New Trail Coaching, Scott Malyszka

Here you go– lyrics for my song “Carrie And I.” You can hear and purchase the single at CD Baby here: http://www.cdbaby.com/scottmalyszka2

I’d love to hear your impressions.

CARRIE AND I

Carrie and I sitting on a bench
In the light, in the patriarchal church
Saint Michael’s day in autumn
Watch the angels playing hide and search
Carrie leans warm against me
Her brown hair is long and tossed
Old Armenian woman hisses at her
Don’t you sit like that with your legs crossed

Walk beside the great stone wall
Construction workers smoking on their break
They’re replacing the gold atop that dome
The king will give as much as God will take
Carrie and I just puzzle it out
Her arm wraps around my waist
Battles for centuries built all this
This wall, this mosque, this church, this fate

Smell of prayers across the room
Faces freeze with grace and gloom
Heart-born stain, rattling chain
Nothing given, nothing gained

Sitting on the grass she removes her shoes
Her legs are so pretty and strong
I stroke her knee while we whisper and kiss
In the park the November sky grows dark
It’s good for friends like us to kiss
She speaks this creed and I just nod
It’s all ours, we didn’t steal a thing
Soul kisses, the language of God

Smell of leaves, undressing trees
Prayers lost upon the breeze
Soul kisses unrestrained
Nothing given, nothing gained

© 2010 by Scott Malyszka

A few days ago I ran into a random mention of some place called “Westview.” My brain flipped back to when I was a little kid and my family would go to Westview Park on the north side of Pittsburgh. It was a little amusement park with old wooden roller coasters, a carousel, one of those sky lift rides where you ride way up high in a car hanging from a cable and your feet dangling out the front. I loved it there, especially the first little roller coasters I ever rode.

Westview Park closed when I was still a kid. I did a little digging and found out that the park closed in 1977 because it didn’t have land for expansion and Kennywood on the other side of town beat them out. The web tells me that the ballroom was a great attraction there. I recently read one of Bill Wyman’s memoirs in which he mentions a Rolling Stones gig at Westview on their first U.S. tour in 1964. I imagine an old-fashioned hardwood dance floor with the young long-hairs rocking and rolling for the local kids. I can picture lots of couples just dancing, chatting, joking, clapping along. It seems like it might have been a special, innocent, rebellious time in the early years of rock and roll music.

Digging around about Westview Park led me to the wacky state of things at Conneaut Lake Park, another amusement park from my childhood that closed and went bankrupt. Conneaut Lake Park was a small, old-fashioned spot with its own classic wooden relic coaster and its own ballroom. The difference is that somehow Conneaut Lake keeps coming back, and I think it is open again now, without the dancing of course. I only remember the rides and the junk food, but I’m sure there was a time when that dance floor had crowds of couples dipping and swirling around. I never saw anything like that in my life. I never went to school dances growing up because I was just terribly shy and quite the backwards misfit. But I know that those dances weren’t like the old-fashioned stuff. My generation didn’t have dancing as a social event like my parents and grandparents did. That’s how I see it anyway–something was lost after that first generation of rock and roll kids.

Then there was Idora Park over in Youngstown. I was only there one time; when I was sixteen I spent an entire day there by myself. The chattering old coasters, the junk food, the dance floor in the ballroom. It was another of those small parks that didn’t survive. Idora closed up in the eighties when a huge fire wrecked the place. Again, that romantic picture with crowds of couples in the dusk dancing to a big band or a rock and roll act. I did a lot of people watching that day at Idora. I remember some snooty girls who looked at me like I was a starving toad. I remember some twenty-something dudes who kept talking about all the action they were going to get. At one point I walked up to a slushy stand, and there was a cute girl with dirty blond hair about my age working there. I said, “Can I have a grape slushy please?” Our eyes met, and we both just stood there for a second or two. I was fascinated. She looked down and said, “Oh, sorry, what did you want?” I repeated it, and she got my slushy ready.

Yeah, I was born too late those innocent, romantic, early days of rock and roll rebellion with crowds of kids feeling free and fun. I think those were unique times, and I wasn’t in the right generation for that. It wasn’t all happy days and good times back then for sure, but that dancing stuff was totally different than anything I ever saw.

Six hours of work and we got two of my compositions recorded from scratch. Pretty good work.

