It's been more than five months since my last blog post!

That's longer than I had thought. I still perform my music some Tuesdays at a local "open mike" night (the Jersey Lilly), but no longer every Tuesday there as I did for most of last summer, fall and the first half of winter. I still play other places too such as the Mystic Earth metaphysical bookstore and Till It Shines coffee shop.

For the first time in thirty years of bicycle guitaring, beginning in February this year I have a place to ride and play indoors when it is too cold and wet to play outside. To watch me doing this, check my most recent YouTube video. A local middle school let me use their gymnasium for one hour a night, two nights a week. Then they cut me back to one night a week, but allowed an hour and a half. This may end soon, but the weather is becoming nice enough for me to start riding and playing outdoors again. Hopefully next winter I will be able to ride and play indoors again.

Last Saturday (April 7) I played my guitar along to the selections of other customers on the jukebox at a local bar (the Kodiak, formerly known as The Beaver Den). After a while I went up to select a few songs myself to play with, and to my delight saw that The Beatles finally have their songs available for digital jukeboxes! For the first time ever I played along to Help! and Blackbird from a jukebox and the crowd loved it. Later I found out a lot of The Beatles' music was released to 50,000 jukeboxes starting April 1.

Happy new year

Last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights I had excellent rehearsal sessions with my bass player Rocky. We've been practicing almost every week the past seven months, usually two or three nights a week an hour or two each night. Our band "Rosetucky" will almost certainly play in public sometime this year, or at least record some of our new material and post it online.

Late last month (December 27, 2009) I posted a video clip on YouTube of The Beatles Help! done by The Bicycling Guitarist that I had recorded a couple weeks before that. As I type this, that clip has 222 views in the 20 days since I posted it.

I play that song even better now than I did when I recorded that a month ago. In general, my guitar playing is crisper, sharper, faster, smoother than ever before. It is my singing though that has improved the most compared to my days with R Band in the early 1990s. I am not known as "The Bicycling Singer." Enough said, okay?