Jesse Sublett's Blog, page 13

Way out in South Austin

NEWS FLASH: now have a print edition of GRAVE DIGGER BLUES. For info on where to buy it, check the Grave Digger Blues page.

The author proofs his work.

SXSW is pretty much over. Our E-Book MeetUp on Tuesday went very well. Thanks to everyone for coming. My MeetUp co-host, Nettie Reynolds, took this pic of me performing the opening benediction, “Railroad Bill.”

Plugging Grave Digger Blues at SXSW

BOOK SIGNING: this is pretty cool. I’ll be singing and signing books at BookPeople Friday, April 5, 7 PM – 9 PM, alongside these really fine authors. And when I say “really fine,” I mean these guys write some truly wild, weird, hardboiled stories. They are: Frank Bill (Crime in Southern Indiana and Donnybrook), Matthew McBride (Frank Sinatra in a Blender), and Todd Robinson (Hard Bounce). Pretty cool, huh?

Here, some sights from my SXSW Saturday. We went to see Split Squad, a rockin’ band featuring Michael Gilby, Josh Kantor, Keith Streng (Fleshtones), and my old pals Eddie Munoz (the Skunks, the Plimsouls) and Clem Burke (Blondie). They were rockin’ it good on SoCo.

Split Squad at Yard Dog

Split Squad, Keith Streng & Eddie Munoz working the crowd

The Split Squad at Yard Dog’s SXSW Saturday party.

A Year of Sea Change in E-Publishing Book World

The Blues Cat, his blues was epic, like a film noir in real time, all those hard luck songs about trains and cheap whisky, jail, no money and bad women like shrapnel from a bomb embedded in his soul.

Today at 12:30 PM I’m co-hosting the E-Book MeetUp at SXSW Interactive. What a difference a year makes. Last year I hosted the E-Books MeetUp at SXSW Interactive. I was energized and inspired.

I was so jazzed by the possibilities and opportunities of E-books that I wrote about my experience publishing to the iPad, my ROCK CRITIC MURDERS debut novel, set in Austin music scene, 25 years earlier. This app, free for download on iTunes as of January 19, 2012, enabled the author to do so much. ENABLE!!! What a beautiful word, right? You could take this app and combine your music, graphics, video and other cool media right into the digital edition of your book. I had been wanting to publish my books with music since 1987! I remember asking my publisher, Viking Penguin — Hey, can we sell my novel, ROCK CRITIC MURDERS, with a CD or cassette of original Austin blues music?? No, they said, Can’t be done. Too expensive. Logistic nightmare. Nobody wants that.

How about a crappy little flexidisk, then? NO.

So on my third novel, I went in the studio and recorded an EP’s worth of original blues music with my pals at a studio in Burbank, California and gave cassette copies out with the first 100 novels sold at book signing events. We had great parties. Some people still remember the events fondly. Michael Connelly, yeah,him, the best selling author of THe Black Ice, Lincoln Lawyer, etc, he fell in love with that music. Every couple of years he asks me if I have more music, and in particular, he wants more versions of a song called “Rained All Night,” his favorite.

Mata Hari

iBooks Author made me flash back to 1977, when during punk movement we were DIY, and took that DIY approach and spirit to much cruder technology– street marketing, taking our music straight to the people, shake things up, etc. We didn’t achieve mainstream success but we DID inspire a movement of our own, and had a whole lotta fun.

Well, same thing happened with putting out books on the iPad, Kindle, and Smashwords. I mean, that was my experience. Here’s where I wrote about it for the Austin Chronicle, one year ago.

Link to the article here.

Ex-Punk Author, DIY or Die Forever

Test-driving the newest iBooks Author app (bumps ahead)

BY JESSE SUBLETT, FRI., MARCH 2, 2012

The ever optimistic author/musician, Jesse Sublett

Looking back, the Apple support technician deserves credit for keeping his cool with me. “I realize this is frustrating,” he told me. “This app was just released, you know, so I’m not very familiar with it.” No kidding. He wasn’t the first Apple rep I’d talked to who knew less about the program than I did.

The app in question, iBooks Author, enables the user to create e-pubs for the Apple iPad, which can be enhanced with audio, video, and 3-D graphics. It can be downloaded free from the App Store on iTunes and – in theory, at least – allows an author to painlessly self-publish a multisensory product for a mass audience.

When I first became a published author back in the late Eighties, the time lapse between the publisher accepting my finished manuscript and the book-launching party was about two years. Here’s one measure of how much things have changed since then: I was impatient with that Apple tech because I’d been trying to publish my book for two days. It took another two days before all the problems were solved and it appeared on the iTunes store for sale. Not bad.

And I wasn’t just publishing a book for an average e-reader, but a book with music, video, and tons of photos and art. Traditionally, if you told a publisher you wanted your book to be accompanied with some kind of music delivery device, like a CD or something, it was like asking for a book tour on the moon. As recently as three years ago, I watched a panel of publishers at South by Southwest Interactive subjected to the righteous wrath of a room full of bloggers on this very same subject. Their response was just as befuddled as when I asked Viking for the same thing in 1987.

