass, there's one hell of a high wind session going on.

The usually sullen and rather rare creaking of the sign for the office below us is now a batshit crazy pendulum of constant "hit me with some WD40" noise, and looking out the window reveals lines swinging like a double dutch rope.

Good times in Central PA...

Update: My update color is never the same, but that's not the update. The update is thus: I hope Lawyer Mama doesn't get too jealous, but for my torrent effort, I got name-checked over on WWdN:IX. I'm still seeding, and we're up to four total seeders now, with just one peer as of 2:20pm my time. On the bright side, I've tossed up enough for two copies, so my part is done :D