maxwell’s.

This past week was a really busy one – and a rewarding one – for us.

On Tuesday, we re-issued Footstone’s Lippy CD digitally.  Monday night I sat up and watched the online services, making sure that it went live on iTunes, Amazon and the like.  Jim had set Lippy up in the Dromedary online store, so all I needed to do was pull the trigger at midnight (ultimately some Facebook friends convinced me to launch it a little earlier).  It was pretty cool to start getting emails at 12:10 on Tuesday morning, as people purchased the CD from the Dromedary website.

haiti.

A close friend of ours was in Haiti, just outside Port-au-Prince when the quake struck.

Natural disasters happen all the time, I know.  But in this case, my friend was there, and it took us a day or so before we learned that she was (thankfully) okay.  During that day, we were all glued to the television (and to the internet and Twitter, but that’s an entirely different story), and thus we were struck by the devastation we were witnessing.  At one point I heard a commentator note that there were hundreds of dead on every block in Port-au-Prince.

one week in.

Well, here we are: one week into what I’ve been calling Dromedary v2.0.

It’s been a pisser of a week.

we’re back.

Really, how could I not do this?

The first entry in this blog was posted on January 3, 2009.  Since then, a ton has happened – rekindling with old friends, building relationships with new ones, and rediscovering our passion for indie rock.

In June, I started to realize that people were really interested in the blog.  And so I began thinking it might be a good idea to turn into a book, perhaps with an accompanying CD.  I reached out to Rich Masio, who’s opinions I truly respect, and asked him if he thought it was a good idea.

Rich responded by telling me that it was almost 2010 – a book was not the way to go.  I should consider putting Dromedary online, and distributing the music electronically.

At the Footstone reunion at my party in September, it really began to crystallize.  We’d seen the release of the book Our Noise, chronicling the rise of the great Merge Records label.  We’d seen fantastic new records by Sonic Youth, Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., Polvo, and a few other guitar-based indie bands that were popular in the mid-90s.

And so I finally decided to get back on the horse.  When I began this blog, re-starting Dromedary was the furthest thing from my mind.  I was looking for closure.  But some doors, they just won’t stay closed.

A lot of our music will be available online only – courtesy of the leading online retailers like iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, Napster, and more.  And we’ll be releasing music throughout 2010.

You can find us online at the new Dromedary Records website.  Our first release will be a digital reissue of the Footstone Wobbles From Side To Side seven-inch, which features their 1993 live staples “Mountain Man” and “Belly” (which features backing vocals from Bill of American Standard).  We’ve also included the definitive mix of “Airbag,” the 1993 song that was remixed 16 times but was, unfortunately, never released.

If you visit our website and sign up for our email list, you can have this three-song EP for FREE. Just go and get it.  It sounds great in beautiful 256 kbps MP3 format, remastered by Mark Abney, the bassist for Footstone and AmStand.

Then, if you keep coming back, you’ll see that on February 2, we’ll be releasing Footstone’s Lippy CD online – you’ll be able to buy it from our online store, or from any of the leading internet music retailers.  It sounds even better today than it did in 1995.

The Lippy re-release will be in conjunction with a Footstone reunion show – their first public performance since disbanding in 1999/2000 – at Maxwell’s.  The Maxwell’s show will be on Saturday, February 6, and they’ll be supported by a reunited Friends, Romans, Countrymen, and also by Josh from Shirk Circus’ band, The Dark Brothers.

Please come.

And please keep coming back to the Dromedary website.  We’ve got scads of new and old music that we’ll be releasing throughout 2010, including some unbelievably exciting things that we can’t wait to spring on you.

We’ll always be small.  But we’ll always be good, and we’ll always be your best friend.

As for this blog?  I’ll keep it going, using it to tell the story of how Dromedary continues to evolve, and to relate the new trials and tribulations that we’re sure to go through.  The blog will always be here, in hopes that new friends will discover our old story.  And in hopes that our existing friends will keep reading new chapters as we move forward.

There is, of course, a more formal press release about this.  But I’m not going to put it here.  This blog is for friends.  It’s not for press releases.

If you’re reading the blog on the Facebook page, you’ll have to start visiting here, on teh interwebs, to get the fun stuff – we’ll begin updating the blog with “real” Dromedary news.  But we’ll also always be here on WordPress, telling the personal side of the story.

If you can’t get enough of my yammering, you can sign up for our email list, become a fan of our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, friend us on MySpace, view our videos on YouTube, or hang out with us as we learn to use LastFM.

I promised a few days ago that I’d post the conclusion of Jim Santo’s Jenifer Convertible Epilogue.  Here’s how it read:

And, needless to say, we’ve reconnected with Al and are earnestly discussing plans to release Jenifer Convertible music — old and maybe even new — on a revived Dromedary Records.

Will we get the chance to rewrite history? Stay tuned.

Stay tuned, indeed.  Hopefully we’ll have lots more to tell you.

Thank you so much for following us so far.  I hope you enjoyed the story – and that you continue to follow along as we write new ones.

where are they now?

I guess one of the things that people like about stories like this is that, when the credits are about to roll, we see images of each of the characters, along with a brief “where are they now?” item.  And I’m happy to do that here as well.  So, in order of appearance, here it is:

live, from my birthday.

On the morning of September 5, 2009, I was really hard to wake up.

It was  the day we were celebrating my 40th birthday, and we had dropped the kids off at my mother’s house the night before, in anticipation of our annual Labor Day party.  I had felt pretty strongly that since it was a milestone birthday, we were going to be doing a bunch of partying, and I’d rather not have my kids around to witness that.

beauty, pt. ii.

And so it goes.

The year went by, and I kept blogging and blogging.  Sometimes 1,500 words a day for a week or two straight.

Gradually, as the year went by, people from the old days would find their way onto the blog, or my sense of nostalgia would cause me to reach out to them – by email, on Facebook, through a Google search, whatever.

A lot of those reconnections took place right in the “comments” section of this blog.  If you read the comments, you’ll see.

a guest post from an old new friend.

There have been 369 entries made to this blog in the last year, and every word has been my own.  For this entry, I’m going to turn the microphone over to someone else.

One of the entries from this past November discussed the day I put Dromedary on hiatus, at the end of the summer of 1996. I came back from vacation and, via email, disconnected myself from both Jenifer Convertible and Footstone.  I was due to pick up master tapes from both bands, for CDs that were supposed to come out at the end of the year.

live from sandy’s birthday.

Almost as quickly as I decided I would start the blog, I began thinking of how I would end it.

On one hand, it could have ended with the day I drove back from Cape Cod and decided I was putting Dromedary on hiatus, and screwed Jenifer Convertible and Footstone in the process.  That would have been a fitting end.  But it also wouldn’t have been accurate – Rich, Ralph, and I worked hard on Razortone and had worked up a long list of bands to work with.

It could also have ended when Rich died.

The problem with that is that it was all so abrupt.  At the risk of cheapening a monstrously huge, tragic, life-changing event by comparing it with a baseball game, the way it happened was very similar to the way the Yankees lost the playoff series against Seattle in 1995.  They were winning.  They were there.  We were on the edge of our seats, ready to celebrate, clenching our fists and ready to move onto the next round.  And then a quick hit, and another, and boom: series over.

and then came the blog.

So Rich told me he thought I should write the story of Dromedary, because it was worth telling.

For some reason, I got to thinking about this toward the end of 2008.  Maybe it had to do with getting that Stuyvesant CD, or discovering the Mommyheads record, I don’t know.  I guess it’s probably more likely just because I was in my late 30s, and I think it’s natural to think about the old days as the old days get further away into your past.