You could say it’s been a long, strange trip for an ex-punk rocker and DIY writer/musician/artist.

My first knowledge of the upcoming release of iBooks Author 2 came just after New Year’s Day. I killed time between then and the Jan. 19 release date proofing the text of my first novel, Rock Critic Murders. I also uploaded a digital version to Amazon for delivery to Kindle and various other e-readers, including the iPhone and iPad, pricing it at $2.99 – about the cost of an order of breakfast tacos. The delivery process with Amazon was clunky, too. The interface is nonintuitive and support is less than satisfactory. Ideally, you can get your digital book up on the Amazon site in a couple of days, although my first one took over a week, and I’d give its support a C-minus. In the end, you get a digital book: text and graphics. Compared to the soaring experience of an enhanced iBook, Apple’s rivals give you a flightless, songless bird.

The story behind the print version of Rock Critic Murders also entails a trip through evolving technology. Originally published by Viking Penguin in 1989, it’s a hardboiled detective novel set in Austin of the mid-1980s. Protagonist Martin Fender is a blues bass player who moonlights as a skip tracer and detective. Martin lives in South Austin with his cats, sleeps late, lives on Tex-Mex, and when not on the road, can usually be found at the Continental Club – in many respects, an archetypical Austin musician/modern bohemian. He’s also kind of my alter ego.

I wrote Rock Critic Murders and its two sequels, Tough Baby and Boiled in Concrete, using Macintosh computers, beginning with a first-generation Mac 512K. Prior to that, I labored on borrowed typewriters, using the backs of leftover gig flyers for paper. Switching to the Mac, I used an early alternative to Microsoft Word called Write Now. Within a few years, Write Now was not only out of production, but documents created with it could not be converted to any other word processor I could find. To republish those books, they have to be scanned with an OCR program and meticulously proofed, which is an old-fashioned pain in the ass.

Backing up just a little further, it was in the pages of this very publication that Martin Fender first sprang to life. In early 1983, Chronicle editor (and SXSW co-founder) Louis Black asked me to write a few stories from the working musician’s perspective. I wrote several of them before I decided to test Louis’ patience by turning in, instead of straight journalism, a Martin Fender crime story wrapped around a half dozen or so strange vignettes from a recent band tour through the South and Midwest.

Louis was a little put off at first, but he ran the story. Louis and another Austin music critic, Ed Ward, told me they thought I had something and encouraged me to write more in that vein, maybe even a novel. I enjoyed the irony, because these same rock critics had inspired the novel. They hated my band, or at least they used to, so I had them killed in my first novel.

After helping me get through several drafts, Ward accompanied me and my wife, Lois (then and now an advertising rep at the Chronicle), to New York to meet some publishers. The editors we met ended up turning the book down, but I persevered, using the same do-it-yourself approaches and attitudes we all learned in the indie scene of the Seventies and early Eighties. You know, sending out a blizzard of demo tapes, pressing our own records, putting up gig flyers in a blizzard in NYC, doing interviews at every college radio station in the country, handing out swag, etc.

I no longer cared so much about becoming a rock star; I wanted to be the next Raymond Chandler. I sent out dozens of copies of manuscripts to agents and editors, called them on the phone, and asked dumb questions like “How do I get my books published?” and hit up published writers I knew for introductions to their agents and editors.

Finally, I ended up talking to an editor at Viking Penguin in New York named Lisa Kaufman. She’d heard of my bands but had not seen me play, and over the course of a rambling conversation, I managed to pique her interest and she asked to read my manuscripts. Two weeks later, Kaufman, now at PublicAffairs, offered me my first publishing deal.

Three of those novels were published, but none hit the bestseller list. I still write and still play music. Maybe if I had been more successful, I wouldn’t have remained such a DIY guy. But for better or worse, that’s what I remain.

Which brings us back to the iBooks Author app and why I love it so. It’s empowering, for one thing. For the first time, I’m able to present Martin Fender with a soundtrack. When I was writing these stories, I always heard the music in my head. Sometimes I’d make up a title of a song for a particular scene. I’d write the scene and later on, pick up an instrument and write the song. A half dozen of those songs are included in the iBook reissue, with the full title of Rock Critic Murders: 25th Anniversary Edition for the iPad.

Before, the novels always seemed incomplete. Besides the music, I really wanted the reader to feel, smell, and taste my vision of Austin. In the new iBook, they also get video postcards (recorded on my iPhone and iPad) from a dozen or more of my favorite places in Austin, from the Continental Club to Mount Bonnell to Texas Coffee Traders. Plus, they get songs by the Skunks and a live video of us playing “Earthquake Shake” last August at Threadgill’s World Headquarters, another of my favorite places. There’s a lot of extra media in the book about the Skunks, because, after all, that’s where the bulk of the musical background informing the novels originated. The book wouldn’t have been complete without a couple of interview clips with my longtime pal and guitar hero from the Skunks, Jon Dee Graham, who is probably a better storyteller than I am, or Billy Blackmon, our drummer, who has few equals in the irony department.

