I'll take it

Jeff told me tonight that he decided, after now listening to me hundreds of times in the studio, that I sound like Junior Parker. Yep, I'll take that.


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Big crowd in Arnold!

We had about 350 people at our sold-out show at Phillip's Lounge in Arnold, PA last Saturday night. Here I am with Sally and Heidi, as Jimmy Britton looks on suspiciously from the rear.



We're expecting another packed house for our upcoming fundraiser this Saturday night, April 1, in Upper Marlboro, MD. The gig is called "An Evening of Denim and Blues," and it's a fundraiser for Queen Anne School. The show begins at 7:30, and more than 300 tickets have already been sold. For ticket information, contact Denise Kenney Bartlett, qaslion@aol.com, 410-923-1076.



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What's up with Arnold, PA?

We're at Phillip's Lounge in Arnold, PA tomorrow night, and the show is already sold out--more than 300 tickets have been sold. I know it's been a while since I've played in Arnold, New Kensington, or Tarentum, but none of these places is too far from Blawnox, and I'm not getting 300 people to pay in advance to see us in Moondog's. So what's up with this?

Meanwhile...All the recording on the new CD is finished. We'll be mixing during the next week, then we'll be working on the cover and going into production. I'm still predicting a release sometime around the end of May or early June. I'll keep you posted.

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Great photos from Burgi's Roundhouse, Altoona, PA

here.

Thanks to Jim Price for sending these.

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King Floyd, RIP

Just found out that King Floyd, best known for "Groove Me" but also the originator of "What Our Love Needs," currently in the BP Band repertoire, died 10 days ago. Here's an obituary.

I read this sad news, by the way, on a great great soul blog, Soul Sides: Music for Rhythm Addicts, which I highly recommend. You can download lots of obscure soul gems here.

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McKeesport Blues Extravaganza

Great long night of the blues last Saturday night, starring Piney Brown, now in his seventh decade singing the blues.

That's James Hilton, a great guitar player whom I had never heard before, on the left, and Jeff "Head Bone Daddy" Ingersoll playing bass on the right. Don't know the drummer.

Here's me with Bobby Wayne, who sounded great singing a couple of Bobby Bland songs that I used to do: Black Night and Don't Cry No More.

I sang "Aretha, Play One For Me" solo with Jimmy Britton, who was on stage most of the night with all the artists who appeared--in additon to Piney Brown and Bobby Wayne, Annie Sutton, Jimmy Adler, and the crowd pleaser of the evening, young Guitar Zack Weisinger, formerly with Jill West & Blues Attack, recently back from the W.C. Handy Awards where he won the Alber King award for most promising guitarist, and poised to rule the world.

The high point of the night for me was Annie Sutton's amazing version of the Jerry Ragovoy song "You Don't Know Nothing About Love." I had never heard Annie before, but she is amazing (she did at least one LP with Felix Cavaliere and the Young Rascals). One of these days, after I stop monopolizing all the time at the studio, maybe Jeff will finish a CD with Annie--I guarantee you it will be good.

We'll be in Altoona on Saturday night at Burgi's Roundhouse at 9:30, playing all the songs from the new CD and lots of the old faves too. Central Pennsylvanians: be there!

Thanks to Rebecca for the photos.

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An oldie but goodie

Jim & Terri sent me this one, from the American Ale House in State College. It's a few years old, but I'm not sure how many years.

Thanks folks!

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Send us your gig pictures

like Eric V did here. Let us know if it's okay to use your name, and we'll credit you.

We're going to be working on a major redesign of the Billy Price Band web site in the next couple of months, and we'll be adding a photos section. We invite you to send your digital photos of Billy Price Band gigs.

We'll post our favorites on the the web site.

