So What?

It’s back to the basic boogie-woogie for us all tonight. “Come on Momma—GET THAT RED DRESS ON!” Today’s track is another Scot Halpin rockabilly original, written in the early 1980’s. This one was always a favorite way back to the “T. Scot Bottom & the Rockabilly Funhouse” days, and it would always come out late in the set. Scot is working it out with “Funhouse,” his San Francisco Rockabilly outfit.

I hear Edward Bachmann, getting down and dirty on bass, a funkified Leland Monagle on drums. I hear Judy Tampa swinging through on rhythm guitar. She often did some knockout harmonies with Scot, and an occasional lulu of a lead vocal, but not today. And then we’ve got Scotty wailing away, in the simplest of ways on guitar and vocals. Dig the wail. Dig the yip. The name of the track is “Let’s Go Out Tonight.”

Today’s artwork is another piece drawn with a squirt bottle filled with extra thick India ink, onto a board that Scot had already laid some wet-on-wet color. The red come from a bottle of red paint that Scot always painted his hearts with. He’d just keep mixing it up, always using the same little bottle for the purpose.

So what about “So What?” We hear Scot settle the band into the groove. The band shifts into a flat out funky beat. At a flub, we hear Scot laugh and say, “Well that’s alright. So what?” And he’s right. I’ve been trying to focus on these two targets. Target #1: Today. Target #2: Have fun. All the mistakes, all the flubs, all the sunburns, are I suspect, just a part of being in on this rotation, so we might as well just try and enjoy ourselves AMAP. All that other stuff adds up to the big “So what?”