…and is on its way to Texas.

Today is the big day. As I write this the first box of Road Show CDs is being shipped to Dallas. They will arrive just in time for my first CD release concerts at Poor David’s Pub Thursday, May 3rd and Cactus Cafe in Austin May 4th.

I’m excited to share these two shows with one of the most talented singer songwriters on the Texas music scene, Bob Livingston. Bob has played with the Lost Gonzo Band, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey and Ray Wylie Hubbard. Whew. His new CD, “Gypsy Alibi” won album of the Year at the Texas Music Awards. I’m hoping we play some songs together during the course of our shows and beyond.

More stops this month for the Road Show include release concerts at Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe in Galveston, Anderson Fair in Houston and a four night tour with Todd Snider in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina.

My work is cut out for me over the next 17 days. You are waiting patiently to receive your exclusive offer for your generous patronage of the Road Show. I have tee shirts to order, boxes to fill, lyrics to write out and miles to travel during the process. But this is the fun part for me. You came through for me in such a heartening way and I am thrilled to give something in return.

So, get ready, the Road Show is coming to town. Let’s celebrate!

–Dana

Hip Hooray!
The Show is just beginning.
Look out on a sea of faces,
Each a little planet spinning…

That’s part of the lyric from a song called “I Am” that I co-wrote with Linda Marks and Lisa Aschmann.

Last year, I opened a great show at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in Austin, MN with ‘I Am’ as part of the “Off 90″ Americana Music Series. The show was recorded for broadcast earlier this year on public television station KSMQ.

I am very pleased with result. I helps that the audio was mixed by my good friend Thomm Jutz, who produced “The Conjurer” with me in 2010.  So these recordings sound as good as they look.

There are a couple of tracks from the Paramount show on “Road Show,” and several more that are not on the new CD.  So I am going to release the video and  a download of some of those tracks in the weeks ahead as “updates” to this PledgeMusic campaign.

And the first offering is this video/MP3 download of “I Am.”

While I was at it, I included a download of the original studio recording of “I Am” from “Harry Truman Built A Road.”  That CD was released in 2002 but is now out of print, so some of you new fans who have never heard it might appreciate having this copy of the original track.

(Incidentally, one of the few remaining copies of “Harry Truman…” will be  included in the ‘Show Box Collection’ listed in the offers with this campaign.)

You can get all the goodies – the video and the downloads, just by following this link to my PledgeMusic campaign page.

There’s plenty more to come.  I am off today for a month-long tour of Ireland and Denmark and will be sending in plenty of updates from that ‘across the pond’ version of my continuing Road Show.

As always, I hope to see you somewhere down the road, and thanks ever so much for your support.

–Dana

Patronage is a concept as old as the arts themselves.

In the Renaissance, families of great means like the Medici’s became famous in part for their support of the great painters, sculptors, and musicians of the day.

In the digital era, when so much has been disrupted by the advance of new media and models, it seems the arts are returning to a tried and true means of support. And systems have been devised in the past few years that put the concept of “patronage” within easy reach of almost anybody with an Internet connection and a passion for the movies, books, and music that moves them.

So I am pleased to announce that today I’ve launched my own little ‘patronage’ program through PledgeMusic.com. Watch this little video to learn more about it:

My sincere thanks to my friends Montie and Jayna Powell for all the brilliant and hard work that they put into the video.

Now, to see what all we’ve cooked up in the way of special offers, please stop by our campaign page at Pledge Music.

Dana Cooper, ca. 1974

I would rather bathe a cat than write this last chapter of the Elektra saga. I’ve procrastinated for weeks, weeding my yard, talking to the IRS, poking myself in the eye, anything to avoid writing about the demise of my record deal. Funny, it still bothers me.

Once the tour was over I retreated to sleepy Santa Barbara California where I shared an apartment in the hills with my girlfriend Mary Ann. While she worked on her Occupational Therapy internship at a local hospital I fidgeted around our little apartment and tried to figure out what had happened over the last year. Off the road I felt directionless. I wasn’t writing much. I had no gigs. Elektra was lukewarm about the prospects for my follow up album. Weeks slogged by before they issued a request that I demo some songs for their consideration. What could I do but comply?

