Down On The Corner
•How I Spent My Summer Vacation
That phrase used to strike terror into the hearts of fifth graders everywhere, and for all I know, still does. What we do over the summer, when "nothing is happening," sometimes moves us forward, sometimes backwards and sometimes drops us right back where we were.
It's my hope that my summertime activity will move LouisvilleMusic.net's music calendar forward a good bit. I've spent most of the last eight weeks or so holed up in my basement office, learning to write web code using two new and different tools, MySQL and PHP. The first is an open source database and the second, originally called Personal Home Page, is a tool for accessing MySQL databases and displaying the data on the web.
Why do I bore you with this? Well, because of speed, stability and relatively ease of writing this code, I have completely converted the online music calendar over to a highly searchable one, that finds and displays data very, very rapidly. In addition, you, the user, can search for any act with shows listed (or any active Louisville/Southern Indiana/Kentucky act in the database), or any live music venue in Louisville by name (or part of a name); you can also look up music series by name or search by the title of an event.
There is also a new combined search feature that will allow you to search for shows by a combination of date or range of dates, age restrictions, part of town (East, Downtown, South), kind of event (concert, festival, jam session, etc.) and main music genre. You could look up, for example, all the jazz and blues concerts and club shows happening during September in the East end or downtown.
The look-up for musical acts will currently show you the act's current calender, a bio photo if there is one, any web links we have and links to any articles about the act that we have online.
There is more in the planning stages. Search and sorting by various substyles of music is in the works, though this is much more complicated than the rest. My plan for the early part of fall is to have a page for individual acts to log on and pick their own styles by which they get categorized, as well as to contribute current data.
A music business links page is not far off - we have the info, just need the pages. A chat room is scheduled for down the line, as well as mp3 links. The usual stuff, in short, plus some other goodies we not ready to reveal.
So, please, log on to www.louisvillemusicnews.com and click on the "Calendar" tab. Try it out, see if it's useful and send us feedback - there's a tab for that as well.
And thanks for reading LMN.
• In other news, I keep hearing that Black Frank of the Fox has been saying tacky things about Jason Koerner, our Louisville Rock Lowdown columnist. Thanks, Frank, and remember to spell his name right - he can use all the publicity he can get and so can we.
•End of Me showcased for several major labels in New York back in the summer. Producer Malcolm Springer is now set to record a new demo for the band. Springer worked on the first Matchbox 20 album.
• We get the more-than-occasional request for help in finding lyrics. Inasmuch as this the age of the Internet, naturally we turned to the web for some resources. Here's part of the list, some of it shamelessly cribbed from About.com:
A Canadian site, www.lyricfind.com, lets you search by song title, artist or by the lyrics themselves It contains a "recommended" section that lists some of the most creative lyrics from current music as well as a "Top Ten" list of the most searched-for lyrics.
The www.lyricsrobot.com/ site searches for lyrics or act names for thousands of artists and songs.
http://www.harmony-central.com/ is a musician-oriented site that also has a search function for lyrics.
www.lyrics.com is a site for searching for lyrics by artist name, which is sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
www.kissthisguy.com/ is a site named after what is possibly Jimi Hendrix' most misheard lyric. Or was it? There's a message from a listener about it that suggests Hendrix sometimes sang it like that.
Finally, for a list of lyrics site, go to http://www.lyricsplanet.com/.
• Fender Musical Instruments Corporation and Fred Gretsch Enterprises, Ltd. have announced that the two companies have entered into an agreement granting Fender the exclusive rights to develop, produce, market and distribute Gretsch guitars worldwide. For more information, visit their web site at www.gretsch.com.