Art Edwards to let Buddy Out of the Cage for One Night In AZ in February!!!

One of the highlights of 2018 was watching the formation and ascendent star of Murphy's Outlaw.

This band consists of three of my best friends, two of which are former Refreshments and one a guy who was the lead singer of all of my AZ bands not the Refreshments. Despite the bass position of this band being more than ably manned by Mitch Cole, I couldn't help but watch on from Oregon and ... well, you know.

It seems my wish is being granted as I am officially scheduled to sit in for one night with Murphy's Outlaw on Friday, February 22nd at Scottsdale, Arizona's ROCK BAR.

I'm already starting to get a little geeky over this.

My understanding is you can get tickets at Rock Bar's Facebook Page and at their website.

Brian Blush asked me if I have any photos that might serve as appropriate. It took some digging, but I found an outtake from the Refreshments' first "photo shoot," the story of which you might find amusing.

In the summer of 1994, the Refreshments had our first LP Wheelie in the can. One problem: we didn't have a band photo.

You know, you're a band, and you want some cool, professional photo to put inside your CD. It's something bands do.

So, what do you do when you want a nice, professional photo of yourself? Why, go to Sears, of course!

As luck would have it, Sears had a sale, and the four of us put on our Sunday best and went to the Sears on (I believe) 44th and Camelback and threw down the credit card for the deluxe package.

It's probably one of my favorite memories of being in the band.

The young lady doing the shooting that day caught right on. "Which background would you like?"

"What are our choices?"

She started pulling down these tacky photo backgrounds, but I assure you, none was more tacky than the "space age" one that clearly dated from Star Wars time.

"That's the one."

So, we got all cozy--our little AZ rock and roll family getting its picture taken--and we came home that day (or back then probably had to go back and pick up a week later) with our photos.

The best one went into the inner sleeve of Wheelie. (I'm listening to Wheelie right now, incidentally. "Don't Wanna Know.") The second was a kind of outtake that found its way into some press stuff back in the day. Here's a partial.

That was 25 years ago. 

Wonder where I'll be in a year? How about 25?

Come see Murphy's Outlaw on February 22nd at Rock Bar and swing right along with Dustin Coleman Denham, Brian David Blush, James Allen Gerke, and of course, Arthur Eugene Edwards III.

Or Buddy.

Refreshments *Wheelie* Sales 1994!!!

The release dates for Ghost Notes and Songs from Memory are set. Both have in-store dates of March 4, 2008, just four months from today. You can count on pre-release sales to start at my Web site, www.artedwards.com, a month earlier, on February 4, 2008.

Many promotional events in many different cities are being planned, so don't be surprised if I'm in your neck of the woods in 2008. Stay tuned!

And many thanks to Brian J. Henderson for the new profile picture. Brian has kindly supplied me with many Refreshments-related scans from his collection, and we’re going to talk about some of them over the next couple of blogs.

Also, does everyone understand RSS feeds? (Don’t be embarrassed. Gerke just filled me in yesterday.) It’s an easy way to keep up with what I post here. Just look for the little orange and white icon, click it, and choose your option.

So Wheelie came out on December 4, 2004 (Funny, the 4th seems to play into a lot of the album releases of my life. See above.) There was some uncertainty regarding what weekend it would come out. We promised to premier it at the Yucca, so our staunchest fans would be the first to own it. We kept saying, “the fourth or the eleventh,” to anyone who asked about the CD. We were all listening to it in our cars and at our homes, proud as hell, waiting for the CD manufacturer to get our product done so we could start selling it. Finally, they came in, unassembled, from the manufacturer, and Kel, Rog and I spent one weekend putting 1000 of them together.

One of my best memories of being in the Refreshments was walking into the Yucca on December 4, 1994. It was early, but the place was already pretty full. I’d guess there were about 100 people there. I came in with my big box of 200 CDs, and 100 sets of eyes followed me, hungry lions honing in on some guy carrying a lamb shank, as I walked through the room and sat down at the far booth. A line quickly formed that extended all the way to the other end of the bar. The first guy in line dropped a stack of bills on the table, looked at me with blood-shot eyes and said, “Give me 15.”

That day, we sold 411 copies of Wheelie, and we would never look back. We actually had to run back to my place in between sets to get more boxes.