Best and most appropriate of all, I suppose, are the video commentaries from contemporary or former rock critics, including Louis Black, Ed Ward, Margaret Moser, Robert Draper, and Joe Nick Patoski. They all answered my request for contributions in different ways. Some of them talked about the music scene depicted in my books; others talked about Martin Fender as if they knew him personally.

Louis Black wanted an interview, so I began with a question that countless other musicians have always wanted to ask: “Louis, why did you hate my band so much?”

“Because you were popular,” he said. “I think most critics liked to support bands that nobody liked.”

Then I asked how he felt about the way that music critics in general were so crudely caricaturized in Rock Critic Murders.

“Actually,” he said, “I think the only critics who were mad about the book were the ones who didn’t get murdered in it.”

What a great time for a DIY guy to live in. If not for the technology revolution, I probably would have never known the answer to that question. Now I’ve got it on video, along with statements from some individuals who, a lifetime ago, were among my harshest critics. Who knows? I might make stars out of them yet.

Well, anyway, here we are. That was then, this is now.

In the spring of 2012, eBooks were gaining big momentum, selling more on Amazon than their cousins in the old Gutenberg print/paper format. Some people I actually knew QUIT THEIR DAY JOB — yes! one was a REAL ESTATE AGENT– to devote their time to writing and releasing several books a year to Kindle alone, with enough time left over to waste playing golf and going fishing.

AFTER YEARS of feeling kind of beaten down by the system –books out of print, frustrated trying to get new agent, new publisher, being over edited and second guessed by editors and copy editors in many different writing fields, from TV to video games, Reality TV, film, plays, magazines, etc…. Apple gave us iBooks Author, a way to do what I’d always wanted, on my own schedule. After Rock Critic Murders was out on iPad and Kindle (followed by their sequels) I wrote and released a brand new surrealistic detective novel, GRAVE DIGGER BLUES to iPad, organically developed FOR the iPAD, with over 100 wild photos, graphics and other media, plus audio chapters and original blues soundtrack. I was very thrilled with the end result.

IPAD EDITION COVER BY RICARDO ACEVEDO

Click here for more information on Grave Digger Blues. 

To check out the Blues Deluxe Edition for iPad, click here.

If you don’t have an iPad, you can download the Kindle version from Amazon and read it on almost anything, including you iPhone. That version has the graphics, but no music. HOWEVER…

All the music is incorporated into the iPad edition of Grave Digger Blues can be downloaded here.

And if you’re still looking for a cheap, Bare Bones Edition, for $.99 you can buy it from Smashwords, text only.

I wasn’t able to quit my day job, working as a ghost writer and freelance journalist, musician, etc. Sold a few copies, got some great reviews. But many people, including many friends said, LOOKS COOL. BUT I DON”T DO EBOOKS. IF IT WAS A REAL BOOK I’D BUY IT.

Were they telling the truth? Or were they just a bunch of lame friends? Slackers, in other words?

Some of these same musings were put into my recent blog, SEVEN STAGES OF EPUBLISHING GRIEF. The piece is at least half tongue in cheek, but sincere about the fact that one, an old-fashioned book-book is still THE thing for a lot of people. And so when presented with an opportunity to publish — release — sell at gigs, whatever — actual print copies of my latest novel, Grave Digger Blues, I jumped at the chance.

BLURB, the self-publishing platform made that possible, and practical. The quality of Blurb’s printing is great. The photos and drawings came out better than I imagined they might. I’m in love again. It’s even more exciting than doing my first iPad book.

I’ve become a micro publisher. I’m ordering small print runs of Grave Digger Blues to make available at neighborhood bookstores, gigs, and other events. If my fans are dying for a physical copy of my novel, I’ve got the thing they want, for a mere $19.95 US, defaced by de author.

So here we are, full circle, or something. You figure it out.

 

The author checks a proof copy of his latest mistresspiece.

 

BLEU MONDAY

Jesse, Secret Six

A quick blog this morning as we clear away the fog. Had a fine time Sunday morning at the Standard brunch at Swift’s Attic. First up as we came in the door, Kelly Truesdale of Standard and Samantha Howe of Blurb. It was nice to attach faces to the names of the cool people we’ve been coordinating with for SXSW and the whole E-Publishing thing. Standard is a very, very cool online magazine of style and art, and Blurb is a publishing/print-on-demand platform and new model publishing concept for writers, photographers, artists and other creative types seeking new ways of getting their work before the public. On hand were print editions of the latest Standard, showcasing the excellent print quality Blurb has to offer, and it wasn’t until we got home that I really, really looked at the magazine and found photo essay profiles of the Standard people we dined with.

