If you lived in Champaign Urbana in the early 1990s, you likely remember Driver Has No Cash, a trio featuring amplified ukulele, toy drums, and the melodious vocals of Frank Gill. If you feel like spending a few moments wallowing in the gloriousness of that time and place, you’re in luck. Driver Has No Cash are reuniting this weekend.

From Bill’s blog, the Williwaw Endeavor:

driver has no cash - francis bradley gill, robert rising & the artist somewhat rarely known as williwaw - have, like the Great Phoenix, risen from the ashes.

SUNDAY MAY 25 8 PM
THE HIGH DIVE
51 MAIN STREET
CHAMPAIGN USA

there will be much roaring, much whimpering, cowering even, from the mighty rock. can you handle such rock? no, you can’t. but you’ll try, oh how you’ll try, to carry on. there are tickets. there will be no t-shirts. no, don’t cry, there will be other trinkets. there will be other bands. so many bands. so much rock. you, you really should stay away. you, you’re just not ready. stay home. yes, the sofa. that’s the place for you…

Alexander Gelfand, author of the liner notes to our nearly-out-of-print first record has scored another impressive byline. A few months after publishing his first piece in a scrappy east coast daily called the ‘New York Times’, Alexander has published an article in a sleepy midwestern newspaper called the ‘Chicago Tribune’. The Trib (as locals call it) is perhaps best known for breaking the story of the election of Thomas E. Dewey to the presidency in 1948 (right). The Tribune company has also helped transform the once hapless Cubs into the second best baseball team in Chicago.

Alexander has penned a piece on soundproofing for modern city dwellers. You can read the full article here: Put a Lid on It

You can hear a recording of Paul’s appearance on WBEZ’s 848 program, preparing his winning Krafty Kontest recipe, on WBEZ’s website:

ChicagoPublicRadio.com

Our ‘Draggin’ the Bow’ (from our second album) closes the segment. There’s also a picture of someone identified as ‘Paul Wargasky’, bearing little resemblance to our bassist.

Previous posts:
Tweed bassist wins WBEZ recipe contest

Tune your dial to 91.5fm Thursday (or possibly Friday) at 9AM. Several weeks ago WBEZ’s morning show 848 anounced a recipe contest which required the use of A-1 steak sauce, Toblerone chocolate and Grey Puopon Mustard. This was a challenge I was up for. Over dinner, my wife Lauren and I colaborated to come up with the recipe that won the hearts and taste buds of the WBEZ staff and Chef Efrain, their finalist judge. We recently recorded a segment of us in the kitchen cooking up the winning recipe. For those of you who can’t wait to hear the segment. Here is our winning recipe. For hot pics of us in the kitchen and to hear the story after tomorrow’s broadcast go to www.wbez.org/848.

Barbecued Short Ribs:

1/2 cup duck sauce (Most people have about this much left over in little packets from takeout)
1/4 cup soy sauce (See above)
3 Tablespoons Grey Poupon
3 Tablespoons A-1 Steak Sauce
2 Teaspoons Hot Sauce
5 Toblerone dark chocolate w/ honey & almond nougat triangles finely chopped
1/2 cup apple cider vinager
Preheat grill or start the charcoal
Boil 4 short ribs in a saucepan with bay leaf 20-30 minutes.

Mix together BBQ sauce and slather on short ribs (or other meat selection)Add ribs to grill and cook on that saucy goodness. Recoat when necessary.

So much of the available footage of Lenny is from his last years, when he looked and sounded worn down from his legal troubles and drug abuse. It’s a rare treat to see him younger and sharper in this Steve Allen Show appearance. If you’ve not read it, I recommend Lenny’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

We are no longer at the mercy of Spry.com. This website is now running on its own dedicated server. Excelsior!

Music-related posts will resume tomorrow.

I’ve complained in the past about our web host, Spry.com. Pages have been slow to load, email messages have taken an eternity to be delivered, and problems that a reasonably well-trained monkey could fix have lingered for way too long. And then I got this communique from them. The misspelling of my name is the least appalling thing about it.

Any time you get an email address from a company that includes the line, “we encourage you all to keep a close eye on your credit accounts,” it’s time to stop doing business with that company. And that is exactly what we will do. I am in the process of bringing our own dedicated server online, and will move everything from spry’s servers to our server ASAP.

Dear Keneth,

This message is to inform you that we have changed your login information for the following accounts you hold at Spry:

Your billing center login information:
Url: *****
User: ******
Password: *****

Please note that we have temporarily disabled access to login to the billing center at this time. If you have an urgent billing need, please call us at 888-808-SPRY option 2 or email sprybilling@spry.com.

In addition, we have changed the login information for your shared hosting account, and sent a separate email to you with further details. Please note that we have disabled ssh, ftp, and cpanel access as a temporary measure while we verify that the security vulnerability has been fixed.

Because email addresses, mailing addresses, and passwords may have been obtained from our billing system, we highly recommend that you immediately update your paypal or other associated financial information. We encourage you all to keep a close eye on your credit accounts as well.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused you. For further information and updates on the security breach and our efforts to secure our systems and your data, please visit http://blog.spry.com/ If you need to contact us for technical support, please email hostingsupport@spry.com or call us at 888-808-SPRY.

Regards,

Spry Hosting
www.spry.com

Our site was offline this morning because someone at our web host, Spry.com, messed up permissions on the server. It only takes a few seconds to run a chmod on a Unix box to make things right, but it took the folks at Spry.com waaaaaaaaay to long to take care of it. The site was throwing 500 errors this morning, and then the Spry folks stepped in to fix it. Thanks to their intervention, the site started throwing 403 errors instead. Gee, thanks fellas. And they won’t give me any answers regarding how the permissions got messed up in the first place.

Anybody know of a decent PHP host with SSH access? I can’t take any more of this.