Observations from the Woodshop

  This past Sunday, “The Meandering Chair” and I had the opportunity to visit back stage at the Mountain Stage radio show. I have been a listener and a fan of this show, since it’s inception, 27 years ago.  As far as I’m concerned this show is  one of the best things West Virginia has to offer.  For us, it is less than an hour drive away.  Parking is free and very easy.  It is very reasonable [ actually cheap] to get in, and you get  two and a half hours of great live music.  The list of outstanding musicians that we have had the opportunity to see there is extensive,  but just a few that are high on my list include; The Band, Natalie Merchant, Leo Kottke, Bela Fleck, Arlo Guthrie, Hugh Masakela, Richard Thompson, Greg Brown, and The Indigo Girls.  It also seems that almost everytime I go, I discover someone , that I like, that I wasn’t really familiar with before.  The show is in an intimate venue, there’s not a bad seat in the house, so if you are ever in the area when they are taping a show, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
       The circumstances that led up to us being invited to a taping of  Mt. Stage  all started with  our visit to Festivall, where we ran into several folks from the show.  My goals going to the show were to see if I could get a few more members of the crew and house band to pose with the chair, and if I was lucky I might be able to get one of the guest artists to use the chair on stage during their performance.  As far as getting an artist to use the chair on stage, I felt that I had  two opportunities. One was Jeff Daniels. Yes, that’s Jeff Daniels the actor, who as it turns out is also a singer/songwriter, and in addition a pretty good guitar player. Well as luck would have it, Jeff brought his own chair, [what kind of person travels around with a chair anyway] and I decided it might not be the best idea to ask him if he would be willing to replace his chair with mine.  My next idea was to ask Ben Sollee.  Ben is a cellist and singer from Lexington, Ky that I first became familiar with from his participation with Abigail Washburn, Bela Fleck, and Casey Dreissen, in the Sparrow Quartet.  Cellists sit down right? Seemed like the perfect fit and Ben was very gracious and agreed to the idea immediately.  Brian Blauser, the staff photographer for the show, agreed to get a shot of Ben in the chair for me, [thanks Brian], so all that was left for me to do was get a few shots of folks in the chair, and then sit back and enjoy the show, which I was able to do from several different vantage points, including the control booth, just off stage, and then finally the audience. Here are some shots from my evening there.