[Note: For more info on this, read my post THE 7 STAGES OF E-BOOK GRIEF].

 

Walking into the room, I heard that unmistakeable shimmering tone of a Collings guitar, which was being played by a singer / songwriter type, name unknown to me, as he serendaded the guests. I wanted to grab the guitar and treat the folks to my rendition of Death Letter, but alas, he wasn’t playing in Open G and I’d left my set of slides at home. Collings are made right here in Austin and the man behind Collings, Steve McCreary, was also one of the guests, giving life to the photo essay on his fine company.

Collings guitar, at birth, in Standard magazine, online & print edition

Kelly Truesdale, Publisher, Standard Magazine, inside a screen shot of the online version of the SXSW edition

This is what the Standard magazine interface looks like.

Expect to see these people at the E-Book MeetUp hosted by my terrible self and Nettie Reynolds Tuesday, 12:30-1:30 at Proof Annex. There will be copies of this magazine available, and also, if you are interested, you can see my the very FIRST print edition of my latest novel, GRAVE DIGGER BLUES. I’ve ordered a very small print run of special editions that I’ll be signing at events around Austin in the near future.

Also, be aware that the digital versions of the Martin Fender mystery novels, set in Austin in the 1980s, are free to Amazon Prime members today and tomorrow only. That’s ROCK CRITIC MURDERS, TOUGH BABY and BOILED IN CONCRETE.

The next MURDER BALLAD MONDAY at The Buzz Mill, featuring my terrible self and special guest Bruce Salmon, an early show, 7:30-9 PM, will be April Fool’s Day. That’s April 1, 2013 for all you newbies.

The author checks a proof copy of his latest mistresspiece.

One final quick note:

Please check out this temporary page of photos by Bill Leissner. Be warned, however, that you might get tired of seeing my face, as all the photos in my collection are of bands I was in during the 1980s. That includes The Skunks reunion show 1985, plus Secret Six, Flex and Hang Em High. Those last 3 bands covered a total of about 4 years and 18 truck loads of Aqua Net hair spray.

The Skunks Reunion 1985, Jon Dee Graham foreground, Jesse Sublett on bass

“THEY’RE HERE!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” SXSW 2013 BEGINS

It’s here. Go with it, or leave town and do a VRBO with your house!

Please be aware of our E-Book MeetUp, Tuesday Mar. 12, 12:30-1:30 at the Proof Annex, featuring my terrible self, NETTIE REYNOLDS, our sponsors, Blurb, and many of our esteemed writing and publishing and publicizing friends, including Standard Magazine. Read the full description here, and my blog post here, in which I talk about my little journey publishing my surrealistic detective novel GRAVE DIGGER BLUES as an enhanced iPad, then to Kindle, Smashwords and finally, what a strange surprise….. a print edition, being released on April 1, or a few days sooner…

The book looks like THIS.

and this:

and… and …

7 STAGES OF EPUBLISHING GRIEF

Out of Print…

1. SHOCK & DENIAL & PATHOLOGICAL BULLSHITTING. Yes, even you authors of high body-count murder mysteries may be SHOCKED to realize that you are OOP (Out of Print). With no prospective publishing deals in the works, even your friends at the bar have stopped asking, “Hey, when’s your next book coming out?” Because they know, you know, it ain’t.

2. PAIN & GUILT, YOU TRY POETRY. You start thinking you’re washed up, a has-been. Worse yet, a never-were. Your parents were right, you should’ve gotten that law degree or plumber’s license so you’d have “something to fall back on,” instead of falling on your face. You write a few poems and submit them to poetry zines. You feel dirty afterward. You can’t believe how conscientious these little hipster rags are about sending out rejection letters and explaining in great detail why your work didn’t make the cut.

 

3.ANGER, DRUNKEN BUTT DIALING:. You drink to excess, because that’s what writers do. And one night at the bar with your phone in your back pocket, you blame your agent’s gender confusion and braided nose hairs for all your problems with publishers, and as luck would have it, your agent’s number is on your speed dial and that’s the call that gets you in trouble.  She takes it like a man: She has the whole rant transcribed and posts it on Facebook and it goes viral. Now even those dinky little university presses won’t touch you.

 

4. DEPRESSION, REFLECTION, CRAIGSLIST ADDICTION. You want to feel superior to someone–anyone, so you obsessively scan the employment ads on craigslist so you can laugh at all the pathetic job offerings there.

BLOGGER WANTED: We need MOTIVATED writers who create eye candy for readers, compelling prose that TOTALLY EXITS [SIC] readers. Can you write like 30 or 40 short articles a day? Send us like 20 sample stories on something really cool. Pay is $5 per article.

