My photos and some videos of WBCN’s 31st Annual Rock N’ Roll Rumble are being published on the always awesome Ryan Spaulding’s music blog at Ryan’s Smashing Life. Here’s our coverage of Sunday night’s festivities.
The Rock N’ Roll Rumble is a “battle of the bands” style competition for Boston area bands. Anngelle Wood, WBCN DJ of weekly show Boston Emissions is the host of this year’s festivities. She’s done a great job putting it together. Most battle of the bands do not have the best reputation but WBCN’s annual event is one of the good ones.
The Luxury perform “Seven Stories” at the first night of WBCN’s Rock N’ Roll Rumble
Here’s a video I shot Sunday night of The Luxury singing “Seven Stories.” They go on to play in the semi-finals on April 16th at The Middle East Downstairs.
Nick Peterson and I are publishing a daily roundup on Free Agent Jungle’s website, Monday-Friday. Each roundup highlights free agent, freelancing and coworking news stories and blog articles that we’ve found percolating online. Check out today’s roundup and subscribe to the Free Agent Jungle RSS feed if you’d like to receive alerts when a new roundup is posted each day.
A friend alerted me that Adam Lambert on American Idol sang Universal Hall Pass’s arrangement of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” a couple weeks ago. A cover of a cover? Aha! Apparently Ryan Seacrest thought it was a version of the song by Chris Cornell. Oops. I finally checked out Adam’s version on YouTube and it was really, really bad. So bad I don’t think I should even link to it.
If you want to hear Melissa Kaplan of Universal Hall Pass’s outstanding version of “Ring of Fire”, listen to it in the playlist below of eight covers. Or download the MP3 from the Universal Hall Pass website. Melissa was the singer of one of my favorite Boston bands, Splashdown.
Photo Credit: I’m not sure who took this photo. It’s an old press photo when Melissa was in Splashdown.
The final installment of my TAZA chocolate tour of their Somerville factory is here! In this video, co-founder Alex Whitmore describes how cocoa nibs are ground. During the grinding process, the cocoa transforms from a solid to liquid because the nibs are oily with 50-55% cocoa butter.
Here’s my second of two videos of TAZA chocolate’s tour of their chocolate factory in Somerville. In this video, TAZA co-founder Alex Whitmore describes how the cocoa nib winnowing machine works. This is the process of removing the shell off of the cocoa bean. They donate the shells to Groundworks Somerville, a community gardening organization.
This video was shot in a room with a lot of people in it and no tripod. Always better to get someone in their natural element than a staged tour — but you’ll also notice a little extra noise at times and the camera moving to avoid a person walking by.
Adam Ritchie from The Lights Out joined The Luxury on guitar for “Ocean’s Limerick” at the Middle East on February 20th. And here’s the video I shot. The Luxury is a great (really great) rock band from Boston. They won the “open for Coldplay” contest last Fall at The Boston Garden and have a new album in the works. Check out their website, become a fan on Facebook and join their group on Facebook .
I’m not a fan of pay-to-play music festivals like Emergenza, but it meant the opportunity to see Sammy Miami’s band Houndstone perform at the Paradise Rock Club if they won their first round at Church on Monday night. They had the biggest crowd and came in first place. Now everyone within 100 miles of Boston needs to come out and see them at the Paradise. It’s happening sometime in May — TBD!
The print version of Rob Weisman’s story about Free Agent Jungle is missing the first bunch of paragraphs. When I saw the story online last night it seemed a little disconnected but now makes a lot more sense after they’ve added those missing paragraphs back. The article includes Nicholas Peterson who is collaborating with me to bring Free Agent Jungle to life plus Free Agent Jungle participants Daniel Batterman, Kathleen Sheridan and Al Willis.
I haven’t been taking lots of photos lately but I’m going to dig back into that. Thanks to some help from Kristarella in the Thesis WordPress theme forum, I was able to make some tweaks to the photo blog category of sooz.com so the photos appear in an area that can accommodate larger photos.
I need to do more tinkering but for now, here’s a photo I took a few months ago of a bunch of peonies at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. I’m optimistic winter will end eventually!
Throughout 1999-2004 I hosted a popular monthly networking lunch called Free Agent Boston. It was an interesting group of free agents, freelancers and consultants from all sorts of backgrounds. One of the things I liked the most about it was that it wasn’t just a tech / web / internet industry event.
I’ve been thinking about ideas to bring the project back to life but I wanted it to have the potential for something more than just a Boston event series. Thanks to inspiration from Jeff Pulver, I came up with the name Free Agent Jungle. Jeff organizes and hosts an event called Social Media Jungle and was nice enough to let me “borrow” part of his event’s name for my new project.
Free Agent Jungle’s first event is a lunch on Thursday, February 19th at Tavern in the Square (Porter Square, Cambridge). To register and learn more, visit the website. I’m also interested in hearing from people in other cities who would like to host Free Agent Jungle events in their part of the world. Send me an email if you’d like to discuss the possibilities.
The tagline for Free Agent Jungle is “solo but not alone” — inspired by a Toad the Wet Sprocket song from 1993, “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted.” (Yes, I’m a music geek. There’s always a song for everything!) Listen to the song at last.fm.
To crawl inside the wire and feel something near me
To feel this accepting
That it is lonely here, but not alone
This is the website where I’ve documented life and work since 2001. I do freelance work as a Boston event planner, photographer, web marketing and social media consultant. (photo by Wm. Marc Salsberry
