Jamming with Julie and Buddy Miller in 1982

I finally got around to digitizing a box of old cassettes and found this little gem recorded with Julie and Buddy Miller. It's not a great song. In fact, it's unequivocally lame, but on this night 32 years ago it was my newest effort. I like to think my songwriting has improved since then.

In 1981, Julie Griffin left her band in NY and returned to Waco, TX, where I met her through a common friend. When my band played a gig at the fair, Julie played 3 songs to open for us.

Several months later, Buddy Miller came down to Texas looking for his lead singer and girlfriend. In January of 1982, Julie and Buddy invited my family over for dinner and afterward we broke out the guitars and swapped songs. I hit record on a jambox before we started.

I don't have the rights to post the recordings of their material, which included How Could You Say No, but I can post one of the songs I wrote that they sat in on, Julie singing background vocals with my wife, and Buddy playing lead guitar.

And also the fun part—some interaction from the Number One Son on the front end.

Y59 R 130C B03 27038

Then the lights on the ceiling fan went out and somebody had to figure it out, so I pulled the light kit off. No apparent problem. I called in The Helpful Neighbor, who has a tester and, more importantly, the brains to use it. We determined that power was coming into the unit.

The puzzler is that there is very little that can fail in this system. The only thing between the wall switch and the light bulbs is wire and a $3 pull switch, and the switch tested just fine.

After an inordinate amount of troubleshooting, The Helpful Neighbor noticed a component about half the size of my little fingernail buried among the wires. We speculated on its purpose, since you don’t really need electronics to run a light. I suggested that it was planted by the NSA to spy on us.

Before we bypassed it to see if it was the point of failure, I decided to Google ‘y59 r 130c b03 27038’ to make sure we wouldn't regret it. It took us several minutes to recover from reading the link at the top of the search results.