5. THE UPWARD TURN, GOING DIGITAL. You’ve always hated Kindles and Nooks and eReaders, but then Apple comes out with its iBook Author app, where you can publish your book for the iPad with music and pictures and video, 3-D, and all that cool stuff, and you start dreaming again. Creative juices flowing, you write like a house on fire, and then you learn the app and you actually publish your own book and release it to the iBookstore, which only keeps 30% of your sales. Then you put it out on Kindle and Smashwords.

In the early spring of 2012, eBook sales are booming. Sales of eBooks have outstripped sales of old fashioned print books. A major factor in this phenomenon is the Kindle Prime program. Authors enroll their book in the Kindle Prime Program–authors offer their book for free during short promotions, then, according to some obscure algorithm, are paid a share of a large pool of money , their share determined on how many people downloaded your book. Does anyone read these free books? Surely some people do. How many? Who knows.

It sounds like the worst ripoff in the history of writers getting screwed, but for some crazy reason, free works.  You actually know of writers who couldn’t get arrested before, and then they started publishing to Kindle and they have quit their day jobs. No, they’re not in the Nicholas Sparks bracket yet, but they are making enough to survive and pay the mortgage every month. Not bad. Some of the successful ones even blog about it, bragging about how many copies of their books were downloaded for free and how much money they made from that, and the buzz from it helped actual sales, too. And the kicker is, these authors aren’t exactly in the Michael Ondaatje league–hell, they’re not even in the Mickey Spillaine league–but they’re making money writing. As the saying goes, it sure beats working.

 

6. RECONSTRUCTION, WORKING THROUGH, AMAZON GETS PICKY ABOUT AUTHORS WRITING THEIR OWN REVIEWS. 

Not that you would ever do this, or maybe you’d do one or two and then remove them once the “real” reviews started coming in. But it’s a sign that change is in the wind. The digital tidal wave is losing steam. Or maybe it was all hype to begin with. Maybe it wasn’t the “books” part of “eBooks” that people were excited about, but the “e.” That is, all the guys in the high rise board rooms who really run the world decided that Kindles, iPads, Nooks and whatever were supposed to be the new electronic gadget everybody has to have, and fortunately there was no shortage of suckers out there willing to work for free to provide the digital products these gadgets snacked on.

Which is just another way of saying that your statements from Amazon and Smashwords and iTunes have been on the underwhelming side.

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE, YOU GO BACK TO PRINT 

Remember way back in the old days, like 2001, 2003, etc., when every time you got on an airplane or talked to a security guard or something, they were reading a paperback book? Nine times out of ten it was a blockbuster, what they call an “airport” novel. We’re talking about James Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, etc., not exactly the avant gard guys, right? So one thing about e-publishing that always appealed to you was the DIY aspect, the idea that the little guy can do it on his own, and mud in the eye to the giant publishing conglomerates. Right?

But now you get on a plane and about the same number of people are reading on their Kindle, iPad or Nook, even their iPhones. And guess what? They’re reading James Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, etc., the same old stuff. Blockbusters, airport novels. Not the avant hard. Not the little guy.

And another thing is, many people you know, not just your mother and your extended family, and the old gang down at the guitar store, but almost all of your writer friends, and almost everyone you know, are not going to buy your eBook. They’re not going to spend two minutes moving their browser over to Amazon or iTunes to buy it, they are not even going to spend 60 seconds to download the sample, or ten seconds to hit the ratings link and give you five stars or even one star.

Well, friends can be like that. That’s just how it is. Also, a large number of them have said, “Hey, I just don’t do eBooks. I still love book-books. I love the feel of a real book in my hands.”

You think about that. Come to think about it, you can relate to that. Sure, you buy eBooks occasionally and you’re always reading McSweeney’s on your iPhone, but nothing beats a real, live forest-decimating book-book.

So you find out about this outfit called Blurb . “Blurb“ is a word that will make the seasoned author nod his or her head knowingly. A real writer knows when a colleague needs a blurb. All they have to do is send you the book. Maybe their agent sends it to you and says, “Johnny X wanted you to have a copy of his new book.” That does not mean Johnny X actually wants you to read the book, nor does it mean Johnny X really hopes you like it. Johnny X wants a blurb, like: “With this ticking time bomb of a memoir, Johnny X gives the hipster generation the reedy, nicotine-stained, but lyrical howl in the darkness it truly deserves.”

And Blurb is also the name of the company that offered to sponsor your eBook MeetUp at SXSW 2013.

Blurb is basically a print-on-demand, self-publishing company with a number of bells and whistles not offered by the average book printer. Yes, as you peruse the website and notice all the coffee table size formats, the emphasis on high quality color printing, it does appear that the average Blurb customer might be someone who is so fond of the photos they took on their trip to the Grand Canyon or Barcelona or whatever, they want a permanent physical artifact, like a book. But Blurb also has a proprietary book formatting program called Booksmart, which allows even novelists, bloggers and poets to upload their work into various templates, which can be manipulated and customized to a large degree.