One change we made to the site last night that is kind of cool--we added links on the home page that open iTunes on your computer to specific pages within iTunes. And if you don't have iTunes on your computer, the code detects that and opens a message asking you if you want to download it. This is a new capability that Apple has provided, and I guess I'm an early adopter. I first saw this on the site for McLemore Avenue, a great band from Austin that include Landis Armstrong on guitar. Landis is on my Can I Change My Mind CD.

There, did you try that? Pretty nifty, eh?

Billy





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More studio photos

"I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler."

Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate.

Why didn't someone tell me what this looks like from the back?

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McKeesport

Jeff Ingersoll of the Boneyard told me yesterday that at one time, before the steel mills closed, McKeesport was the third largest city in Pennsylvania. Could that possibly be true? The place is kind of a ghost town now. Jeff, D.J., and I went over to have hot dogs at Sam's on Saturday at about 2:00, but it was closed. It wouldn't have been closed at 2:00 on Saturday in 1965.

We're trying to reenergize McKeesport around a new product--soul, blues, and R&B. I should have paid attention to what they were doing out at the Boneyard a long time ago. The more I hear, the more impressed I am. I listened this morning to a CD that they made in 2000 for Guitar Shorty called Git Shorty and was knocked out, as I have been by almost all the stuff that comes out of the studio.

Mike Sweeney's stuff, the two Hoodoo Drugstore CDs, is like a Pittsburgh version of The Band. It's the tree falling in the forest that no one hears, and it's a damn shame. Sweeney is an amazing songwriter. Here are the lyrics that begin "The Hard Hours," one of the songs on East End Avenue:

Close my eyes, hold my ears
But the last words won't disappear
"I'm leaving," was all she said.

Pittsburgh haiku.

It would be great if East End Avenue could help draw some more attention to Bobby Wayne, Tommy Brown, Piney Brown, and Sweeney.

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Back to Work

Tomorrow night we'll be at Carnegie Mellon, for the Beaux Arts Ball, in the revival of a longtime tradition at CMU. The costume ball, which hasn't been held since 1993, is described by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as having a "lushly costumed history...which, at times, was so bacchanalian that one reveler said it would have made Caligula blush."

Update: Here's a photo from the first set, which we played for no one--it was still early.



On the second set, three hours later, we followed some band that played loud and fast, said "fuck" frequently in the microphone, railed against Department of Defense funding of Carnegie Mellon, and induced frenzy among those assembled in the room. It was a tough act to follow, but we kept it fast and funky, and everyone danced and had a good time.

It's an odd way for the band to go back to work after a long layoff from live performances. Maybe the oddest thing about the gig is that the first set is at 8:20 and the second set is more than three hours later. Maybe we should drive to McKeesport during the break and cut a few more tracks for the new CD.

Lenny will be in the studio finishing up some solos tomorrow, and I'll be there with him. Now that everything else is just about done, I'm finally going to record my for-keeps vocals on Monday; then we do a little more cleanup, mix the tracks, and we're done.

Speaking of McKeesport, here's a plug for the Piney Brown show at the Palisades Ballroom in McKeesport on March 11.


BP Band keyboard player Jimmy Britton will be playing in the band that will back Mr. Brown, who is in town to record a new CD this week at the Mojo Boneyard for Bonedog Records. I couldn't find anything about it on the web to link to except this little blurb:

The Western PA Blues Society and Bonedog Records present a BLUES EXTRAVAGANZA!! THE LIVING LEGEND........PINEY BROWN....the only living blues artist to have recorded for the past SEVEN DECADES!!!.. at the PALISADES in McKeesport PA SATURDAY MARCH 11TH. Doors open at 7:00. 15.00 in advance 20.00 at the door.

Special guests: blues axe man JIMMY ADLER and Pittsburgh's premiere soul singer BOBBY WAYNE !!! For advance tickets and to charge (visa/mc) call the PALISADES at 412-678-6979.

Should be a great show--Jimmy Adler and Bobby Wayne are also both great. If you're there, look for me and Rebecca and tell me that you read about it on my blog. That will make me happy.

Billy

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