We’re back in the van, this time heading to LeMars, Iowa for two shows at the National Old Time Music Festival.

Hopefully there will be no speeding tickets, no impassable traffic jams, and no one will lock the keys in the van (all of which happened within the span of a few hours in West Virginia two weeks ago). Also, shortly after passing into Maryland, we ran over a beaver.

The banjo player isn’t riding with us — he’s already in Iowa for his wife’s family reunion. Instead, we have Paul’s wife riding along.

For more about the festival, read on:

LeMars, Iowa…..LeMars, Iowa, is the home of Blue Bunny Ice Cream, the largest manufacturer of ice cream in the world. It’s also a north-east Iowa rural area surrounded by corn fields. According to Sheila Everhart, Director of the upcoming 33rd Annual old-time rural roots music festival, “We’re expecting the largest influx of foreign performers,and guests, from foreign countries at record breaking numbers this year. We’re definitely not the Olympics, but we are just as concerned with our traditions and our cultural heritage as the Chinese are, and we have several gold medalists coming from Iowa in Bejing to prove the athletic side of Iowa. Now we begin the process of proving the validity of Iowa’s traditional music. Bob (my husband) and I went to China to perform in Bejing five years ago, and my how it has changed. The experience is one we will never forget, and because of it, we continue to extend invitations to foreign performers of America’s traditional country and bluegrass music to attend our festival. This year will be an incredible adventure in ’saving’ America’s rural music. We expect 36 performers just from the country of New Zealand. There are also performers coming from Australia, Holland, Ireland, Germany, England, Canada, and France. The festival lasts 7 days, so as the dollar is low, it’s a real bargain for foreign guests.”

The event starts on August 25th, and ends on August 31st, with ten sound stages accomodating well over 600 performers of old-time acoustic rural music. According to Bob Everhart, “Acoustic music is health food for the ears, and we have a ton of it this year in LeMars at the Plymouth County Fairgrounds, with our main stage indoors in an air conditioned building. There’s also workshops and contests for just about everything there is in old-time music. Our doors are wide open, and like China, we encourage everyone to participate in our efforts of keeping our great American traditional rural music alive.” More information is available at their website: http://www.oldtimemusic.tipzu.com

I’ve written in previous posts about the horrible experience we had with a CD manufacturer called EkoDisk.com. Thanks to our excellent search engine placement for the phrase “EkoDisk sucks” (#1 in Google!), we heard from another band that had a similar experience. The Freedom Movement left a comment on one of my earlier posts, and a more complete rundown of their experiences on the CDBaby bulletin boards:

What a good idea! But what a bad company! Our music group tried do do the responsible thing by going with an Earth-Friendly CD pressing company for our second Album. We found EcoDisk on-line and thought, “what a great concept”. So we committed to going with Dave Phillips company and sent him our payment in full in the form of a cashiers check.

Everything after this point was an absolute disaster. Every timeline we set was very delayed on Dave Phillips end. Our cd release date was not met. When we finally received 50 of the 1000 units 3 weeks after our CD release date, the Cd cases themselves were of very poor quality, and did not come close to meeting industry standards. The Screen Print on the CD itself was not what the proof’s said it would be and had a mistake that was overlooked on their end that had been previously addressed during the “proofs” stage.

Dave Phillips told us to return the 50 CD’s and said he would return our money per the warranty agreement. We mailed back the 50 CD’s with confirmation of their arrival, and that’s the last we heard from EcoDisc and/or Dave Phillips. We sent out emails and phone calls for the next 3 weeks, but no response. I looked on-line for other consumer complaints, and Low and behold found some other people in the exact same boat (http://www.tangleweed.org/blog/tag/ekodiskcom-sucks/).

So to our utter dismay, we have no other option but to file a law claim to hopefully get our money back. We invested everything we had into this release so we have nothing left to move forward with while we wait for some sort of resolution with this unresponsive company. I’ve never had to sue anyone in my life, and can’t believe that I’m even in this situation.