The help desk at Blurb   is also very quick and thorough as well. And when you finally (yes, there’s a learning curve and the app isn’t as good as sex, but what is?) get your book formatted and ordered and it arrives via Fed Ex in about seven days (there are several options, but the one week shipping rate is a pretty good deal (hey listen, maybe if Hemingway had been able to ship off a manuscript and get the books back in seven days he wouldn’t have committed suicide…) the print quality is pretty impressive.

It really is. No kidding. A lot of the stuff in items 1 — 6  is not necessarily true. I’ve been writing a long time now and as you know, writers are not all that reliable when it comes to the facts. Plus I had to go along with the Seven Steps of Grief format. Obviously, I do have a handful of good friends, including writers, who took a few minutes out of their busy schedules (and happy hours) to write some cool blurbs for my book, and I think they were halfway sincere when they said they liked it and they think it’s pretty good.

In any event, now that we’re on the 7th stage of E-Book Grief, we’re sticking to the facts.

Around the first of February I started working on the BookSmart app and ended up deciding to self-publish, in print, my entire last novel, Grave Digger Blues. So what if various other digital editions already exist–even a Blues Deluxe Edition for the iPad that has my original blues soundtrack, numerous audio chapters with jazz soundtracks by Johnny Reno and myself, and 100s of photos and drawings, plus some video. I decided to rethink the visuals on the print edition and replaced most of the ones from the digital versions. I found lots of public domain photos of atomic bomb tests, silent movie vamps from the 1920s and 1930s, and even some great shots of Marilyn Monroe. Plus my drawings of women, armadillos and grizzly bears. Nearly all of these images all printed out quite well in black and white on uncoated paper. And the new cover looks very, very good.

I ordered 2 print copies so I could proof the text one more time and also give one copy to a friend who collects my work and is just a great guy, anyway. He happens to be an attorney and for some reason this made me reconsider some of the material in the book, which some might have considered libelous or defamatory, so I made a few last minute changes in that area, too.

The book is a surreal detective story, set in the near future or, as we often say, it’s the story of Hank Zzbynx, the last detective at the end of the world. The book also has a few of my songs in it, as well as the parallel story of a doomed jazz musician called The Blues Cat. I’ve written about this book a lot elsewhere, including on this blog, so just check this link, and Amazon, and iTunes, to read that stuff about it.

Left, my Hot Rod Steel single cone resonator guitar; Right, white metal chair.

So I’ve become truly self-published, I reckon. I’m doing a micropublishing venture.

I’m as excited about having copies–PRINT COPIES–of Grave Digger Blues as I’ve been about anything I’ve created in the last 30–40 years and released to the public. We’ll be doing some small book signing events and readings in the near future (after the tidal wave of madness a k a SXSW passes, that is), and I’ll bring some with me to sell at gigs, too. And I’ll bring the print copy to our E-Book MeetUp on Tuesday, March 13, at SXSW 2013. Representatives from Blurb will be there, and also people from Standard magazine, and myself and Nettie Reynolds, the fabulous Austin author/ book publicist/ performance artist.

Also, I guess I’ll find out if all those people who said, Hey, if that was a book-book, I’d buy it, were telling the truth.

Listen, I’ve had fun. In 1978, I started a band called The Skunks with two of my pals and in about 6 weeks time the band was the talk of the town. At the same time  I was in a band called The Violators, with Kathy Valentine (later of the Go-Go’s) and Carla Olson (later Textones). We helped ignite the punk/new wave scene in Austin, Texas, which jump-started Austin into its LIVE MUSIC CAPITAL OF THE WORLD reality. The Skunks had a pretty good run. In 1987 my wife and I moved to Los Angeles so I could write detective novels, and six weeks after we moved there, I had a publishing deal with Viking Penguin, which published my first three books: Rock Critic Murders, Tough Baby and Boiled in Concrete. In Los Angeles I was living the life — a novelist, screenwriter, working in documentary television, and playing in bands with ex-Go-Go’s and ex-Rolling Stones, among other people and fun times. Stuff like that.

I’ve published more books. I started painting and have done art shows.   Now and then I even write poetry. (No, I never submit it. I’m not that crazy.) I have a great time doing my gigs, playing murder ballads and blues.

Acceptance & Hope? A real writer never accepts things as they are. He writes his own reality. Hope? I don’t know, it’s just another form of visualization. Right now I’m visualizing a real book with my crazy ideas inside it, raising hell, howling at the moon, and it feels pretty good.

I dig things that are cool.

 

 

Playing Footsy While Rome Burns

If John McCain had a colostomy, Lindsey Graham would carry the bag.

(Credit: AP Photo/CBS News, Chris Usher)(defaced by Jesse Sublett)

So, today, a little political update. I like Salon a lot, but sometimes I think their graphics are a little weak, thus, this morning’s slightly altered graphic. You can read the salon.com post here.