It was a dream-come-true, and that day will always be the apex of 1994--and in many ways the apex of the Refreshments--to me. The road ahead would lead us to great victories, but also would be fraught with difficult decisions and hard-to-swallow compromises. With Wheelie, it was all pure. We handled everything ourselves, and we succeeded on our own. There was no reason to believe we couldn’t have continued on in that way--making records and selling them out of the back of my pick-up truck--but none of us wanted that. We were destined for something else, and by the end of 1994 we were ready for it.

You’re going to hear many different numbers of how many copies of Wheelie are out there, but most of them are false. Here’s the truth, as remembered by the guy who managed the entire project.

The band ordered Wheelie in batches of 1000, but we usually got somewhere in the area of 1050-1100 in each batch, the extra being printer over-run. We placed a total of five orders, which means there are no more that 5500 copies of Wheelie in existence. We sold most of those, but we gave a lot of them away, too. Still, 5500 copies are floating around out there. It’s not impossible to score one of them, even in 2007.

Next week, random musings over Refreshments-related pictures supplied by Brian Henderson.

Art

*Wheelie* Insert

Ghost Notes is out the door, and I'm putting together the artwork for Songs from Memory this week. Let's talk Wheelie once again.

So, here's the insert of Wheelie.





Click on them for a larger view.

I should try to explain some of it. The front cover, the airplane, I talked about at length last week. The back cover lists the songs as property of Frosty Acres Music. I'd completely forgotten that we'd ever published our songs under anything but Chuckling Grunion Music. I don't remember the circumstances around either name, but I can assure you that these names got a laugh at one point of another, which was all the validation we needed back then.

You'll notice from the song list that the only song on Wheelie and not Fizzy is "Psychosis," an old Mortals song that was a staple of our live set in Wheelie days. ("Interstate" was rewritten post-Wheelie and made the cut for Fizzy. "Blue Collar Suicide" is another old Mortals song that literally came together in the studio while we recorded Fizzy, so it wasn't ready for Wheelie, either.)

This might be old news, but just in case you've never heard the story, "B.O.B.A." is an acronym for "Buffett on Bad Acid." We came to our senses and called the song "Mexico" when we recorded it for Fizzy.

The inside lists many names, and I'll try to hit on the ones that aren't obvious.

First of all, we felt the need to list our full names, middle names and all, so if you were ever curious, here they are.

You'll also notice Dusty sang all the backing vocals back in the day.

Dorothy Denham, Dusty's mom, was gracious enough to let a very loud band play in her basement for the first two years of its existence; hence, she earned the first thank you.

"Steve for the wagon" refers to Dusty's friend Steve, who loaned us his station wagon when Brian's van dropped a spider gear or something and we were out of a vehicle.

Matt Engstrom owned Gibson's, and I think Barett Rinzler was involved with it, too.

Tammy Fletcher I'm pretty sure worked at Yucca, but I'm not positive on that one.

Jeremy was the guy who designed the bomb flag and the drunken hot dog.

Jim and Jody at CHUD helped us design the CD package.

I think that's it. If you have questions, run them by me in the comments section.

Next week, Wheelie sales figures, as remembered by yours truly.

Art

And the answer to the trivia question from last week:

Lo, Our Much Praised Yet Not Altogether Satisfactory Lady-Art (The title is a paraphrase of a line from an Ezra Pound poem.)

Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy-Brian (Yes, he woke up muttering it one morning.)

Bottle-Rog (A phrase roughly meaning, let's do it again, as in, "Bartender, give us a bottle and fresh horses, we're going out again," which we were at the time.)

Congrats to John and chole, who both nailed it in the comments section last week.

More on *Wheelie*

As I finalize Ghost Notes and Songs from Memory over the next few months, I’m going to blog regularly on the Refreshments.

Someone asked about the cover of Wheelie, which makes me want to talk about the entire package, which is probably more than anyone wants to know but, hey, it’s my blog.

The title of Wheelie came from “Pop a wheelie,” a line Roger came up with and quickly edited down to “wheelie.” We all liked that it evoked something from childhood, and that it sounded cool and fun.

