Loose Leaf Notes

At William Walter’s performance at the Sun Music Hall Friday night, I learned about live looping and discovered I was able to dance pretty freely with one arm in a sling.  Recovering from a fracture in my forearm, I wore the sling because the place was crowded and I didn’t want my arm to get bumped.  Everyone who saw it wanted to know what happened.  I got tired of telling the boring story of how I tripped and fell, so I began to use the line that my friend Tom Leedom provided when I joined him at the Dogtown bar and he looked at me in the sling and asked, ‘What’s the matter, Colleen? Do you have writer’s cramp?’

Floyd loves William Walter.  He’s been a Floydfest favorite since his band won “Best Emerging Artist” in a vote of 14,500 festival attendees in 2008.  He has also appeared as a model on ads for Green Label, a Floyd organic t-shirt company run by my friends Rain and George. On this occasion the Charlottesville singer songwriter followed two other bands that I missed. Playing with band mate guitarist Tucker Rogers, Walter incorporated some live looping jams into his cover and original songs, which means he recorded his own background music on the spot and then looped them into the performance.  I had to be told what I was witnessing. See HERE.

I first discovered William Walter & Co. playing on the Pink Floyd stage in the Floydfest beer garden the year before his band won Best Emerging Artist when my friend, one-time Blue Mountain School teacher of my son Dylan and Grateful Dead dance partner, Suzanne and I kicked up some dust to his heartfelt music.  I remember thinking that he looked like Kurt Cobain and, maybe because he sang a song called “When I leave for California,” I thought he had a California rock sound.

The Grateful Dead number he played at the Sun last night got everyone dancing like it was old home week, and Suzanne – who doesn’t live in Floyd anymore but had just arrived from the coast after a family vacation was cut short because of the pending hurricane – was there to enjoy it with us.

Post note:  Listen to an original Walter song performed at the Sun Hall HERE.