Marlin Greene offered to produce. He scheduled a day for a demo session and I drove the two hours from Santa Barbara biting my nails all the way. It felt odd pulling into the parking lot for the first time. I never owned a car when I lived in Los Angeles. I always walked to the recording sessions. The four secretaries and one receptionist who sat at their desks surrounding the Spanish courtyard lobby always looked up from their work and gave me a friendly hello. Not today. Everyone’s eyes remained downcast as I passed through to Marlin’s office. Before I got there my presence was requested by the west coast treasurer. She proceeded to further question me about the long distance phone call confusion. Even though I assured her I had already made arrangements to settle the bill with the phone company she lambasted me for being a troublemaker.
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Continued from Part 2:

Are we having fun yet?

The day after the accusatory dinner with the Atlanta radio program director, Roger (the promoter who maybe wasn’t doing his job…) took us for a drive up Lookout Mountain to another radio station that was spinning my record in heavy rotation. The Program Director there, a fellow named Frank, invited us to tour the station and meet some of the DJs and staff. Frank was a cross between Fog Horn Leg Horn and Colonel Sanders. He was a tall, barrel-chested man with boot black pomaded hair and a pencil thin mustache to match. He wore a seer-sucker suit with a white belt and white shoes. He spoke in a slow, booming Georgia drawl. I liked Frank even though I thought he was full of bull right from the get go. Frank gathered a couple of DJs, technicians, Al, Roger and me into his office. We all sat in a circle while he opened a big bottle of Cuervo. The bottle went round several times and tongues loosened up. Somebody mentioned their latest office party and they all sniggered in a secretive, knowing way.

Frank told a tech to break out the party photos so we could have a gander at what they all found so humorous. Frank, being the big boss man, took the first look, peeling off each glossy in the stack and sending it around our way. Everyone studied the pics for a few seconds, laughed out loud and passed them on. Roger did likewise and handed the first one to me. It was an 8×10 of a man in a suit apparently passed out on the floor surrounded by four other men in suits standing with their dicks in their hands pretending to urinate on their unconscious friend. I blinked and handed the thing to Al.
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Phil Ochs, ca. 1973

Phil Ochs was a ravaged man by the time I met him in Washington, D.C. at the legendary venue The Cellar Door. Once a vibrant activist singer/songwriter, he appeared to be bitter and frail now. He was still robust enough to out-drink Al and myself though (and we drank quite a bit). This truly was the beginning of the end for him. In less than three years Phil Ochs took his own life. I don’t recall having any pleasant conversation with him and, in fact, I remember avoiding him. I was young and, sadly, had no idea how to relate to him.

Ochs received several encores after every show. He would stagger through the backstage door and relieve himself in the toilet which had no door while the crowd downstairs stomped and shouted for more. He would stagger back down, the crowd went crazier, he would play one more, stagger back upstairs for a quick drink, stagger back down and play another. He did this every set, every night.

A cadre of homeless men milled around on the sidewalk in front of  The Cellar Door. One of these fellows reminded me of Popeye after too long a sea voyage. To get to the dressing room one had to exit the front door of the club, walk around to the uphill side of the building, turn the corner and climb the stairs to the second floor. Every time we finished our set and popped out to climb the stairs this one guy would hone in on me. He tried to engage me in conversation but I never understood a word he rattled off. He was short, muscular, anywhere from fifty to sixty years old and his one unsquinting eye shone wild blue.

Al and I had just played our first set of the last night. We stood in front of The Cellar Door in the warm spring evening talking with Ron Stone, head of A&R for Elektra in Los Angeles. Popeye loped up and began slurring something at me. I smiled, keeping it friendly, straining to decipher what he wanted. He hooked my right hand in his and we stood there in a prolonged handshake while he kept baffling me with gibberish. I kept asking him to repeat himself. He became more and more agitated, his eye glinting hotter, his hand gripping tighter. Maybe he was Popeye’s evil twin after all.

