This popped up on my iPod this morning, a live recording from June, 2006, at the Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was shortly before our second CD, Where You Been So Long, came out, and we were playing our first real out-of-town shows.

The Ark was a good place to start–it’s a nice-sounding room, with an attentive and appreciative crowd. The show was an opening set for the Hackensaw Boys. Decent folks, they, and a good band as well.

Fun fact: the hollering you hear in the background is me yelling cues to a band member.

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You can download the whole show @ Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/Tangleweed_The_Ark_20060623

Tangleweed will be on the road for the evening, but folks in Chicago should head on over to the Old Town School of Folk Music to check out the Ebony Hillbillies.

Our pal (and sometime sub) Steve Rosen will be opening. There will also be an old-time jam with the band, starting at 4pm at the school. Bring an instrument if you feel like picking.

We had hoped that our third CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, would be out by now. We submitted money and the master to the manufacturer in June, and the usual manufacturing time is ten to fifteen business days. But we’re no closer to having our CDs now than we were six weeks ago.

We paid a company in Portland, Maine, called EkoDisk to manufacture the CDs. I had done a previous project with them, and was happy with the results. This time, though, it’s been different. David Phillips of EkoDisk has gladly taken our money, but he has utterly failed to produce the CDs we paid him for. What’s more, he has behaved like a coward, refusing to answer his phone or email for six weeks, hiding behind the distance that lies between Chicago and Portland, Maine.

So this week we started over again, nearly $2000 poorer, with DiscMakers. And we’ll have our discs in a few weeks. In the meantime, I have the pleasure of dealing with Visa and PayPal to attempt to recover the funds that Phillips absconded with.

If you’d like to ask David where our CDs are, you can send him a note at via EkoDisk.com’s contact page.

We’re very pleased to be among the performers at this year’s Ola Belle Reed Homecoming Festival. We recorded Ola Belle’s song “High On a Mountain” for our second CD, Where You Been So Long, and we’re going to learn another of her songs especially for the festival.

The trip will bring us to North Carolina for the first time. On the way to the festival, we’ll do a radio show in Knoxville, and a show in Fletcher, NC. We’re riding a high right now. On our last trip, we passed through three states, and weren’t threatened with a firearm once. Take that, Wisconsin!