My goal is to warn anybody who’s considering doing business with this company to PROCEED WITH CAUTION, or at the very least prepare a contract of your own for Dave Phillips to sign and agree to legally. And for God’s sake, don’t pay this guy with cash/cashiers check.

Sincerely,

A very dis-satisfied customer
The Freedom Movement

By the way, although David Phillips has signed on to his MySpace page as recently as yesterday, he still hasn’t returned any of our email messages or phone calls for almost two months now. No matter, we got our money back courtesy of a credit card chargeback. Caveat Emptor, though. You may not be so lucky.

We had a great time playing at Fletcher’s Feed and Seed last week. And today we were mentioned in a news article about the growing scene Feed and Seed is helping to engender:

This scene is happening at the Feed & Seed, which is fast becoming an arts and music venue to reckon with, drawing notable bluegrass acts like Chicago’s Tangleweed; Ron Block, banjo player with Alison Krauss and Union Station; and Asheville’s own Dehlia Low.

Read the full article at BlueRidgeNow.com.

Though we had hoped to have discs in hand by the 30th, the new CD is still a few weeks away. We (or, more precisely, our crack designer Tony Nuccio) found a problem with one of the proofs, the fixing of which will push our delivery date back further. It now looks like we won’t have discs in hand for at least another three weeks.

Our first CD, Just a Spoonful, is now out of print. We sold the last copies we had on this tour. CDBaby has a handful of copies on hand, and Amazon has one or two. You can, of course, still get it as a download from iTunes, Amazon, and any number of other download services.

We may repress the record at some point in the future if there’s sufficient interest.

We’re on the road again, heading to Knoxville to do a radio appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special tomorrow afternoon, then on to Hendersonville, North Carolina for an evening show.

We’re presently, however, still on the Dan Ryan, just passing 83rd Street. Non-Chicagoans are often baffled by our freeway naming system, which uses names rather than numbers or directions. Thus, if someone tells you to take the Bishop Ford, you would take, um, whatever stretch of interstate is named after the Bishop. Dan Ryan was a politically powerful pal of Richard J. Daley, who named a perpetually clogged, perpetually under construction segment of 90/94 south of the Loop in his friend’s honor. Cheers.

We’re passing through Louisville, and will get a few hours sleep at Scott’s brother’s place there.

We’re not camping this time, and packed waaaay lighter than we did for the Colorado trip. As a consequence, the rented minivan (a Dodge Somethingorother) feels positiviley spacious. I’m in the backmost seat, affectionately referred to as ‘the hole’, typing away courtesy of my mobile broadband connection.

More later.

We played a show at the Abbey Pub a few months back, opening for Hot Buttered Rum (nice folks, they). Our friend Brian taped both band’s sets, and they’re available for download at Archive.org. Here’s a tune from midway through our set: a fiddle tune medley of The Takeup Reel, Cold Frosty Morning, and Grey Eagle.

The clip should play in the flash player dealie above, or you can download the show at Archive.org.

A studio recording of this medley will be on our forthcoming 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, due out soon. The first tune in the medley is a fiddle tune that I wrote for the band about a year ago. I included sheet music for it in an earlier post, should you feel motivated.

We just got the money we paid EkoDisk.com back. Not from the company itself, natch, as they’ve still failed to return any correspondence for six weeks. I’ve made repeated attempts to contact EkoDisk.com owner David Phillips for weeks via telephone and email, and had also filed a series of disputes with PayPal and our credit card company, all of which were ignored. Instead, we got the money back by filing a dispute with my credit card company, which issued a chargeback.

I have no idea what’s happened to EkoDisk or Dave Phillips. I don’t know if they’ve gone out of business, if he’s fled to South America with our money, is in jail, whatever. And, now that we have our money back, I don’t much care. We’re going full speed ahead with DiscMakers, and should have copies of our new CD in hand in a few weeks.