Dragon*Con Filk and Comedy Music -- A Big Honkin' Thank You

[filkertom]

Hey there! Tom Smith, Filk Track Director here, one last time.

On behalf of Dragon*Con, I would like to thank our incredible performers and our equally wonderful audiences. Seriously, there was a lot of great acoustic music to be had this weekend, and if you missed it, well, you missed out.

Alphabetically:

• Grant Baciocco (trumanburbank, throwingtoasters.com), who was funny as hell, as usual
• Rob Balder (partiallyclips, robbalder.com), who was as "on" as I've ever seen him
• The Bedlam Bards (bedlambards.com), especially Cedric in that fiddle-jam on the Exhibition Level (props also to Louis Lamp and the other four people jammin')
• The Boogie Knights (boogie-knights.org), who not only kicked ass during their sets but hung out at the open sings until 3:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday nights
• The Brobdingnagian Bards (marcgunn and Andrew McKee, thebards.net), who are rapidly becoming favorites of mine
• Carrie Dahlby (pixelene), who flattened the room with an amazing cover of wormquartet's "I'm Not A Girl"
• Joe Giacoio (joegiacoio.com), who (as I anticipated) boggled everybody with his guitar wizardry and great songs
• Matt Leger (thatcrazycajun), who broke everybody's heart with "A Simple Country Doctor"
• Roberta Rogow (a fan page), who brought Ye Olde Classic Filk in a big way and sounded great
• the great Luke Ski (lukeski, thegreatlukeski.com), who was everywhere, helping everybody, as well as performing his butt off
• our Guest Of Honor, Carla Ulbrich (carlau.com), who was every bit as fun and hilarious and musically wonderful as you could hope for

And people seemed to like my sets, too. :)

There were a number of special moments. The Big Honkin' Funny Music Show went pretty well, I thought, especially when Rob and I sang "Rich Fantasy Lives", and the incredibly funny opening when the BrobBards sang "The Old Dun Cow", substituting "pizza" for "beer". Joe and Carla's joint concert on Friday night was amazing, one of the best I've ever seen. The BrobBards were SRO before their concert even started. Saturday night, we were filling in for wormquartet, who had to cancel due to illness at the last minute, and Rob, Luke, Carrie, and I tag-teamed through a cover of his amazing ballad, "Great Idea For A Song". It worked really well, and jannyblue got video, so you may see that soon.

Special thanks are also in order to:

• Logan and Clyde of Emerald Rose, who ran tech on the Concourse stage and made us all sound great
• the sound crew in Regency 6 and 7 for the Big Honkin' Funny Music Show on Friday, who had everything nailed quickly, efficiently, and perfectly
• Joseph, who had me in for two songs at The Pirate Party
• Three Quarter Ale, for doing a really rockin' set at said Pirate Party
• huskiebear, Ken, Ronnie, Michael, Ian, tomreedtoon, Wayne, Sara, Judi, and everybody else who helped the artists at their tables and at their concerts
• The audiences, which were sizable and enthusiastic all weekend -- thank you so much for your interest, your support, and your applause

Anyway, that's most of what I needed to say. If you are at all interested in continuing filk/comedy/Celtic/acoustic music at D*C, be sure to e-mail programming @ dragoncon.org about it. And, seriously, you might want to mention to them the notion of changing it from "filk" track to "acoustic" track. I'm proud to be a filker, and we had spectacular musicians and singer-songwriters top to bottom, but we get kinda lost in the din of the amplifiers. ;)

Many thanks to each and every one of you,
Tom Smith
Dragon*Con 2007 Filk Track Director