I am playing the opening slot at Merl Saunder's Birthday Party at Great American Music Hall on Friday, February 17th in San Francisco, CA. Traveling kept me from the show last year, but as I've done many years before, I'm back getting to honor a great man who has treated me and my family as his own the past decade or more. We love Merl Saunders and his family. Its looking like my son Zach will be making a stage debut that night too if he gets his confidence up and "act" together. We're working on it. Check out the Great American Music Hall website for the full lineup that night, which includes Bill Kreuztman on drums with Tony's SF all-star band with Norton Buffalo, and some others.

I am over my flu/sick week from hell. I was actually not 100% over it until last Tuesday evening, the night before the Grammy Awards. I had a tinge of it hanging on, that sweaty sheen of nasty cold/hot fevery feeling lingering in the top layer of skin. However, while on my way to a meeting with somebody at Native Instruments in Hollywood, I stopped for a hot bowl of Green Curry with chicken and steamed rice at the RCA Thai Restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. It was hard to eat at first, because I was feeling hot, it was hot outside and the restaurant, well it was hard to tell between my temperature and the heat from the curry just whether or not the room air was right. What I do know is that within a hour of eating that delicous spicy green dish, I was normalizing for the first time in a week from the nastiest flu bug I've had in years. I'm also running a bit of an experiment here at home to see if perhaps the furnace that heats my master suite is the cause of some of the migraines I've been waking up with this winter. If the rooms gets too hot during the evening, I don't get enough sleep and am woken suddenly by a phone, our barking dumb dog or even an alarm, my head would just pound, requiring ice packs, three Excedrin and sometimes even a couple of Darvocet to knock it out, along with an eye mask to keep out the light and ear plugs to keep out the sound. We're going to have that furnace tested to see if its giving off anything it shouldn't, but meanwhile, since I got home from the Grammy Awards trip and have left it off overnight with the new warmer weather we are having up here in "Calabama," I've not awaken with a headache the past couple of days.

The Grammy trip was fun, but frankly it physically wore me out from the remaining pain damage from those two operations last year. I'm one of the lucky ones who got the chronic nerve pain post-surgery and am enjoying the wonderful routine of changing Duragesic pain patches every 48 hours, watching carefully what I lift (how heavy, how long I hold it, etc), and choosing my transportation and trips carefully. This has upset some who want me across country for meetings, but I just can't fly right now. It was all I could do to make it to LA in a Ford Expedition without even doing much of the driving. A plane for hours would be grueling.

In spite of the measured agony of the trip, a lot of walking and way too much standing, I got to see my favorite friends and colleagues in the industry from around the country that I've known, worked with or even just admired over the years. During the Nominees Celebration the night before the show, I was able to run into an old friend that was starting in the industry the same time as I, Clay Bradley, who was going to the university in Tuscaloosa, AL when I was playing that town. I used to play on his radio program, and turns out he was a "Nashville Bradley" and grandson of Owen Bradley. Ironically, Owen (along with his brother Harold and Chet Atkins) became my first landlords in Nashville in 1991 when I opened my first publishing office at 30 Music Square West. Clay most recently was responsible in his current career in A&R for signing Gretchen Wilson to Sony. He was at the Grammy Awards accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of Owen. Looks like he may head out to my neck of California for a fly fishing trip pretty soon. It will be good to see him.

Meanwhile, among several others at the parties and concerts I hit while there, I got the chance to snap a photo with a man whose work turned my world upside down when I was just a kid bringing home records by the Beatles. No, it wasn't Paul, who was on the show, but it was the engineer in the studio who recorded Paul for Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album (both of which I got in 5th grade with allowance money) and even Abbey Road. This photo is me with the great Geoff Emerick. I'm not worthy. :)

I've been asked if I wanted to do the opening slot for Merl Saunder's birthday party show at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, CA on February 17. The headliner act for Merl Saunders Birthday Party is a band featuring Norton Buffalo, Mic Gillette, Skip Mesquite, Tony Saunders, Bill Kreutzman. In years past I have opened and sometimes sat in as well. I haven't confirmed that I'll be playing this, but I was asked by Tony while I was down in San Francisco for a NARAS party on Nov 30th last year.

If I do the date, it's possible my oldest son, Zach, will make his debut on guitar on a song or two. Zach and I will be going down on Feb 2nd to see Jorma Kaukonen at the same place. Great American Music Hall is a great room that I have seen a lot of fun shows in and also had the pleasure of playing in many times over the past ten years. It's always a great time.

Looks like my first solo appearance in Redding is not happening now. I happened to stop by there for coffee today on the way home from a Dr's appointment and saw a flier on the door with two other guys playing this Friday. Apparently there was a double booking and I drew the short straw in getting canceled. I'm starting to remember now why I stopped doing a lot of live shows in small venues and took to only doing opening slots at big concert halls and theaters. :)

The first solo show I have done in a long time is taking place next week here in Redding, CA at a nice coffee house I frequent. Having not played one since late last year in San Francisco, I'm working up some new and old material to make sure I can fill a night without boring the crowd and myself in the process. I've been woodshedding with the TC VoiceLive and Boomerang units plugged into the Bose Personal Amplifcation System with my Gibson J200 and Gibson 160E, with a little Dobro added in, too. I plan to do some of my songs, both older and newer ones, plus some songs I played with Merl Saunders over the years, along with some other bluegrass, blues, country blues, Dylan/Garcia/Dead favorites and probably some stuff by The Band mixed in for good measure.

We are having such unusual weather for June here in Shasta County, with low temperatures and rain this whole week. Very odd, indeed, but it gives me little else to do if my off-hours but work in my studio or rehearse for the show. I'll be cutting vocal tracks tomorrow afternoon, and maybe doing some mixing, too. If the v3.9 upgrade for my UAD-1 card from Universal Audio would ever surface I could get so much more done. Here's hoping they are getting close. I miss using the plugins, plus some of my older unfinished mixes are looking for those plugins but can't find them since the v3.8 driver isn't compatible with OS X Tiger.