Of course, we had to completely undercut the title with the album art. Brian wanted something that looked the opposite of “wheelie.” We settled on some kind of jalopy wreck, preferably one of those doomed, multi-winged planes that crashed on its first attempt at flight.

We liked the juxtaposition of calling our CD Wheelie and having some kind of bad wreck on the cover. That’s the kind of stuff that made us laugh, and undercutted any attempt by people--especially ourselves--to take the Refreshments seriously. That was the key in those early days.

It became my job to find a crashed plane, and I spent all day at the Tempe Library flipping through books. I eventually found what became the cover, which wasn’t a jalopy at all but a normal-looking little plane crashing, but it was all we had. CHUD Graphics helped us turn it into a cover, and we were set to go.

Of course, every CD needs a band picture, and we had no idea how to go about getting one. Someone got the idea to have our photo done at Sears--phony pose, funky back-drop and all--and we all thought that was perfect. We went to the Goodwill, bought some snazzy clothes, and all piled into Roger’s Landcruiser for the trip up to the Pleasant Valley Sears.

The result, with Rog and me sitting on the table in front of Dusty and Brian, was the epitome of what the band was in 1994: clever, spontaneous, silly, and at all costs unpretentious, exactly the opposite of what every band in the universe was trying to bring across. After that picture, nothing could stop us.

Throw in some artwork of an inebriated hotdog and a bomb flag, and you’ve got Wheelie.

All this gives me an idea for a new trivia question: which Refreshments member was responsible for coming up with which album title? The album titles are:

Lo, Our Much Praised Yet Not Altogether Satisfactory Lady

Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big & Buzzy

The Bottle and Fresh Horses

(Hint: Roger, Brian and I each came up with one of the above.)

Take a whack at it in the comments section. I'll reveal the answers next week.

Art

Wheelie and the Beeramid

Finishing Songs from Memory in Atlanta this week, I'm in the mood to ramble on about another independent recording project.

The Refreshments were offered many things in those first months of gigging. Lots of bands wanted to play with us, and lots of club managers wanted us to play their venues. People offered to be our fan club president (thanks, Kathleen) and to run our official Web page (whatever that was; this is 1994 we’re talking about.) We could feel that people wanted to help us, wanted to be part of this thing we’d started. If they thought they had something that would be of value to a fledgling band, they offered it.

Don Salter was one such person. Don approached one of the band members after a show in what must’ve been the early summer of 1994. Don owned and operated the Saltmine, a recording studio in Mesa, Arizona. Don loved the band, and he wanted to have the Refreshments into his studio, so much so that he offered free recording time to get us there. If we didn’t mind coming in at odd hours--times when Don didn't have a paying act in the studio--we were welcome to have a go at it.

Free? The price was right.

We got ready to make our first record by doing what we always did, playing and practicing. There was very little discussion of how we wanted the record to sound, no pre-production; we were proud of how we sounded live, so we were done, as far as we were concerned. The only thing we really had to decide was which songs we would record, having more than an album’s worth of material by then. We quickly decided to record only our “first batch” of songs, more or less what we had going into our first gig, plus “Mekong.” We would go into the Saltmine and play these songs, just like we were playing a live gig, only this time tape would be rolling.

And that’s what we did. We went into the Saltmine, usually late at night, set up, cracked a twelve-pack, played our songs, cracked another twelve-pack, played some more, broke down our equipment and went home. This happened maybe two or three times for basic tracks, once for guitars, twice for vocals, once for mixing. It was all done by the end of the summer, Wheelie in the can, our first record.

Don Salter’s fond of telling the story of the Beeramid, and he tells it well, so I’m reluctant to repeat it here. Basically, one night while we recorded basic tracks, the band started building a pyramid of beer cans in the window between the console room and music room. By the end of the night (sometime early in the morning) the Beeramid was so tall and impressive that the engineer had to struggle to see around the thing to view the band.

The Beeramid. It’s an adequate symbol for the whole project. Anyone who’s heard Wheelie knows why. It’s still out there somewhere, Wheelie, if you can find it. I was careful to keep a few copies for myself, but over the years I’ve found reason to part with one here, one there. I’m down to one copy, and that one’s staying with me.

We’ll do more on Wheelie later, as it fits into our time line. There's plenty more to tell.

Art