April Showers Bring Not Much to Talk About

Well, April Fool's Day has passed with little fanfare. Contrary to what I may have convinced a few people of, I am not moving out of state, nor did I buy a 3 month old goat named Reginald, although now I kinda wish I had (buy the goat, I mean).

I hope your April Fool's Day was how you envisioned it to be. Taping the light switches so they won't turn on and making prank calls to your stock broker are definitely the best ways to usher in a new month.

But now it is May, and it is the time to mature and leave the childish pranks behind (until next year, of course). In case you weren't aware, summer is just around the corner! To folks from my neck of the woods, summer means 90+ degree days and an endless stream of beach pictures invading your social media feeds. This would all be well and good if the California weather didn't decide that high winds might be a nice way to switch things up after the good dousing of rain and hail from a few months ago! The folks out in the eastern half of the country have also been experience a bit of rain so I hear. Fun times!

At long last, we at Wimberley Manor have finally got our garden planted! I'm looking forward to harvest time when I can indulge in some purple hull peas, okra, bell peppers, tomatoes, and corn on the cob! Another sign of summer, and just another way we move on from the childish (but ever hilarious when non-destructive) April Fool's pranks. Just as we will be cultivating nourishing vegetables, in our lives we will be cultivating not-vegetables.

Oh, before I forget, I'm going to be participating in an event next week that will be really different for me. I'll tell you about it in a later post. Stay tuned.

But "that" time of year has come, and I hear your questions. I feel your inquisitive thoughts. "Mark," you say, "will you be doing another tour this year?" My answer is super super simple: "I really hope so, it may or may not definitely or not definitely is maybe almost possible if we can sorta almost take mostly care of a few kinda small but humongous issues that will take little to a ton of time and a Mack Truck load of resources to fix so how does next month maybe or maybe not sound?"

Ok, so actually, I have no answer. If you remember my blogs from last year, you'll know how much difficulty we had getting on the road then. It's even harder this year!  But never fear! Remember my New Years Resolution? No? (Neither did I...I had to go back and check) The long and short of it was dream big to achieve big. So I'm just going to go into the month of May with that mindset regarding a tour.  I'll let you know if anything good happens.

One last thing before I close: We don't actually call our home Wimberley Manor. I just couldn't think of a really cool name that was accurate.....besides "that house I live in".

Dressing for Success: A step-by-step guide (with Pictures)

As the Father of Bluegrass once told a fiddler of his: "You can't play bluegrass wearing striped britches." Other than that, we conclude, anything goes.

My band and I strive to always dress well for our shows. In fact, if there were an IBMA Award for best dressed band, I would like to think many of y'all would cast a vote for us (knowing that the Del McCoury Band and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver would win each year anyway).

Ask any bluegrass band if there is a right way or a wrong way to dress on stage and they will give you unintelligible answers. No one could mistake the Kentucky Derby look of the early Bluegrass Boys, then the string ties and hats of Flatt and Scruggs. But then along came a checkered cowboy hat from Jimmy Martin, followed by who-knows-what from the inimitable John Duffey.

Like this.

It's okay. I hear your cries for answers. To sum up the bluegrass cut of clothes as best as possible, we require a formally casual country themed business attire, where bolo ties and boots didn't die with the 90s.  Hats and mullets optional.

Let's break this down.

The above example is only okay in two situations. One: if you're starting a Southern Gospel group, and two: if you're going for the look of this classic album cover from 1999:

Notice how the camo hat in the first picture really makes his head look like it's not there. That's what camo does. Notice in the second picture, they look like they actually know what they are doing (unlike in the first picture).

Speaking of hats, let's talk about that.

The first bluegrass band never went without hats. Flatt and Scruggs seldom went without hats. However, if hats aren't your thing, you can omit them. Just make sure you have epic hair (a la Del McCoury, Ricky Skaggs, Larry Sparks, etc.)

Check out the side-by-side difference between the epic hat look and the epic hair look. If you can't be the Meyerband, you can always be the Johnson Mountain Boys.

Let's talk about ties. As far as which ones to wear, I would argue that Hot Rize is the clear winner.

Honorable mentions would be the following:

Basically anything these guys wear works.

And finally,

Sometimes I feel like we're the only group who still wears these bolo ties, but I could be wrong....

If you can't bring yourself to wear a suit and tie, you have the ever popular (and ever in style) Hawaiian shirt.

So there you have a by-no-means-exhaustive look at the official bluegrass dress code. There are so many different "looks" to a bluegrass band that it is a little difficult to precisely pin it down. 

Hopefully, you found this post to be enlightening. May your band always look like this:

And NEVER like this:

I told you John Duffey was eccentric. Now he's got Keith Whitley in on it, too.

The world's most Okay-est expert!

If there is one thing I've learned as a professional musician and entertainer, it would be this one thought:  For everyone at your level of expertise, there are 150 people better than you.

This can be quite the depressing statistic. It kind of is, actually (made up, too). I would be amiss if I didn't tell you that I've experienced this truth firsthand.

One of my band's sit-in bass players came to visit with us the other day.  He is a very nice gentleman and we had a wonderful afternoon reminiscing and picking some bluegrass together in our front room.  As he was leaving he turned to my sister and said "You deserve the best!" He turned to my older brother and said "You have the best!" He turned to my younger brother and said "You ARE the best!" Finally, he turned to me and said "Great sideburns." As another example, I was fortunate enough to play some music in Nashville, Tennessee this past summer and I had the honor of meeting some of my top favorite pickers in the industry while I was there.  While they sat in the audience, I played with every ounce of gusto I had.  Still, something in the back of my mind saw them sitting and staring at me. Judging every stinking note I played.  They heard every mistake.  I'm sure they laughed at my playing when they got home.

None of this bothers me that much, however.  I find that if there are people better than me, I find something that I'm better at than them.  Sounds kind of spiteful, I know.  Here's how it works:

Friend: I won 1st place in international guitar contests 82 times in a row.
Me: I could probably do that too, but I chose to get my second degree black belt instead.
Friend: My voice range spans 5 octaves and I'm a champion yodeler. 
Me: I had an Associate Degree when I graduated high school.
Friend: I had all of my wisdom teeth pulled without anesthesia and I was eating a caramel apple by that afternoon.
Me: I took care of my wisdom teeth and still have them.

Let me just say that the above conversation is completely fictional; none of my friends would listen to insufferable bragging like that.  I guess the message (yes, there is one, so stop laughing) would be to remember that if you are the best you can be, it doesn't matter that somebody's better than you.

So here's the remedy: Think about it as excelling in mediocrity!  You're much better at being "sort of good" than your friend!  You are the greatest mediocre person you know!  Isn't that great? Now you have something to brag about!