Whatever

Hey, we're back. Happy to see us or is that a copy of Bone in your pocket? Yeah, yeah, yeah… it was a long summer and we just didn't feel like it, okay? Alright already. We busted our butts on The Soundtrack to the Scene Volume One CD release. We spent the summer collecting press clippings and sucking up to DJ’s and writers. Argh, writers! Don't ever let me become one. We got really great articles and reviews and magazines all over the place like Alternative Press, New England Performer, Lollipop, Vox, The Burlington Free Press, Durchsehen, the Collegian, Exclaim Magazine, Instant Magazine, New Rock Review, Thicker and CMJ. We got the disc played all over the country and a whole bunch of stations reported it to trades like CMJ, including WRUV and WJSC… both at Number One! Of course, we got ignored by a bunch of big bullies too but the experience was overall rewarding and cool. Some of the bands met record company weasels because of their exposure, and that's good to hear. Next!

But we didn't spend the whole summer sitting on our backsides. What did we do? Lots: we hosted a great show called Good Citizen Takes Over City Hall that featured Slush, Twelve Times Over, Rocketsled, Envy and The Pants and we had a huge mosh pit right where the city council sits every week. No truth to the rumor that Mayor Clavelle was spotted crowd surfing. It was a great turn out and kicked off the whole whoops Burlington / Vermont / New England music conference weekend in Burlington. The Vermont Jam concerts down at the waterfront were a great opportunity for Vermonters to absorb and acknowledge the work of their homegrown musicians. We started work on the Good Citizen Radio Hour, a weekly program hosted by Nicole Hegeman and myself. We're recording live concerts out at the amazing Eclipse Recording Studio in Hinesburg with producer and all around nice guy Joe Egan. We've already recorded The Pants, Rocketsled and Wide Wall and we'll be doing a whole bunch more Burlington bands before the show starts running. Where, when etc…. stay tuned. We'll let you know 

What else? Oh yeah… we've decided to work on the record label idea for a while, so we released our second project, the new long playing compact disc from my band Chin Ho that we like to call Exhaust. And in October we’ll unveil a rocking new CD from Burlington's hard-funk monsters DysfFunkShun that they're calling Home on the Range. It rips. And then later this Fall we'll have The Soundtrack to the Zine Volume Two featuring some of our area is coolest Jazz and acid jazz bands like Belizbeha, Science Fixion, Baby's Nickel Bag, New Nile Orchestra, DaVinchi, Freefall, Jenni Johnson and many others. We're always looking for Vermont bands to do things with, so if you qualify… write us and introduce yourself. We're harmless.

We've got other stuff on the way. We've got our first video- The Good Citizen Video to the Soundtrack to the Scene Volume One. It's a rocking live tape of performances at Club Toast that was filmed by Azure Moon Productions during the May 4th and 5th CD release party- all 16 bands in a 2-hour video. We’ll be premiering the film at Burlington's Contour Auditorium in City Hall on Sunday, November 5 at 7 pm. We're also debuting the first Good Citizen Calendar, a big time glossy affair with twelve black and white photographs voted by Good Citizen photographers as some of their favorites of the past year. Included are some really great shots like Pat Santini's Infamous Twelve Times Over, Mark Sasahara classic Wide Wail, Larry Shea’s Gordon Stone standing in a graveyard and Matthew Thorsen's photograph of a hollerin’ Tom Lawson of The Pants taken at the Paralisk in Montpelier. This calendar is a great way to raise funds for the magazine and support the work of our starving photographers at the same time. We'll have a reception and unveiling of the calendar at Magic Hat on Tuesday, November14 at 7 pm, and let our paparazzi display their goods. We'll see you there.

Breathe deep. Okay. We're also working on a tour to be called The Vermont Invasion: A Good Citizen Militia featuring Wide Wail, Chin Ho and The Pants. All Points Booking is looking for colleges up and down the east coast that are hip to the impending Burlington explosion and hopefully we'll meet a lot of new people and make friends everywhere we go.

And, we're in the pre-production stages of The Soundtrack to the Scene Volume Three: Burlington does Burlington. We're getting a bunch of Burlington bands to choose and cover the songs of other Burlington bands, past or present. We've already got Slush doing Black Hairy Tongue. DysFunkShun is covering Chin Ho, Ken Sleeps Naked takes on Pinhead, 12 Times Over is doing Streaming Broccoli. Jesus Nut has signed on to cover Epitaph. The new band featuring Danny Donovan and Brad Searles called Starlight Conspiracy is tackling a Do It Now Foundation song. And there are some really cool surprises in the works, too. We're kind of hoping that we can get the musicians in our area thinking about their fellow musicians and raise some desperately needed funds for the ‘zine at the same time.

Okay. as you were. Go see a band will ya? And be a good citizen.