James Lee Stanley

I am in Texas and am doing a concert tonight at the Athens Country Club. And I have been dealing with some Eurotrash cold. So here’s what I did.

Went to bed at 11 o’clock last night, slept til ten a.m. this morning, had some fruit, practiced guitar, broke my two most important nails and drove off to a beauty parlor where a beautician put two acrylic powder nails on and it is amazing. I’ve used crazy glue in an emergency, but if you have the time before a show, have a beautician put on this acrylic thang. It’s so hard and looks utterly natural, though if you look closely you can see the broken nail underneath.

I asked her to leave them a little long as I figured it would be easier to file them down than to drive back down here and have her do it again after I blew it by making them too short.

I came back and practiced for an hour. These things work great and they are hard as a rock. A Godsend for the soft nailed among us.

Next I went over to the club and oversaw the set up of the sound system, set up my effects and looping box and played a song. It took about eight minutes to do the sound check. Then I came directly back here, had a banana because they sooth the hoarse throat and help to temporarily relieve a cough and as soon as I finish this little post I will go to bed for an hour.

Then get up and take a hot steamy shower, as east texas is a pretty dry place right now and the steam will help lubricate my pipes for the singing tonight.

I will start out with a few instrumentals and then slip into the lowest of the songs that I sing in terms of vocals.

As I warm up I will bring on the more difficult songs with the broader range of notes and finish the set with some of my strongest material. And making a determined effort to do as many songs from one CD as I can.

The reason for that is so that when I take the break and folks ask which CD has which song, I can hopefully say “everything I sang was on this CD”.

That takes the guess work out of the equation for the customer. Make it easy for them to pick up a CD and you know that they are going to like it because they wouldn’t have bought it if they didn’t like those songs.

Take a break to sell CD’s and then go back up there and do it again.

When you have a cold and must perform, it’s important to take everything as easily as you can, the stress only makes the cold worse. And you must keep eating, as eating also makes the cold a little better.

Just like those fabled “old wives” said, “feed a cold starve a fever.”