FROM SALON: SENATE COMMITTEE SET TO VOTE ON OBAMA’S CIA CHOICE

The Senate Intelligence Committee will vote Tuesday on John Brennan’s nomination

BY BY RICHARD LARDNER

You can read the salon.com post here.

TUESDAY, MAR 5, 2013 07:27 AM CST

WASHINGTON (AP) — John Brennan’s nomination to be director of the CIA is set for a key test before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Brennan, who is currently serving as President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser in the White House.

Brennan’s nomination to lead the spy agency has been held up by demands from Democrats and Republicans for more details about the classified Justice Department legal opinions that justify the use of unmanned spy planes to terrorist suspects overseas, including American citizens, and about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya.

Obama nominated Brennan to be CIA director in early January. If the intelligence committee, which is controlled by the Democrats, approves the nomination, it would then move to the full Senate for consideration.

By the way, back to the usual pop and pulp culture topics, I want to thank everyone for coming out Monday night to my Murder Ballad Show at The Buzz Mill. We had a great gig!

And about that print edition, softcover, illustrated, 200 pages of hardboiled detective story in a surrealistic stew, GRAVE DIGGER BLUES, I just want to say that our micro publishing experiment is progressing nicely, and I should have a small stock of printed copies soon, and will convey info on orders, preorders, book signing gigs, etc., very soon. All this has been possible through the urging of some fine people at Blurb.com, who encouraged me to give their alternative publishing model a try. I’ll talk more about that, and introduce my new friends at our SXSW Meetup Tuesday Mar. 12 (the fabulous Nettie Reynolds will be there too). Details here. Proof is in the pulp fiction pudding, below.

Right, proof copy, left, author

Cheers,

Jesse

Friday Favorites

OK so it’s Friday, so here are some of my favorite things.

JON DEE GRAHAM’S BIRTHDAY PARTY, which was last night, at Maria’s Tacos. Jon Dee played for us, working on his birthday, as he tends to do, and so we were all reminded what a gift he is. Mike Hardwick accompanied him, although the size of Mike’s contributions kind of make the word “accompanied” seem inadequate. Suffice to say, if you’re a fan of Jon Dee Graham, and you go way back to the origins of his groove as a solo performer / bandleader, then you’re aware that a good deal of Jon Dee’s material from his first two albums was developed this way, just the two of them, together, melding their harmonic and melodic grooves. It was grand to hear the early material like this again.

Jon Dee Graham’s birthday party at Maria’s had many cool guests in attendance

Not surprisingly, Maria did a superb job decorating. It was post card perfect. Lots of cool friends were there and a grand time was had by all, I’m sure.

I’ve probably said this before, in this space, but Jon Dee and I met when he was 19 years old, a Plan 2 student at UT with a brilliant career ahead of him, but that was all ruined when he auditioned for The Skunks, to replace the departing Eddie Munoz (who went off to be Elvis Costello‘s guitar tech, then guitarist with the Plimsouls), and Jon Dee got the job, as you may know. Then he went on to other things. UT’s loss was the art world’s gain.

MONDAY IS MURDER BALLAD MONDAY AT THE BUZZ MILL.

I am playing solo 7:30-9 PM Monday March 4. I love this new joint. It’s just off I35 down Riverside on 1505 Town Creek. Sure, you know where Walgreen’s is, right? It’s just West of that, on the North side of Riverside. Before Emo’s or Antone’s or whatever it’s called now. See my blog about the gig here, or just come out. It’s free, for all you cheapskates, and it’s early, for all you elderly 9 to 5 types, and there are drink specials, for all of you lounge lizards. The Facebook event link is here.

SPEAKING OF THE SKUNKS, we will be playing at the super fab MARGARET MOSER BIRTHDAY EVENT, which is being organized by Jon Dee’s son, William Harries Graham. Confirmed performers include The Skunks, Kathy Valentine, Mystic Knights of the Sea, with many other super special guests yet to be announced, so an eye on Facebook or whatever social media pipeline suits you, for more details. Margaret Moser‘s precise birth date happens to be May 14, and mine is May 15, the same year, and Eddie Munoz and Lesley Woods are May 16; and there are many other notable Taureans are around, as you may know.

AND THEN THERE’S SXSW. Nettie Reynolds and I are hosting an EBOOK MEETUP Tuesday March 12, 12:30 PM, details here . It’s sponsored by BLURB. It will be a cool opportunity for all of you who are working with, trying to figure out, or simply curious about going digital with your writing life. It’s been a very, very interesting year for me in the world of EPublishing, and I’m not saying it’s been all wonderful and that I am now an eTycoon or an eNicholas Sparks, or whatever, but I’ve learned a lot and been incredibly inspired. As you can see.

Secret backstage scenes after the Republican coup, as chronicled in Grave Digger Blues.