Then he reeled back still clutching my hand, swinging his left fist, slamming it into the center of my chest. As I tried to pull my hand free I saw him haul back to take another swing. He fidgeted with something in his left hand and I saw it was a switch blade knife. He was drunkenly trying to get the damned thing open. Seems his first attempt at stabbing me had failed but he was a determined guy. The two of us lurched around for a while. No one else knew what to do but watch us in our grotesque waltz. Finally I managed to fling him to the ground and break his grip on me. The police were called while somebody detained Popeye. I left in shock and went for a walk around Georgetown to clear my head of what had almost happened. Someone I did not know had just tried to stab me in the chest. Fate is a funny thing. Once I stopped shaking I walked back to the Cellar Door where we played our last set of the weekend.
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Yes, we were all young once...

Not too long after my Elektra LP was released, my hometown newspaper, the Independence Examiner, ran this feature story about my burgeoning career.

Reading this article from the perspective of several decades later, I have determined that my brain was not yet fully developed.

The connective tissue between my mouth and my still callow brain had a tendency to unsnap and reknit awkwardly in those days. Occasionally, it still unravels. Especially during interviews where — in the final reading — I don’t recognize having said anything of the like. Kind of Gingrichian.

So much for the disclaimer. Once I get over the initial humiliation this tickles me. I hope it tickles you. Take a big dose of salt before reading. Check out the movies that were playing in Kansas City and Independence at the time. “Grizzly Adams” and “Stepford Wives!” Several really good ones too. Also gotta love the moustache. That’s the one I got caught between my teeth while biting into a Chunky bar. Maybe that’s how the connective tissue came undone!

The LP is out! Just click the album cover to visit "The Parallel Universe" and listen to it.

I felt poleaxed standing in the middle of Tower Records Store on Sunset Boulevard. A thigh high block of stacked LPs, over 1,000 of them, sat fat together in prominent display, all with the same cover staring back at me and the face on the cover was mine. I wondered how many more thousands of copies were crammed into a warehouse somewhere and who outside my immediate family and friends was going to buy all those albums.

In the weeks to come, Elektra Records would  release a single to radio, distribute to record stores and I would tour the country, following the record around from town to town. I’d be opening concerts for Townes Van Zandt, Leo Kottke, the Persuasions and Phil Ochs, scheduling radio and press interviews from New York City back to Los Angeles.  There was basic tour support offered from the label but not enough for a band. I could afford to take one accompanist. I called on creative guitarist and friend Al Billings to join me on my four month tour.

Al didn’t own a worthy instrument at the time so I went to Elektra seeking an advance to buy him a guitar. This meeting led to a bit of a yelling session between the Vice President of the New York office and myself. I could have benefited from having a manager who would take on these sorts of negotiations but I was on my own. After Elektra spent tens of thousands of dollars on production of the record and were so modest in tour support a few hundred dollars for an instrument didn’t seem all that unreasonable for me to expect. Apparently I was mistaken. I paid for the guitar out of my own pocket.
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(If you missed the first installment of this saga, you can find it here.)

(Listen to “Lover Baby Friend,” the first single from Dana Cooper’s 1973 debut LP, while reading the post that follows:

01 Lover, Baby, Friend by Dana Cooper

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

I sit listening to my first album from 1973 and I am overwhelmed with emotions. They run all over the place. Always do. Looking back is not what  I want to spend my life doing. Yet, I do it everyday. Aren’t all our lives spent balancing amongst what we’ve done, what we are doing and what we hope to do? I am no different than you. Only our experiences vary.

The Entrance to the Elektra Records Studios in Hollywood, ca. 1973

The seventh decade of my own particular balancing act has already begun.  On the night of my 60th birthday (April 2)  I was fortunate enough to perform at Ebeltoft Kulturhus in Ebeltoft, Denmark with my talented young friends, The Sentimentals.  Fact is, I’ve always been fortunate even if I didn’t realize it at the time. I’ve been on the road since I was 19. That’s 41 years and counting. There I go again; then, now and someday.
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