the acffh morST cyber-blog is here now.

Bugs Salcido is my friend! What a great guy he is. Johnny Hickman introduced him to the crowd as "My Little Brother" and I am very happy to have gotten to know him. Bugs lives right by the Pioneertown Palace, and played a gig there on Thursday, the night the early arrivals came in for the Crampout. After his 25-minute opening song, he looked down and said something like "oops, I guess I have to hit record!". . . Later in the show he looked down and said it again. He has a Marantz CD recorder that is flaky, it only runs about 45 minutes before it adds little glitches to the audio, so he has to record in small chunks to get good sound. This means frequent changes of discs, and during a live show it is easy to forget. Anyhow, after the show, which ran about 2 hours, I mentioned to Bugs that I had a recording of the whole thing, and I'd be happy to plug my DAT deck into his recorder and let him run it. I joked that I had heard he lived nearby, and he said YEAH RIGHT THERE! and gestured with his hand in the direction of his house. I showed up with my tape deck after bar time and walked into his living room where he was hosting a few people chilling out, including a few members of Cracker, and suggested we start the machines a-dubbing but he said "Ah, I just PLAYED the show, I don't want to hear it again right now!" I said that's fine, I'm staying next door at the PiTown motel, and would be happy to do it tommorrow, and asked him what time he got going in the morning, "Noon?" I said, and he said Yeah that would be great.
So I went on back to the motel and there was a nice party gathered around the picnic table by my room, and I hung out and got acquainted with the gathering crowd of Crumbs and sipped some barley-pops. After a while my roomie and I were in the room getting some snacks and Matt (aka MTP, Matt's Tiny Phone, Harry Carey, El Hairy Watermelon, Eduardo Sanchez etc) said let's get out the Fakermeister from the freezer. I already told you about that part in the last installment, but I will mention that Bugs came on over from his place, and sat down at the picnic table and joined us in the festivities at our place. It was already feeling like a close-knit cramper-family scene and it just got better the next day.
Saturday noonish I found Bugs at Pappy and Harriet's, just starting to wrap cables and remove his gear from the indoor stage where he played the night before, so of course I offered to help him break his stuff down and load it out. We made a trip over with some lightweight stuff, and soon were running the DAT of his show onto his CD recorder. After we got the copy started, we headed back to the stage to finish loadout and gradually shuttled his gear back to his living room from the bar. Somewhere along the line, Bugs said he was planning to set up a PA system on his porch and have a jam session after-hours, and I told him about how last year there was the "Porchstock" jam, so it would be really cool that he was gonna do that, cause people would show up. "I guess we'll have porchstock here this year" I said. . . well, that wound up being exactly the case. More on Porchstock later, since I'm gonna try to keep this semi-chronologicamabobble. Oh yeah, I saw a roadrunner, see if you can find him in these shots, the second one is the easiest to see him:
According to Bugs, roadrunners are territorial, so that is his local one! There are also coyotes in the area, we could hear them howl at night, but they kept their distance from the commotion of the campers, for the most part.

The Saturday lineup on the main stage was Thriftstore Allstars, then John Doe, then CVB, with Johnny Hickman on the indoor stage after the CVB set.
I went into the concert area before the band was even on stage, and set up my taping gear by the soundboard while Casey and the PA guys set up the sound system.
I was set up right in front of a Joshua Tree by the woodpile which had been the only part of P&H's to catch fire during the massive blaze that leveled a lot of Pioneertown just a few months ago. The fire department took apart the woodpile and extinguished it, saving the premises from destruction. Bugs told me that the way the mountains surround Pi-town, that the wind gets funneled right in, and whipped the fire around very randomly. Near his house his neighbor had some blackened Joshua trees, and some unscathed ones. Anyhow, the band's van and trailer were parked outside the stage area:
They are unabashedly lefties, eh? The van has a sticker on its back bumper that says "If you can read this, I lost my trailer!" haw! :-)

The first band, the Thrift-Store All-Stars has a regular gig at P&H's every Sunday. I don't know if it's always the case, but for this show they were supposed to feature Victoria Williams on bass, but she was not there. Her replacement was quite a fine-looking person, and she rocked out on the bass, anyway.



Teddy Quinn (in the orange pants in the third photo) joined in on vocals for part of the show, he played a set on the indoor stage Saturday, and he has a great voice. I told him I recorded his set, and would send him a copy, and he was very pleased and gave me his studio CD. I gave it a listen on my roommate's laptop sunday morning and it's really good. He and the other bands on the indoor stage are all from the area. The spirit of Gram Parsons seems to haunt the whole region. Gram was in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and he died at the nearby Joshua Tree Motel, in room number 8. Gram is known as the first country rock star, and is nothing short of legendary. Rojer Arnold who sat in with Bugs on Thursday night played with Gram, and on Saturday and Sunday he did sets with his band on the indoor stage. Rojer is a very nice guy, and I kept running into him and having cool conversations.



Perhaps you notice the "Horns" photos? MTP told me that Mungo, the great Camper-Cracker fan from Merry Olde England, took some horns shots last year, and it was one of our side missions to get as many as we could this year. Rojer is blurry in the second shot but I kept it cause it's got "good horns!"
I better knock off this post and get to the John Doe, Camper Van, Johnny Solo, and Porchstock IIa stuff later. Seems like this is a nice chunk to read already for now, especially if you follow up on all the links.