If you have not yet downloaded my latest noir novella, GRAVE DIGGER BLUES, I hope you will give it a shot very soon. You can buy the Kindle version here, or the Blues Deluxe iPad Edition here. And if you’re really cheap, the Smashwords Bare Bones Edition, text only, is here, for $.99.

GRAVE DIGGER BLUES may in fact be too weird for you. Maybe you’d rather listen to Celine Dion and wear elephant plaid to your high school reunion.

 

 

MURDER BALLAD MONDAY

Left, my Hot Rod Steel single cone resonator guitar; Right, white metal chair.

Happy to announce that I’ll be playing at Buzz Mill Monday, March 4, 7-9 PM. It’s Murder Ballad Monday, and we’re planning on making a regular thing of it.

What are murder ballads? Well, you can check wikipedia if you want. There’s a pretty good book on the topic, co-edited by Greil Marcus, The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love & Liberty in the American Ballad. You can sort through the reviews and comments on the book on this Goodreads entry. One more recommendation: People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, a great box set of old music about, guess what, murder, disaster, floods, etc. A lot of the songs are about the Titanic, several more are about train wrecks. Some good discussion can be found here.

I’ve added a couple of my favorite murder ballads here: Stones in the Coffin and St. James Infirmary Blues. I’ll try to add more later in the week.

STONES IN THE COFFIN

Saint James Infirmary Blues

I like crime fiction, noir and blues. Once you’ve been exposed to a bit of this stuff, you’ll get it. I’ve posted a number of my demos here in the last couple of years, and I’ll try to post more between in the next few days.

Buzz Mill, brought to you by the guys behind Emo’s and Antone’s, is a great new addition to our East Travis Heights / East Riverside neighborhood. It’s just a few blocks east of I-35, down Riverside on Town Creek Drive. It’s a 24-hour espresso bar with a full service bar, a beer garden and a barbecue trailer in the beer garden. Check it out. It’s become one of my satellite offices.

Monday I’ll be rolling out my new Reso guitar, upright bass and Gibson J-50, and my latest collection of dark blues and murder ballads. I haven’t played out much in the last few months, so I hope some of you can make it. It’s free and it’s early.

GOP Flop Sweat

Where did this kid come from? I mean, who thought it was a bright idea to have junior Marco deliver the response to President Obama’s State of the Union address? The speech was a by-the-numbers right wing attack speech that could have been written back during the days of Milli Vanilli. Nothing about voter suppression. Why did he vote against the Violence Against Women Act on this very day? It’s not even controversial. No wonder he’s got dry mouth.

The GOP ran a robot for President. He lost. They sent a thirsty boy next.

A Texas Congressman named Steve Stockman intived Ted Nugent to the speech. The less said about Nuget here the better. But if Steve Stockman was hoping to be remembered as the stupidest man in the US. he’s got our vote.

Big day for Mario, however. He shaved for first time AND gave his first State of the Union response.

TEN REASONS TED NUGENT WAS INVITED TO THE STATE OF THE UNION

Steve Stockman, a US Representative from, guess where, Texas, has invited Ted Nugent to be his guest at the State of the Union address by President Obama. You may be wondering why. For more info about this Stockman character, click here.

Nugent has made no secret of his hatred for Barack Obama. He’s a rabid right winger. He is beloved by the NRA, and not just because he loves to shoot animals, including at least one rhinoceros. He’s made lewd, violent suggestions about what he thinks President Obama and also Hillary Clinton should do with his assault rifle. Given the serious problems our nation is facing–including climate change, the economy, voter suppression, and a very serious debate about ways to keep innocent citizens from being murdered by the truckload by people who buy military weapons as easily as you can go buy a quart of milk–you might be wondering, Why the heck would anyone invited a foul-mouthed, hateful idiot like Ted Nugent to a serious, important event like the State of the Union address?



Also, if you are a kind of a music fan under the age of 60, you might be asking, “Who the heck is Ted Nugent, anyway?”

Here are Ten Reasons Ted Nugent was invited to attend the State of the Union address by the president.



1. Krusty the Clown was already booked.

2. A bucket of pond scum carefully considered the invitation and then declined.

3. Ted is curious to see what a bona fide rock star looks like.

4. They are cleaning Ted’s cage at the zoo that day anyway.

6. Stockman is a huge Nugent fan. But we wonder what his wife thinks of lyrics like these, from “Stranglehold”:

Here I come again now baby

like a dog in heat…

You ran that night you left now baby

You put me in my place

I got you in a stranglehold baby

then I crushed your face

7. Ed Gein wasn’t available.

8. Because musicians like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen, for example, sell millions of records and have won multiple Grammys. Ted Nugent sells dozens of records and no one has heard of him except your old Gramma.

9. Because large crowds have an adverse affect on Stockman’s pet chicken, Bushmaster, who suffers from irritable bowel syndrome.

10. In Congressman Stockman’s words, “I am sick and tired of Rick Perry getting credit for being the stupidest Texan in the world.”