Here’s how it went: The first hour was spent tuning, then recording rhythm guitar tracks for the two songsI’m always quick on these, and today I got the rhythm tracks on the first take both times. Then about three hours doing vocals. I did eight takes of each vocal. People always say that vocals are hardest to get done and take a lot of work. I’m not a great singer, so I am no exception to this rule. I actually felt a bit rusty today, so I wasn’t sure if the vocals were going to work out. But in the end I think we got it pretty good. At least the final vocal tracks sound like me. The last two hours were spent recording mandolin parts, including half an hour tuning the stubborn instrument, and then a little editing. That’s it.

Both songs were arranged with guitar, mando, and vocals. One song, “Sweet By And By,” had been recorded live in the studio with a couple friends last year, but the vocal bled so much into my guitar mike that the track was unusable. The other song, “Steel Guitar,” was recorded last year as a waltz, but I came up with a better, up-tempo swingy feel since then. So that’s why I re-recorded these two.

I’m very glad to have engineer Les working with me. He is always calm, supportive, and efficient. He edits and fixes problems quickly, and he gives me lots of room to do my work. So there ya go, a terribly productive day recording stuff for the CD. Just a little more mixing etc. and we’ll be on our way.

Here’s a video of the Whitetop Mountain Band playing “Rooster’s Crowing Blues”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj6Paqgt4DQ

A few days ago I took in the “Crooked Road” show here in Reston. The Crooked Road is a series of cultural landmarks in the mountains of southwest Virginia promoted by the state. I need to check into the details, but it is basically a promotion of traditional Appalachian music and folk culture. The show is a group of traditional musicians from that part of Virginia playing old-time and bluegrass music.

The show had two long sets. The first one was old-time music, with ballad singing, fiddle tunes, and flatfoot dancing. The old-time music emphasizes old ballads from the British traditions that were handed down over generations while folks lived in some isolation in the Appalachian regions. The ballad singing in this show was strong and emotional. It is something to hear a voice fill up a room with a couple hundred people in the audience. The dance music from this area also comes from the British Isles and has been preserved by the isolation that ended about a hundred years ago. The fiddlers play a rhythmic style on the tunes with lots of droning notes and double stops. I play old-time fiddle in a slightly different style; my style leans more toward West Virginia, with less droning and a little more syncopation, influenced by contemporary fiddlers such as John Hartford and Alan Jabbour. For this show, the fiddle tunes and accompanying banjo parts were lively, grooving, and tremendous. The Whitetop Mountain Band finished up this first set with a variety of songs, fiddle tunes, and blues. I had seen Martha and Jackson from this group performing as the Whitetop Mountaineers at a house concert last fall, and they were outstanding again in this show. Jackson’s mandolin tremolo is so powerful; I wonder why more mandolin players don’t work up a good tremolo like this.

The second set focused more on bluegrass and twentieth century music. At one point all the banjo players from the dozens of musicians were on stage at once, about six of them, playing a beautiful “Mississippi Sawyer.” Wayne Henderson did a fabulous set playing flatpick guitar. He played clean, strong, pretty, fast, and imaginative parts–practically a one-man band. I started to get sleepy after Henderson’s set, so I didn’t pay much attention to the band that went on after him to finish up the show.

Go see the “Crooked Road” show if you get a chance. It’s a fun and accessible experience of traditional music from Virginia–really a fun evening.

I took in a fine and fiery performance by Samuel James on Tuesday at a restaurant in Herndon. Here’s a video of James doing some “Walking blues”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq0cv5gOOVQ

James performed solo on a small-body acoustic guitar and a steel-body resonator guitar. His vocals are intense and scratchy with some real emotion. He plays spontaneous and imaginative craziness on guitar in a lot of different styels. I’m no blues geek, so I won’t go on trying to talk about Piedmont, delta, or whatever style, because I just don’t know that much. I hear a lot of analysis about blues music, and most of it is boring and meaningless to me. all I know is that I love everything I hear James play, whether live or on CD.

james seems to have a shy intellectual side to his music. he teased the audience with little starters like how blues music originally comes from Russia, or how the Great Depression in America stopped the development of acoustic blues music. But he didn’t go on and on, and someone could do a dissertation or a dozen of them on each of these topics. I’d love to pick his brain on some of this stuff sometime, but a show isn’t the time for a musician to sit there and talk.

James played a lot of traditional and well-known tunes, but he also played some of his originals. He says that he tries to write in a way that picks up where acoustic blues music stopped in the 1930s. I like the rocking music of his compositions, and his lyrics are entertaining and interesting. Hard to beat a song that has a good tune and a good story.

Music is about setting fire to a moment in time and enjoying the heat and smoke of it all, and James gets that. He’s a great performer, so check out his show next chance you get. buy his CDs and treat your ears.