My wonderfully intuitive and insightful girlfriend bought me a Flip video camera for my 30th birthday. This will no doubt prove to be an invaluable tool in documenting Tumbledown House’s adventures, and will also provide hours of ridiculously silly entertainment and countless gigs of worthless footage.
I managed to capture a lot of the aforementioned footage during my 30th birthday weekend, which included an ideal camping spot, voraciously starving mosquitoes, The National Folk Festival (in its last year in Butte, MT), and ended, as all birthdays should, with some drunken karaoke at a shithole bar called ‘The Party Palace’.
As this is my first foray into video editing, it’s still a little rough, but hopefully you’ll notice a glimpse of promise and talent, budding through the choppy and poorly thrown together shots, that just needs to be finely honed and nurtured, like a young Spielberg or Almodovar. Then again, maybe not.
At the beginning of August we leave for our tour in Alaska, which will likely provide tons of source material for our next movie. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
In Montana, June always brings one last good snowstorm. It’s as if mother nature just needs to relieve herself one last time before our two beloved months of solid, sunny weather. Everyone here knows this and is somewhat prepared. We were not, however, prepared for what happened yesterday:
Here’s a pic I found, taken by Andy Meehan, of the hail that fell in our fair town yesterday. Now, it didn’t take much research to find out that this isn’t that uncommon, especially in parts of the country such as Oklahoma or other places I wouldn’t want to live. But, for this Arizonan, I found the experience downright morbid and unsettling.
The hail fell hard, breaking windows, denting cars, and scaring the shit out of dogs throughout Bozeman. Our beloved van, Rocinante, had two of her own windows damaged. Keep in mind, these aren’t “Let’s just run to the auto glass store and replace them” windows.. No, they are much more like “Wow, I haven’t seen these manufactured since the early 90s” RV conversion windows. I believe her resale value just took a dive comparable only to BP’s stock value. Our once pristine trailer is now riddled with dimples (of the unflattering variety) and landlords all over town are facing a barrage of complaints. I wouldn’t be surprised if the damage caused reaches into the millions.
The forecast today and tomorrow calls for more thunderstorms, so I must go now to buy plywood, food supplies, and rosary.
Last week we picked up a documentary on Pete Seeger called ‘The Power of Song‘. It was especially moving, full of great archived footage, and worth recommending to anyone. We were inspired to dig up some old union music and add it to our repertoire. Now, for some of you this song may be familiar, but apparently it wasn’t too well known in the mines I worked in growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Here’s a great video of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing 16 Tons:
There are a couple of hilarious things about this video. The obvious, of course, is that a man with a mustache like that would name his fists ‘iron’ and ‘steel’. Maybe Subscooby said it best in the comments of the Youtube video when he remarked “it seems a little incongruous, a song about back-breaking labour being sung by a guy who looks like he would be more at home sipping martinis while smooth talking Miss Sweden 1955″. Indeed, I couldn’t agree more.
A little bit of research (read: visiting the wikipedia page), revealed that Sixteen Tons was claimed to have been written by Merle Travis, although another man named George S. Davis (who had actually been a coal miner) claimed that he was in fact the true author.
The song refers to the truck system in which workers were paid in vouchers redeemable at the company store instead of cash. This system prevented them from saving any money and forced the laborers into debt bondage. We found this all very fascinating, and there’s a good possibility that more union music can be heard at TDH shows in the future.
As we step gleefully into the summer months, the dust is beginning to settle at Tumbledown Headquarters. We’ve recently moved into a new apartment and purchased a magic bullet, which is in my humble opinion, the most amazing invention since birth control. We have a wonderful summer booked, mostly in Montana. In August we will be embarking upon a week long tour in Alaska, from which we hope to return without getting shot.
This morning I finished routing our fall tour, which could be described as “ambitious” or more appropriately “likely regrettable”. Here’s a map:
The tour will be very similar to the one we did last year, except we will partake in a larger excursion of the Deep South and, in an attempt to save money and brain cells, will spend a little less time in New Orleans. If you happen to have any suggestions of venues we should contact along our route, please email us.
Finally, here’s a video segment from a show produced by Tucson-12 called ‘DTOWN’. They edited together an interview of us with snippets of our ‘Race Track Song’. Enjoy.
Hello dear readers, and welcome to the new (and slightly improved) tumbledownhouse.com!!
Maybe you are thinking, “Hey! This website isn’t that different from your old website, which was so awesome and loaded to the gills with wonderful pictures, hilarious razor-sharp wit, and nostalgic tour photos!”
Those things are all true, and I apologize for the change of format. Basically, Google decided to discontinue FTP publishing for their blogger platform, which our old website was based on. “What the hell does that mean?”, you’re probably asking yourself. Without getting into it, it means that I’ve had to spend the last few days reprogramming our website from the ground up so that we can continue our blog format and bring you new juicy stories from the road. If you’d like to review any of our past blogs, you can do so here.
So, this website will be under construction for awhile while I make improvements! We will now be able to blog at our leisure, and will do so with renewed vigor and enthusiasm! If you have any questions, please feel free to email us.
